Yet even as she fell asleep, Jess was aware on some level that her memories were being moulded so that they were all different, and that Siobhan had not been dancing, but rolling, bump bump bump, from upstairs to down, terrible, she shouldn’t have pushed her, why had she pushed her?
It was a hot day in June when Jess returned from the park through the back door into the kitchen, and noticed that there was an empty coffee cup in the sink.
It was her father’s.
Puzzled but happy, she smiled, feeling as if this was somehow a gift. She dropped her mother’s hand and ran through the kitchen and into the passageway, shouting, “Daddy?”
He was in bed, but that was OK. She wanted to tell Tilly, but she was nowhere to be found.
III
ONE
“Daddy, there were, like, ten people in that car!” Jess risked the gusty whirring of the air-conditioning on her face as she knelt up on the seat and gesticulated wildly at the battered light-blue Ford that had just pulled ahead of them on the road. The people were crammed inside the car so tight that from the back they looked like one dark mass, as if they had been mixed together and spread across the car windows. You could differentiate backs of heads and necks, but only eventually.
“Um, I think that’s another cab,” her father said doubtfully, fanning himself with a newspaper as he looked at her mother for verification.
“Yup! The police don’t really care about that sort of stuff round here,” Sarah told Jessamy, who was gaping as she tried to imagine being in the backseat with six or seven other people, all in a ball of sweat, elbows, knees and rough hair.
They were back in Lagos, two days before Jess’s ninth birthday.
“The buses are worse,” Sarah smiled, to loud guffaws from their cabdriver.
Daniel playfully dragged Jess back down into a sitting position on the seat and threw his arms around her. She briefly rested her head on his shoulder and twisted a few strands of his hair around her finger, delighting in his laughing “ouch,” glad that he was here and real, and that his eyes and hands and movements were his own again. Then they were both laughing as Sarah told them (and the driver) a new story that her friend Yemi, who lived at Ojoo, had told in a letter she had written her. The roads entering and leaving the immediate vicinity of Ojoo were extremely bumpy and filled with potholes, and Yemi had written that a truck loaded with petrol had crashed just outside the town. The driver had managed to escape the entanglement relatively uninjured and flee the scene for assistance, the immediate result of which had been about thirty people ignoring imminent danger and running out with buckets to fill up on diesel for their electricity generators. If you could afford a generator in the first place, you could never have enough fuel for it, since NEPA was always in the throes of some system failure that meant no light, and petrol was very expensive. It was an irony, said the driver, nodding sagely, that in a country where the chief source of wealth was petrol, people were behaving as if they’d never seen it before. Sarah bitterly suggested government corruption and Daniel tentatively agreed, but with a pull in his voice as if he suspected that he might be laughed at for offering his opinion. The driver, sent from Bodija by Sarah’s father, who had airily ignored her insistence that she could get a cab herself, laughed at both of them.
“Ah, no, that cannot be the reason,” he said, casually checking the rearview mirror. “Our military boys are too honest for all of that now!”
Then all three adults sniggered in some mysterious solidarity that left Jess to wonder instead at the curious thought of a small crowd running out in flip-flop sandals to take what they needed, even if the taking might kill them.
The first person that she saw when the car had come in through the gates was Uncle Kunle, but his shouts of welcome as he helped Gateman to unload the suitcases were mainly for Jess’s mother. It was Aunty Funke, in a dazzling blue-and-silver boubou, who, after greeting Daniel and Sarah, swooped on Jess, enfolding her in a big, soft embrace.
“Ah-ah! What is this, now? Are you sure this is Jessamy?” she teased, taking the by now diffidently smiling Jess by the hand and leading her into the house, where it was cooler. “Did someone come from the sky and just stretch you upwards and upwards?” Funke continued, making Jess laugh.
Inside, Ebun was as cool-faced as ever. Her hair, wrapped around and around in black thread, looped stiffly outwards from her scalp. She sat on a chair in the hallway, talking in unhurried Yoruba to the new houseboy, Kola, who stood at the ironing board set up against the wall, neatly sprinkling water from a small bowl onto a rumpled white shirt before setting about it with the hot iron. When Ebun saw them, she approached, smiling vaguely, hugged Jess and told her that she was welcome. Jess greeted all her cousins, even deigning to drop a kiss on the deferential Bose’s cheek as the six-year-old stood before her with downturned eyes.
Then, impatient to find her grandfather, she ran out of the back of the house and up the outside stairs that led to the upper level, where the sleeping rooms, the kitchen and her grandfather’s study were. In her haste she ran straight into the man that she was seeking, and she hissed with the pain of her nose bumping his arm as he stretched out to catch her.
“Wuraola! My own Wura-Wura! You are too much in a hurry!” her grandfather laughed, picking her right up off the ground and patting clumsily at her nose. Jess shrieked exultantly as her grandfather spun her around, letting her go for a split-second before catching her again and putting her down.
“Daddy, she’s too big for that,” Sarah said half-heartedly, putting her head out from the parlour where she, Daniel and Biola were loudly catching up. She watched, smiling, as Gbenga beckoned to Jess and told her, “Wura! I have something to show you!” Jess took his hand and he walked her to his study, pausing to shout out, “Ebun and Tope! I trust that you are bringing minerals to the sitting room for everyone—” There was a rippling cheer from downstairs, and then Jess, smiling up at her grandfather, was led into the high-shelved, cream-and-brown-wallpapered study.
Jess had to reach out and steady herself on a shelf as the memory of TillyTilly impishly grinning in the chair by the big desk hit her with some force.
“See! It’s a birthday present for you and your sister!” Her grandfather pushed her up towards the desk, where a small wooden statue sat. Jess tried to halt and snatched at her grandfather’s big hand, because she didn’t want to go near it. If Fern was supposed to look like her, then this statue didn’t look anything like Fern. She couldn’t imagine anyone being at peace because of this carving, with its long, heavy features and clasped hands. It looked too bulky and too light a brown, with some deeper brown blotches, as if it were covered in previously dark skin that had been bleached. The head seemed unnaturally pointy, and the sloping cheekbones and stylised, pupil-less eyes not glossy-book beautiful, but real and here before her, supposed to represent Fern but not. The only beautiful thing was the hair: the intricately chiselled pattern of braids pouring down over the shoulders. But even as a woman, neither she nor Fern could look like this, ever, ever, amen. Overflowing with a fear that now some could-have-been-would-have-been Fern would dog her thoughts and dreams, Jess turned quickly away from the statue and threw her arms around her startled grandfather’s belted waist.
“Why didn’t YOU tell me about Fern?” she whispered into his shirt.
Her grandfather put his hands on her shoulders. He sounded troubled.