Jess made no reply. It was so breathtakingly obvious that knowing someone’s name didn’t mean that you knew them that she didn’t even attempt to protest. He thought her name was Wuraola, but he was wrong.
“She didn’t just take her body away from this place — she took everything. Nothing of her is left here,” Jess’s grandfather said, sounding more ruminative than upset. “But I must be vain. She dedicates two books to me, and I forgive her.”
Jess laughed, then stopped when she realised that her grandfather wasn’t laughing with her. He closed his eyes for a few moments and his mouth slackened.
“You are a fine daughter,” he said, helping her up from the floor.
“That thing is not in you,” he said, as they wandered outside.
One afternoon, Aunty Funke took Jess, Bose and Femi to the zoo.
“It’s sponsored by the University of Ibadan, so most people just call it the UI zoo,” Jess’s mum explained to her at breakfast. Her grandfather’s driver was Gateman’s brother, and Jess was finding it difficult to tell the difference between them. She sat in the back of the car, carefully keeping her knees from touching Bose’s, and stared at the driver’s face in the mirror, trying to differentiate him from his brother. She was also, of course, keeping an eye on Bose, who was speaking in a low voice to her little brother. Femi was tiny, the tiniest four-year-old that Jess had ever seen. He sat in the car in his khaki-coloured shirt and shorts, clutching a round, sweet, yeasty bun left over from breakfast, not eating it. He stared at her more than Bose did.
She focused once more on the driver, whose name she did not know. If his brother was generally known as Gateman, should he then be known as Driver? He was light-skinned and had a long nose. A thin slit of tribal marking crossed each of his cheeks, and as he drove, he spoke cheerfully to Aunty Funke, one hand occasionally coming up from the steering wheel to tug at his earlobe, rub the side of his nose. He was wearing the same squarish upright hat as Gateman; only his was dark brown to match his pressed trousers, whereas Gateman’s was green. She nodded once or twice to acknowledge this, because it seemed to her important that there be a difference between a person and their sibling.
At the zoo, she wandered listlessly around, clutching a Gala roll her aunt had purchased from a street vendor on the way. She held it when they passed through the turnstiles and Aunty Funke paid their entry fees, explaining to the woman behind the glass screen that her niece from England was visiting. The woman smiled down at her and asked her how she was finding Nigeria. Yet again, Jess hadn’t known what to say.
She still hadn’t unwrapped her Gala. It was supposed to be “just like a sausage roll,” but she couldn’t simply unwrap it and eat it as if it really was a sausage roll when there were all these people milling around her, looking at her so deliberately that she was forced to lower her head and look at the shapes her feet were leaving in the sandy-coloured gravel that lined the paths. She could barely even acknowledge the animals. Some monkeys were climbing around each other in a cage; she could hear them but felt a heaviness, as if she couldn’t lift her head under some burden. Here she was, half a world away, still feeling alien, still watching the ground.
Perspiration formed on her cheeks and she put the Gala in the pocket of her three-quarter-length trousers so that she could wipe her face with her hands, momentarily hiding herself to feel cooler.
The only thing that she really looked at was the enormous snake in the clear, reinforced glass box. It was dapple patterned, green and black, twined lethargically around a vast wooden branch, the forked ends pointing outwards to form a V independent of its thick, sinuous shape. Bose and Femi pressed their faces and fingers up against the glass, and Aunty Funke laughed at Jess, who stood as far back from the thing as she could. It was dark in the display room, and there was a smell of wet leaves and something tangier, more animal. She couldn’t take her eyes off the snake. She found her lips moving, she was praying, but not in English, or even Yoruba, but in some loose, gabbling language that was born from her fear. She just knew that the snake was going to form itself into a whip, launch through the glass, sending sharp, brittle pieces flying everywhere to get them all and make them pay for putting it in a place where it was the focus. Weren’t there supposed to be jungles in Africa?
Aunty Funke looked at her and gave a surprised, concerned half laugh. She seized Jessamy’s hand and clasped it in her own for a few seconds, then gave the smaller, milky-coffee-coloured hand a pat before announcing that they were leaving.
It was falling to dusk by the time they returned, approaching the main house, in which her grandfather reigned from around the back of the compound where Driver had parked. It was sort of, but not quite like, an old-style compound, the kind that Jess had read about in the bustling, preparing month of suitcases and anti-mosquito cream, the month before they had left. The old-style compounds were supposed to be groups of buildings that housed related relatives of male lineage. Her grandfather’s was organised this way, but built differently — his three-storey house, in which everyone congregated during the day, was in the middle, with Uncle Kunle’s smaller bungalow directly in front of it, the single-storey house where Aunty Funke and her husband lived to the right, and Aunty Biola’s to the left. The other houses stopped the light from reaching the centre, forcing it to push through at angles and in chinks, which was why the inside of her grandfather’s house was often so dim and in shadow, except for the top floor and the balcony roof, which during the day were bathed constantly in waterfalls of gold. From where they were, Jess could see the railings running around the top of the roof balcony, and remembered the previous night when she had sat there alone, knees pulled up to her chin, seeing, properly seeing the stars for the first time, open-mouthed with wonder.
Aunty Funke explained that the compound had been this way since the 1870s, when her great-grandfather, who had died years before Jessamy was born, had had it built to house himself and his three wives, who each had children by him. Her grandfather had lived there in one of the bungalows right up until his father had died and he, as the eldest son, had inherited the compound. His brothers, sisters, half brothers and half sisters had all scattered across Nigeria, some as far as Minna and Abuja, others to Benin, Ifẹ, Port Harcourt.
Aunty Funke and Jess were walking around a big grey building that was roughly the same size as the central one. The windows were coated with fine layers of dust, and the outside walls were streaked with fading white, as if the very stone was beginning to crumble away. Jess stared up and up, conscious of her hand caught in Bose’s sweaty grip, and even of Femi holding Bose’s hand on the other side. Aunty Funke flicked a brief glance upwards, too.
“This is the Boys’ Quarters,” she told Jess with a smile.
Jess was confused; her expression said it all.
Aunty Funke laughed.
“That doesn’t mean that only boys can go in there, it’s just that your great-grandfather had it built for his servants, a place for them to sleep and get their three square meals. He needed a whole troop of boys to keep the main house going, and to get water for the individual houses. It hasn’t been used for years, because your grandfather hasn’t needed servants — he gets us to do all the running around instead! To tell you the truth, because it’s old, it’s all faulty inside. Certainly not fit for anybody to live in!”