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  As they walked toward the palace the gravel growled beneath their feet. Inside was a black marble staircase speckled with white, with thin iron ankles holding one step to another. It would be a cruel place to fall. At the top of the stairs was a corridor with rooms leading off one side. On the other side were long glass windows, slanting up toward the sky. There were new bedrooms, new beds, and they fell through deep sleeps in thin sheets, Kemy with Bel, and G + B in a triangular room.

  EVERY HOT DAWN for three years was announced by cockerels and prayer. On flat roofs across the country, in bell-tipped mosques with the sun at the windows, barefoot worshipers in shrouds of white sank onto their hands and knees and put their heads to the ground. The morning breeze caught the songs and they traveled south toward the ocean, leaving benedictions on breakfast, on cool showers, on scrambled eggs with red peppers and onions and Maggi sauce, the way Festus made it. Hefty Festus who ruled the kitchen in army green shirts and was married to Nanny Delfi in the nurse’s uniform. They shared a bungalow and argued behind doors about territories. Nanny Delfi would tell Festus, “You don’t put Maggi with eggs, can’t you see they are English, mek it plain, sa,” and Festus says, “Dela, they love the eggs, stay away from the food. The food pay me—the children and the clean place pay you, okay?” Then Nanny Delfi would pull at his nose and charge off with her pile of towels. She cleaned furiously, under the white sofa, across the mahogany in the study (which had a beanbag, just one), and also human beings. Once a week the twins and Kemy had to stand up in the bath and be scrubbed until they were shiny, until they were almost bleeding. The reflection of Nanny Delfi’s clinical frown, with which she met nudity, could be seen on their torsos.

  It became inevitable that Ida would join in the arguing, for she was incapable of accepting the concept that she should stay out of the kitchen. What did this mean? Festus kept telling her, “Don’t worry, everything is under control,” as a polite way of saying keep off my turf, and she didn’t like it. She had been brought up in the intestines of kitchen activity, instilled with Nne-Nne’s philosophy (passed down through generations of Aruwa ancestry) that a woman knows her family best, loves them best, lives her best, through the kitchen. And whether Ida agreed with this or not, parts of it had stuck, so that she felt most at home sitting near a fridge, or a boiling kettle, or making magnificent smells with new combinations of secrets. Festus would often come back from his afternoon break to find Ida chopping plantain and dropping the pieces into a frying pan of palm oil sizzling next to a pot of rice, and it filled him with fury. He complained about it to Delfi, who told him, “See, didn’t I tell you about too much spices, they don like it! You won listen.” When Festus eventually confronted Ida by saying simply, “It’s my job to cook the food,” Ida said, “It’s my job too, you see.” The only solution was to cook meals together. They argued until they almost agreed about measurements and coconut and chili, about menus and what to have on Thursday, and about the supremacy of yam over cassava in the preparation of eba, which was what was served on the first Christmas Day, with chicken stew, roast potatoes, and vegetables.

  “No gravy?” said Aubrey.

  “The stew is the gravy,” said Ida.

  It was a somber meal. There was no tree in the corner and no ribbon around the presents. Halfway through a potato Kemy burst into tears, slammed down her fork and said, “I want to go home. I want to watch Top of the Pops!” Aubrey was oddly touched. He pretended to cry and said, “The speech! I’m missing me Queen’s speech! Boo-hoo!” which made Kemy laugh. There was surprise Christmas pudding for dessert (Ida had bought three, one for each year) and the Little Ones were allowed sips of brandy to wash it down.

  Georgia loved eba, though not too much of it because it was fattening. For the twins’ ninth birthday in January there was lots of eba (or mashed potato, as Aubrey had started calling it—but it was better than that because you could dip it in the stew with your fingers). Because they did not yet have any friends in Sekon, apart from one or two of Aubrey’s dreary colleagues who lived a block away, the only guests at the party were the staff. Festus, Nanny Delfi and Ida sat on deck chairs in the shade of the orange trees while Aubrey stayed inside because of the heat. Sedrick watched everything from a distance. It was the first party of many. Georgia and Bessi were rara fairies with wands and Kemy an angel with wings made of wire and torn sheets. Bel, whom Nanny Delfi had nicknamed “Mystic Bel” on account of her bewitching green eyes, was God, in tight trousers and a cherry shirt with wide collars. She walked around the garden trying to tell everyone what to do.

