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  “Can I take Bumbo?” asked Kemy as the car was being loaded with Brent Cross. “No, you can’t,” said Bel. “He stinks.” The twins giggled. They were ten now, two numbers instead of one. Ida said Bessi was zero and Georgia was one because she was oldest.

  It was April. The sun had made coffee of them and against their skin white was blinding. They looked as if they’d been polished. “Are we proper Nigerians now?” Bessi had asked Ida after looking in the mirror at the end of an afternoon in the garden watching guavas grow. Guavas had replaced apples. Hibiscuses had replaced roses. Ida said Bessi could be as Nigerian as she wanted to be. She said, “Half your blood is proper Nigerian, and blood is more than skin.” Bessi liked the sound of that. She told Georgia. “Mummy said we can be as Nigerian as we want to be because blood is more than skin. How Nigerian shall we be, then?” This required a beanbag. It often disappeared into the triangular room when decisions came up, most recently, when they should next pretend to be each other at school for a day (result: in three weeks) and whether they should tell Nanny Delfi that Georgia had broken a plate during a midnight feast (result: no). So Bessi fetched the beanbag from the study while Georgia set the scene—a hibiscus in a jar, a light sheet for Bessi. They sat back-to-back, deep in thought. This one took a long time, though not as long as divorce. Eyes closed, lips concentrating, Bessi spoke first: “Not all, so that we can go home in 1984.” “Yes,” said Georgia. “But a bit very, because that’s still a long time, more than one and a half years.” Bessi agreed. “We’ll have to learn Edo, then,” she said.

  On the way to Aruwa the twins practiced saying “hello” and “how are you” in Edo. Georgia had a bow in her afro and Bessi didn’t; there were thoughts with bows and thoughts without. Everyone was wearing trousers because of the mosquitoes, except for Ida, who had on a wrapper suit and headwrap made out of Nne-Nne’s champagne fabric. She was gleaming at the thought of seeing her parents again, and a youthful look had returned to her face. She thought of Cecelia and had the urge to smoke.

  Spaces between the signs of life grew wider. Cars disappeared into slow, rusty bicycles and there were cornfields under the hot noon sky. When the car stopped at the edge of Aruwa, the sky disappeared too. It began with two little boys running up to the Mercedes and pressing their faces up against the windows. More faces joined them, and hands. The windows became skin. Palms and lifelines and tongues blocked out the sun and the children were shouting “Oyibo! Oyibo!” which meant white, severely undermining how Nigerian they could be, even if they could say “hello” and “how are you.”

  Troy pushed his way out of the car. Some of the children ran off; others stood back and let them through, led by a boy in a Hawaii shirt with a huge beige smile. Like a sleepy carnival across the warm red dust the Hunters walked into the village, Ida in front, Aubrey holding up the rear, children skipping and gossiping around them. They approached the singing tree. Ida slowed her pace. She walked toward it and stood under the thick green leaves and leaned against the ancient bark. She closed her eyes, unconcerned about being watched. When she drifted away toward the house she began to cry. For Nne-Nne, her face, her mother, was standing there in front of her, in a proud new wrapper, calling out her name. Ida and Nne-Nne hugged for a long time, fourteen years’ worth of head-conversations, and Ida almost fell to the ground with gladness.

  Baba and Nne-Nne had finally gotten over her escape. Nne-Nne quicker than Baba, who had taken five years in total, including a feud of silence between himself and Aka, an overdose of palm wine and many late-night talks with the ancestors, until eventually he could see the brighter side of his loss. A daughter with a house in England amounted to more in status than a portable television did in entertainment. “Ida live jos by the Queen,” he told people. “Yes, on Buckingham Road.” He might not have two extra goats, but he had more opportunities for travel (though, it was true, he would probably never go farther than Lagos) and exotic oyibo children, golden grandsons in a distant land.

  But where were they, these sons? Four girls, he counted, all in trousers! He took Aubrey aside as everyone squeezed into the living room and said, “You mean…no sons for Baba?”

  Aubrey, in his safari suit, didn’t know how to respond to this except by doing what his own father would’ve done, dragging from it a joke. “’Fraid not,” he said, “four little mites and not an Adam’s apple in sight!” Baba was not amused—although he was impressed by the cut of Aubrey’s jacket.

