After a while the minutes sank into each other, and Jess sat still, her eyes following the two air hostesses up and down the aisles. Beside her, she felt her father’s heavy, musky-smelling presence, the weight of his arm pressing along hers, heard his shallow breathing as he slept. An air hostess whose name badge said “Karen” smiled quickly at Jessamy, and sleepy as she was, Jess somehow understood that this woman, her jaunty red cap perched atop a black bun of hair, was not smiling at her in particular, but at a child, at the idea of a child. Because she was an air hostess. Smiling at a child. That was what she was supposed to do. Jess gave a drowsy smile in return.
Jess fell asleep slowly, her hand reaching for her dad’s. She closed her eyes completely, and the darkness was warm and quiet, like a bubble lifting her higher even than the aeroplane.
Her father reached out and enfolded her hand in his far bigger one. She turned her head a fraction in his direction, opening her eyes into slits. His dishevelled, sandy hair obscured his forehead, and his greeny-blue eyes were half open; they looked darker with the overhead light switched off. He had taken off his glasses, and she could just about make out the two small indents they had left on the bridge of his nose. He gave her a disorientated, inquisitive smile. Are you okay, Jessamy? Really okay? I’m worried. But she was too tired to move her face, and, letting her eyes linger on his face for a few seconds longer, to acknowledge the smile, she closed her eyes again and slept, and dreamed a confusing dream that had people and animals and dancing coloured shapes moving in and out of it.
TWO
Jess had not expected Nigeria to be this hot.
She stood at the luggage carousel, holding her mum’s hand, trying to ignore the stickiness of her orange-and-white button-up top. She could feel the sweat collecting into a big drop in the hollow of her back, and wriggled her shoulders a little, wondering if it would drop and splash the floor like water from a bucket.
The heat was emptying her out already.
Two thin, tall men in khaki shorts were helping people to load their luggage off the carousel. Luggage was moving past her in a disorderly line, some of it big, bulgy plastic bags, striped red-and-white, some suitcases and trunks. The men were laughing and calling out to each other in Yoruba, flashing white smiles at each other, sometimes staggering with the force of their laughter.
Her father was standing near the carousel, his hands in his pockets, watching out for their luggage. Another thing she had not expected: she hadn’t expected him to seem so . . . well, out of place. His face was wet with perspiration and flushed pink, and even the way that he stood marked him out as different. The people milling around him all glanced pointedly at him as they passed; their glances were slightly longer than usual, but not outright stares—more the kind of look that Jess herself gave when passing a statue or a painting. The acknowledgement of an oddity. She looked at him, willing him, at least, to look at her.
He didn’t.
Her mum smiled at her. There was something in the smile that Jess could only vaguely describe as careful.
It was the same smile that she had worn when they had been going through customs. The official behind the desk had a neat moustache and goatee beard, and his expression had been polite; in fact, overpolite. So solicitous that his face was immobile, and Jess, looking at him from a short distance beneath the counter, thought that he was somehow making fun of her mother. The man had flicked his gaze over her with the same small smile on his face.
Had he been thinking, Who is this woman who has a Nigerian maiden name in a British passport, who stands here wearing denim shorts and a strappy yellow top, with a white man and a half-and-half child? Had her mother also put herself in his place, looked at herself from his side of the counter and found herself odd and wanting?
Maybe that had been the carefulness in her smile.
All that the eight-year-old Jess knew was that the smile wasn’t a particularly happy one, and that her mother hadn’t smiled like that in England.
She felt herself, also, growing careful.
Her mum tugged at her hand, and Jessamy saw a real smile spread across her mother’s face, as if she had just remembered sunshine.
“We’re going to see Grandpa and your cousins!”
