The Icarus Girl (5 page)

Aunty Funke explained that the compound had been this way since the 1870s, when her great-grandfather, who had died years before Jessamy was born, had had it built to house himself and his three wives, who each had children by him. Her grandfather had lived there in one of the bungalows right up until his father had died and he, as the eldest son, had inherited the compound. His brothers, sisters, half brothers and half sisters had all scattered across Nigeria, some as far as Minna and Abuja, others to Benin, Ifẹ, Port Harcourt.

Aunty Funke and Jess were walking around a big grey building that was roughly the same size as the central one. The windows were coated with fine layers of dust, and the outside walls were streaked with fading white, as if the very stone was beginning to crumble away. Jess stared up and up, conscious of her hand caught in Bose’s sweaty grip, and even of Femi holding Bose’s hand on the other side. Aunty Funke flicked a brief glance upwards, too.

“This is the Boys’ Quarters,” she told Jess with a smile.

Jess was confused; her expression said it all.

Aunty Funke laughed.

“That doesn’t mean that only boys can go in there, it’s just that your great-grandfather had it built for his servants, a place for them to sleep and get their three square meals. He needed a whole troop of boys to keep the main house going, and to get water for the individual houses. It hasn’t been used for years, because your grandfather hasn’t needed servants—he gets us to do all the running around instead! To tell you the truth, because it’s old, it’s all faulty inside. Certainly not fit for anybody to live in!”

“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.

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.