26a Page 5

  Alders Financial liked his writing. It was not easy in banking to find a numbers whiz with a good hand. And he was a smart fellow, always in a tie well knotted (though perhaps a little too tightly) and polished shoes. They started him off administrating in business accounts and Aubrey moved into a room in Pimlico where, for the first time on winter nights, he experienced the crisp and finite discomfort of cold linen. He read most evenings, spy novels and the banking press, in the pool of a standing lamp. At work, too terrified of getting anything wrong, he was impeccable, infallible; he wasted very little time conversing with colleagues and very little money eating in overpriced restaurants. He got promoted, quickly, first to auditor and eventually to the oil clients at the top of Alders’s corporate priority list. They sent him away, much much farther than any stamp he’d ever imagined.

  “Nigeria? But where’s that, dear?” she asked, sounding older.

  “It’s in Africa, Mother,” said Aubrey, standing in a phone booth on Victoria Street with a nasty draft getting through his socks.

  “Africa? What d’you want to go there for? It’s full of flies, you know. They get all in your supper.”

  “Mother…”

  “You’ll starve. They’re all starving over there, Aubrey dear. I’m sure I heard it on the news once, little children, all dying of malnutrition, poor mites. And all those flies! There’s mosquitoes, too, you know—they bite.”

  “Mother, I—”

  “Oh, are you sure, dear? It’s so far away. How far is it, dear? And why haven’t you phoned in so long?”

  “I phoned last fortnight.”

  “Well, you used to phone every week. You used to phone every day.”

  “I never phoned every—”

  “Are they looking after you properly there, dear? Is someone doing your cooking? Oh, I suppose you can cook a bit, can’t you, you can make beans on toast and mashed potato. But what about your washing? You can always send it to me, you know, I’ll get your father to send it back, I’m sure it won’t cost that much, honestly, I don’t mind, I don’t have that much to do now with—”

  “I can do my own washing, Mother!” Aubrey snapped.

  A fretful silence squirmed down the line and scratched his ears.

  “Sorry.”

  He looked for something to count. There were eleven holes in the telephone dial.

  “Don’t interrupt your mother, Aubrey. What’s happening to my best boy, ay? You’d never’ve spoken to me like that before…your dear old mum. Aubrey? Are you still there?”

  “Yes”—he jerked his tie loose—“but I don’t have time to chat really.”

  “You haven’t spoken to your mother in two weeks and you don’t have time to chat?”

  Aubrey pictured her fingers scuttling around the top button of her housedress. He hadn’t the nerve to tell her how long he’d be gone. It could be a year, it could be five. When he went to say good-bye, standing in the hallway in a long winter coat and a new pair of glasses with a softer lens that kept his eyes from her, he told her maybe six months and that was bad enough. Judith burst into tears and shuffled off to the kitchen for another glass of sherry.

  He got fizzy with excitement. The very best things about the journey were: (1) that sound, “BA556 to Lagos, now boarding”; (2) the simple freeing fact of flying; and (3) the dinky plastic supper, not least the pudding.

  LAGOS WAS THE loudest place on earth. Traffic, markets, dust storms and shouting. Music rocketed out from open windows. Traders wandered through the dust and obstructed the traffic, with trays on their heads selling plastic lighters, broken batteries and peanuts. Bodies and their handbags hung ruthlessly to the outsides of buses. Stout crooked skyscrapers rumbled at their bases and men in open shirts walked by. Children burst out from alleyways and corners and it was chaos. It was heat.

  She was seventeen and he was thirty-two then. A shabby cinema with wooden benches on Lake Street. The film was West Side Story and Aubrey wasn’t the same as the other guys. He had on too many clothes—and a tie! He was white with hair too white to be blond and he had the look of someone who was always alone; as Ida was alone, torn between the home she missed and Cecelia’s lofty example. Aubrey Hunter and Ida Tokhokho met in darkness, just as Tony and Maria spotted each other across the dance-fight between the Jets and the Sharks, just before they floated toward each other in dream bubbles and almost kissed.

