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  Magika sloped into the room.

  “Where’s the babies?” asked Georgia.

  Magika yawned.

  Georgia put her moccasins on and a too-big cardigan over her pajamas and crept down the hard stairs. Mrs. Reed was sitting on the end of the white sofa crying. A woman in a sequin dress was dancing to Val Doonican with one hand in the air. Aubrey was sipping gin and talking to a man in an orange shirt. The door was open. She slipped out to join the crickets, and no one noticed.

  When the parties happened, Sedrick had to sit in his hut until everyone had gone so that he could lock the gate. He had fresh sugarcane to keep him occupied. His eyes were yellow from watching, his teeth were yellow from sugarcane. As Georgia appeared in the dark, a cockroach crawled up the wall next to him.

  Georgia walked around the house and ran her hands along the ivy. She passed Troy’s bungalow and found one of the kittens sitting at the entrance to the garden. She lifted it up. It felt warm and heavy.

  The garden was beautiful at night. Flowers changed color and the orange trees whispered. The hibiscus shrubs glowed a forest red. Georgia saw the quicklime of a grasshopper taking a giant leap in the grass. Of all the places in the world, apart from the loft and next to Bessi, Georgia felt most at home in a garden. That’s where she would live, she thought, if she ever found herself without a loft, because you could never be sure. She would put up a tent made out of something strong and rest there. And in the morning she would open her door to flowers.

  There were low lights and voices coming from the house. But Georgia felt that she was very much alone in the garden. It was just her and the warmth in her palm. Until footsteps began to disturb the grass.

  She looked around and Sedrick was standing a few paces away from her with a stick of cane.

  “What are you doing out here?” he said, half smiling. He leaned to one side and peered at her.

  “I’m sitting down,” Georgia said, “playing with the kitten. What are you doing?”

  Sedrick said: “I’m looking at you. Pretty.”

  When Ida had called him a monkey and a dog, Georgia and Bessi had laughed. “Mummy said you’re a monkey!” they’d joked. “You got shame! You’re a dog!” Georgia remembered this now.

  “Bessi’s sick,” she said. “She ate egg.”

  Still holding the kitten, Georgia started getting up. The kitten jumped out of her arms and walked away.

  “You want some sugarcane?” Sedrick offered.

  Georgia took a piece and said thank you. “I’m going to bed now. Bessi might be awake.”

  “Want to play cartwheel?” he said. “I bet you can do seven. I’ll watch you.”

  “I can easily do seven,” Georgia said. “That’s easy anyway.” She bit off a piece of cane.

  “Do it, then. Do it now for gold,” Sedrick told her, standing back.

  “Then you have to do one after,” Georgia said.

  “Okay. Do it.”

  “I bet you can’t do one.”

  Georgia did one cartwheel to start off. Sedrick couldn’t do cartwheels. It would be funny telling Bessi and Kemy what he looked like trying to do one.

  It was a good garden for cartwheels. She made a perfect shape. She did a neat row of seven all the way to the bushes and got dizzy. Then Sedrick was next to her (she thought it strange how he’d moved so quickly, so quietly—had he done cartwheels?).

  Sedrick gave Georgia a rough kiss on the mouth. Georgia said, “Oh, no thank you,” and her feet felt as if they’d turned into grass, and grown there, and wouldn’t be able to go anywhere until they were pulled out. Sedrick held her by the waist. “Come on, pretty,” he said. He smelled of sugarcane gone sour. His wide chest with hair was sticking out of the holes in his vest. Again he shocked her with lips, he knelt down (What is he doing? What is it?) and rushed his dry hand up the back of her leg, the early thigh of a girl, the beginning of a place for pleasure.

  Earlier that week, they’d had ju-ju men (that’s what Nanny Delfi called them) at the gate, with ash rubbed into their torsos, holding knives. They demanded money, otherwise they’d kill everyone. Sedrick had sat in his hut with the door closed while Nanny Delfi and Ida got rid of them by handing over niara through the gate.

  Georgia decided now, in this moment, that Sedrick must really be a ju-ju man, not a watchman at all. A ju-ju man. He had seen a man die. He had seen many men die. And she didn’t have any money.

  “But I don’t have any money!” she cried.

