Jess shook her head vigorously, laughing as she did so. Cold! Here?
She looked to the doorway, over which was hung a cascade of vertically arranged brown-and-cream sandalwood beads. They were still swinging from the impact of her Aunty Funke’s passing through, and you could see chinks of the landing through them. She could see patches of something else, too. Three of her cousins — she couldn’t see clearly which ones, or even if they were boys or girls — stood there, peering curiously through at her, as she sat on their grandfather’s lap.
Were they even really there?
She thought she sensed something like resentment in their expressions.
FOUR
“Do you know what your mother did?” Jess’s grandfather said to her the next evening. They were in the parlour again. It was nearly dusk; orange light and growing shadows played on the walls. Jess was sitting at his feet, gingerly licking at a round, hard ball of nutty adun. He was wearing traditional costume, and she stared at the finely stitched blue-and-silver embroidered waves that ran around the bottoms of his trousers. She wanted to touch them to see if they really did stand out all bumpy. From the corner of her eye she could see her mother, who was curled up on the sofa opposite, engrossed in low-pitched conversation with Aunty Funke. Her mother had stopped speaking, and was gazing at Jess’s grandfather with pursed lips. Running her tongue over her adun with a slurp, Jess decided to hold out on answering her grandfather for as long as possible. Her instinct that the conversation wouldn’t be a good idea was confirmed when Aunty Funke stood and began clearing away, muttering that it was about time that she cleaned the kitchen. The meal had been finished for half an hour.
Jess’s mum began helping Aunty Funke to clear away. It looked strange, seeing her mum, dressed in a shapeless black vest and denim shorts, helping Aunty Funke, who was wearing a yellow boubou with green leaves on it. Even though the sleeves on Aunty Funke’s boubou were rolled up in a businesslike manner so that they bulged just below her shoulders, Jess’s mum still looked like the household help.
Jess licked her adun ball, and said nothing.
“Wait a minute,” her grandfather said, dipping his fingers into the big plastic bowl filled with water. Aunty Funke, who had bent over the table to take the bowl, froze where she was, waiting patiently for him to finish. Using his other hand, her grandfather unhurriedly paddled the water and dribbled it over his fingers, working at his fingernails to remove leftover bits of amala. Bits of speckled green okra were swirling around in the water as well. When he removed his hands from the bowl, he shook them a little, dropping water onto the rug. He made a vague, impatient gesture to the general atmosphere, and Aunty Biola came in from outside, as if on cue, holding out a rough green hand towel. He grunted, dried his hands and thrust the towel back at her before silently accepting the toothpick that Aunty Funke offered him and reclining in his seat once more. Aunty Funke left with the plates, but Jess’s mother hovered on the other side of the beaded door curtain.
“Wuraola.”
Jess jumped when he brought his hand down on her shoulder. She looked up at him, licking the corners of her mouth.
“Mmmm?”
“I said to you: ‘Do you know what your mother did?’ and you say, ‘Mmmm.’ Is that respect?”
She squeezed one eye shut and peered at him with mock incredulity, and he laughed.
“I was saying ‘mmmm’ because you called me,” she protested.
“Even then, it’s yes, ‘grandfather’. . I mean, what is this ‘mmmm’?”
Jess gave up.
“I don’t know what my mother did.” (You’re going to tell me and she’s going to get angry. I can see it already because she’s all nervous.)
Jess wasn’t sure whose side she was supposed to be on if her grandfather told her something really bad and secret about her mother.
When her grandfather snapped his toothpick and didn’t say anything else, she prompted him.
“Was it something really bad?”
“It was just something that she did.”
“Yeah?”
(Good or bad?)
He spread his hands. “This is how your mother really is. Sometimes I think that she doesn’t know what she’s doing at all, at all, but she follows some other person inside her that tells her to do things that make no sense. There is no other way that someone could be so very stubborn, and not pay.”
Not daring to look up, Jess reached out on impulse and touched part of the trouser embroidery.
“I sent her to learn medicine in England,” her grandfather told her, his voice a mix of amusement and irritation. “Listen, this is what your mother is like. She hadn’t even been there six months when she writes me a letter, telling me that she is now studying English. English literature! What job do you find in Nigeria that requires the knowledge of all these useless words? Different words for hot, for cold! Words describing white people, white things, every single story spun out in some place where WE don’t exist! It has no value; in my eyes, it is to confuse. .”
“Confuse, dissemble, obfuscate,” Jess whispered.
“What?”
“Dissemble and obfuscate — they’re two different words, same meaning: ‘to confuse.’ ”
Silence. Jess heard her mother snort with laughter, then retreat, choking, down the corridor to the kitchen. She looked at her grandfather, whose lips were pinched so tightly together that they looked as if they had been sewn at the corners.
“Hmmm,” he said. “Hmmm. I see you are the same.”
They both laughed. It wasn’t true, of course.
“Anyway, listen. It made me. . I couldn’t. .” Her grandfather pounded his chest and let out a loud sigh that sounded the twisting of his heart.
“But didn’t you want her to be happy?”
Her grandfather didn’t answer her question, but arranged the splinters of toothpick on the table. Jess presumed that one or other of her aunts would soon appear to clear them up.
“Wuraola, your mother had no job, she was living far from home, and she was writing and saying that she would find some work and pay for her studies! Such nonsense! I can tell you that I was afraid of witchcraft. I was frightened that some enemy had laid a curse on her head so powerful that it had stolen every single bit of sense from her head.”
“It couldn’t have been that bad,” Jess ventured.
Her grandfather exploded.
“She left her home, and she went to England, and studied English stories, and gave up her own, and gave up all her talk of healing people, and married some omugo oyinbo man who knows nothing, nothing at all—” His words slowed and he heaved a deep, snuffling sigh when he saw that Jess had dropped her adun ball on the floor and was staring at him wide-eyed, her mouth half open.
“What does omugo mean? Is it bad? Was that a bad thing you said about my dad?” Jess questioned, sternly. It sounded bad.
Her grandfather shook his head slowly as Aunty Funke reentered and swept up the toothpick shards.
“Just forget. Forget I said that. I mean. . that I don’t know who your father is; I don’t know his people, I don’t know what his name means and where it comes from. Harrison — what does that mean, Harry’s son? Harris’s son? Now take Oyegbebi — it means ‘kingship lives here.’ ” He tapped his breastbone. “Here. Here is where kingship lives. I am a princely man, and my children therefore should be proud and strong. Everyone who hears my name and knows my people should know that. I don’t know your father, I don’t know his father, or what his people have done. It is something about your mother that made her do this, marry a man that she didn’t know.”