My best friend Ayele says she is a lifestyle curator. In all honesty, it’s just an excuse for her to unleash her inner Jay Gatsby without judgement. It’s been said that getting an invite to one of her lavish theme parties is harder than getting a donkey to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards and in Japanese. Her latest shindig has been dubbed “Celebrities: The Vampire Edition” and while at first I was of the understanding that we were all to be dressed like characters from Twilight or one of the many mundane vampire series that, like their protagonists, suck the life of you, I was made aware that it was an ode to us dressing up as celebrities who have found the secret to everlasting youth.
My pick was easy: Naomi Campbell. I already have, in my wardrobe, a similar outfit to the white ensemble she wore frolicking around town with Michael Jackson in “In the Closet”. All that is missing from my get up is the perfect wig.
The perfect wig. I could write a whole dissertation about the perfect wig. To summarize, what you want to avoid at all cost is synthetic hair or the type of human hair that looks like it sheds profusely like it clogs drains like it was plucked from the unmoisturized scalp of a person who has a personal vendetta against drinking water. What you want is a genuine lace front Brazilian hair wig: thick, strong and healthy lustrous single strands that constantly obey the wind and gravity and are at all times picture perfect ready for a Pantene shampoo and conditioner ad.
This is the Holy Grail of wigs I should have been scouring the central Accra business district for on this gloriously hot Saturday morning but instead, I find myself seated in a dilapidated bamboo tavern keeping a close eye on the gelato shop across the street. Ayele and I are the only female patrons in the establishment. I’m pretty sure we are the only ones sober. As I eye these men sitting idly, drinking palm wine and akpeteshie as they argue about the origins of highlife music, my only thought is that these men, who are shamelessly inebriated at an hour where some people haven’t even had the chance to brush their teeth, were the type of men Chinua Achebe sought inspiration for Unoka.
Beside me, Ayele takes a long unladylike slurp of her chilled sobolo. She checks her red stained tongue before turning to me.
“Don’t look so glum Yaba. If this turns out to be true, it will be good for you in the long run. Jeremy is about as interesting as a math equation and you will find that if you remove your height goggles and take a really good look at him, he looks like a baobab tree.”
Her revelation is in sharp contrast to the lengthy philosophical speech she gave me last week about relationships.
“I thought you said looks didn’t matter in a relationship,” I say.
She takes another long gulp. Now her teeth are red. “You are misquoting me. Had you listened with rapt attention you would have heard the clause in my statement. I said that looks do not matter in a relationship if your man has wealth. Any man with a bank account that encompasses a lot of commas goes from looking like an ostrich to a slightly less attractive version of Idris Elba if you really squint.”
I never really listen to Ayele. It’s hard to take seriously a person who once said without any hint of irony but with a boatload of misdirected gumption that she still finds the Teletubbies intellectually stimulating.
But she might be right this time, not about the money and looks analogy but about Jeremy. I have been so blinded by his six-foot-four-inch frame, his attentiveness, his ability to flame torch leftover food into gourmet cuisine, and his insistence on making me the focal point of his Instagram feed that I have never quite realized that he resembles an accursed gnome left desolate in a decrepit house.
That’s a blatant lie.
While Jeremy is not the type of guy you would give a quadruple take like a Legends of the Fall era Brad Pitt, he does have this inherent beauty that makes Tyson Beckford look like a praying mantis with an overindulgence for Botox. With skin like freshly poured molten tar, hazel tinted almond shaped eyes hidden underneath inconceivably thick eyebrows, broad shoulders that are prototype Tempur-Pedic orthopedic pillows, and a soothing voice that makes you think of ice kenkey cooling your esophagus on a sweltering day; he is a far cry from the images Ayele and I were trying to conjure.
“What if this is just a hoax by Afia?” I ask. “She changes the girl every time. First, she was Indian. Then she was Lebanese. Last time, she didn’t even bother with a nationality. She said she was ‘Pocahontas hued’. What does that even mean?”
