26a

by Diana Evans

  “Yeah.” Bessi waited.

  Georgia wanted to tell her about the cockroaches, about what happened. She wanted to say, One night in Sekon…that night. She wanted to say, Sedrick, that night, he. But she felt them crawling toward her, up the bedspread.

  “What?” said Bessi.

  “My eyes don’t work properly,” said Georgia.

  Bessi was silent.

  “I think I need glasses.”

  “Me too,” said Bessi.

  6

  Mr. Hyde

  The film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was nothing like Dallas. There were no shoulder pads or Bobby Ewings in tuxedos. Mr. Hyde’s makeup made him look like a potato, and his metamorphosis screams sounded false. Nevertheless, it was the concept of the film that brought Georgia, Bessi and Kemy downstairs to the sofa when it came on telly, to watch and wait for that moment when the nice doctor, the kind, selfless, beloved doctor, drank his mysterious blue potion and then seethed and bulged into the debased Mr. Hyde. His chemical alter ego. Because it was just chemicals, they believed, that sometimes turned Aubrey into a monster. They imagined that this was how it happened: Aubrey drank the syrup-tone whiskey—a glass, and another glass. It moved down toward his heart. There was a fierce and helpless roar in the dead of the night, the splitting and reddening of skin, the immediate acceleration of hair growth and the sudden expansion of body muscle. And the nice doctor was no more. He lay sleeping somewhere in a syrup haze and would arrive back the morning after Mr. Hyde’s moonlight massacre, a little groggy, a touch confused and in absolute denial of his own indecency.

  Bel no longer watched it. She was nineteen now with a boyfriend called Jason, who had a car, bought her earrings and hadn’t gone to college. He was four years older than her and worked in the box office at the Cricklewood Odeon. Jason had a gold tooth like Troy, which was the first thing Bel had noticed about him as he pushed toward her a free ticket to see Back to the Future, and brushed her little finger with his thumb. Waifer Avenue thumped when he came to pick her up in the Jeep with black windows. It thumped in chairs and in the carpet. “Tell that boy to turn his music down!” Aubrey shouted. “How he can afford a car like that anyway I don’t know.”

  Neither Georgia nor Bessi had gotten around yet to asking Aubrey’s advice on empire building because he hadn’t been in a good mood for a long time. (They had, however, been busy conducting flapjack surveys, so far in Willesden and Kilburn. This involved going into possible flapjack outlets—newsagents, supermarkets, cash-’n’-carries—making a note of brands and flavors, and carefully looking out for local pedestrians eating flapjacks. They had also deduced that the average cost of producing one flapjack would be eighteen pence.)

  Since Judith’s accident, Aubrey had been spending more time in the sun lounge or walking about with a glass in his hand, and there were no cocktail parties to make it seem festive. There was just him, in the middle of the night, with the fridge humming and the new creaks. His mother hadn’t recognized him when he’d visited her in the hospital. He had sat with his face very close to her bandaged head and she had opened one eye and looked at him. “Dorset’s too far but I’ll need the green one first,” she’d whispered. She had then fallen back to sleep and not woken again for seventeen days. A month later Aubrey had spent a week with her at the house in Bakewell, which now smelled of must and dirty socks. Wallace wheezed in cigarette smoke and told Aubrey, “She never came back from where she went,” while Judith sat by the window, thin and white, smiling occasionally and forgetting Aubrey’s name. The whole thing gave him a lost feeling, like a teenager who had left home for the first time.

  Georgia asked Bel what was wrong with him. Aubrey didn’t talk to anyone about his mother, except brief reports that she was “on the mend” or “more or less back to normal,” but they all knew it must be more serious than that because she didn’t phone anymore. “Why doesn’t he tell us about Gran?” Georgia asked. “Is it a secret? Is she going to die or something?” Bel told Georgia that she didn’t know, but she did know that their father was a repressed male animal, and this meant that he didn’t know how to talk about his feelings. “Is it?” said Georgia. She liked sitting on Bel’s bed, next to the windowsill where she burned her incense sticks. Today it was Purple Musk from Shepherd’s Bush. “How did he get to be a repressed animal?”

  Bel stopped with her mascara. She searched past herself in the mirror. “He didn’t answer his demons,” she said. “And now they’re eating him up.”

