The girl paused in her laughter, and then looked over her shoulder. Curious, Jess looked too, but couldn’t see anything except the Boys’ Quarters, which stood tall and grey and empty. Beyond that, she supposed, was only the car park and the back road that led to the rest of the houses in Bodija.
“I need to go,” the girl said, saying “go” on a winding-down breath, as if she were about to say something else, say what she had to go and do, but she didn’t.
Jess leapt up from the staircase and was surprised to see the girl shrink as if expecting a blow. She began to back away, moving faster with each step.
“Wait! Um. Wouldyouliketobefriends?” Jess asked, anxiously.
The girl stopped stock-still for a few moments, then spoke softly and almost as quickly as Jessamy had.
“Yes.”
Another swift, illuminating smile, then she added hastily, “Watch for a light tonight.”
She turned and hurtled away from where Jess stood, moving past the Boys’ Quarters and around the back of the car park in what felt to Jess, who could hardly follow her figure for the sheets of sunlight wobbling down, like seconds.
Jess thoughtfully climbed the steps up to the middle floor. The air smelt like a mixture of toast and baking bread. Aunty Funke was supervising Tope, and Akin was grunting as he poured cassava from one huge pot into another; they were at the final stage of the gari making in the kitchen, and steam billowed from the open kitchen door. Her mother had gone shopping with a carload of old friends. She had tried to persuade Jessamy to come along, but Jess, who had been to the amusement park with her mother, father and these same friends the day before, demurred. It had been almost, but not quite, as bad as the zoo.
In the parlour, she could hear Aunty Biola attempting to teach her father Yoruba, collapsing into helpless giggles whenever he mispronounced his vowels, giving them the flat English sound instead of lifting them upwards with the slight outward puff of breath that was required. Jess couldn’t speak Yoruba to save her life, but she somehow had an ear for it, and could hear when it was spoken properly, even catch a little meaning in it. She crept closer to the beads that formed the door curtain and peeped through them.
“Orukọ mi ni . .” her father began, then stopped, confused when Aunty Biola fell about laughing again. He had said orukọ, “my name,” through his nose, as if it was a weird kind of sneezing sound.
“Orukọ,” she stressed gently as soon as she had recovered.
Her father shrugged, grinning.
“That’s what I said!”
Aunty Biola slapped her hands together in the typical Nigerian gesture for helplessness, exclaiming, “What am I going to do with this man?!” Then she fell back onto the the sofa as another fit of laughter overtook her.
Jess watched her father fan the two of them with a copy of Tell magazine, then she continued down the corridor. She paused outside the closed door at the end, her grandfather’s study. Ebun had told her, in the quiet of the night, lying in their beds, when the two of them had begun to speak as they did when they couldn’t see each other properly, that the door was always kept shut and locked — ever since the time that Bose, with her hands coated with spicy adun, had nearly destroyed the wine-coloured leather bindings of his specially commissioned copies of Things Fall Apart and A Dance of the Forests.
She hovered outside the door, longing to enter, just to glimpse just once, the rows of shelves Ebun had described to her, and the desk with the official-looking seal on it and to see her grandfather. Since the day she had gone into the entrance of the Boys’ Quarters, he was always wanting to know if she was happy, always wanting to make her happy, not in the anxious way of her English grandparents, who kindly, unintentionally made her feel abnormal, like a freak, but in a powerful, questing way that seemed to put her melancholy under a microscope and make her fears appear groundless. And so she quietly seated herself cross-legged on the clean, shiny squares of the floor outside the study, her back against the wall.
Jess closed her eyes and thought about TillyTilly, glad that she hadn’t gone shopping with her mother. Should she ask Ebun about her? But she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to ask anyone, she wanted to keep TillyTilly. TillyTilly was nothing like Dulcie or anyone in Jess’s class; TillyTilly was barefoot and strange, and wanted to be friends.
Jess could hear Aunty Funke’s laughter ringing down the corridor above the sound of popping, puffing cassava pieces in the black iron cauldron that sat on a big gas ring in the kitchen. Her father was in the kitchen, teasing Aunty Funke. No, Aunty Biola was there too; both of them were laughing at something her father had said in an excited tone of voice.
Aunty Funke called her.
Jess did not reply, didn’t even move. She only stirred and opened her eyes when she realised that her grandfather was emerging from the study. She scrambled up and threw her arms around his waist as he emerged, his slippers shuffling out of the carpeted room and onto the linoleum, where she had been sitting. He laughed with surprise and, dropping the key into his pocket, passed his hand over her hair, which was now neatly cornrowed, thanks to the efforts of Bisola.
“So you were waiting for Baba Gbenga! Will you drink with me, madam?”
She nodded furiously, and he laughed again, beginning to move towards the kitchen although she didn’t release him. Her mother or father would have detached her, her father gently, her mother with an exclamation of mild annoyance, but her grandfather struggled good-naturedly into the kitchen and ordered Aunty Biola to bring him a Powermalt and a Fanta from the cold crate.
“My granddaughter and I are going to drink our health,” he said.
That night, something woke Jessamy. She wasn’t sure whether it was a sound or a smell or an abrupt sight in one of her various dreams that made her suddenly open her eyes and stare around. For the first time since arriving in Nigeria, she felt a gaping disorientation; for a split second she couldn’t even remember where she was, and everything was dim and out of focus.
Then clear images came tumbling back into her vision and she looked to where Ebun lay, breathing shallowly.
Then she remembered.
Tilly Tilly.
Was she too late?
She glanced at the window — it was still dark. She sat up as quietly as she could in the bed, then slipped out of the room. As she ran to the staircase leading to the balcony to watch for the light in the window of the deserted house, she heard a sound in the shadow behind her.
Not a voice.
She looked back down the corridor, saw nothing but doors and squares of floor stretching out before her.
There it was again.
A creaking noise.
Like. . a door.
The noise stopped just as suddenly as it had started, and Jess walked down the corridor, hurrying slightly now, checking each room. She could hear the creaking sound in her head now; it didn’t need to be real.
The parlour door — shut.
Her mum’s and dad’s door — shut.
The storeroom door — shut.
Her grandfather’s door — shut.
The study door — partially open, a little space between door and doorpost exposing only more darkness.
What?
Breathless, she gave it a push, just a little push, with the tip of her finger, and slowly, impossibly, the door opened. She felt a thickness in the back of her head somewhere. Her tongue? Her brain? How could this door be open?