“It means the girl we are expecting is a person of colour but definitely not Black. And you give Afia too much credit. I don’t think she possesses the required brain cells to pull off a hoax of any kind.”
A few days ago, Afia Bartels, the receptionist at my workplace, resident gossip and known homewrecker, summoned me to reception to divulge how her pregnancy cravings have her camping out at a gelato store close to her home. Her news was inconsequential to me until she made it known she had been seeing Jeremy there regularly never with a gelato in hand but always with a stunning girl in attendance.
“They have been meeting up every Saturday for about an hour. They seem pretty chummy with each other,” she said not once taking her eyes from the framed photos of David Beckham that adorn her desk. Afia, who is seven months pregnant, is of the belief that by staring at the famously gorgeous footballer regularly, her baby will look like him. This, she believes, would be achieved through the intricate power of osmosis. It’s safe to say that when you are tangling in the sheets with the married CEO of the company, you don’t particularly need brains to be hired. But for her sake, I hope her wish comes true because Seamus Allotey, our boss and her soon-to-be baby daddy, is the human equivalent of expired marmite on burnt toast.
“Maybe they are just friends hanging out,” I said.
“This chick is gorgeous. I’m talking about all capital letters with several exclamation points gorgeous. Unless he is a eunuch, no man is just friends with a girl like that. But if you want to test the theory, ask him what he did on Saturday.”
So I did, asking him in a discreet text that I hoped didn’t portray me as a crazy stalker girlfriend and his reply was disheartening.
Worked on a project and slept for the most part.
Afia took a look at the text and actually laughed. “They are not friends. Isn’t it telling that they always meet up at a gelato shop, the one place your lactose intolerant self will never be caught dead in? It’s the perfect place to hide his indiscretions from you.”
At 8:35 am, a spotless black Audi rolls up in front of the gelato shop. It’s Jeremy’s. He pulls his long frame out the car, stretches his arms towards the cloudless sky and leans against the car once he is done removing all the kinks in his limbs. In his grey t-shirt and navy jeans, he looks like he’s posing for a spread in GQ. His whole life is like a photoshoot. He could be taking a bowel wrenching dump in a fly-infested pit latrine and he would still make it look classy.
“So what do we do if we find out he’s been cheating?” Ayele asks. “Do we go the old fashioned way of surprising them mid-cheat and hooting at them or do we just go the quiet route and break up with him via text. I’m all for public humiliation but I think we should do the latter. There’s this new app that I have been commissioned to promote and what it does is that it generates the perfect break up message based on your mood. The more traffic I bring their way, the more money they will invest in my next party.”
I am about to sarcastically tell her how glad I am that my impending heartbreak could be fodder for her next party when a magenta coloured motorcycle parks next to Jeremy. The rider, sans helmet, disembarks gracefully clad in denim shorts, which showcase her never-ending legs, and a tight white tank top. She approaches Jeremy and they engage in a kiss, one on each cheek as though they were traipsing down the cobbled streets of Lisbon or something. Her back is to us but we can clearly see her café con a teaspoon and a half leche skin, made a tad darker by the unforgiving midday Ghanaian sun. She lets loose her midnight raven hair that had been secured in a furious bun and it cascades all the way down to her muscular calves.
“So he prefers them Latina then,” Ayele whistles lowly, next to me. “No wonder he always talks like he is auditioning for a role in a badly scripted telenovela.”
But I’m not listening to Ayele. My eyes start to tear up not because of the loving way Jeremy appears to be guiding his companion into the shop but from the scent that wafts towards us from across the street and chokes my sinuses like a turtleneck two sizes small. There is only one person in this world that has that sickening sweet smell and I know who she is before she turns.
“Yesenia!” Ayele and I both gasp.
Fraternizing with the enemy. This is unpardonable.