  “You don’t look like God,” said Kemy.

  “How do you know? God can wear what he wants. Go and get me a Coke.”

  One of Kemy’s wings was falling off, as angels’ wings sometimes can, and she sloped across the garden for the Coke. The garden was twice the size of the one in Neasden, and it was alive. Its creatures had the kind of audacity Ham would have found terrifying. Moths were birds. Birds were harlequin bats. The spiders there were bigger than incredible, with muscled legs and visibly volatile eyes, and sometimes, even under Ida’s wicked broom, they refused to die. They strutted across the radiant grass with handbags and sunglasses and filthy feet and walked all over the house, taking siestas behind doors and under pillows. Lizards waltzed up the walls, blue lizards with scales, and leaped over people’s feet. There were dragonflies whose beating wings you could hear before you saw them, black and yellow ladybirds with eyelashes, tumble-fly who sucked at the blood and left shiny craters in the skin.

  And cockroaches. The insect dinosaur.

  God waited for her Coke, disdainfully watching Georgia and Bessi granting wishes by tapping people on the nose with their wands. It was at this point, while Bessi was granting Nanny Delfi’s nose a five-star holiday in America, that a gigantic flying dinosaur landed just below Bessi’s collarbone. It stayed there for a terrible, silent momentless moment. Then it stayed there, glaring up at her with busy tentacles, while Bessi screamed.

  Such a beast, thought God, and so close to the heart.

  Bessi could think of two worst things that could happen. The first was Georgia dying without her. The second was monsters. This was a monster and it was on her chest. Georgia screamed too, and Kemy ran out of the house screaming because she thought the twins were being murdered. She had also just seen a snake crawl out of the washing machine, brass-colored, with brown spots, but she couldn’t tell anyone for the noise and the horror. Aubrey stepped out of the lounge with the paper dangling from his hand and said, “What the blast is going on?” Ida and Nanny Delfi shook Bessi by the shoulders to try to get the cockroach off her, but it was clinging, as if the tips of its big legs had been soaked in glue. Festus tried, he had a rougher shake, and still it clung. Bessi was getting a headache and her face was going crimson.

  Now Sedrick, who had been standing by the hibiscus bushes at the edge of the garden, approached her. He stubbed out his cigarette on the way and moved very slowly, focusing on the cockroach shimmering in the sun. When he reached her, he bent down so that his nose was almost touching the monster. He could smell little-girl smells, perfumeless, clean sweat. Sedrick raised his hand and aimed toward Bessi’s chest. He lifted the cockroach off her and held it in his palm. Its wide brown wings twitched. The children were still screaming. There was a sense that Sedrick and the cockroach were brothers.

  And then, as if it was innocent, it flew away.

  IN THE BEGINNING it was all too much. The creatures and the longing. The hot Christmas and no roses in the garden. All the strangers. That sad naked man who sometimes walked past the gate in the afternoon and stared into the house (it was the first time they’d seen in real life what a man looked like underneath clothes and it was ugly). Georgia and Bessi missed the loft and wondered about the lodgers. Were the grandmother and the little girl following their instructions? Were they tampering with the beanbags?

  At night, in the first weeks, the twins met each other in the middle of homesick
dreams and went back together to check. They navigated the indigo skies hand-in-hand cloud-stepping over the Mediterranean toward Neasden, and slipped through the front door, up the two flights of stairs and into their room. Things seemed unruined. The grandmother lay in Bessi’s best bed gently snoring and the girl, whose name was Lynn, slept in Georgia’s by the window. Lynn dreamed one night that she opened her eyes and saw worried twins in summer dresses (one pink, one blue, with stripes) standing at her bedside watching her. One of them, the taller one, said, Don’t forget the roses. The dream made Lynn open her eyes, expecting them, but by then they’d gone. They’d left through the window and wandered down deserted Waifer Avenue to the Welsh Harp, strolled along the river and into the clearing where the rope hung. They took turns swinging and didn’t fall, and the rope made twisty creaking noises from the weight.