  Sedrick wasn’t listening. He pulled down Georgia’s pajamas and was trying to get her foot out of one of the legs so that he could then put her legs into a cartwheel shape. Georgia’s skin and underneath her skin was petrified. There were kitteny noises near them in the bushes.

  Georgia said desperately, “I can ask Daddy for some money! But you have to stop!”

  “Come on, pretty.”

  Was Bessi dying? They had decided that they would die together. Was it now?

  Sedrick pulled Georgia’s grassfeet out of the ground and Georgia screamed. In the house, in her sleep, Bessi felt her face throb once.

  Sedrick put his hand over Georgia’s mouth. It took a lot of coordination. To hold the legs in cartwheel, to cover the mouth, to undo his belt. She was wriggling in all directions.

  Yes, this is definitely it, thought Georgia. A wild thought. She saw the headlights. She heard the engine. Oh, Bessi, be there when I get there, be there when I die!

  In the grass the kitten was writhing. Someone from the end of the scream was coming into the garden. Sedrick heard steps in the grass and started putting himself away. He let her mouth go. The cartwheel collapsed. Georgia pulled up her pajamas with rattling windup wooden hands. Her heart had leaped out of her. She put it back in. The steps were coming closer.

  “Hey,” said Bel. “Hey, what’s going on? Who’s that?”

  Sedrick pushed himself into the bushes. “Georgia?” said Bel. “Is that you?”

  Georgia didn’t answer. She felt lines of cockroaches marching up and down her legs. She ran as fast as she could, back to the house. The guests were beginning to leave and she crashed into Mr. Bolan at the door. He glared down at her with red-wine eyes and his tie undone and said, “I hope your mother doesn’t know you’re not in bed!” Then he laughed very loudly.

  Georgia took two marble stairs at a time and entered the shadows into the triangle. Bessi was lying with a sheet over her face. Georgia shouted her name, flew to the bed, and pulled away the sheet. Bessi woke up and Georgia asked her if she was still alive.

  “Yes,” said Bessi. “Are you? You look funny.”

  When Bessi had opened her eyes, Georgia had felt a hideous joy.

  “Sedrick’s a ju-ju man,” she panted. “He’s a monkey and a dog but most of all he’s a ju-ju man. He is!”

  Bessi had lumps around her eyes. She looked out at Georgia through the lumps, waiting. She said, “How d’you know that? You look funny.”

  Georgia tried to think about how she could put the cartwheels and grassfeet and the dark bushes like the evil forest and Sedrick’s hands and Sedrick’s belt opening into words that were sayable. It was the first time ever, in this land of twoness in oneness, that something had seemed unsayable.

  “Has he got a knife?” asked Bessi, who had not completely come out of her dream about going to a flea market with Billy Ocean. When Georgia had asked her if she was still alive, Billy Ocean had been about to put a piece of suya in her mouth. He was waiting now, at the edge of Georgia’s face, with the meat hanging from his finger.

  “Yes,” said Georgia, as if she was somewhere else. “I saw it. In his hut.”

  “Is he going to kill us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, we should not talk to him anyway,” said Bessi, “in case he is.”

  Georgia felt confused. She couldn’t remember something. How exactly, exactly, the kitten had felt in her hands while she’d sat in the garden. She couldn’t remember it. There seemed, all of a s
udden, lots of things in the way.

  “Are you all right, Georgie?” said Bessi.

  “Yes. I want to go to sleep.”

  “Let’s go to sleep, then.”

  “Can I sleep with you tonight?”

  Bessi moved over. Georgia stiffly lay down. She put her heavy arm around Bessi’s waist. She didn’t cry, she didn’t sleep, and she didn’t tell Ida or anyone else about not being in bed.

  IN THE FINAL months of emigration two things happened. Kemy saw the snake reappear from underneath the sofa in the living room. She fled to get Festus and Festus knew exactly what to do. He took a knife, a dagger (it was the only thing to use in these situations), held the middle of the snake like a monster handbag, and chopped it in half on the kitchen counter. He chopped the length of it to pieces and the next day Troy ate a piece for breakfast, a marinated, palm-oil-brushed, and high-heat-fried chunk of dead reptile, with the skin still on. Bel was horrified and full of lust.