  “Oh,” said Georgia. She felt prickly. “Will it get better, Bel?”

  “People can change,” Bel said. “Something incredible could happen. It’s all in the stars. Don’t look so worried, darling, be thirteen. Here, want some gloss?”

  These days Bel liked to wear apricot lipstick with a brush of gloss across the top and the earrings Jason bought her, two and a half pairs at a time because altogether she had five piercings in her ears. Golden violins and planets in hoops dangled about her neck. Her hair was enormous, black and curly, and oiled with rosemary to make it grow. Bel was studying to be a chemical-free hairdresser—“no relaxing, no bleach, just plaits, afro treats, twists and henna”—and Kemy and the twins were her practice models. She could often be seen with one of them sitting with their head between her knees while she plaited their hair into zigzag cornrows or pineapple shoots, or sprayed the twins’ afros to make them shiny. Bel knew all the gels and oils to use and all the ways to get beautiful. She wore Ida’s shawls and glitzy high heels that she complained about afterward, in a heap at the bottom of the stairs when the boy who hadn’t gone to college dropped her off. Aubrey waited up. He swayed in the hall. He told her she looked like a gypsy and that ruffian’s got a cheek bringing you back this late. Bel kept silent and waited until he’d finished, which took about forty-five minutes because there was a lot to cover (Jason’s loud music, lack of further education and probable investments in dubious enterprises, Bel’s ungratefulness for Aubrey’s fathering, Ida’s failure as a mother and wife, Britain’s failure with public transport particularly the London Underground, the increase in speed bumps in Willesden, and the fact that he had been working for almost thirty years and he was bloody tired).

  “Good night, Dad,” said Bel when it was over. “Try and get some sleep.”

  Aubrey looked up the stairs after her with fuzzy vision. Down in a hovel inside himself it struck him she was beautiful, they all were getting beautiful, like Jacqueline Flynn all those years ago in Bakewell with her red hair and perfume, little women, with pretty green and brown eyes.

  To watch Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and anything at all on TV, Georgia and Bessi now had to wear their National Health Service glasses. They were farsighted. They could see all the way to the A406 and Wembley Stadium across the rooftops, but not words or television. At Watley they were being called the Goggle-Eye Spam Twins and secretly they blamed each other. Twins often develop bad eyesight, the optician had told them, and there wasn’t much to be done about it. “It’s because you’re special,” Bel said. “It’s good to be special. Don’t forget, you’re lucky to have each other. Now don’t forget.”

  Dr. Jekyll screamed and rolled his eyes and gritted his teeth in his laboratory. Syringes and test tubes got knocked over. Mirrors smashed. The floor got covered in poison. And the nice doctor was no more.

  MR. HYDE AND Ida did not get on well. In fact, Dr. Jekyll and Ida did not get on, and Georgia and Bessi had come to accept that being married meant not getting on and not getting divorced. Ida had retreated back into her dressing gown as the Sekon sun had faded. For her, home was not homeless; it was one place, one heat, one tree. She made herself a bubble and it was called Nigeria-without-Aubrey. Her children were allowed inside, Bel on her right, Kemy always on her lap, where the lastborn never left, and the twins a little way off, in a bubble of their own. At dinner, Ida sometimes said “pass the pepper” in Edo, and Aubrey would stab something on his plate; or in the early mornings, she said, “At home now, they�
�re singing.” She held Edo lessons in Bel’s room on Saturdays, because language was loyalty, and Ida was not pleased when Aubrey told her to stop. “We’re in England now,” he said. “The girls don’t need Nigerian here. They’ll forget it soon enough.” The lessons became secret and eventually the twins dropped out because of flapjack commitments, Kemy dropped out because the twins had, and Ida only spoke Edo to Nne-Nne now, mostly upstairs alone in the evenings.

  And very occasionally, to Bel. Ida was not a woman who approved of swearing, or of using the names of the gods in vain. But on a blustery October afternoon in 1986 when Bel took her by surprise, she could not help herself.

  She said, “Ovia!” which in translation was not dissimilar to “Jesus Christ almighty” or “God have mercy.”

  Bel had asked everyone to sit down in the living room. She had a grave look on her face and Georgia wanted to ask her if she was all right. The cricket was on. Aubrey clutched the remote control.

