Lavender.

Art by Kseniya Lapteva on Unsplash.

“You have to bathe again,” my mother’s voice pierced through the void. Not angry, not tired, but hurt. Like she couldn’t believe I dared to trample on her heart. She stood in the doorway of the cramped bathroom, arms akimbo, eyes roving around me like she was trying to scan a scar, a stain on my body.
I was fourteen, and under her glare, I began to wilt. I held the towel tightly to my chest. Blinking away the tears before she could spot them. I wanted her to ask where or with whom I had been for the last two days. Instead, she eyed me again:

“You still smell of him,” turning away, her nose wrinkled, “Go and wash.”

The water was cold. The heater had never worked, and it was January now. I scrubbed at my skin until it was raw. Until I couldn’t feel his touch any longer under the layers of pain. My mother never asked where I’d gone, never asked where I’d left in the first place. She left the lavender soap on the sink and shut the door behind her.

I didn’t think about him again until university. I learnt the art of pushing him behind my mind, of not allowing the questions to pull him out of the abyss. Of course, there were flashes – leather jackets that smelt of weed, the sound of a guitar from another dorm room, even the cheap beer that forced itself into my nose when he breathed on me. But nothing that stayed. Nothing that could bring him back to disrupt my life.

But at the university, it was harder; harder to hear my roommates talking about their fathers, and stay silent. So I began to craft tales of my own. I told everyone who cared that my father died when I was young. Which was true. The man who had twirled me round the room, washed my short kinky hair and rubbed Ori into it, the man who would’ve never let anything hurt me. That man was dead. In his place, someone else had appeared. Someone who hurt so much he had to spill the pain.

The addiction may be. Or maybe it was the pain. The pain I first saw in his eyes when he walked in and told my mother, “Twenty years and they just let me go. Can you imagine?” Nothing could make it go away. Not my mother’s reassurance that her business would hold the family while he looked for something else. Not even the government’s reassurance that the layoff was only temporary until Supertex could get back on its feet. For him, it felt like he had given the textile company his life, and they had betrayed him in return, never mind that he wasn’t the only one who was laid off. So he nursed the bottle as a consolation. Maybe the addiction was just a side effect. Along with the late-night visits to my room, the abuse and the beatings.

I never told my mum what really happened. There was no need. That night, when she left the lavender soap on the sink, we both knew there was no going back. That it was better for the story to remain unsaid. For us to bear the burden individually. I had lost a father. She had lost a husband; my siblings had lost their dad. But his absence was so much easier to bear.

I’m thirty years old now. I live with a man who is afraid to touch me because all touches seem so similar. My skin has learnt to recognise all touches, even those of loved ones, as threats. I have tried to move on. I have tried all the rituals I’ve seen online. I have even tried the Cele churches, the one my mother began to attend after he walked out of our lives. Nothing works.

My husband thinks I should get a therapist. He doesn’t understand when I scoff. We are Nigerians. It is our DNA to carry pain until it becomes our skin. What good will talking do?

Just like when my father left the house after I reported him, and his family blamed me for involving outsiders, I’ve often thought about pulling off a disappearing act again. Then, I had simply picked up my bag and began to walk, determined to go some place no one could ever find me. Two days later, sore, hungry and tired of staying with a friend whose house I had eventually ended up in, I returned. But I still think of doing the same thing, walking out of my house and walking, walking, walking for miles until the house is a dot in the distance, until I can leave myself behind.

But I’m no longer fourteen. I am thirty, with a son who won’t sleep unless I cuddle him. I try to convince myself that I have left my father behind. But sometimes, I find myself scrubbing at my skin over and over again. It’s like trauma has a scent, and mine is his. The smell of the lavender soap my mother loved so much that she made all of us use it. I imagine she didn’t think that when she left the soap on the sink. That he hadn’t only smelled of factory engine oils and machines, but also unwashed armpits. That at night, freshly bathed, the smell that lingered on him was Lavender.

Tonight again, I stare at myself, but not in my mother’s eyes, in the bathroom mirror. My newly barbed hair, wet and shiny, glistens in the harsh glow of the bathroom light. My red eyes look back at me. For a minute, I am fourteen and my mother is looking at me, and there is a soap on the shelf, smelling of my dad.

I can’t blame my husband. It wasn’t his fault that the Signature English Lavender soap he bought to ‘calm me’ had the opposite effect. Like what it struck between me and my father, my relationship with Lavender is one he will never know. I have locked it up inside me like everything else. My mother and I are similar in that we both have the ability to lock away a part of our lives and pretend it never existed.

I look at myself in the mirror again and sniff at my skin. The smell of Lavender still lingers. Even after spending hours in the shower, letting the water cascade down my skin, I still smell like my father. There’s no other soap in the bathroom, so I pick up my hair shampoo and let it lather on my skin. Yes, I’ll wash again.