♠♠♠
Before I started wishing for bad things to befall on Yesenia Alvarez Estrada like the electricity going off at the exact moment the winner of her favourite competition show is about to be announced, we were actually friends. It had always been Ayele and me, two peas in a pod trying to survive boarding school but when Yesenia joined us in our second year of high school, we found that with her being an amateur wrestler, adding her to our posse would be beneficial in keeping the bullies that our school was rife with at bay.
The Colombian born — but Spanish, English, Australian, Thai and Ghanaian raised — beauty was a bit of a rebel, constantly getting in trouble with school authorities. She spent more time in the principal’s office than in the classroom for offences such as customizing her school uniform, never being ready for inspection, and spiking the snack juice with vodka she “borrowed” from the principal’s cabinet. You didn’t need a child psychology degree to figure out she was desperate for her parents’ attention. They were not particularly neglectful but were constantly busy. Their diplomatic careers meant that they never spent more than two years in one place and they chose to drop Yesenia in boarding schools wherever they went.
She also wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. The only subject she excelled in was Spanish and that was a given being that she, a native speaker, was being taught Spanish as a foreign language like the rest of us. Spanish class was surprisingly the only time she ever spoke her language. Even with her parents, she spoke English. She explained that she spoke Spanish like a Spaniard and not a Colombian and that embarrassed her. She lied. It was just another tactic to piss her parents off.
What Yesenia lacked in academics, she more than made up for in sports like wrestling, basketball and volleyball.
She couldn’t have been more different from Ayele and me but our love for pitting boyband heartthrobs against each other and our shared contempt for the monotony of boarding school life bonded us.
But this love would eventually come to an end.
Like any angst-filled teenager with a penchant for entertaining a host of opinions but a particular disdain for voicing said opinions, I kept a diary. That’s how I will always remember that it was April 4, 2004, that things fell apart.
On the eve of the fourth, Yesenia received a care package from her parents in the mail. Encased in it were homemade baked goods, prescription tablets and magazines but the thing Yesenia was most interested in were the special mint coffee packets she had asked for.
She burst into my shared room and plopped on my bed where I was trying to study for a geography test. Ayele wasn’t around, having been sent home with a bad case of food poisoning.
“These are going to change our lives,” she said excitedly, brandishing the coffee packs in my face.
“Unless these have hard drugs in them, which I do not advocate, they are still not going to be able to keep me awake. I am immune to coffee,” I said, yawning audibly.
“These are not for drinking, Yaba. They are for treating our hair.”
“Huh?”
According to the latest craze in hair care, the key to better hair lay in a cold brew of this mint coffee. All one had to do was rinse her hair with this cold brew, secure a shower cap over the hair while damp, keep it on overnight and voila, the next morning say hello to longer, softer and glossier tresses.
Yesenia went on to mention the names of women across Latin America known to use this regimen but there was one glaring thing missing from this list.
“Erm, none of these women are Black. You do have Afro Latinas, right?” I asked eyeing the coffee packs.
“Of course Afro Latinas exist. I just haven’t read of any using this.”
“Okay, that’s alright but until I get documented evidence of at least two successful case studies of Black women doing this, I will not be participating in this experiment,” I said turning back to my geography notes.
“Oh come on. Hair is hair. It’s all the same.”
“That’s where you are wrong, my dear. It would take me a fortnight trying to scratch the surface of the intricacies of black hair and the different textures we have in our commune. You should know this, you’ve been living in close quarters with us for more than a year. I will watch you do it though.”
“No. We are meant to do this together. Friendships require shared experiences.”
“Well, this is one experience I will be abstaining from.”
I don’t know if it’s a product of being the only child or the fact that her parents give her anything she asks for to assuage their guilt for never being around but Yesenia is used to getting her way. I once saw her manipulate our hard-headed literature teacher, Mrs. Bekoe, into allowing her to skip class by arguing that she couldn’t be complicit in honouring the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, a man whose people were instrumental in colonizing and enslaving her ancestors. I am yet to find a section in any history textbook where the English colonized and enslaved Colombians. This was a perfect excuse tailor made for us, Ghanaian students but she got away with it, using her free time to alter her school skirt into a mid-thigh length and stitching the word “Booty” across the rear end just in case people didn’t know what that part of the human anatomy was called. It was truly a gift.
