When they had reached the back veranda, something, some feeling of additional heat on the skin at the base of Jess’s neck perhaps, made her turn and look at the house that they had just left behind.
Something glittered from the still, solid darkness, something warm, alive.
There were three big windows at the top of the old building, and in the centre one she saw, quite clearly, shadows dancing in a corner just beneath the windowpane, as shadows tend to do when light shifts around its source.
There was lantern light in the window of the Boys’ Quarters.
FIVE
That night was a virtually sleepless one. After seeing the light in the Boys’ Quarters, Jess was unable to stop thinking about it. She lay in bed among her tumbled sheets, gaping without really being aware of it as she considered possibilities. For the first time in her life, she was at an imaginative loss. She couldn’t think who could possibly live in that building without her grandfather’s knowledge.
As soon as she was certain that everyone was asleep, Jess slipped out of bed and crept out of the room, quailing at first as she stood in the pitch-dark corridor, then relaxing as her eyes adjusted to the alarming shapes and objects that confronted her. Climbing the stairs to the roof balcony, she kept watch, listening to the sounds around her, jumping slightly every now and then when she looked over her shoulder at the looming darkness at the mouth of the staircase below. But no light burned in any of the windows of the empty building that night, and she strained her eyes so much with peering that for a few seconds she confused the clean, steady, white light of the stars with the orange radiance that she had glimpsed before, and her heart nearly stalled on her as she sat breathless, waiting for—
What?
In any case, nothing happened. She had to brave the staircase again and go back to bed as the sun was creeping over the rim of the horizon.
The next morning at breakfast Jess dipped her spoon into her Quaker Oats, then watched the porridge dribble back into the bowl and spatter against the rim as it rejoined the yellowing sugar that sat on top of it.
She pulled a face at it.
Her mum was sitting across from her, a lined notepad on the table in front of her, leaning with one elbow on the table mat, her face half cupped in her other hand, biro to her mouth as she looked into the space above, around, behind her daughter. When Jess played with her porridge, she blinked a little, but kept her gaze vague.
Jess spattered her porridge again.
“Do you not want that?”
“Nope.”
“Do you want something else?”
“I don’t know. What else is there?”
Sarah Harrison shrugged, her movements slow, unhurried. Jess, aware that there was something about the warm morning air that made you feel unbothered about anything much, eyed her mother attentively. She had only written about three lines on the pad in front of her. “I’m going to write AT LEAST four sides a day,” Sarah had said to Jess, her captive audience in the sitting room since she had roped her into helping sit on the suitcases. Four sides was an infinitesimal amount in comparison with the pages of her novel that remained to be written, and she couldn’t even do that.
Deciding not to say anything that would put her mother into a bad mood, Jess waited.
“What else is there?” she repeated eventually.
Her mother scribbled a few more words on to the page before her. “Go and ask Aunty Funke,” she said distractedly.
Jess wriggled off her chair and went down the hallway, past Aunty Anike, Uncle Kunle’s wife, who was standing barefoot in a wrinkled sleeveless vest with a green-and-blue wrapper tied about her waist, busy ironing a pile of her grandfather’s shirts and trousers. She smiled her good morning and continued to the landing, where the staircase went upwards to the roof and the corridor swerved right toward the kitchen. The crackling, static sound of the Radio OYO jingle filled the entire landing:
It’s the nation’s station!
Oh-why-oh!
It’s a happy station!
Oh-why-oh!
It’s your favourite station!
Oh-why-oh!
It’s Radio Oh-why-oh!
Aunty Anike was singing out of sync with the radio so it sounded like an echo was in the house with them. Jess had to shuffle past her eleven-year-old cousins, Ebun and Tope, and her Aunty Biola, who were sitting on small, three-legged wooden stools with newspaper spread out before them, grating wet, peeled knobs of cassava into bowls. She held her breath so she didn’t have to cope with the pungent, almost rotting smell.
They were making gari, and Jess, who had eaten gari with beans plenty of times, had not known that it was such a long and complicated process. Aunty Funke had explained it to her. The cassava had been left to soak the night before, so that the tough skins would be easier to peel, and when they had been peeled, they would be very finely grated and, once grated, sundried, and once sundried, fried in a sort of cauldron so that the little cassava shavings would crackle and puff up, and then they would be dried again so that they became hard and chewy. All that just to make it not taste like cassava! Jess thought it hardly worth the trouble.
Her father was sitting on a stool beside Aunty Biola, clumsily attempting to peel a cassava with a sharp flick-knife like the ones that the others were using. He wasn’t making a very good job of it, as he struggled to keep a grip on the slippery cassava with one hand and make the rapid peeling motions with the other. “Oi, I’m an accountant, not a . . . a . . . well, a cassava peeler, you know!” he protested, as Ebun, Tope and Biola giggled at his attempts. Aunty Biola, her long, glossy weave pulled away from her face with a large silk scarf, took the knife from him and showed him how to peel the cassava. Her smile as she did so made Jess think that this probably wasn’t the first time; probably not the second either. Or the third.
Her father smiled gratefully at Aunty Biola, then said “Right,” several times, rolling up his sleeves and pushing up his glasses with an air of determination. Then he looked around and saw Jess backed up against the wall in the corner, nearly faint with suppressed laughter.
“That’s it! I have to be a role model to my daughter! She can’t see me fail, and that’s why . . .” He let out a defeated puff of air, blowing his blondy-brown fringe upwards as he did so. “I give up.”
