“Oh.”
Aunty Funke had passed the edge of the house and walked out into its long shadow towards Jess’s grandfather’s house. Jess followed, her feet sinking into the gravel as the tender lump of a mosquito bite from a few days ago itched on her ankle. She considered bending to scratch it, but that would have meant letting go of Bose’s hand, so she ignored it as she looked up at the points of lantern light that were already blazing from some windows in her grandfather’s house. NEPA had already cut off the electricity.
When they had reached the back veranda, something, some feeling of additional heat on the skin at the base of Jess’s neck perhaps, made her turn and look at the house that they had just left behind.
Something glittered from the still, solid darkness, something warm, alive.
There were three big windows at the top of the old building, and in the centre one she saw, quite clearly, shadows dancing in a corner just beneath the windowpane, as shadows tend to do when light shifts around its source.
There was lantern light in the window of the Boys’ Quarters.
FIVE
That night was a virtually sleepless one. After seeing the light in the Boys’ Quarters, Jess was unable to stop thinking about it. She lay in bed among her tumbled sheets, gaping without really being aware of it as she considered possibilities. For the first time in her life, she was at an imaginative loss. She couldn’t think who could possibly live in that building without her grandfather’s knowledge.
As soon as she was certain that everyone was asleep, Jess slipped out of bed and crept out of the room, quailing at first as she stood in the pitch-dark corridor, then relaxing as her eyes adjusted to the alarming shapes and objects that confronted her. Climbing the stairs to the roof balcony, she kept watch, listening to the sounds around her, jumping slightly every now and then when she looked over her shoulder at the looming darkness at the mouth of the staircase below. But no light burned in any of the windows of the empty building that night, and she strained her eyes so much with peering that for a few seconds she confused the clean, steady, white light of the stars with the orange radiance that she had glimpsed before, and her heart nearly stalled on her as she sat breathless, waiting for—
What?
In any case, nothing happened. She had to brave the staircase again and go back to bed as the sun was creeping over the rim of the horizon.
The next morning at breakfast Jess dipped her spoon into her Quaker Oats, then watched the porridge dribble back into the bowl and spatter against the rim as it rejoined the yellowing sugar that sat on top of it.
She pulled a face at it.
Her mum was sitting across from her, a lined notepad on the table in front of her, leaning with one elbow on the table mat, her face half cupped in her other hand, biro to her mouth as she looked into the space above, around, behind her daughter. When Jess played with her porridge, she blinked a little, but kept her gaze vague.
Jess spattered her porridge again.
“Do you not want that?”
“Nope.”
“Do you want something else?”
“I don’t know. What else is there?”
Sarah Harrison shrugged, her movements slow, unhurried. Jess, aware that there was something about the warm morning air that made you feel unbothered about anything much, eyed her mother attentively. She had only written about three lines on the pad in front of her. “I’m going to write AT LEAST four sides a day,” Sarah had said to Jess, her captive audience in the sitting room since she had roped her into helping sit on the suitcases. Four sides was an infinitesimal amount in comparison with the pages of her novel that remained to be written, and she couldn’t even do that.
Deciding not to say anything that would put her mother into a bad mood, Jess waited.
“What else is there?” she repeated eventually.
Her mother scribbled a few more words on to the page before her. “Go and ask Aunty Funke,” she said distractedly.
Jess wriggled off her chair and went down the hallway, past Aunty Anike, Uncle Kunle’s wife, who was standing barefoot in a wrinkled sleeveless vest with a green-and-blue wrapper tied about her waist, busy ironing a pile of her grandfather’s shirts and trousers. She smiled her good morning and continued to the landing, where the staircase went upwards to the roof and the corridor swerved right toward the kitchen. The crackling, static sound of the Radio OYO jingle filled the entire landing:
It’s the nation’s station!
Oh-why-oh!
It’s a happy station!
Oh-why-oh!
It’s your favourite station!
Oh-why-oh!
It’s Radio Oh-why-oh!
Aunty Anike was singing out of sync with the radio so it sounded like an echo was in the house with them. Jess had to shuffle past her eleven-year-old cousins, Ebun and Tope, and her Aunty Biola, who were sitting on small, three-legged wooden stools with newspaper spread out before them, grating wet, peeled knobs of cassava into bowls. She held her breath so she didn’t have to cope with the pungent, almost rotting smell.
They were making gari, and Jess, who had eaten gari with beans plenty of times, had not known that it was such a long and complicated process. Aunty Funke had explained it to her. The cassava had been left to soak the night before, so that the tough skins would be easier to peel, and when they had been peeled, they would be very finely grated and, once grated, sundried, and once sundried, fried in a sort of cauldron so that the little cassava shavings would crackle and puff up, and then they would be dried again so that they became hard and chewy. All that just to make it not taste like cassava! Jess thought it hardly worth the trouble.
Her father was sitting on a stool beside Aunty Biola, clumsily attempting to peel a cassava with a sharp flick-knife like the ones that the others were using. He wasn’t making a very good job of it, as he struggled to keep a grip on the slippery cassava with one hand and make the rapid peeling motions with the other. “Oi, I’m an accountant, not a. . a. . well, a cassava peeler, you know!” he protested, as Ebun, Tope and Biola giggled at his attempts. Aunty Biola, her long, glossy weave pulled away from her face with a large silk scarf, took the knife from him and showed him how to peel the cassava. Her smile as she did so made Jess think that this probably wasn’t the first time; probably not the second either. Or the third.
Her father smiled gratefully at Aunty Biola, then said “Right,” several times, rolling up his sleeves and pushing up his glasses with an air of determination. Then he looked around and saw Jess backed up against the wall in the corner, nearly faint with suppressed laughter.
“That’s it! I have to be a role model to my daughter! She can’t see me fail, and that’s why. .” He let out a defeated puff of air, blowing his blondy-brown fringe upwards as he did so. “I give up.”
He was greeted by derisive laughter, and got up and wandered off in a pretend huff. Jess continued into the kitchen. Aunty Funke was washing dishes at the sink, up to her elbows in frothy white. She turned her head as Jess entered with the bowl full of porridge, and laughed.
“Ehhh-ehhhh! Madam is too good for oats!”
Jess felt herself redden even though she knew that Aunty Funke was joking.
“I don’t really like them,” she said, shyly proffering the bowl.