by Yaba Badoe
‘What did Peter say about the accident?’
‘The usual. I shouldn’t stir up trouble. I should try and “shape up” because if I put my mind to it I’m “game” for anything.’
‘Sounds like the sort of stuff fathers say. They don’t get it, do they? They don’t get it at all,’ I said, mimicking Polly’s exasperation and experiencing my own. ‘My father is impossible.’
‘But you don’t miss him, do you? Not like you miss your mom.’
I was silent and Polly, sensing my vulnerability, drew closer. Very gently, she whispered: ‘What d’you miss about your mom, Aj?’
I wondered how best I could encapsulate the void left by my mother. I couldn’t find English words for my sentiments, so I described my favourite food instead.
On her good days I associated my mother with food: the scent of ripe guava, the orange of mango and pawpaw. I remembered meals that she cooked for me: a plate of kenkey, pepper and fish; groundnut soup on a bed of rice; mashed plantain seasoned with ginger and chilli, then transformed at leisure, by frying in palm oil, into tatale.
I described all these meals to Polly, and, remembering familiar smells, I caught a glimpse of my mother’s smile. She had a way of eating that invariably enticed me to the table. Watching her fingers shape a morsel of food for her mouth, I would want to eat whatever she held in her hand. Mama transformed the simple task of eating into an unsurpassed pleasure. I hadn’t realised how ravenous I was to taste her food again.
‘My mother’s the best cook in the world,’ I told Polly.
‘Don’t you have McDonald’s in Ghana?’
I wasn’t sure. ‘We ate lots of McDonald’s when we lived in London,’ I replied. ‘And Kentucky Fried Chicken. I don’t like the food in London or the food here. It’s not as nice as what we have in Ghana.’
Polly agreed that what passed for nourishment at school, Toad in the Hole in particular, was disgusting. But since she’d never tasted my mother’s cooking, she didn’t have a point of comparison. After some reflection she said: ‘You know Isobel’s supposed to be a good cook. At least Peter says she is and so does Theo, my brother. They can’t get enough of her cooking. You’d like it too, if you tried it, Aj.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Naaa. I’m so not into organic, wholegrain stuff. But Jacinth liked it and I reckon you would too.’ Stretching out on her back, Polly yawned. ‘Let’s face it, Aj, just about everything on Planet Earth sucks, but at school it sucks a million times worse. Why not come home with me? Isobel might give you something to smile about.’
‘You really think so?’
‘I’m almost one hundred per cent sure,’ she said, determined to convince me. Then, reacting to my puzzled silence, my inability to respond wholeheartedly to her invitation, Polly gave me a get-out clause. ‘Look, if I’m wrong about Isobel, you can sue me. I mean, what have you got to lose? Just come for half term. I bet she’ll make you feel better. She can’t help herself, Aj.’
Her sales pitch had already persuaded me that I’d be a fool not to meet her mother. I said I’d think about it. But unbeknown to me what I thought was incidental, for Polly had already chosen me as her best buddy. And when Polly wanted something, she usually got it.
5
OVER TEA WITH Aunt Lila in London, my aunt said something that’s stayed with me. I was telling her about my friendship with Polly and her family; our life together at Graylings, which I latched on to, absorbing the sensuality of the Venuses through my pores. Along with the nostalgia I expressed, Aunt Lila must have heard something else: a tremor of tenderness perhaps, a slight break in my voice that surfaces whenever I speak of Polly. Gathering my fingers in hers, clasping them to her breasts, my aunt sustained me through the most difficult part of our conversation. When I finished telling her everything, when I had shared the burden I have been carrying all these years, she helped me make sense of it by explaining her view of the world.
Aunt Lila believes that the emotional landscapes we inhabit and the houses we live in are the dwelling places of unseen entities: spirits from another world that permeate our own, influencing events. She believes that the realm of the senses is threaded with the breath of spirits, and that what is glimpsed with the human eye is merely a fragment of reality.
‘Sometimes,’ Aunt Lila said, ‘reality is simply too bright, Ajuba. It’s so bright that we have to blind ourselves to survive. What happened was not your fault. You were a child. You are your mother’s daughter.’