  Most times, Georgia slipped away from Bessi to say hello to Gladstone and Bessi kept on swinging. Georgia knocked on the door and Gladstone let her in and gave her hot chocolate. He wrapped a shawl around her and listened while she told him all about Nigeria, the spiders, the cockroach on Bessi’s chest, the rain and the rainbows. “It sounds a wonderful adventure, my dear,” he said, “but do be careful in the world.” Usually she would fall asleep for a few minutes under the spell of Gladstone’s voice and then she would wake up flustered, remembering Bessi, and that she was waiting for her. It was time to go, back to the heat, the crickets and the white morning songs.

  These trips became less and less frequent. For home had a way of shifting, of changing shape and temperature. Home was homeless. It could exist anywhere, because its only substance was familiarity. If it was broken by long journeys or tornadoes it emerged again, reinvented itself with new decor, new idiosyncrasies of morning, noon and dusk, and old routines. Nanny Delfi singing “Amazing Grace” as they woke up, the minibus that took them to a school with one corridor and back again at lunchtime when the school day ended; Aubrey’s glass being set down on a table in the middle of the night; and the long rainy Sundays spent in the upstairs hallway, looking out.

  Aubrey left for work in the mornings in much the same way as he did in London, with a briefcase and a tie and Old Spice around his neck. Perhaps because he was not alone in Lagos this time, but a man of experience, with responsibilities and a wife and a family, he behaved in a more confident, sociable manner. His colleague Mr. Reed, and his American wife Mrs. Reed, had invited him and Ida for cocktails at their house on Victoria Island, and in return Aubrey had invited them over for dinner. The dinner had turned into a larger affair, with more guests and slices of pineapple on aluminum platters and even Val Doonican at midnight. Aubrey did not shout as much as he did at Waifer Avenue, and his late-night liquor was less imposing. On mornings after, when the house had slept soundly while he walked around the garden with his glass or sat in the study under lamplight, he would get up early with the heat and be ready by 6 A.M. to face the traffic. Ida, without bags under her eyes, wished him a good day. Troy chauffeured him, over the bridge into the chaos of Lagos Island. And sometimes Bel, feigning sickness to get the day off school, tagged along to keep Troy company, wearing a little denim skirt and a padded bra beneath her vest—and lipstick with lip liner to enhance her pout.

  Bel had turned fifteen in August. There she was at the bottom of the marble stairs, a ring of love-heart beads around her wrist, as Troy stood in the doorway with his keys, the morning flapping at his shirt and showing her a small coal snippet of his abdomen. All the way into the center of the city, as they dodged the overcrowded buses and the holes and dead animals in the road, Bel would sit in the back behind him, coughing intermittently, waiting for the moment when her father was dropped off outside Alders’ high gates and he disappeared into the world of oil and money, and they were alone, just Isabel Hunter and Troy, in a blond Mercedes, with air-conditioning. She asked him questions. Where do you live, then? (In one of the bungalows, but he also had a place in town.) What do you do on your day off? (Which was Sunday, so they never went anywhere on Sundays.) Have you got a girlfriend? (He had two, the stallion.) How old are you? (Twenty-six.) Can I come with you?

  “Where?” he said.

  “Anywhere.”

  He let her sit in the passenger seat and there were times when he’d change gear and his hand would touch her leg. There were other times when he didn’t drive straight home but to the edge of the Atlantic, where they walked the dunes on Bar Beach. Bel would sit down on her favorite rock and gaze out at the water, looking mystical and mature, and she hoped he would see her like that. Mystic Bel. He asked her one question: Is this how you spell it? Bel. Yes, that’s right—she smiled—that’s it. Three bold letters, written in the sand.

  When they got back at lunchtime the Little Ones danced in the gravel and Kemy shouted things which were ignored. “Bel fancies Troy! We know, we know, Bel fancies Troy!” Kemy was usually carrying Bumbo, the other dog, Beetle’s older brother, whom she’d adopted. He had a permanent cold and a squint and was dying of old age. There were also two cats called Magika and Netty, who liked to mate, and who had just produced four Ham-sized kittens, two of which had been given away to the neighbors. Georgia especially liked the kittens, and let them wriggle about in her hands.

