“Here, sir! I have very nice car for you here, air-conditioned, right size to take your luggage, now,” one man was bellowing above the din of the others.
“Only ten thousand naira to Ibadan or Ife, or I go take you to Abuja, where there is a Hilton,” pressed another one.
They were surrounded by the folds of clothing, the gesturing hands, the smell of ironed clothes and sweaty bodies. Jess felt as if the heat was intensifying, even though she could only see chinks of sunlight through the gaps in the milling gathering around them. She clutched her father’s fingers for dear life, her hands alternately sticking and sliding as the pads of her fingers caught his fingernails.
Her father, standing defensively by his suitcase, darted a confused look at her mother, who quite suddenly took charge and began to outshout them all, speaking rapidly in a mixture of Yoruba and broken English.
“Wetin you be wanting, now? You no go want us to chop?. . Ten thousand naira, sae everything is okay, or ori e ti darun ?”
Both her mother and the people surrounding her began to laugh — mysterious laughter, like a liquid, bubbling wall, leaving Jess and her father drenched with it, but still outside. Jess rubbed her forehead with her free hand and squinted at her mother, who seemed to be transformed by her bargaining, bantering tone, then up at her father, who shrugged, putting his own hand to his face to adjust his glasses, which were slipping down the bridge of his nose.
Minutes later, her mother had selected a driver, and the other hopefuls scattered, grumbling good-naturedly. “Daniel, could you help the driver?” she said, abruptly slipping back into her smooth English accent as she took Jess’s hand again and led her to the long, egg-brown sedan that would take them to Ibadan.
Seeing her mother get into the front seat of the car and slip her sunglasses on, Jess sat in the backseat of the car. She turned her face upwards so the air-conditioning cooled her skin, and opened her mouth and gulped loudly, imagining that she was filling up with cold air like a balloon. Then she looked out of the side window, straight at a man who was leaning against his car, his jaw working as he chewed gum. He was almost impossibly tall and wearing a rough cotton shirt and a pair of long shorts that reached down to his calves. The light colours contrasted with his skin, and he stood out in gaunt relief against his cream-coloured car, like a paper cutout. He was looking at her, but in a distracted manner, as if she was something to look at while he waited for something else.
The car rocked downwards as her father loaded his suitcase into the back, and she heard his shoes clicking on the white pavement as he began to walk around the car. She carried on looking at the man who had laughed. She even pressed her fingers against the dusty window and brought her face closer to it, peering at him. He watched her laconically, slapping flies away as he chewed. Her father, puffing slightly, opened the car door and threw himself down onto the seat beside her. “All right, Jessamy?” he asked, cheerfully, and although she didn’t turn from the window, she felt cooler, as if a lone scrap of home had just blown into the car. England, where people who stared at you would shift their eyes away with an embarrassed, smiling gesture if you stared back. England, where people didn’t see you, where it was almost rude to, wrong to.
Would her cousins be like this? Would they look at her, then see her, and just not really. . well, care? See her, and leave her looking, trying to see something?
Then, as the driver got into the seat beside her mother and started up the car, chattering in Yoruba, the man suddenly widened his eyes so that the whites seemed enormous and luminous, and gave a short laugh again as she drew away from the window, startled.
Her father fanned himself with a copy of a Nigerian newspaper that he’d bought as they were leaving the airport. The car began to move away. The man in cream mouthed something.
“Mummy,” she said, finally, when the man who had laughed was out of sight and they were moving down a seemingly interminable length of road.
Her mum paused in her conversation with the cabdriver.
“Jess?”
“What does oh-yee-bo mean?”
Her mum twisted around in her seat, looking puzzled.
“What?”
“A man just said it to me.”
The cabdriver looked into the rearview mirror and laughed.
“He probably meant oyinbo. It means somebody who has come from so far away that they are a stranger!”
Jess settled back against the leather seat, fiddled with her seat belt.
“Oh.”
Her father looked up distractedly from a column he was reading about the Nigerian president.
“That’s a bit of a shabby thing to say. .”
He looked at Jess and winked, and she smiled at him.
The driver said something in Yoruba.
Her mother, who had pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head so that they settled on her thick, slightly frizzy hair, seemed restive. When the driver spoke, she looked at him and said, in a slightly sharper tone than usual, “I think we should speak in English, so everyone can understand.”
Mr. Harrison stamped his feet to applaud his wife’s sense of fair play.
“Bravo, Sarah!”
He beamed at her, his hair standing on end as usual, and Jessamy smiled too, in preparation for the unifying smile, the smile that they would all be smiling because it was important that they could all understand and share this country too.
It didn’t come.
Her mother turned back in her seat and began a discussion with the driver about several places that she used to know in the Lagos area.
In English.
THREE
When they arrived at the Bodija house, Jess’s grandfather calmly greeted her mother as if all the things that Jess’s mum had told her had happened weren’t true, as if it had been just yesterday that he had sent her to England to go to university, not fifteen years ago, a period of time in which she, Sarah, had properly grown up, and her mother, his wife, had died. As if it didn’t matter that she had stayed away for so long.
Gbenga Oyegbebi’s stillness contrasted greatly with the constant movement of Jessamy’s two aunts and her uncle. Aunty Biola had been looking out for the car, and called Uncle Kunle to help her open the main gate (Gateman was eating a late lunch), and Jess immediately saw the three figures jumping up and down at the gate, waving with barely controlled excitement before the car had even drawn close.
Jessamy’s cousins had been slightly more reserved. The five older than her, Aunty Funke’s and Uncle Kunle’s children, greeted her with tentative but almost patronising smiles; the two youngest, Aunty Biola’s children, stood as if in awe of her, surveying her clothes, her hair, her entire self with raised eyebrows, twisting their hands together.
She was surprised by her disappointment that none of her cousins was the right age to show an interest in her as a companion, although she had already had their names and ages recited to her by her mother, who had named them off by heart, repeating them as if by rote. Uncle Adekunle’s children: Akinola, fourteen; Bisola, twelve; Ebun, eleven. Aunty Funke’s children: Oluwatope, eleven; Taiye, ten. Aunty Biola’s children: Oluwabose, five; Oluwafemi, four. There they all stood, an uncertain circle, and then her grandfather came forward, greeted her mother, shook hands with her father. Although he seemed mellower and smaller than the picture that her mother had painted for her over the years, Jess had a sudden and irrational fear that he might start shouting at her.