From Aunt Lila’s viewpoint, the events I am piecing together, the long libation I am pouring, reverberate with voices from my past and the house itself: faint echoes that grew louder, the more familiar I became with Polly’s family and the place where she died.
At the time, Polly gave me a blow-by-blow account of her family’s move to Graylings. It was only a week before the Whitsun break, when I was due to stay with them. I had decided to go home with Polly not merely to sample her mother’s cooking, but because I liked her. And her willingness to palm her mother on to me, though confusing, intrigued me. Moreover, Polly’s enthusiasm for her new home was contagious.
Graylings was a few miles from our school and the Venus family had been staying, up till then, in a rented cottage close by, Peter Venus returning home for the weekends from his houseboat in London, while his wife supervised the renovations needed to make their new home habitable. For the past fifty years the house had been the home of Miss Olivia Fielding and her companion, Miss Edith Butterworth; and for the past forty years, little had been done by way of home improvements. There was no central heating, the wiring had reached a dangerous state of decay, and what was left of the kitchen was dilapidated. Using a part of her considerable personal fortune, Isobel Venus set out to make her new residence worthy of her family.
I first met Mrs Venus when she came to collect Polly and me for half term. We were waiting for her in the school hall, a haven leading to the drawing-room, which the Derbys used as a study and a place for meeting parents. Isobel Venus arrived slightly late. She’d been summoned by Mrs Derby to discuss Polly’s behaviour. She quickly kissed her daughter, said ‘hallo’ to me and then, standing to attention, she knocked on the drawing-room door, leaving a scent of bluebells behind her. Penhaligon’s Bluebell, I later discovered: a blaze of indigo in spring sunshine.
She was an elegant woman, tall and fine-boned, with a luxurious sweep of hair the colour of ripe corn. When she glanced at me, her dark-brown eyes were unusually disarming in their frankness; it was this quality of hers, combined with her taste in clothes and perfume, that reminded me of a sleek saluki dog. She was wearing a white silk blouse and beige linen trousers, colours guaranteed to blend in no matter where she was. Unlike the other parents picking up children, Mrs Venus sported a suntan. She appeared calm when she entered the drawing-room, but when she emerged half an hour later, with a holdall containing Polly’s confiscated magazines, she was seething.
Ever the tactician, Polly made me sit in the front of the family’s black Mercedes for the journey home, while she sat in the back behind the driver’s seat. She positioned herself so it was virtually impossible for Mrs Venus to make eye contact with her.
The grating irritation between Polly and her mother transformed what should have been a short drive into an arduous pilgrimage to an unknown destination. Polly stared nonchalantly out of the car window and Mrs Venus, her knuckles white, her hands clenched on the steering wheel, sparkled with anger. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, rubbing the safety belt with my chin. I wondered when they would speak to each other and if what Polly had described as Isobel’s ‘wrath’ was likely to erupt. Sensing tension mounting between them, sucking it in through the air I was breathing, I began counting the miles of our journey as they registered one after the other on the car meter. It wasn’t until we’d passed through Axminster and travelled five miles into the countryside beyond that Mrs Venus spoke:
‘Polly, please sit where I can see you.’
&nb
sp; ‘I’m staying put.’
‘Move!’
Grudgingly, Polly shifted a few inches. Adjusting the rear-view mirror, Isobel Venus glanced at her daughter. To my surprise, she began talking to Polly quietly, without fuss: a reprimand, followed by a stern warning never to take the magazines to school again.
‘Give me a break, Isobel! I’m not totally dumb.’
‘Cut it out, Polly. I’m not putting up with this, not this weekend or any other weekend. And I’m certainly not having you singled out as a troublemaker at school. Do you hear me?’
‘There’s no need to raise your voice, Mommy dearest. I’m receiving your signal loud and clear.’
‘That’s enough, Polly!’
But Polly had only just begun. ‘I mean, why make such a big deal of something that wasn’t even my fault? It was my idea, I admit. But did I put a rope around Beth’s neck? I think not. The girl went crazy. It wasn’t my fault, was it, Aj?’
I decided it was prudent to remain silent.
‘I mean, why’re you making such a big deal out of something Peter’s cool about?’