  The parlor shrank as everyone crowded in. Baba’s Singer had been moved into a corner along with his piles of fabric, and the battered radio had been replaced by a larger, newer model, with bright green buttons and a tape deck. The radio was set on a table covered with a plastic tablecloth. The rest of the room was taken up by random chairs, stools and cushions that looked as if they had been borrowed from other people’s houses to accommodate the visit. Nne-Nne charged about, patting at surfaces. “Sit down,” she kept saying. “Sit down!” The parlor got hotter and hotter as it filled up, and sweat started collecting along collarbones and upper lips. Aubrey ripped off his jacket. Baba studied the stitching. There was meat wafting out from beyond the bead curtain.

  The girls, noting that Nne-Nne was not a woman to be disobeyed, sat down on the cushions, Bel on a chair wishing she was with Troy. They played with their fingers while Nne-Nne and Baba stood back to inspect them. The doorway was left open; it was filling up with staring children.

  “Ahh, de twins,” said Nne-Nne. “Heh!” She pinched their chins roughly and studied them. “No…they are not de same.” She held Georgia’s face and shook it. “This one little fatta.” (Georgia was dismayed.) She shook Bessi’s face. “This one smalla.”

  It was times like this that Kemy most wished to be a twin. Wherever they went, they got all the attention. She stared up at the ceiling and it reminded her of the sun-lounge roof at home. She pointed upward and asked in a serious voice, “Is your ceiling made of corgated iron?”

  “Corrugated,” corrected Bel.

  Baba laughed. “We made a new roof, Ida,” he said. “Iron much better than reeds for when de rain is very bad.” Baba went on to tell everyone how they had lived without a roof, only a sheet of plastic, while the roof was being replaced, and how some of his equipment had been soaked in sudden heavy downpours. Georgia imagined it, lying in bed at night with the stars above you, and the rain falling onto your face. She wondered whether it had rained the night Ida left Aruwa.

  Ida had told them all once about when she had left the village. They were alone with her in the kitchen at Waifer Avenue, Bel and Kemy and the twins. She had told them about getting out of bed in the middle of the night and running across the compound. She had described the stars above her as she had waited in the road for Sami to come on the bicycle, and how sad she had felt to be leaving her mother. Georgia pictured it now, Ida creeping out of the house with her bag of things, and the millions of stars outside, waiting for her. She imagined that it would be a very hard thing to do, to run away and leave everything behind and not turn back.

  Nne-Nne had her arm around Ida. They were still studying the twins and seemed to be conferring silently, even though Baba had moved on to an animated account of the bad harvests caused by drought a few years before. Bessi was beginning to feel uncomfortable. She hated long-drawn-out comparisons like this.

  Then Nne-Nne said, “It is very special to be twins, you kno that? Your motha tell you about them—the stories?”

  “No,” said Ida, lightly reproaching Nne-Nne. “You scare them!”

  “Ah, but come, Ida, mek them tough now, not so!”

  “What?” said Bessi.

  “Who?” said Georgia.

  “Yeah, what?” added Kemy.

  Baba had stopped talking. His eyes flashed. He rubbed his hands together. “Dey kill dem!”

  The twins looked at each other and decided they wanted to go back to Neasden. Kemy slipped her arm through Georgia’s.

  “Don worry,” said Baba. “It’
s a long time ago.” He stood around with his arms folded, wanting sons. Baba was the best storyteller in Aruwa, and he found that his stories were often wasted on girls because they got scared so easily.

  Ida unzipped her bags and started taking out the shops—the shampoo and cocoa butter and toys and clothes. There were sighs and excited whispers at the door. “This is for Marion and the children, this is for you, this is for Oncle…” When the unpacking was done, Nne-Nne and Ida eloped to the kitchen and came back with plates of mountains. Buttered yam, goat stew, jollof rice with lashings of cayenne pepper that gave Bessi a rash, Kemy a fit of coughing, and Aubrey perspiration, which he dabbed with his handkerchief, sitting flushed in the ditch of an old armchair. Nne-Nne proudly passed around chicken wings and when Bel tried to decline with a “No, thank you,” Nne-Nne looked her up and down as if she was a vegetarian and jabbed the plate in her face. “Tek! Eat!” she said. And Bel ate.