  Sedrick had some too and asked Georgia and Bessi, who no longer spoke to him, if they wanted a bit. Bessi said, “No, go away, monkey,” and Georgia couldn’t look at him. She had fallen to third place, then dropped out of the Cartwheel Olympics, and when Bessi asked her what was wrong with her Georgia couldn’t say it, so she said, “Nothing.” Bessi knew it wasn’t nothing but she couldn’t work out what it was. She said to Georgia, “You can tell me anything you ever want to tell me, you know. Ever,” to which Georgia nodded, and looked away.

  The other thing that happened was that Georgia’s fingers became slippery. She dropped plates and cups and pictures in their frames. A bowl of potatoes on the way to the dining-room table. She dropped a glass in the kitchen and a shard of it landed in the back of her ankle. To stop the bleeding she put her foot in a basin of cold, clear water, and the water immediately changed color to red. “That’s Georgia,” said Ida. She said it each time something else got broken. “That’s Georgia.”

  Georgia’s hands were contagious. The clumsiness spread into Bessi’s body, and Kemy’s too. Bessi leapfrogged over a chair in the study and cut her chin on the desk, leaving a scar. Kemy slipped at the edge of the upstairs landing and fell down the cruel stairs, splitting her head open. Ida ran around the house shouting “Kemy’s dying! my baby, my youngest, Kemy’s dying!” and Kemy, who was knocked unconscious, had to have six stitches across her crown. “I almost died,” she kept saying when the stitches were taken out. “You’re lucky I’m still alive.”

  On the last Christmas Day, as a farewell gesture, Aubrey invited Festus, Nanny Delfi, Troy and Sedrick to join them at the table for Christmas lunch. There was no Christmas pudding because they’d run out, and Georgia wasn’t allowed to carry anything hot or heavy because of her fingers. Nanny Delfi, Festus and Troy sat down. Sedrick wiped his hands on his grubby trousers and approached an empty chair opposite Bessi. Bel instinctively looked at Georgia, whose eyes fell into her lap, and Ida’s nostrils flared with disapproval. She turned to Bel, remembering the shower-room peep show, and then back to Sedrick. She said sharply, “Sedrick must watch the gate.” Aubrey started to say something but Ida interrupted him. “Go and watch the gate.” And Sedrick sank back, away from the table. He went outside and returned to his sunless hut.

  Among the breakages and falls, Bel was the only one who didn’t get hurt. But she cried all the way home on the plane because of Troy. Georgia was sitting next to her, Bessi by the window looking out at the clouds. Georgia ignored heaven. Instead she concentrated on Bel. She patted her hand and said, “Don’t worry, Bel, it’s all right. Don’t be sad.”

  On the last Sunday in Nigeria it rained as usual. Georgia and Bessi did what they’d always done in Sekon on Sundays, their faces turned up the way Bel had pictured them. They sat down on the upstairs landing and looked up through the glass wall at the rain coming down. As they watched, Georgia thought how empty the sky looked, like the orange trees in the garden now, sad trees hanging; and not just on Wednesdays, every day.

  The rain hit the glass just above Georgia’s and Bessi’s faces. The slant of it made it feel as if heaven might fall into their mouths. They fell asleep for a few moments underneath the rain.

  As they slept they waited for the rainbow. It was one of the best things about Sekon. They knew it would come. While Bessi dozed she imagined herself walking between the green ray and the yellow ray to the gold at the end, holding a snakeskin handbag. Georgia saw herself walking the red, away from the gold, and finding it hard to keep her balance.

  They opened their eyes. There it was. The break of rainbow. The rebirth of color.

  “Isn’t it pretty,” said Bessi. “I’m going to miss this bit when we get home.”

  Georgia had felt the colors and the rain, but she would not miss here. There was something lost. The nowness of things. It was not pretty.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Bess,” she said. “Not quite.”

  The Second Bit

  5

  Snowgirls

  The snow had come down slowly at first. It had laid itself upon the ground like powder, disappearing into the Welsh Harp waters and tapping silently against the windowpanes of Neasden. And then it had fallen harder. Gusts of black wind slammed the heavy flakes against garden gates and the roofs of cars, against the lamplit pavements and the naked oaks across Gladstone’s grounds. The mornings were thickened with white, and the traffic coming in along the A406 moved slowly, taking careful, sleepy turns toward home.

