It was looming out from across all the water and land that they had to cross in the aeroplane, reaching out for her with spindly arms made of dry, crackling grass like straw, wanting to pull her down against its beating heart, to the centre of the heat, so she would pop and crackle like marshmallow. She had been reading about Nigeria for the past month, and her excitement had grown so much that she had nearly succumbed to that peculiar febrile illness of hers again, but recovered just in time for the yellow fever and hepatitis C injections that she needed. The anti-malaria tablets were disgusting, coating her tongue like thick, sickly chalk.
It was the combination of the two white pills and the leering idea of her mother’s country that made her begin to struggle and thrash, screaming, half dangling headfirst out of the seat, nearly choking on her seat belt, fighting off her mother’s hands as she snaked herself away from the little chalk circles. Inside her head, she could hear her skin blistering, could almost feel it, and she tried to outscream the sound. She could hear herself. She felt other people looking, heard people stirring, muttering, and felt good to be making this sharp, screeching, hurting noise. Yet some part of her was sitting hunched up small, far away, thinking scared thoughts, surprised at what was happening, although this was not new. She panted as she shook off her father’s restricting hands. Sweat was beading on her forehead and her eyelids, and she felt the prickly feeling at the back of her eyelids and that familiar sensation of her eyes almost involuntarily rolling upwards onto her head. It was a kind of peace.
Then her mother, who for a while now had been speaking in a pleading monotone, said something with a sharp buzz, something that she didn’t quite catch, and slapped her hard. It was oddly like a cooling wind on her skin, the sting that remained when her mother’s hand had left her, and she stopped struggling and hung limp from the side of her seat, her mouth a small, open O, until her father, murmuring reproachfully, settled her properly into the aeroplane seat.
He looked at her, dabbed at her cheek with his handkerchief. “Never mind about the pills for today,” he said quietly and put them back into her pillbox.
After a while the minutes sank into each other, and Jess sat still, her eyes following the two air hostesses up and down the aisles. Beside her, she felt her father’s heavy, musky-smelling presence, the weight of his arm pressing along hers, heard his shallow breathing as he slept. An air hostess whose name badge said “Karen” smiled quickly at Jessamy, and sleepy as she was, Jess somehow understood that this woman, her jaunty red cap perched atop a black bun of hair, was not smiling at her in particular, but at a child, at the idea of a child. Because she was an air hostess. Smiling at a child. That was what she was supposed to do. Jess gave a drowsy smile in return.
Jess fell asleep slowly, her hand reaching for her dad’s. She closed her eyes completely, and the darkness was warm and quiet, like a bubble lifting her higher even than the aeroplane.
Her father reached out and enfolded her hand in his far bigger one. She turned her head a fraction in his direction, opening her eyes into slits. His dishevelled, sandy hair obscured his forehead, and his greeny-blue eyes were half open; they looked darker with the overhead light switched off. He had taken off his glasses, and she could just about make out the two small indents they had left on the bridge of his nose. He gave her a disorientated, inquisitive smile. Are you okay, Jessamy? Really okay? I’m worried. But she was too tired to move her face, and, letting her eyes linger on his face for a few seconds longer, to acknowledge the smile, she closed her eyes again and slept, and dreamed a confusing dream that had people and animals and dancing coloured shapes moving in and out of it.
TWO
Jess had not expected Nigeria to be this hot.
She stood at the luggage carousel, holding her mum’s hand, trying to ignore the stickiness of her orange-and-white button-up top. She could feel the sweat collecting into a big drop in the hollow of her back, and wriggled her shoulders a little, wondering if it would drop and splash the floor like water from a bucket.
The heat was emptying her out already.
Two thin, tall men in khaki shorts were helping people to load their luggage off the carousel. Luggage was moving past her in a disorderly line, some of it big, bulgy plastic bags, striped red-and-white, some suitcases and trunks. The men were laughing and calling out to each other in Yoruba, flashing white smiles at each other, sometimes staggering with the force of their laughter.
Her father was standing near the carousel, his hands in his pockets, watching out for their luggage. Another thing she had not expected: she hadn’t expected him to seem so. . well, out of place. His face was wet with perspiration and flushed pink, and even the way that he stood marked him out as different. The people milling around him all glanced pointedly at him as they passed; their glances were slightly longer than usual, but not outright stares — more the kind of look that Jess herself gave when passing a statue or a painting. The acknowledgement of an oddity. She looked at him, willing him, at least, to look at her.
He didn’t.
Her mum smiled at her. There was something in the smile that Jess could only vaguely describe as careful.
It was the same smile that she had worn when they had been going through customs. The official behind the desk had a neat moustache and goatee beard, and his expression had been polite; in fact, overpolite. So solicitous that his face was immobile, and Jess, looking at him from a short distance beneath the counter, thought that he was somehow making fun of her mother. The man had flicked his gaze over her with the same small smile on his face.
Had he been thinking, Who is this woman who has a Nigerian maiden name in a British passport, who stands here wearing denim shorts and a strappy yellow top, with a white man and a half-and-half child? Had her mother also put herself in his place, looked at herself from his side of the counter and found herself odd and wanting?
Maybe that had been the carefulness in her smile.
All that the eight-year-old Jess knew was that the smile wasn’t a particularly happy one, and that her mother hadn’t smiled like that in England.
She felt herself, also, growing careful.
Her mum tugged at her hand, and Jessamy saw a real smile spread across her mother’s face, as if she had just remembered sunshine.
“We’re going to see Grandpa and your cousins!”
Jess nodded and gave a half-hearted, placebo smile while she thought about this. When she thought of her Nigerian grandfather and cousins, she saw a bustle of people, a multitude, all of them moving so quickly that she couldn’t see their faces, and any one of them could be family. Her grandfather would have a walking stick. Would he have a walking stick? Her mum said that he was very active and strong, and so suspicious of people that he liked to do things for himself to make sure that they were done properly. He would have grey hair, like her English grandfather, but his hair would be springy and less silver, sprouting like steel wool. But his face — there was none. She felt her lungs constrict and turned her head away from her mum for a second, struggling to breathe in the humid air.
If she couldn’t see him, then how would he see her?
Once they were outside, which was only fractionally cooler than the inside, her father had no sooner tipped the man who had helped them with the luggage than several people hurried across the white paving from where they had been lounging against their parked cars. The sun struck everything, bouncing ultra-shiny colours into Jessamy’s line of vision, and Jessamy, now silently clutching her father’s hand, thought she might begin to scream when she saw the men, some in the loose, flapping gowns worn, she would later learn, by Nigerian Muslims, descending upon her father as if they wished to swallow him up.