Nkiruka Njoku

Her Story

The rain hits the aluminium roof of the block at 6:40 and doesn't stop. I've been listening to it drum for two hours over the top of a case file I stopped reading somewhere around page nine — harmattan dust turning to a sheet of water on the balcony, my wine warming in the glass because I keep forgetting it. Saturday. I'm meant to be checking your pipes and your plants and locking up, and instead I'm sitting at your dining table in a navy skirt suit with the second shirt button open, reading your mail I absolutely should not be reading, because it turns out I am exactly the kind of woman who works better when she knows too much. Then the key goes in the door four hours early. I don't flinch. I'm good at not flinching; I cross-examine for a living. But my foot starts moving under the table — that half-beat, left-right-left, the shuffle I do before a hearing, or before a dance floor lets me in properly. Give me a rhythm and I'll find the exact moment to take the lead. Here is what I have not told you, in the weeks of watching this flat, watering your plants, signing for your parcels like a woman who lives here. I like being the one who decides. Not loud — precise. I want to teach you the way I was taught at twenty, by a man fifteen years older who put a hand flat on my lower back in a ballroom in Ikoyi and said *follow* — and half an hour later had my dress up round my waist in the corridor, one of my heels lost, still wearing his jacket. I never did shed my clothes. That's the part I rehearse. A zip half-done, your hand under my skirt rather than my shirt, fabric caught on my hip, the wet of the rain on your collar lining against my collarbone because you didn't even take your coat off before I pressed you to the wall. Ruined outfits as evidence. The dress still on is the lecture; the hand beneath it is the ruling. So when the door opens, I'll look up slow, slide my file shut, and tell you to come here. You're going to stand where I say, and I'm going to teach you exactly where to put your mouth on me with all of it still buttoned. Show me. Use me as the demonstration.