  Ida and her friend Betty had no money and were dying for a drink. Sweat was traveling down from their armpits to their waists. Their mouths were drying and on the next bench Aubrey leaned back with a warm beer, and stole looks at Ida, and swigged. Betty said, “Aks your friend to buy us a drink, eh. My throat feel like desert.” When Ida had arrived in Lagos, wild-eyed and wretched, Betty had helped her find her way to Uncle Joseph’s street, which Aka had made her write down on the inside of her hem. All the way on the bus Betty had talked nonstop about her brother’s new barbershop in Lagos Island and how she was going to help him build it up. And she had. She got free hairdos whenever she wanted them, the most recent, burgundy extensions all the way down her spine. Ida was taking night classes to finish her schooling and sewing the neighbors’ tatty clothes during the day. She had not spoken to Nne-Nne or the rest of her family since she’d left Aruwa.

  With her head kept down she turned and saw Aubrey watching her. “You aks him,” she said to Betty, who hissed back, “It’s not me he likes, is you. Go na, aks him.” As they whispered, huddled together like newborn chicks, Aubrey clambered over. He felt that he was riding a wave, and he could see her waiting for him at the end of a tunnel of water. His hands got sticky. He swigged and then he said, over the music, “Would you like a drink, a drink?” Betty was relieved. Ida smiled (What a smile, he thought) and said, “Please yes, we are thirsty,” and he loved the need of it, the thirst, and the idea that he could quench it. He bought her a Fanta and Betty a beer, ice water sliding down the bottles. Ida sipped. He watched. Later he drove her home through the settling evening as a single stroke of night colored the sky indigo. Lagos continued, wide-awake with streetlights, crickets and speeding cars. Before he drove away, Aubrey asked what her favorite color was—red, she said—and could he come back tomorrow.

  If love is a quenching of loneliness, a substitute for a dream or a filling of a void, they fell into each other headfirst with their eyes closed, touching each other’s different chests and different hair in Aubrey’s air-conditioned bungalow. He told her, “I’m no good with people mostly, but you’re nice.” She showed him the flea markets where lanterns hung against bamboo stalls and they walked through the alleys eating akara cakes. “My mother,” she said, “she makes the best akara in Nigeria, believe it.” They never held hands or touched in public places; Aubrey preferred to show his increasing affection with gifts. He bought her a whole new red wardrobe and promised, if she returned with him to England, to buy her a sewing machine.

  They were married within a year, strangers still, unaware of the knots hidden inside waiting for the right amount of time and neglect to unravel them. He took her home to a hedge-lined house by a river and a motorway with red crinkled windows in the porch, and a loft. Aubrey was glad to be away from the raucous noise of Lagos, and there were times when he thought he could still hear it from Neasden.

  Ida’s early reaction to England was mostly a prolonged state of shock. She was shocked by the cold and the coldness that went with it. Up and down Waifer Avenue, or along the foggy city streets during their drives to Kilburn, she stared at the way people slid past one another without a flicker of curiosity, at how fast they walked, speeding around trees and lampposts to avoid contact. “How your body?” they asked one another at home. “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you.” No one asked questions here. They were silent and their joys and hurts were private. She told Nne-Nne (the flame of her, in the mind) everything, how strange it was, how she missed home. She pictured the cheekbones shining in the sun and the battered baseball cap and whispered, “Nobody here k
now my name, or where I am from.”

  Opposite the mirror in the hallway, so that you could see it if you saw yourself, Ida put up an ebony carving of an old spirit woman with horns. “It will give us wisdom,” she told Aubrey, “and wise children.” Aubrey wasn’t altogether convinced. He thought it looked mucky, like something off the rag-and-bone cart. In the dining room he lined the main wall with miniature watercolors of the English countryside: the jade ocean at Land’s End, a willow tree in a field of buttercups, the misty mouth of the river Wye. “Now that’s what I call a sight,” he said.

  Ida put more heads all over the house, on shelves and windowsills. From the top of the stairs an eyeless black mask with a freakish mane of straw hair “protected them,” Ida said, from the evil that was everywhere. (For goodness’ sake, thought Aubrey.) And finally, for the living room, Aubrey chose, very carefully, a large-scale tapestry of the Derbyshire dales. They were colliding, silently, through geography.