Jess nodded and gave a half-hearted, placebo smile while she thought about this. When she thought of her Nigerian grandfather and cousins, she saw a bustle of people, a multitude, all of them moving so quickly that she couldn’t see their faces, and any one of them could be family. Her grandfather would have a walking stick. Would he have a walking stick? Her mum said that he was very active and strong, and so suspicious of people that he liked to do things for himself to make sure that they were done properly. He would have grey hair, like her English grandfather, but his hair would be springy and less silver, sprouting like steel wool. But his face—there was none. She felt her lungs constrict and turned her head away from her mum for a second, struggling to breathe in the humid air.
If she couldn’t see him, then how would he see her?
Once they were outside, which was only fractionally cooler than the inside, her father had no sooner tipped the man who had helped them with the luggage than several people hurried across the white paving from where they had been lounging against their parked cars. The sun struck everything, bouncing ultra-shiny colours into Jessamy’s line of vision, and Jessamy, now silently clutching her father’s hand, thought she might begin to scream when she saw the men, some in the loose, flapping gowns worn, she would later learn, by Nigerian Muslims, descending upon her father as if they wished to swallow him up.
“Here, sir! I have very nice car for you here, air-conditioned, right size to take your luggage, now,” one man was bellowing above the din of the others.
“Only ten thousand naira to Ibadan or Ife, or I go take you to Abuja, where there is a Hilton,” pressed another one.
They were surrounded by the folds of clothing, the gesturing hands, the smell of ironed clothes and sweaty bodies. Jess felt as if the heat was intensifying, even though she could only see chinks of sunlight through the gaps in the milling gathering around them. She clutched her father’s fingers for dear life, her hands alternately sticking and sliding as the pads of her fingers caught his fingernails.
Her father, standing defensively by his suitcase, darted a confused look at her mother, who quite suddenly took charge and began to outshout them all, speaking rapidly in a mixture of Yoruba and broken English.
“Wetin you be wanting, now? You no go want us to chop? . . . Ten thousand naira, sae everything is okay, or ori e ti darun ?”
Both her mother and the people surrounding her began to laugh—mysterious laughter, like a liquid, bubbling wall, leaving Jess and her father drenched with it, but still outside. Jess rubbed her forehead with her free hand and squinted at her mother, who seemed to be transformed by her bargaining, bantering tone, then up at her father, who shrugged, putting his own hand to his face to adjust his glasses, which were slipping down the bridge of his nose.
Minutes later, her mother had selected a driver, and the other hopefuls scattered, grumbling good-naturedly. “Daniel, could you help the driver?” she said, abruptly slipping back into her smooth English accent as she took Jess’s hand again and led her to the long, egg-brown sedan that would take them to Ibadan.
Seeing her mother get into the front seat of the car and slip her sunglasses on, Jess sat in the backseat of the car. She turned her face upwards so the air-conditioning cooled her skin, and opened her mouth and gulped loudly, imagining that she was filling up with cold air like a balloon. Then she looked out of the side window, straight at a man who was leaning against his car, his jaw working as he chewed gum. He was almost impossibly tall and wearing a rough cotton shirt and a pair of long shorts that reached down to his calves. The light colours contrasted with his skin, and he stood out in gaunt relief against his cream-coloured car, like a paper cutout. He was looking at her, but in a distracted manner, as if she was something to loo
k at while he waited for something else.
The car rocked downwards as her father loaded his suitcase into the back, and she heard his shoes clicking on the white pavement as he began to walk around the car. She carried on looking at the man who had laughed. She even pressed her fingers against the dusty window and brought her face closer to it, peering at him. He watched her laconically, slapping flies away as he chewed. Her father, puffing slightly, opened the car door and threw himself down onto the seat beside her. “All right, Jessamy?” he asked, cheerfully, and although she didn’t turn from the window, she felt cooler, as if a lone scrap of home had just blown into the car. England, where people who stared at you would shift their eyes away with an embarrassed, smiling gesture if you stared back. England, where people didn’t see you, where it was almost rude to, wrong to.
Would her cousins be like this? Would they look at her, then see her, and just not really . . . well, care? See her, and leave her looking, trying to see something?