  “Turn off the TV, Dad,” said Bel.

  “There’s only one wicket left, dammit!”

  Bel sat still in the armchair closest to the door and waited. Autumn leaves were flying at the bay window outside and the telephone wires were trembling in the wind.

  “Will you turn it off, please, Dad?” said Bel. “I’m pregnant.”

  That’s when Ida swore at her. She got up, losing a slipper, staggered over to Bel and tried to sit on her. Bel jumped up just in time, having been half expecting this after the incident with the C&A socks. When your children disappoint you, you sit on them—that was how it went. Nne-Nne herself had sat on Ida many times and Cecelia had sat on Baba before that.

  So Ida fell into the empty chair and the cricket match stayed on because Aubrey’s fingers were too shocked to turn it off. “Bloody hell,” he muttered. “Bloody hellfire, what the devil—the lout.” Kemy and the twins pushed their shoulders closer together on the sofa with their arms clenched in their laps and looked from Aubrey to Ida to Bel, who was standing in the dining room in tears, looking ready to run.

  “It’s that boy, isn’t it?” said Aubrey. “With that ridiculous car.”

  “Jason,” said Bel.

  Aubrey started muttering again about Jason being a lout.

  “He’s not a lout!” cried Bel. “Don’t call him that.”

  “He’s a lout and a bloody lout! Have you told him, then? Does he know? We’ll see whether he’s a lout.”

  “I did tell him and he’s not a bloody lout, Dad!”

  Ida was slowly shaking her head, looking down through the carpet. “You see,” she was saying. “You throw your life away, like me. See what happen? You are just a child.”

  Bel was the only one who heard her. “I’m almost twenty. God!” she said.

  “Yeah,” Kemy put in suddenly. “She’s old enough to be a mum. I know this girl at school, her sister’s only eighteen and she had one last year! A boy. And she’s fine. She’s alive and doing well and her mum helps her take care of the baby.”

  Aubrey shot a look at Kemy, who was wondering whether she should have kept quiet.

  He turned off the TV. It was quiet thunder. He stood up. He said the words.

  “I’m going out.”

  Please don’t, thought the house.

  He didn’t say good-bye. They heard him get his coat. The front door slammed. They all looked up at the beer stain on the ceiling.

  “Sorry,” said Kemy.

  “It’s not your fault,” said Ida.

  WHEN AUBREY SAID “I’m going out” there was always lots of cleaning to do and things to prepare. They had a few hours to make perfection, contentment and supreme obedience. The vacuum, dusters, brushes and polish were laid out on the kitchen table. They checked the chores list, which Aubrey had established last year when Kemy turned ten. They got confused about whose turn it was to do what because today was Thursday and the cleaning was usually done on Saturdays. Bel sniffed and said, “Just do what you would’ve done on Saturday.” So Kemy got the stairs, both flights with the pan and brush. Georgia, living room. Bessi, dining room. And Bel got the rest. The area around the front door shuddered. Dusk was gathering itself. They sped to their stations and began.

  Ida took out onions from her plastic bags and started cooking. She didn’t expect that Aubrey would bring home fish and chips tonight even though that was the Thursday dinner. Nne-Nne sat down on a stool by the sink and rubbed her knees. My bones are getting worse, she told Ida. I’m getting tired. Then Nne-Nne started on a story about Cecelia. She chuckled. Hmm! You kno what she did? When she was sixteen, before she ran away, a boy from Inone tried to kiss her body in the night by the shrine when she was giving worship. So Cecelia, she lifted her leg and kicked the boy in his stomach. Nne-Nne slapped her thigh. Yes, she was strong, Ida. She jumped up high and beat that worthless boy until he begged her no more, and the next day she reported him to the elders. After that, she started to carry a knife in her skirt. The knife went with her to Lagos. She was tougher than you, Ida!

  The house was beginning to smell of polish and air freshener and the sandalwood joss sticks that Bel was burning in all the rooms to cast out bad fate. Kemy was making banging noises against the stairs with the brush. Georgia had the vacuum. She was moving armchairs and the sofa to suck out the dirt from under them and check for cockroaches. In the dining room Bessi was singing the Eurythmics song about the angel. It was a reason to sing, that there was still space in the air, lightness, the smell of onions, that in this moment the house was clean and loose and free.