At the mention of her husband, Mrs Venus bristled: ‘Peter knows, does he?’
‘I called him right away.’
Flipping back her hair, Mrs Venus retorted: ‘I wish one of you would take the trouble to let me into your loop once in a while. Especially since I’m the one taking all the flak for you at school.’
‘And who decided I should go there? Who decided we should live in this godforsaken country again? Was it me? Was it Peter? Hallo? I think not.’
Polly’s mother glanced at me, acknowledging my presence in the car for the first time. She tried to smile but the expression that flitted over her face resembled a grimace. I was beginning to wonder if Polly had invited me home to distract her mother from being on her case all the time, when Mrs Venus, gathering her resolve with a sharp intake of breath, gave her daughter an ultimatum: ‘If you know what’s good for you, Polly, you’re going to behave this weekend. We’ve finally found a home and we’re going to be happy. Theo’s arriving later with a friend and you’ve got Ajuba. So let’s try and be kind to each other. Message received?’
Polly grunted. It was then, turning left into the drive, that a pair of dogs distracted us. Two huge boxers leapt at the car, barking furiously. They were with an old woman in a faded dress, a torn woollen cardigan flung over her shoulders.
‘Candy! Fudge! Heel!’ the woman bellowed.
Momentarily uncertain, the dogs slackened their pace as the Mercedes raced ahead.
‘That’s our resident bag lady,’ Polly told me. ‘She lives in the Gatehouse. You’d better believe it, those dogs are something else.’
It seemed to me, that first weekend, that Graylings was an Aladdin’s cave of delights, and the Venuses an exotic variant of the human family. They shimmered and shone, and though unfinished, the work that had been done on their house complemented them, creating an illusion of light and warmth. Rooms had been gutted and an Aga installed in the new kitchen at the heart of the house, to create the dwelling of Mrs Venus’s dreams: a place she could put down roots at last, gathering her family around her.
The colours on the walls were bright, the fabrics of curtains and upholstery luxurious, the carpets resplendent. The atmosphere was that of an eastern bazaar: a jumble of patterns that, like a complicated jigsaw, interlocked creating a sensation of harmony and sumptuous ease. Adorned with objects from the family’s travels, the house contained exquisite porcelain from Singapore, metal-topped side tables from North Africa, and crockery from Andalusia.
Armed with ideas absorbed from True Murder, I used the Basic Principles of Detection as an anchor to prevent me surrendering, unreservedly, to a strangely alluring environment. Applying the first principle diligently – a detective is observant above all else; she keeps her eyes peeled and listens to every word that’s said – I deployed Eugene Malone and Beau Leboeuf as I would a pair of sunglasses: to shield my eyes from the brilliance of the Venus sun.
I wanted to touch everything, to graze my fingers on every surface. But I didn’t dare to, in case something broke. ‘Am I allowed to?’ I asked as Mrs Venus drew back the curtains in Polly’s bedroom. They were Indian silk, pale as the ripening fruit of a dawa dawa tree: a flush of pink before it blushes crimson. I was tempted to embrace the colour, folding it against my cheek.
‘You can do anything you want here,’ Mrs Venus laughed. ‘You’re a guest in our home now, Ajuba. You’re not at school.’
I stroked the curtains, and, feeling a ripple of excitement trickling through my fingers into my veins, I smiled at Mrs Venus. Her eyes softened, her delight in my pleasure brought the taste of molasses to my tongue: a taste that grew stronger as, the scent of bluebells enveloping me, she lifted up my chin, and planted a kiss on my mouth.
‘I’m glad you’ve come home with Polly,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘I think we’re going to be good friends.’
When her mother had left the room Polly shrugged dismissively. ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘She can’t help herself. Isobel does that to all my friends. Do you mind?’
I said I didn’t mind. I rather liked it.
‘Do you like my room? Do you like the colour?’
Overlooking the south-west slope of the garden, Polly’s bedroom was a subtle shade of rose: a warm rose, which in the light of the setting sun became womb-like, a place for secrets and dreams.
‘It’s wonderful,’ I exclaimed.
‘Do you really like it?’
I said that I did.