Then, as the driver got into the seat beside her mother and started up the car, chattering in Yoruba, the man suddenly widened his eyes so that the whites seemed enormous and luminous, and gave a short laugh again as she drew away from the window, startled.
Her father fanned himself with a copy of a Nigerian newspaper that he’d bought as they were leaving the airport. The car began to move away. The man in cream mouthed something.
“Mummy,” she said, finally, when the man who had laughed was out of sight and they were moving down a seemingly interminable length of road.
Her mum paused in her conversation with the cabdriver.
“Jess?”
“What does oh-yee-bo mean?”
Her mum twisted around in her seat, looking puzzled.
“What?”
“A man just said it to me.”
The cabdriver looked into the rearview mirror and laughed.
“He probably meant oyinbo. It means somebody who has come from so far away that they are a stranger!”
Jess settled back against the leather seat, fiddled with her seat belt.
“Oh.”
Her father looked up distractedly from a column he was reading about the Nigerian president.
“That’s a bit of a shabby thing to say . . .”
He looked at Jess and winked, and she smiled at him.
The driver said something in Yoruba.
Her mother, who had pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head so that they settled on her thick, slightly frizzy hair, seemed restive. When the driver spoke, she looked at him and said, in a slightly sharper tone than usual, “I think we should speak in English, so everyone can understand.”
Mr. Harrison stamped his feet to applaud his wife’s sense of fair play.
“Bravo, Sarah!”
He beamed at her, his hair standing on end as usual, and Jessamy smiled too, in preparation for the unifying smile, the smile that they would all be smiling because it was important that they could all understand and share this country too.
It didn’t come.
Her mother turned back in her seat and began a discussion with the driver about several places that she used to know in the Lagos area.
In English.
THREE
When they arrived at the Bodija house, Jess’s grandfather calmly greeted her mother as if all the things that Jess’s mum had told her had happened weren’t true, as if it had been just yesterday that he had sent her to England to go to university, not fifteen years ago, a period of time in which she, Sarah, had properly grown up, and her mother, his wife, had died. As if it didn’t matter that she had stayed away for so long.
Gbenga Oyegbebi’s stillness contrasted greatly with the constant movement of Jessamy’s two aunts and her uncle. Aunty Biola had been looking out for the car, and called Uncle Kunle to help her open the main gate (Gateman was eating a late lunch), and Jess immediately saw the three figures jumping up and down at the gate, waving with barely controlled excitement before the car had even drawn close.
Jessamy’s cousins had been slightly more reserved. The five older than her, Aunty Funke’s and Uncle Kunle’s children, greeted her with tentative but almost patronising smiles; the two youngest, Aunty Biola’s children, stood as if in awe of her, surveying her clothes, her hair, her entire self with raised eyebrows, twisting their hands together.
She was surprised by her disappointment that none of her cousins was the right age to show an interest in her as a companion, although she had already had their names and ages recited to her by her mother, who had named them off by heart, repeating them as if by rote. Uncle Adekunle’s children: Akinola, fourteen; Bisola, twelve; Ebun, eleven. Aunty Funke’s children: Oluwatope, eleven; Taiye, ten. Aunty Biola’s children: Oluwabose, five; Oluwafemi, four. There they all stood, an uncertain circle, and then her grandfather came forward, greeted her mother, shook hands with her father. Although he seemed mellower and smaller than the picture that her mother had painted for her over the years, Jess had a sudden and irrational fear that he might start shouting at her.
He looked at her, put his hands on his hips in mock consternation, and her cousins and her mother laughed. Her father, standing slightly outside the circle, smiled encouragingly at her. Her grandfather held out a hand. His hands were big and square, spadelike, the palms deeply etched and callused. She took a step towards him, smiling a wobbly, nervous smile that she could not feel on her face.
She did not know what was expected of her.
She had nearly reached him when suddenly, on an outward gust of air, he half said, half announced a name.
“Wuraola.”
