“Sorry,” Jess said, then scrambled off Sarah’s lap as Aunty Biola came down the stairs carrying the enormous birthday cake.
“Cake! Cake!” she said, merrily, bouncing around in Aunty Biola’s path as her aunt smilingly tried to outmanoeuvre her so that she could get safely to the table. It was like a frenzy in her; Jess was jumping as high as she could manage, gleefully attempting to poke the cake, which Biola was holding higher and higher until the cake was in danger of toppling off its silver platter.
“O ya, stop that, now,” Jess heard her grandfather bark out from behind her. Sarah looked on in bafflement as Jess and her grandfather levelly met each other’s eyes, Jess’s expression suddenly sullen as she moved out of the relieved Biola’s way. Her father may have sternly told her off many times, but Sarah had never heard him speak this way to his Wuraola. She shrugged, reminding herself that Jess needed antiseptic for her knees, then began following Biola up to the kitchen, followed by Jess, who skipped up the stairs after them. She passed her grandfather without a glance, even though he frowned at her all the way up the stairs.
And as evening fell and Jess stood on her chair so that she was better able to blow out the candles on the enormous pink-and-white cake that Aunty Funke had made, Sarah leaned back into Daniel’s arms and watched thoughtfully as Jess, surrounded by a blur of smiling faces, cheers and clapping (and the soft smacking of balloons together as Bose and Femi attacked each other), blew out all the candles in one gusty puff and clapped her hands delightedly as she sang loudly along,
(HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOOOO)
finally smiling contentedly, because even if Jess’s voice did seem a little nasal (did she have some kind of fever coming on? it couldn’t possibly be malaria already), she was happy, at last.
Reclining on a sofa in the downstairs living room, Daniel was watching Sarah, Bose and Femi munch contentedly on the firm sweetness of sugarcane, plucking back the green with their fingers to reveal the creamy yellow-white that left gluey juices on their hands and clothes. Sarah’s father had sent for the sugarcane, but aside from Daniel, he was the only person in the room not eating it. Instead, half lying on the opposite sofa with his eyes closed, he was nodding occasionally in response to what Sarah was saying. A newspaper was on his lap as he ruminatively chewed on half a bitter kola nut, which he occasionally dipped into a small bowl of yellow salt that was set beside him. Bose and Femi were pushing trucks around on the floor in between their sugarcane eating activities, hers yellow and with a broken windscreen, his blue with the PepsiCo logo on the side.
Sarah changed to English. Daniel drooped for a few minutes longer under the unrelenting sun flowing in through the open, uncurtained window, then got up and put the setting on the fan to high. To his amazement, Sarah, who had been in the middle of explaining the plotline of her children’s story to her father, stopped, complaining to him, “Aw, why? It’s all cold now!”
“What?!”
Sarah began an exchange which they both knew would inevitably end in Daniel’s switching the fan power back to medium, but was interrupted by her father suddenly opening his eyes and saying, “Bisi-mi. When was the last time that you prayed?”
Discomfited, Sarah glanced at Daniel, who put his hands up to show that it wasn’t his situation.
“I can’t remember,” she said at last. “It was probably recently, though,” she added hopefully.
Gbenga Oyegbebi shook his head and closed his eyes again.
“Eh-heh, so I see that you are now too big a writer to say any prayers. There’s nothing God can do for you.”
Daniel began to feel alarmed, hoping that there wasn’t going to be an argument right before his eyes. Where had this come from, anyway? Hopefully, he waited for the discussion to slip into Yoruba, but it didn’t. Evidently his father-in-law wanted him to hear this.
“Daddy, you know that’s not true,” Sarah said, calmly enough, wrapping the remains of her sugarcane in some newspaper that she had gestured to Bose to bring from Gbenga’s lap. Gbenga laughed quietly and dipped another corner of the kola nut into the salt, still without opening his eyes.
“Bisi, I am your father. You think I don’t know why you don’t want to pray, but I’m telling you now that you’re wrong. Think on Jesus! Think on him so that you don’t start thinking only of yourself, going inwards and inwards until there is no life outside of Bisi—”
Daniel heard the strained tone in his wife’s voice; she was checking herself so that she didn’t disrespect her father, much in the same way that she restrained her quick anger when she spoke to anyone important.
“Daddy. I don’t think only of myself, I assure you. How much does it matter whether I pray or not?”
Sarah’s father shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Bisi, how could you, now? You know that when you pray, you are heard, if not by God, then by yourself. When you pray, you tell yourself what you truly want, what you really need. And once you know these things, you can do nothing but go after them. Sae you understand?”
Sarah flicked an embarrassed gaze at Daniel as Bose and Femi, apparently not liking the seriousness of the conversation, crawled out of the room in a spectacular truck chase, making growling motor noises under their breath.
“Daddy, I’ll try and pray.”
“Try, oh! Believe in curses, believe in miracles, believe, believe, believe in these things even if you don’t see them happen. Remember, I am your father. And I tell you, forget about the face of Jesus.”
The face of Jesus?
Daniel looked at Sarah for clarification, but she was reeling with surprise.
She opened her mouth, then closed it, opened it again.
“How—?”
“Where is your daughter?” Sarah’s father interrupted her.
The whirring of the fan came to an unexpected halt, accompanied by Funke’s shout from the kitchen: “Up, up, Jesus! Down, down, NEPA!”
And all three of them laughed, curses, miracles and the face of Jesus carried away on the humid air.
The next day Sarah was sitting in the kitchen with Funke and Biola, deliberating the merits of bread and butter over the “arduous” efforts of akara.
“Hah! Arduous! Big writer word! Akara is only arduous to you, Bisi,” Funke snorted, with the supreme confidence of a woman who has no fear of her kitchen. “I already soaked and grated plenty of beans and put them in the freezer. I can take them out and blend them and make akara whenever I want.”
“Well, good for you,” Sarah told her. “I just hope that one day you don’t run out of oil for the generator, because when those NEPA devils cut off the electricity again, what would happen to your precious beans then?”
Bose skidded into the kitchen, the sleeves of the blue shirt of Akin’s that she’d decided to wear floating out around her arms. “Aunty Bisi, Aunty Bisi, Jessamy can speak Yoruba!”
Conversation came to a surprised halt as Sarah laughed aloud and Biola reached out and grabbed Bose, tickling her until she screamed.
“Ha, Bose, no! Jessamy is our very own Iya Oyinbo!”
“Irọ, irọ,” Bose chortled, before breaking away and pointing to the upstairs sitting room a few doors away. “Ebun is teaching her!”
She leapt excitedly in the air, in expectation that her statement would be verified when Jess, squealing with laughter, was jostled into the kitchen by Ebun and Tope, who attempted to cajole her into saying a few words in Yoruba. She would not.