  Georgia wondered, when she saw the way Bel looked at Troy, whether they were really truly in love and what that would feel like. It wasn’t like being married, because Ida didn’t look at Aubrey like that. So was it something like being a twin?

  AFTER THE COCKROACH incident, the twins had developed a fascination with Sedrick. They spent a lot of time loitering around his hut, being careful not to get too close in case he had roaches in his hands. The inside of the hut didn’t get sunlight, even though it had a small window. It faced away from the sun. Beneath the window there was a shelf holding only a small penknife, for undressing sugarcane.

  Sedrick was not in love. Georgia knew. Because he didn’t smile very much and never went anywhere apart from to the end of the road to buy three cigarettes. When he was out once, she put a marigold on the shelf next to the knife to see if it made any difference, but it didn’t. Being alone inside his hut, even for that moment, made her feel like there was someone behind her who might lock her in.

  The twins asked Sedrick questions: how old are you (at least thirty, they bet, but he wouldn’t say), have you got a girlfriend (probably not, Georgia knew, but he wouldn’t say), did he ever get bored sitting down and if so what did he do when he did, and was it possible to get a disease from holding cockroaches?

  “No,” said Sedrick, “only if you crush it in your hand—the blood is poisonous.”

  Had he crushed a cockroach in his hand, did he get sick, what was it like and how long did it take to get better?

  “Not me,” he said, “but I have seen it, I have seen a man die.”

  “Have you?” Georgia and Bessi said, astounded.

  “Yes. And others. In the war.”

  “I know about the war,” said Bessi. “They told us at school. They said that one million people died, isn’t it.”

  “One million,” went Sedrick.

  While Sedrick was in the hut Georgia and Bessi often ran to open the gate and, being lazy, he didn’t mind that. They also sprang out at him sometimes during his walks around the house with Beetle.

  “Why don’t you wear socks?” Bessi asked him. “You’ve got dry ankles and we can see them.”

  Georgia offered him Vaseline. “Nanny Delfi makes us put Vaseline on our feet every day and it makes them not dry.”

  “…or we can steal a pair of Daddy’s socks?”

  Sedrick mumbled something about the heat. He didn’t want socks, or Vaseline. He wanted peace, and good views of young thighs, which he savored whenever they appeared.

  Among the bungalows, between his and Troy’s, there was a small shower room and Bel took a shower there once while the Little Ones were having their bath. Sedrick, dawdling past, peered in through a slit in the door and saw the shimmering backs
of Bel’s wet sepia thighs and the edge of an early breast. He couldn’t tear himself away. He settled there, bent at the door with his mouth open, and didn’t hear Ida walking by with Troy’s lunch, a bowl of okra soup (slime broth, Aubrey called it, because it looked like snot).

  Ida spotted him and, outraged, leaped at him with the soup, turning the bowl upside down on his head so that his face got slimed hotly, with chili and paprika. Onion and tomato mush trickled down his temples. Ida cursed and damned and chased him around the cedar tree, throwing twigs at him until he begged her to stop.

  “Stay away from him,” she told the twins. “He’s a monkey and a dog.”

  Sometimes Sedrick watched the twins and Kemy doing the Cartwheel Olympics in the garden. Judgments were based on who could do the most in a row, who was the neatest, and who could twist mid-cartwheel and turn it into an Arab spring, which meant a gold medal. They let him be the referee when Bel wasn’t there and he decided most of the time that Georgia was the best.

  THEY LEFT SEKON only once during the emigration, for an overnight stay in Aruwa. It took a lot of preparation and forewarning and did not happen until 1983. Ida sent a message via Troy, who told his uncle who knew Joseph who told Aka who told Baba that she was finally coming to visit. Baba and Nne-Nne didn’t have a phone. Nor did they have a portable television. Ida had not actually spoken to them since 1969, discounting her daily head-conversations with Nne-Nne.

  Word spread around Aruwa that the Tokhokhos’ runaway daughter was coming, with her white husband and yellow children, and there was much kerfuffle. Many chickens were strangled and a goat was slaughtered. The market was raided for bags of gari and okra, ginger stems and sweet potatoes. The fronts of houses were swept with fan brooms and the singing tree checked its posture.