Who?
She froze, not knowing what to say or do.
Of course, she knew that Wuraola was her Yoruba name, the name that her grandfather had asked in a letter for her to be called when her mother had held her Nigerian naming ceremony. Wuraola means gold.
She knew all this . . .
But nobody had ever called her Wuraola, not even her mother, whom she could now see from the corner of her eye making anxious, silent gestures for her to go to her grandfather.
Here, in this stone-walled corridor where the sunlight came in through enormous, stiff mosquito screens over every window and her clothes clung to her like another skin, Wuraola sounded like another person. Not her at all.
Should she answer to this name, and by doing so steal the identity of someone who belonged here?
Should she . . . become Wuraola?
But how?
She could not make herself move forward, so she stayed where she was, avoided his touch, looked up into her grandfather’s face, smiled and said quietly, but firmly, in her most polite voice “Hello, grandfather.”
After they had taken baths, and Jess had been made to eat a little, her mother disappeared with her youngest sister, Aunty Biola, and her father befriended Uncle Kunle, who was clearly as newspaper-minded as he was, and wanted to talk about politics. Swiftly dropping a kiss onto her forehead, her father released her into her grandfather’s clutches before mounting the stairs that led up to the roof balcony of the house, gesticulating wildly as he spoke, clutching a bottle of Guinness with his free hand. Her uncle followed closely behind, pointing downwards as if at some artefact that would prove him right beyond doubt, and saying emphatically, “No, no, it’s quite clear to me and to everyone that the reason why they don’t want Abiola for president is because he’s a Yoruba man!”
So her grandfather did have a face. It was a broad, lined face; the smile and frown lines ran deep into his skin, his eyes made smaller by the loosened flesh around them. He had the same wide, strong jawline with the determined set as her mother, and the same prominent cheekbones, although Jess could see that his were made angular more through the emaciation of age than anything else. He was quite short and moved about very quickly. He didn’t have a walking stick.
As Jess sat in the parlour, keeping very still so that she wouldn’t take up much space on the brown-and-white sofa, she al
lowed herself to stare openly and seriously at her grandfather, and he did the same. She felt as if she were a little piece of him that had crumbled off maybe, which he was examining for flaws and broken bits before deciding whether it was worth taking it to be reattached. It was impossible to tell what he thought of her.
She sat at a right angle from him, breathing out silence. He sat very upright (like her, she noted, with surprise), his hands on his knees, the crisp lines of his white shirt almost moulding him, fixing him still in her sight. They were both waiting, supposedly for her Aunty Funke to bring them some soft drinks (her grandfather had called them “minerals”), but really Jessamy sensed that they were waiting to see if they would like each other or not. She stared at him wide-eyed, unaware that she looked overly anxious with her bottom lip jutting out slightly below the top one. She sensed herself on the edge of a screaming fit, already beginning to hear her breath coming faster than usual, feel the flat tightening at the bottom of her stomach. She tried desperately to quash it. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, mustn’t, start screaming at her grandfather. He was not like her English granddad at all. He was . . . someone, something, else, more hidden.
Finally, he smiled, and although his smile was bumpy because some of his teeth were jagged and broken, it was a warming, infectious smile that was reflected in his eyes. It made her smile widely in return. She felt as if the room had been lit up. He held out his arms, and she went across the room to him, almost running. She buried her face in his shirt, her nose wrinkling up as the scent of his cologne mixed with the nutty, sourish smell of camphor that filled the room. He put his arms around her, but gently, so that there was space between his forearms and her back, holding her as if she was too fragile to hug properly. Awkwardly, he patted her light, bushy aureole of dark brown hair, repeating, “Good girl. Fine daughter.”
Her grandfather’s words had a lyrical quality to them, and she felt lulled, as if she really could be Wuraola, this good girl, this fine daughter. She wondered, briefly, why her mum allowed some people to call her Sarah, and others to call her Adebisi.
The Icarus Girl Page 2