“I knew you would act like this. You are so predictable. Hi, my name is Yaba Afful and I always follow the rules and don’t know how to have fun.”
She said the last statement in a voice I am guessing was supposed to be an impersonation of mine. It was terrible. Yesenia had a vast library of accents, all fighting for dominance in the crevices of her larynx. Whenever she opened her mouth, you never knew which accent you’ll be addressed with. In her quest to capture the subtle nuances that I usually project, a hybrid of at least three accents came to play in a startling baritone that almost made me yearn to listen to DMX attempt to hit a Mariah Carey note instead.
“This is the reason why you don’t have a lot of friends and no boy wants to ask you out. You need to learn how to live a little.”
Today, had she said that to me, the seasoned adult who could care less about the opinions of sheep, I would have told her point-blank that we all can’t be fun people and that the world needs boring people like me to keep it in equilibrium. But back then I was still at an impressionable stage in my life. I suddenly started thinking about what other people thought of me and how I would never have a boyfriend in high school even though I had already come to the staunch conclusion that the boys in my school looked like rejected “Ed, Edd and Eddy” character illustrations.
Then she hit me with the kicker.
“I wish Ayele were here. She would do this. She’s way more fun.”
The feeling of comparison to a young girl still trying to find her way in life is more torturous than the feeling of watching your beloved dog chase a crow off the balcony only to misjudge the height from the third floor and fall to his death. The pain and fear of not measuring up make you do stupid things like forsaking your studies to condition your hair with coffee.
I left the preparation in Yesenia’s capable hands. The usual smell of sweaty feet and asbestos that usually clouded the dimly lit common room, where we had relocated to, was overpowered with the strong sweet smell of mint and coffee by the time she was done. After cooling the brew in the freezer, we followed the regimen meticulously but not without me voicing my doubts repeatedly.
“Can you stop being a wuss,” was the reply I got to my genuine reservations.
As we parted to our respective rooms with our shower caps secured, I felt a slight snap, crackle and pop sensation happening in my hair which I addressed.
“It probably means it’s working,” Yesenia said. “I’m already excited. We are going to feel brand new tomorrow.”
And brand new we were.
Overnight, Yesenia locks flourished. They were lustrous and longer, hanging just above her butt. It was like juju had taken place. I went to bed with an enviably full afro and woke up on the fourth looking like I had received an ill-advised hair transplant from Cynthia of “Rugrats” fame.
They say my screams were heard as far as the abattoir, four streets away from the school premises.
It was a disaster.
Mrs. Anim, our housemistress, had to be called in because I apparently had some kind of psychotic episode, trying to pick up the huge clumps of hair on the floor and glue it back onto my scalp. Mrs. Anim, in turn, called in the school doctor, Dr. Martei, who diagnosed that I probably had an adverse reaction to one or more of the ingredients in the coffee and was suffering a mental breakdown because of the outcome — all things even a dehydrated donkey strung on amphetamines could have diagnosed. He, in turn, called his barber who got rid of the few strands that were hanging on for dear life.
I was officially bald. If you slathered a little oil on my scalp, you would see your reflection in high definition.
When I had hair, I used to joke that I looked like a prepubescent boy giving my lack of breasts and curves but with this suddenly forced alopecia, the transformation was complete. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with looking like a prepubescent boy; it just wasn’t the aesthetic I was going for.
It should be put on record that out of all of God’s creation, teenagers are singlehandedly the scum of the earth. The jokes were countless — my head became a magic ball for the wannabe fortune tellers, a bongo drum for Ekow Osei, who fashioned himself a Travis Barker on the bongos, a mirror for the conceited girls who topped up their lip gloss with more efficiency than they did activating their brain cells for better grades — and the nicknames were creative. Till I graduated, I was known as Rabaldzel and sometimes Hump D., a shorter version of Humpty Dumpty.
