The Icarus Girl (4 page)

Left alone again, Jessamy and her grandfather sat quietly, her arms now flung around his neck as she marvelled at how at ease she had begun to feel with him. Then, remembering her grandparents in England, she shuddered slightly, wondering if this grandfather would understand that sometimes people needed to have lights on.

“Wuraola, can it be that you are cold?”

Her grandfather sounded amused.

Jess shook her head vigorously, laughing as she did so. Cold! Here?

She looked to the doorway, over which was hung a cascade of vertically arranged brown-and-cream sandalwood beads. They were still swinging from the impact of her Aunty Funke’s passing through, and you could see chinks of the landing through them. She could see patches of something else, too. Three of her cousins—she couldn’t see clearly which ones, or even if they were boys or girls—stood there, peering curiously through at her, as she sat on their grandfather’s lap.

Were they even really there?

She thought she sensed something like resentment in their expressions.

FOUR

“Do you know what your mother did?” Jess’s grandfather said to her the next evening. They were in the parlour again. It was nearly dusk; orange light and growing shadows played on the walls. Jess was sitting at his feet, gingerly licking at a round, hard ball of nutty
adun
. He was wearing traditional costume, and she stared at the finely stitched blue-and-silver embroidered waves that ran around the bottoms of his trousers. She wanted to touch them to see if they really did stand out all bumpy. From the corner of her eye she could see her mother, who was curled up on the sofa opposite, engrossed in low-pitched conversation with Aunty Funke. Her mother had stopped speaking, and was gazing at Jess’s grandfather with pursed lips. Running her tongue over her
adun
with a slurp, Jess decided to hold out on answering her grandfather for as long as possible. Her instinct that the conversation wouldn’t be a good idea was confirmed when Aunty Funke stood and began clearing away, muttering that it was about time that she cleaned the kitchen. The meal had been finished for half an hour.

Jess’s mum began helping Aunty Funke to clear away. It looked strange, seeing her mum, dressed in a shapeless black vest and denim shorts, helping Aunty Funke, who was wearing a yellow
boubou
with green leaves on it. Even though the sleeves on Aunty Funke’s
boubou
were rolled up in a businesslike manner so that they bulged just below her shoulders, Jess’s mum still looked like the household help.

Jess licked her
adun
ball, and said nothing.

“Wait a minute,” her grandfather said, dipping his fingers into the big plastic bowl filled with water. Aunty Funke, who had bent over the table to take the bowl, froze where she was, waiting patiently for him to finish. Using his other hand, her grandfather unhurriedly paddled the water and dribbled it over his fingers, working at his fingernails to remove leftover bits of
amala
. Bits of speckled green okra were swirling around in the water as well. When he removed his hands from the bowl, he shook them a little, dropping water onto the rug. He made a vague, impatient gesture to the general atmosphere, and Aunty Biola came in from outside, as if on cue, holding out a rough green hand towel. He grunted, dried his hands and thrust the towel back at her before silently accepting the toothpick that Aunty Funke offered him and reclining in his seat once more. Aunty Funke left with the plates, but Jess’s mother hovered on the other side of the beaded door curtain.

“Wuraola.”

Jess jumped when he brought his hand down on her shoulder. She looked up at him, licking the corners of her mouth.

“Mmmm?”

“I said to you: ‘Do you know what your mother did?’ and you say, ‘Mmmm.’ Is that respect?”

She squeezed one eye shut and peered at him with mock incredulity, and he laughed.

“I was saying ‘mmmm’ because you called me,” she protested.

“Even then, it’s yes, ‘grandfather’ . . . I mean, what is this ‘mmmm’?”

Jess gave up.

“I don’t know what my mother did.”
(You’re going to tell me and she’s going to get angry. I can see it already
because she’s all nervous.)

Jess wasn’t sure whose side she was supposed to be on if her grandfather told her something really bad and secret about her mother.

When her grandfather snapped his toothpick and didn’t say anything else, she prompted him.

“Was it something really bad?”

“It was just something that she did.”

“Yeah?”

(Good or bad?)

He spread his hands. “This is how your mother really is. Sometimes I think that she doesn’t know what she’s doing at all, at all, but she follows some other person inside her that tells her to do things that make no sense. There is no other way that someone could be so very stubborn, and not pay.”

Not daring to look up, Jess reached out on impulse and touched part of the trouser embroidery.

“I sent her to learn medicine in England,” her grandfather told her, his voice a mix of amusement and irritation. “Listen, this is what your mother is like. She hadn’t even been there six months when she writes me a letter, telling me that she is now studying English. English literature! What job do you find in Nigeria that requires the knowledge of all these useless words? Different words for hot, for cold! Words describing white people, white things, every single story spun out in some place where WE don’t exist! It has no value; in my eyes, it is to confuse . . .”

“Confuse, dissemble, obfuscate,” Jess whispered.

“What?”

“Dissemble and obfuscate—they’re two different words, same meaning: ‘to confuse.’ ”

Silence. Jess heard her mother snort with laughter, then retreat, choking, down the corridor to the kitchen. She looked at her grandfather, whose lips were pinched so tightly together that they looked as if they had been sewn at the corners.

“Hmmm,” he said. “Hmmm. I see you are the same.”

They both laughed. It wasn’t true, of course.

“Anyway, listen. It made me . . . I couldn’t . . .” Her grandfather pounded his chest and let out a loud sigh that sounded the twisting of his heart.

“But didn’t you want her to be happy?”

Her grandfather didn’t answer her question, but arranged the splinters of toothpick on the table. Jess presumed that one or other of her aunts would soon appear to clear them up.

“Wuraola, your mother had no job, she was living far from home, and she was writing and saying that she would find some work and pay for her studies! Such nonsense! I can tell you that I was afraid of witchcraft. I was frightened that some enemy had laid a curse on her head so powerful that it had stolen every single bit of sense from her head.”

“It couldn’t have been that bad,” Jess ventured.

Her grandfather exploded.

“She left her home, and she went to England, and studied English stories, and gave up her own, and gave up all her talk of healing people, and married some
omugo oyinbo
man who knows nothing, nothing at all—” His words slowed and he heaved a deep, snuffling sigh when he saw that Jess had dropped her
adun
ball on the floor and was staring at him wide-eyed, her mouth half open.

“What does
omugo
mean? Is it bad? Was that a bad thing you said about my dad?” Jess questioned, sternly. It sounded bad.

Her grandfather shook his head slowly as Aunty Funke reentered and swept up the toothpick shards.

“Just forget. Forget I said that. I mean . . . that I don’t know who your father is; I don’t know his people, I don’t know what his
name
means and where it comes from. Harrison—what does that mean, Harry’s son? Harris’s son? Now take Oyegbebi—it means ‘kingship lives here.’ ” He tapped his breastbone. “Here. Here is where kingship lives. I am a princely man, and my children therefore should be proud and strong. Everyone who hears my name and knows my people should know that. I don’t know your father, I don’t know his father, or what his people have done. It is something about your mother that made her do this, marry a man that she didn’t know.”

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.