  It was six o’clock. He might be anywhere but most probably at Alfred’s in Neasden precinct talking to Jim at the bar. Jim was the plumber who sometimes fixed the boiler. Aubrey was knocking back syrup to wash the day, and telling Jim about how you worked for thirty years of your life and what for, eh? For a broken boiler, that’s what. Jim laughed. And the missus, though, lovely, your missus, he said, a real African queen that one! Aubrey’s head was starting to dance. A waltz. He took its arm and let it lead. Into the empty glass he disappeared—and from the murky bottom, Mr. Hyde was rising.

  Georgia left the living room and went upstairs. She looked back once at the front door. From the top of the stairs the mask with the straw hair stared down at her with no eyes. It was dark now. She heard someone crying.

  She pushed open the bathroom door and sat down next to Bel on the edge of the bath. They were wearing aprons with old stains on them. Georgia put her arm around her sister and looked at the heater.

  “I don’t know what to do,” said Bel.

  Georgia sat quiet. Unless you were extremely important, like Gladstone or God, there was nothing to say when someone didn’t know what to do.

  Bel carried on between sobs. “Jason said he wouldn’t run off, he’s not like that. He’s not a lout.”

  “No,” said Georgia. “Not if he says he’ll look after you anyway.”

  “A baby,” said Bel to the white walls.

  “A baby.”

  “Do you think I’d be a bad mother?” asked Bel.

  Georgia thought about it. She pressed her lips together. “You’d be a good mother to a poor little thing like a child.”

  Bel looked at Georgia and wondered, as she often had.

  “You could call it Bel, or Bill, or Bob. Or Bumbo.”

  “He said we could get married,” said Bel.

  “Did he?”

  “But I don’t know if I want to marry him.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Georgia. “Then you won’t have to get divorced either.”

  “Who’s getting divorced?”

  Georgia shrugged. “Lots of people. Reena’s parents did.”

  “That’s other people.”

  Georgia turned to her. “Do you know what I think, Bel?” she said. “I think you can do anything you want to do, because you’re Mystic Bel…Be mystic.”

  Bel laughed and Georgia smiled down at the heater. They heard Bessi singing from downstairs.

  “You won’t le
ave, though, will you?” asked Georgia.

  “I don’t know.”

  Bel paused and looked inside Georgia at the thing that wasn’t right. A fear, a panic, a way of looking out.

  “Georgia,” she said. “Are you all right, love?”

  “Yes,” said Georgia.

  Bel took her hand. “So. I’m Mystic Bel, like you say. And you have a secret.”

  Georgia kept her eyes low and searched invisibles.

  “Do you ever miss Sekon?” Bel asked. “I do sometimes. Kemy says she misses Nanny Delfi.”

  “No,” said Georgia firmly.

  Bel moved closer to Georgia and lowered her voice. “I heard you scream that night, you know, when I found you in the garden? I couldn’t see properly but I know something happened there, Georgia…I wasn’t sure, whether Sedrick might have…he just always seemed cruel to me.” She waited for Georgia to say something, but she stayed silent, rubbing her toes together. “I’ve been waiting for you to come to me, love, because I couldn’t be sure. Why don’t you tell me now?” Bel traced a line on Georgia’s palm with her fingertip. “This line here means there’s something in your heart, and you should say what it is because if you don’t you’ll always be sad. Like Mum, except at least she’s got somewhere to go and get happy.”

  “I’ve got somewhere,” said Georgia stiffly. “I’ve got a place to go.”

  “Where?”

  “Bessi. Bessi and me.”

  “What about when Bessi isn’t there?”

  “She’ll always be there. She’s the best bit of me. We’re half each.”

  “Georgia…tell me. Did he touch you?”

  Georgia stood up suddenly and saw her face in the mirror. A pitiful thing, not pretty, a dark old thing. The worst bit. She sat back down and her eyes got slippery.

  “Come here,” said Bel.

  All over Bel’s apron, through the gravy stains and tea, she spilled herself.

  She tumbled through cartwheels and heard the roaches marching. Mr. Bolan had such a loud voice. Don’t tell your mother you haven’t been in bed! he shouted.