My parents weren’t helpful either. This catastrophe happened during an era where wig technology wasn’t as advanced and most wigs on the market looked like they catered to octogenarian church-loving librarians called Eunice or Gertrude. I would have gladly worn one of these drab looking wigs but my parents refused. They even refused to buy me a simple scarf to cover up. “This should serve as a reminder,” my mother said. “Anytime a friend tries to pressure you into doing something stupid, take a look at your head, remember the abject humiliation and make an informed decision.”
The only people sympathetic to my plight were the members of my youth group at church but that was only because they were not privy to what had happened and through an unfortunate case of Chinese whispers thought I had cancer. I didn’t have the heart to tell them otherwise.
And while all this was going on, Yesenia drew away from our friend circle, severing ties with an apoplectic Ayele and a disconsolate me to hang out with the group of students at school most likely to be convicted felons before age twenty-five. While she continued to douse her hair daily with that demonic coffee and get “Rapunzeled” and as my hair refused to grow no matter the amount of Jamaican black castor oil I massaged on my scalp, she never once apologized. We graduated without her ever acknowledging me or my pain.
♠♠♠
There’s a package on my desk, next to my computer where my breakfast — waakye and fried egg with an unhealthy helping of shito — is currently supposed to be. It’s a big black box with orange polka dots and it’s been lying on my desk since I got to work.
According to Afia, the package was brought in by my ex.
After seeing Jeremy wave his traitorous flag in the enemy’s camp, I took Ayele’s offer of using the breakup app. My mood was deemed irate and the resulting message it generated was a triggering one filled with enough explosive expletives to get one hailed at a sailors’ convention. In hindsight, maybe breaking up with him, whom I’ve been with for three years, via text message and later tossing his prized Rolex in the ocean by Labadi beach was slightly insensitive.
Now I fear that what lies inside the box could be a bomb, a tightly coiled python, poisoned cake or all the above.
Afia has abandoned her post at reception, where the phones are ringing off the hook and her Beckham photos remain a distraction, to huddle with me in my office.
“Let’s not be melodramatic,” she tuts. “I have a lot of experience when it comes to men and I can assure you that Ghanaian men are not that callously vindictive when they are heartbroken. Yes, they will disparage your name and reputation to high heavens such that you will be known around town as the girl who feels her body or the girl who thinks she’s all that but they will never cause you any bodily harm. That, if I can’t have you then nobody will, mindset is not embedded in their DNA. Besides, Jeremy doesn’t look like he could hurt a fly.”
“That’s probably what the angels in heaven said about Lucifer.”
“If you are so sure that there’s a bomb in there, why don’t you shake it and find out?”
I pass up the opportunity to tell her that shaking the package would be the worst way to find out when I get a text from Ayele.
You have to go on Instagram. I am currently stalking Yesenia and she’s made a DRASTIC change to her appearance. I hope she’s not sick. I wrote some really nasty things on her Facebook wall and I would hate to have to take them down.
I roll my eyes at the text and watch as Afia, without my permission, carefully takes the lid off of the package. We are neither disintegrated nor lunged at by anything venomous. We are instead hit with a very powerful minty smell, a scent that I still have recurring nightmares about.
Taped to the bottom of the lid is a note scribbled in Jeremy’s usual scrawl.
This is the project I was working on. She, who shall not be named, was on board from the start. It’s her long-awaited apology. Have fun at the party. Love always and forever faithful, Jeremy.
Inside the box, sitting pretty, combed and bundled beautifully is an extremely long wig as black and sleek as the skin of a panther on the prowl, soft enough to run your hands through without the fear of finger entanglement, voluminous enough to use as a blanket, shiny enough to blind a passerby if the sun hits it at the perfect angle.
The perfect wig, the Holy Grail of wigs, radiant in all of its splendor.
