Aunty Funke dried her hands and took the bowl from her, put it on the table.
“So what do you want to eat instead? Shall I make you some buns?”
Jess shook her head.
“Don’t worry, Aunty. I’m not that hungry.”
She turned towards the door and the cassava smell, but was nudged aside by her cousin Bisola, who burst in looking flustered, her hand on Bose’s shoulder to stop her from wriggling away. Bose’s hair had been combed out of her thick cornrows, and stood out around her head like a dark, springy bush, glistening with hair food and health. Jess smiled at her, and Bose smiled back, before complaining that she wanted Tope to do her hair, not Bisola, because Bisola pulled too hard and nearly broke her head open.
Bisola, looking peeved, cut across her cousin’s protestations.
“Mama, I’m about to start braiding Bose’s hair for her and I need a candle to burn the ends! Where have you moved them now?”
Aunty Funke yelped with surprise, making Jess jump. “Ah-ah! What do you mean by that? Your aunty Biola just bought another box of candles yesterday! Did you look in the supply room, or are you wasting my time, you this girl?”
Bisola raised her hands in a gesture that was at once defensive and defiant.
“I checked, oh! They weren’t there! So you haven’t moved them?”
Aunty Funke turned back to the sink and began washing the dishes with a sort of controlled violence, slapping soapy water on them with both hands.
“What do you mean? Of course I haven’t. . Those candles haven’t been moved at all, at all. You this girl! I just don’t know! You are so LAZY that you don’t want to help Bose to do her hair! Well, you still have to do the hair — you can just do plaiting for her until we find the candles, because they are in this house!”
Bisola retreated from the doorway, dragging Bose with her, muttering under her breath, shaking her cousin with a baleful glare when Bose made a final attempt to free herself at the staircase.
“I can’t believe it! You ask her to do just one thing and it is too much for her.” Her aunt railed after her, “Well, let me tell you something, fine young lady, if I should find those candles, you will be sorry for yourself, that is all I can say!”
Jess fled the kitchen and wandered back past the cassava graters, who were working in concentrated silence, and passed through the clinking curtain of beads at the parlour door. Should she go to the Boys’ Quarters and find out if someone was living there?
Should she?
Or was she going to anyway, whether she should or not?
“Hello?”
Jess paused in the middle of the corridor, peering about her. It was so dim in here, despite the windows pouring in sunlight. It was as if the dust that coated everything was muting even the rays of the sun. Everything was a still, uniform grey. Clearly, Aunty Funke was right: no one had bothered to come in here for years.
There was a rickety wooden table up against the wall that looked as if part of one of its legs had been eaten away by wood lice. It was an old-fashioned writing desk with an inkwell set in the corner. Its surface was covered with the film of dust that obscured everything else.
As she examined the tabletop a cockroach suddenly scuttled across it, and she jumped back.
After her pulse had stilled again, she turned and walked towards the end of the corridor, stepping carefully so that she didn’t trip over anything. She touched the bluish walls as she did so, to remind herself that she really was there. She could hear and feel her nails scratching against the walls as she passed her hands over them. When she reached the end of the corridor, she stopped, disappointed, expecting there to be a staircase as there was in her grandfather’s house. A staircase running straight through the house, leading ultimately to the balcony on the roof. There wasn’t one, just a blank wall.
The staircase must, then, be at the other end of the corridor. She walked back, passing the old table.
Then her eye caught on something and she backed up, all thoughts of staircases and balconies and upstairs rooms completely forgotten.
On the surface of the tabletop, someone had disturbed the dust. Scrawled in the centre in lopsided lettering were the words HEllO JEssY
She stared in silence for a few moments longer, and then turned and ran straight out of the door, running so hard that she couldn’t see properly and the rush of air going past her brought tears to her eyes.
She stopped when she had run all the way around the front of her grandfather’s house, heading towards where she heard bantering shouts — noise, normal happy noise — and stood, hunched over, desperately dragging in breath, in the expanse of concrete laid out before the gates. She looked up from the sweat dripping over her brow when she noticed that all the noise had stopped, and saw that Taiye and Akinola, her two older boy cousins, were looking at her with a mixture of concern and amusement. Akin stood in an attitude of boyish enquiry, his nose wrinkled up as he squinted against the sun, holding a basketball loosely in his two hands, and Taiye’s hands hung limply by his sides as if he had just dropped them from a raised position, marking Akin.
She wanted to tell them what had just happened to her, and that it meant something more scary than snake-scary. Snake-scary she could scream about and push away from her, but this! Someone was living in a place where no one lived, lighting things in the dark, had been watching her, had seen her, and knew her name. She couldn’t help but think that this was a very bad thing.
But she couldn’t tell them.
Because they were boys, because they were her cousins, because they belonged here and she didn’t?
She didn’t know.
“Sorry,” she managed to whisper, then turned and ran back along the side of the house.
She ran into her father, who was emerging with her grandfather from his study at the end of the corridor. He swept her up into a bear hug, lifting her off the ground as he anxiously examined her face. She twisted her face away, burying her head into his T-shirt.
“Daddy, let’s go home now!”
“Ah-ah!”
She heard the now familiar accent of alarm in her grandfather’s voice, felt the air shift as he drew closer to her. She clung harder to her father.
“Is somebody doing something to my child that I can’t know about? What is happening? Why can’t you be happy in my house? Tell me and I will make it right, now!”
To that there was, could be, no reply. She gave a long, shuddering sob, almost a howl, and didn’t lift her head.
“Jess,” her father said quietly. “Jess, little girl!”
She sniffled, shifted her head and wriggled a little so that her wet cheek was up against his dry one. He smelt of aftershave.
HEllo JEssY.
Jessy?
The second time. This was the second time that someone had called her something that she had never been called by anyone before. First Wuraola, now Jessy. She’d always been Jess or Jessamy, never a halfway thing like Jessy.
Who was there, hiding in the Boys’ Quarters, who called her halfway Jessamy?
She sighed, a faint, snuffling sound, the sound she always made when calming down, drifting off into the reverie that inevitably followed her panics. Her father was still there, and he still held her. She wondered if he wanted to ask her what was the matter. He probably didn’t; he probably wanted her to tell him.
Be my daughter, Jessamy. Tell me.
He carried her into the parlour, closely followed by her grandfather, who was making distressed clucking sounds with his tongue. He set her down on the sofa then sat beside her, allowing her to crawl onto his lap and curl up against him. She closed her eyes for a second to draw more breath, still trying to think about the matter in hand without actually, really thinking about it.