  They all ate. With inward sighs they ate until their skin seemed thinner and they could barely speak. The only refusal Nne-Nne would accept was Bessi’s declaration of her egg allergy, which meant she couldn’t eat the crayfish moi-moi. “Honest,” she pleaded, Nne-Nne looking suspicious. “Isn’t it, Mummy? It makes my mouth sore and my face get bumps and they don’t go for two days! Isn’t it, Georgie?”

  “Yeah,” rushed Georgia. “She can’t eat egg. Never! Not even scrambled how Festus makes it.”

  “…and cheese,” said Kemy.

  “…and spinach!” said Georgia. “It makes her teeth itch.”

  “…and bananas,” Bessi added, in case there were any coming. (Kemy and Georgia had recently started a new game of chasing her around the house with banana skins and she was tired of it.)

  When they’d finished eating Nne-Nne stared disapprovingly at the food left over on people’s plates. She and Ida were sitting together at the table, their thick legs brushing against the tablecloth. They muttered to each other and fanned themselves. From the open door, the many pairs of eyes were still watching.

  Kemy had been thinking about what Baba had said earlier about the twins. She wanted to know what it meant, and whether it was a good story or a bad one. Was it a better story, she wondered, than her mother’s story about leaving the village on a bicycle?

  She spoke up and directed her question toward Baba. “Did someone get killed?” she said.

  “Kemy!” Ida said. “Stop that!”

  Baba was impressed. He pointed at Kemy and laughed. “This one tough already, you see! I like dis one-o!”

  He sat up in his chair next to the sewing machine and said, “You sure you wan to kno?”

  Kemy looked at the twins and then at Ida, who said nothing. The twins looked at each other. Bel sighed a might-as-well sigh. The four of them nodded.

  “Well!” Baba shuffled in his chair.

  A long time ago, he told them, people believed that twins came from witches who lived in the forest.

  “Did they have brooms?” asked Kemy.

  “Of course!” said Baba.

  They flew around and around the treetops on their brooms. They ate birds and made skirts from the feathers. And when they were at their most evil, they gave birth to twins.

  “Who were the fathers?” asked Bel.

  “The devil,” said Baba. “Now listen.”

  That is what the people believed. Twins were a curse. “The children of devils,” Baba spat, for he advocated the use of special effects. And they had to be destroyed. So this is what they did. They took the second twin…

  That’s me! thought Bessi.

  …and burned it.

  Gasps, four times. Bel glanced at Ida.

  Aubrey put in, “But this is a long, long time ago, remember.” And Ida said, “It’s not true,” even though she knew it was. All the stories Baba told were true.

  They burned the second twin with the other children of witches, the rest of the cursed. That is, the blind, the crippled, the dumb, the deaf and the sick. And if the father of the twins happened to be a fisherman…

  “Your father is not a fisherman.” Aubrey sighed…. what they did was take that second twin, and drown it, “in the riva!” Baba was excited now. The children in the doorway sniggered at the little squirming yellow girls.

  Baba carried on, breathing heavily. He told them of a woman who once had two girl twins who were best friends from the very beginning, even before they were inside their mother’s womb, when they were spirits. Their names were Onia and Ode. Onia was first. Ode was second—they set her on fire.

  When Ode was burned (the father was not in this case a fisherman), Onia got sick and wouldn’t eat at all until Ode’s ghost entered her body. The ghost came in, and Onia began to eat again from her cursed mother’s breast. But Ode could only stay for one year, because that was how long it took for the soul to be ready to leave the earth. After that, there would be no choice.

  In that year Onia had many wicked thoughts. She dreamed that when she grew up she would burn down the village and the forest around the village. “Then, after the year was over,” said Baba, “Ode left her—forever.”

  Georgia and Bessi’s eyes had gotten as big as Kemy’s. Their bellies were full of moths.

  “So…did she do it?” asked Georgia, because Onia was her.

  “Do what?” Baba said, wanting to make sure they were following.

  “Did Onia burn down the village and the forest?”

  “Of course!” he said. “She became a witch. She destroyed the whole village and the surrounding land, everything! And her womb was barren. That was the end of it. So afta that they decided it was not a good idea to separate twins, or kill them. Terrible things can happen, you see!”