  In 1967, Bel was born. Isabel. She surprised them both for the canyons of love a child can throw open. She had Ida’s temper and Judith’s green eyes. “My eyes, fancy that! She’s a cute one, oh, she is!” Judith said when she hurried down from Bakewell for the christening (the others couldn’t make it). Ida had only met Aubrey’s mother twice before, once at the wedding and then a few months afterward when she had stayed for the weekend and given Ida cookery lessons covering Sunday roasts (including Yorkshire pudding) and shepherd’s pie. “Got to keep our men happy, haven’t we,” Judith said slowly, for they had trouble understanding each other’s accents. Ida found that Judith made her feel tired, even over the telephone, when she called to check that Aubrey was being looked after properly, and to let Ida know she would be happy to provide more cookery lessons whenever she wanted. Ida told Aubrey, “Your motha fuss too much, it’s not right,” upon which Aubrey flew to Judith’s defense, a little hysterically, Ida thought.

  Judith made Ida miss her own mother even more. As she watched her the day of Bel’s christening, fussing over the cradle in her old-fashioned pearl earrings, she wished it was Nne-Nne standing there instead. She wished it so hard that she saw it. Nne-Nne, in an orange wrapper and headwrap, in this lonely house in Neasden, gazing down at her new granddaughter. “Welcome, sweet girl,” Nne-Nne said, “to our hearts and our home.”

  It was Bel and Nne-Nne who kept Ida in good spirits through days that stretched for miles, days whose endings began to bring Aubrey home with a bitter smell on the edge of his breath. Aubrey had come to realize that there was a part of him that was a stranger to the world and everything in it, and that was therefore supremely incapable of succeeding as a human being. He was a marvelous failure locked in Judith’s love and Wallace’s scorn. He complained to Ida about his sloppy colleagues at work, about Bel crying all the time, about his Yorkshire pudding being subpar. In solitary moments he looked down at the baby as she slept and was terrified by her frailness, and he became increasingly unnerved by Ida’s whisperings and cryptic laughter. We must face these things with fortitude, and a tiny glass of sherry.

  Sometimes he got home late, and sat up with a glass by his side, which he refilled at intervals. Once he woke Ida up in the middle of the night and told her, standing at the end of the bed looking lost and menacing, that the fridge was dirty and tomorrow she should clean it. Then he went back downstairs. In the morning, he was asleep in his armchair and there was a note on top of the fridge. It said: Clean the fridge. And the floor’s dirty too. He went to work that day later than usual. She made him a cup of tea before he left. He didn’t mention the fridge.

  It was not often, it was mostly never, that they said I love yous. Instead, after dinner while she was ironing, Aubrey might bolt forward in his chair with an encyclopedia on his lap and say, “My God! Did you know that the blue whale’s tongue weighs more than an elephant and it can go for six months without food? Well, I never!”

  The lights were on. There were no princes and no angels on the ceiling. But somewhere, he loved her. He bought her a sewing machine with a three-year guarantee from John Lewis. A Singer, like Baba’s. And he arranged a short holiday in Lagos for her and Bel, where Ida had a brief, stilted reunion with Baba and Nne-Nne at Uncle Joseph’s house. Baba was still bitter; Nne-Nne was still hurt, if covertly overjoyed to see Ida again. It was difficult to say good-bye, and when Ida returned to Neasden, to the clouds and the gloom and Aubrey, her homesickness took on a new intensity and the bath became her refuge. Years slipped by. She soaked for hours as her body swelled with the twins. She told Bel about the singing tree and the millions of stars in Aruwa, and she wrote messy, doleful letters home that she never sent because there was shame in her unhappiness. In return, she received no letters back. Nne-Nne had never written a letter in her life, and Baba, Ida assumed, had nothing to say to her. In the evenings, to keep herself from despair, Ida sat down before the sewing machine in the dining room, to make her magic dressing gown.

  She had three pieces of fabric: a white and copper kente she’d brought back with her from Lagos, an explosion of stars on a black background bought from a fabric shop in Harlesden, and the third a design of Nne-Nne’s, amber and disco blue shooting through each other like the inside of champagne.