  The house was empty when they got there. The lodgers had left the spare keys in an envelope in the porch, and a beer stain in the pattern of a peacock’s tail on the living-room ceiling. Shivering from the cold, the Hunters stood beneath the chandelier looking up at the stain. Their faces were dry from the sudden lack of sunshine. Their eyes were glazed from flying.

  Georgia slipped away into the garden. When Bessi noticed she’d gone, she followed the open doors out into the sun lounge and saw her standing in the snow. She was wearing Bel’s Wellington boots and Bessi could tell she had that new look on her face, the one that looked at invisible things in the air.

  Bessi put on Aubrey’s wellies and the snow gave way beneath her footsteps. She stood next to Georgia and said, “Shall we go up to the loft and see?”

  “Yes,” Georgia said, and faintly smiled.

  They helped Aubrey carry up suitcases. His back was hurting again and he said, “Shitting hell, I say,” when Georgia’s slippery fingers lost a hold of one of the handles. He needed a cup of tea and a sausage and tomato buttie, and to put his feet up after the long journey. While they were struggling up the stairs Kemy asked the twins if she could come up to the loft too. Bessi told her to wait. “We have to check everything’s the same.”

  G+B WAS STILL on the door in chalk but it had faded a little since 1981. So had BESSI BEST BED. And Bessi noticed that above her name someone had written GRANNY’S. She had forgotten what Granny looked like because she’d only seen her in dreams, but she felt extremely angry with her. This was no one else’s best bed but hers, who did she think she was? “That granny put her name on top of mine,” Bessi told Georgia. “Look. That’s rude, isn’t it.”

  Georgia sniffed the beanbags. The strawberry had also faded and she did not know whether all this fading was because of the presence of strangers or the passage of time or something else. But the beanbags had definitely been sat on. She said to Bessi, “They sat on the beanbags too.”

  “I told Daddy it was a bad idea having lodgers,” said Bessi. “You see, look.”

  The two girls who had lived in Kemy’s room, Tina and Alice, had also written their names in green felt tip on the walls, next to Kemy’s Michael Jackson poster. Kemy was outraged. She took it as an affront against Michael Jackson himself. She kissed him on the cheek and apologized for letting this happen, then she got Bel to help her move the poster a little to the left to hide the scribbles.

  In Bel’s room, which was next to Kemy’s, the three boys had left behind a funny smell, a mixture of
underwear, sweat and bubble gum. Bel had to leave the windows open for three days and three nights. She cried throughout and four days beyond that because she wanted Troy to pick her up in the Mercedes, to see his white shirt flapping in the warm breeze again and to feel that feeling of his thick hands (he had good, clear hands, she’d read them—they said three children, two marriages and seventy years until the end) rubbing up and down her waist and the middle of her back where you couldn’t reach if it itched.

  Aubrey and Ida’s room was virtually unmarred except for the bed, which now had a creak. Apart from that, it had the same yesterday atmosphere, as if the two people who slept in it, the twoness of it, had left. The wardrobes on each side of the room made hollow sounds when they were opened, and the red chair with chipped legs, where Nne-Nne sat sometimes when Aubrey was at work, had been moved away from the bed, closer to the window. Ida moved it back.

  The rest of the house had also begun to creak. “They must have had parties,” said Kemy, who was looking forward to being ten soon, two digits, which meant people would have to listen to her. “They must have played chase up and down the stairs and in the hallways. See, Daddy, the lodgers did it, I told you it was a mistake, didn’t I, having lodgers, they gave us back a creaky house with beer on the ceiling. You should get compension.”

  “It’s compensation and you can’t get it for creaks,” said Bel.

  “There’s nowt in a few creaks,” Aubrey said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Well, that’s all right for him to say, thought everyone.

  THERE WAS NEW life under the snow. It was more than apples and roses. It was about foreheads and survival, high school days with boys on one side and girls on another. In the middle of January, Georgia and Bessi turned twelve—old enough to kiss wet-lipped boys over garden gates, young enough to giggle afterward. A new figure entered the loft: Puberty, growling and scowling in a musty corner not far from the beanbags with claws outstretched, dripping bacteria. At night it stood over their beds, hunchbacked and panting damply, waiting for when their bodies would be warm enough for blood and boils, backlashes of sugar (Mr. Kipling’s French Fancies on Sundays), and fried food (fish and chips on Thursdays). Georgia could feel it, though when she opened her eyes in the middle of the night she saw nothing but the wisp of a scowl.