  Oh, what a load of haddock, thought Aubrey.

  The day was beginning to close in now and shadows had gathered in the parlor. Kemy’s eyes were huge wet circles and Georgia and Bessi were as still as scarecrows on their cushions. There were vivid scenes in their heads of forests burning and witches in bird-feather skirts and innocent twins being set on fire. Georgia had moved closer to Bessi. She was holding on to her arm as if she might be snatched away at any moment. Ida scolded Baba for scaring the children. “They’re not used to these stories,” she said. “It frightens them.”

  Tomorrow there would be more feasts and more visits to Ida’s extended family. The thought of it made Aubrey very tired, and he began to doze off. Nne-Nne switched on the lamp and she and Ida huddled together at the table, laughing between themselves. Every so often Nne-Nne pointed at one of the children as if clarifying something. When Aubrey’s snoring began to fill the room, their voices lowered to whispers and Ida became very serious.

  Realizing that he was going to get no such banter out of Aubrey, and there would be no more storytelling to these gutless girls, Baba stood up after a while and stretched. He grunted something to Nne-Nne, who hardly noticed, and disappeared out into the dark for a nightcap.

  It was too hot. It stayed too hot all night. The twins were traumatized and insisted on sleeping together on the floor of the living room holding hands, with Bel for protection in case anyone felt like doing anything to Bessi. They didn’t sleep well. Onia and Ode were in the room, one inside the other. And this was the deepest darkness they had ever known, not a light for miles in these long hours, just the noises outside, the bats and the dogs, and that distant sound of fire.

  When they woke up the next morning Bel had gone. Georgia peeped out into the morning and saw her walking back toward the house smiling.

  She had spent the night in the Mercedes with Troy by a field of tomatoes. She had let him touch her on the breast, pressing it. She had gotten full of breath, and warm and wobbly inside.

  EVERY MONTH THERE were power cuts. They lit candles and waited for Sedrick to turn on the generator. And when the power came back they danced. At the house in Sekon, there was enough room for dancing. Across the polished pine of the living room and beneath the dripping chandelier. Bel played records and they made up routin
es while soul men in white suits sang behind microphones inside the speakers. During the school holidays, when Aubrey was at work, Troy joined in. Bel would sit down and he’d walk up to her and ask, “Do you want to get down?” Bel would stand up beaming and the Little Ones, who were getting bigger, danced around them, singing:

  it’s only for the sight of you

  my eyes open up each day

  the rain could fall forever, girl,

  if it meant that you would stay

  truth is your love’s got me flying high

  but the ground ain’t pretty like you

  Twice a year were the parties. Aubrey’s swooning cocktail parties with sunset sliding over sequins. The Alders people came and their friends, the Reeds and the Bombatas and Mr. Bolan from the next block and also strangers, who sometimes mistook Ida for a member of staff, so she preferred to stay in the kitchen with Festus and organize the food. The twins and Kemy passed round canapés, wearing Ida’s jewelry and Bel’s lipstick. And Aubrey drank too much gin and tonic.

  During the last party in Nigeria, as heat pressed its belly up against the door, Bel and Troy made buttery love in the bungalow next to the shower room. She was sixteen now and she was allowed. Afterward they lay back and listened vaguely to the shouts and laughter coming from the house. Georgia walked past, looking for the new kittens, but Bel didn’t hear her.

  Georgia was worried about Bessi, who was sick. It was a Wednesday and perhaps because of this Nanny Delfi had accidentally given her a fishcake with egg in it and Bessi was lying in bed with a face full of lumps. To entertain her, Georgia had kept looking over the landing at the party and reporting back to Bessi what was going on.

  “Mrs. Reed is dancing—I think she’s drunk.” Bessi chuckled from her sickbed.

  “That pretty lady is sitting on the sofa and Mr. Bolan keeps looking down her top.”

  “Mrs. Reed has just spilled her drink all over her. I think Daddy’s drunk too.”

  Bessi fell asleep and Georgia watched her for a while wondering when the lumps would go. She looked out of the window at the night and thought about Ham. She often thought about him at night—it was a time when dead things could come back to say hello, and ask you how you were. When she held the kittens in her hands, it was almost like before Ham died.