  As she sewed one piece to another in cyclical patchwork, she came across a road. Not a strange road, with headlights or danger, but one to take her back, to remind her of who she was and where she had come from. Inside champagne, Ida saw the water pump and the bushes moving in the breeze. There were home skies in her yard of universe; there was ancient bark singing old songs in the copper. She imagined, as she sewed, that she was the needle, walking along Aruwa slopes, back through the village, her footsteps soft and steady like slow rain into sand. Bel was six years old then and already having dreams. She named the dressing gown magic, because it made her mother shine, and probably fly.

  4

  Sekon

  Would there be television? Would there be Dallas? Could they watch Sue Ellen wake up in the morning with her makeup on and would there be music? Did Nigeria sell nectarines? Would there be a loft and could they take the beanbags because three years was a long time, longer than any place they’d ever been, and there’d definitely be decisions. Were they ever coming back? Were they emigrationing? Ida was behaving as if they were. She kept shopping, every day. She wasn’t in when the twins and Kemy got back from school (Would there be school? Would there be uniforms?) and Bel had to be their mum and toasted-sandwich provider until Ida came home, laden with plastic bags splitting from the weight. She bought wholesale. Ordinary things that were a part of life, like shampoo and bubble bath, soap bars and clothes and toys, as if this were her last chance to get them. Didn’t they sell soap there, or shampoo? She even went south of the Thames to Brixton with Bel on a Saturday and bought fabric and false hair and cocoa butter. Brent Cross, aglow and bulging with Christmas, became a weekly expedition. And Aubrey complained about the money, that he wasn’t made of it, and just because Alders was paying for everything it didn’t mean Ida could behave as if her husband was an oil tycoon and they lived on a ranch.

  Would there be Christmas? Couldn’t they go after Christmas? Christmas was meant to be cold and snowy, not hot, and Nigeria was hot. Most of the clothes they were taking and that Ida was buying (the best so far: two identical bow-strap stripy dresses, Georgia’s white and turquoise, Bessi’s white and fluorescent pink) were for summer, even though it was almost winter. And they’d even had their hair cut, which Georgia was still angry about because of how it went wrong. The hairdresser in Neasden was run by an Irish couple whose two daughters were the stylists. They were not officially trained. They were not up to the challenges posed by afros. The trimming of an afro required an understanding of roundness, which needed to be applied to the scissors. Mandy, the older daughter, snipped at Bessi’s hair for a very long time, looking confused, flicking her brown bob from side to side, until it was not the trim Ida had asked for but a full-blown, four-inch transformation that s
ent Bessi into a torrential grief there in front of the mirror, watching her face getting soggy. Ida and Aubrey were sympathetic. Ida called Mandy useless (the coming of Nigeria was making her vocal, even feisty) and Aubrey refused to pay. Georgia was also sympathetic—“Don’t worry, Bess,” patting her. “You still look pretty”—until the sacrifice of her own hair was suggested as the only solution. They were twins. They had to look like twins. Georgia’s hair must also be cut, to the same length. But not by Mandy, by her sister, the other one, by Emma, who got it wrong, even wronger than Bessi’s. She took five inches off and Georgia was bitter, even toward Bessi, probably for the first time.

  Georgia and Bessi didn’t believe in looking absolutely the same because that was there in their faces, almost, though Georgia’s features were fuller, she had rubyness in her lips, and wider, browner faraway eyes with lashes that hit the sky. But these differences were almost invisible to outsiders. They were the same, like dolls. They were twoness in oneness. When they’d started primary school one of their classmates, Reena, got them to stand next to each other on the wall in the playground, not moving, while she counted differences. There were five. Reena wrote them down and put them on the notice board:

  Georgia’s mouth is biggist.

  Georgia has big ears, Bessie don’t.

  Bessie’s eyes are smallist.

  Georgia is half an inch tallest and a bit fatter.

  Georgia has a beauty spot by her mouth—she is pretteist.

  They got cornered at lunch by people checking, pointing, looking for more differences. Were Bessi’s teeth slightly more crooked and was Georgia’s face rounder? And Georgia, doesn’t she walk with her feet pointing outward, like a penguin or a ballerina, whereas Bessi points hers inward as if she’s knock-kneed?