‘Isobel wanted to change the colour but I wouldn’t let her. I like it the way it is. So does Peter. He says it sets my zebras off well.’
On a wall facing Polly’s bed was a Serengeti landscape of zebras grazing in savannah; and beside a bookshelf was an elaborate collage made of zebras cut out of magazines. I might have supposed, had I not known better, that under Beth’s influence Polly had succumbed to the wonders of wildlife in Africa. I was under no such illusion. Adjacent to the zebras was a garish poster, with an amputated hand in the foreground, of her favourite film, The Addams Family. Like me, Polly was given to unusual preoccupations. Her interest in zebras was purely aesthetic. Nevertheless, I told her that I liked them and my bed as well. It was beside Polly’s, a simple wooden bed, a companion to the one beside it.
As soon as we were out of our school clothes Polly dragged me outside. I had confessed, during one of our late-night conversations in Exe, that at one time my most treasured possession at Kuku Hill had been a red bicycle. I had also confessed that I’d left Ghana before learning how to ride it properly, so Polly was determined to teach me, on a set of wheels she had brought over from America.
When I was able to maintain my balance, she fed me chunks of Toblerone; and when I could go a bit further, she ran behind me as I circled the building.
Graylings lay in a stretch of deciduous woodland. With part of its foundations dating from medieval days, previous owners had emphasised its ancient origins by adding a gabled entrance porch overlooked by oriel windows on either side. On the ground floor the yellow stone mansion peered at the world through mullioned windows. There was a fine cedar at the far end of the lawn, a monkey-puzzle tree a distance away and, between the top and bottom lawns, a crumbling stone balustrade.
Manoeuvring outside on Polly’s bicycle, I saw Mrs Venus in the house wearing workman’s overalls. She was arranging plates on the kitchen dresser: Moroccan plates, I later discovered. When I sped past a second time, she opened a window, asking what we wanted for lunch. Polly answered for us both: salami sandwiches and sarsaparilla. We laughed, hearing together the musical chime of the words running into each other.
We were upstairs, cocooned under our beds reading True Murder out loud, when the rest of the family arrived. The moment Polly heard her father’s car on the drive, she dropped the magazine and ran downstairs. I followed her, only to find at the bottom of the staircase that Polly and her father were nowher
e to be seen. Unsure what to do, I hovered at the kitchen door while Isobel welcomed Theo and his friend.
At eighteen, Theo was a male version of his mother. They had the same corn-coloured hair, the same brown eyes. I thought him beautiful in a way that only someone of a completely different physical type can be beautiful. I stared at him in wonder, his face radiant as he hugged his mother.
‘Isobel, you’ve done marvels,’ he exclaimed, his arm around her waist. ‘Your palate may be a little hot for my liking, but this room works. It really works.’ Theo wanted to be an architect when he was older; either an architect or a designer of some sort.
Mrs Venus laughed. Then, seeing me stranded at the door, she drew me to her side, introducing me to her son. I shook hands with him and the girl at his side: a slim, voluptuous teenager with the dark eyes of a sphinx, Sylvie was the daughter of Parisian friends.
Emerging from her father’s study, Polly stared at Sylvie, raising an eyebrow. The French girl was dressed in what looked like the remnants of a jumble sale: a white cotton petticoat edged with elaborate flounces and a silk camise, at least a size too small, that exaggerated her cleavage. On her feet were black combat boots. Drawing me aside, Polly hissed in my ear: ‘Theo likes girls with tits. Big tits.’ I giggled as Polly gesticulated, making mountains of her breasts, while Mrs Venus and Theo, speaking occasionally in French, planned an itinerary for the afternoon.
Sylvie wanted to visit the seaside. She kept asking what colour the sea was in Britain: green, blue or grey? In the Caribbean, she said, her eyes half-shut in reverie, in the Caribbean at Christmas, the water had been a translucent turquoise. Perfect, quite perfect. And the Aegean in the spring was wine-dark. Now that she was in Devon, she wanted to see the Atlantic, to breathe in great gusts of iodine.
Mrs Venus suggested Branscombe. Theo said the houses on the Lyme Regis seafront were architecturally interesting.