He was greeted by derisive laughter, and got up and wandered off in a pretend huff. Jess continued into the kitchen. Aunty Funke was washing dishes at the sink, up to her elbows in frothy white. She turned her head as Jess entered with the bowl full of porridge, and laughed.
“Ehhh-ehhhh! Madam is too good for oats!”
Jess felt herself redden even though she knew that Aunty Funke was joking.
“I don’t really like them,” she said, shyly proffering the bowl.
Aunty Funke dried her hands and took the bowl from her, put it on the table.
“So what do you want to eat instead? Shall I make you some buns?”
Jess shook her head.
“Don’t worry, Aunty. I’m not that hungry.”
She turned towards the door and the cassava smell, but was nudged aside by her cousin Bisola, who burst in looking flustered, her hand on Bose’s shoulder to stop her from wriggling away. Bose’s hair had been combed out of her thick cornrows, and stood out around her head like a dark, springy bush, glistening with hair food and health. Jess smiled at her, and Bose smiled back, before complaining that she wanted Tope to do her hair, not Bisola, because Bisola pulled too hard and nearly broke her head open.
Bisola, looking peeved, cut across her cousin’s protestations.
“Mama, I’m about to start braiding Bose’s hair for her and I need a candle to burn the ends! Where have you moved them now?”
Aunty Funke yelped with surprise, making Jess jump. “Ah-ah! What do you mean by that? Your aunty Biola just bought another box of candles yesterday! Did you look in the supply room, or are you wasting my time, you this girl?”
Bisola raised her hand
s in a gesture that was at once defensive and defiant.
“I checked, oh! They weren’t there! So you haven’t moved them?”
Aunty Funke turned back to the sink and began washing the dishes with a sort of controlled violence, slapping soapy water on them with both hands.
“What do you mean? Of course I haven’t . . . Those candles haven’t been moved at all, at all. You this girl! I just don’t know! You are so LAZY that you don’t want to help Bose to do her hair! Well, you still have to do the hair—you can just do plaiting for her until we find the candles, because they are in this house!”
Bisola retreated from the doorway, dragging Bose with her, muttering under her breath, shaking her cousin with a baleful glare when Bose made a final attempt to free herself at the staircase.
“I can’t believe it! You ask her to do just one thing and it is too much for her.” Her aunt railed after her, “Well, let me tell you something, fine young lady, if I should find those candles, you will be sorry for yourself, that is all I can say!”
Jess fled the kitchen and wandered back past the cassava graters, who were working in concentrated silence, and passed through the clinking curtain of beads at the parlour door. Should she go to the Boys’ Quarters and find out if someone was living there?
Should she?
Or was she going to anyway, whether she should or not?
“Hello?”
Jess paused in the middle of the corridor, peering about her. It was so dim in here, despite the windows pouring in sunlight. It was as if the dust that coated everything was muting even the rays of the sun. Everything was a still, uniform grey. Clearly, Aunty Funke was right: no one had bothered to come in here for years.
There was a rickety wooden table up against the wall that looked as if part of one of its legs had been eaten away by wood lice. It was an old-fashioned writing desk with an inkwell set in the corner. Its surface was covered with the film of dust that obscured everything else.
As she examined the tabletop a cockroach suddenly scuttled across it, and she jumped back.
After her pulse had stilled again, she turned and walked towards the end of the corridor, stepping carefully so that she didn’t trip over anything. She touched the bluish walls as she did so, to remind herself that she really was there. She could hear and feel her nails scratching against the walls as she passed her hands over them. When she reached the end of the corridor, she stopped, disappointed, expecting there to be a staircase as there was in her grandfather’s house. A staircase running straight through the house, leading ultimately to the balcony on the roof. There wasn’t one, just a blank wall.
The staircase must, then, be at the other end of the corridor. She walked back, passing the old table.
Then her eye caught on something and she backed up, all thoughts of staircases and balconies and upstairs rooms completely forgotten.
On the surface of the tabletop, someone had disturbed the dust. Scrawled in the centre in lopsided lettering were the words HEllO JEssY
She stared in silence for a few moments longer, and then turned and ran straight out of the door, running so hard that she couldn’t see properly and the rush of air going past her brought tears to her eyes.
She stopped when she had run all the way around the front of her grandfather’s house, heading towards where she heard bantering shouts—noise, normal happy noise—and stood, hunched over, desperately dragging in breath, in the expanse of concrete laid out before the gates. She looked up from the sweat dripping over her brow when she noticed that all the noise had stopped, and saw that Taiye and Akinola, her two older boy cousins, were looking at her with a mixture of concern and amusement. Akin stood in an attitude of boyish enquiry, his nose wrinkled up as he squinted against the sun, holding a basketball loosely in his two hands, and Taiye’s hands hung limply by his sides as if he had just dropped them from a raised position, marking Akin.
She wanted to tell them what had just happened to her, and that it meant something more scary than snake-scary. Snake-scary she could scream about and push away from her, but this! Someone was living in a place where no one lived, lighting things in the dark, had been watching her, had seen her, and knew her name. She couldn’t help but think that this was a very bad thing.
But she couldn’t tell them.
Because they were boys, because they were her cousins, because they belonged here and she didn’t?
She didn’t know.
“Sorry,” she managed to whisper, then turned and ran back along the side of the house.
She ran into her father, who was emerging with her grandfather from his study at the end of the corridor. He swept her up into a bear hug, lifting her off the ground as he anxiously examined her face. She twisted her face away, burying her head into his T-shirt.
“Daddy, let’s go home now!”
“Ah-ah!”
She heard the now familiar accent of alarm in her grandfather’s voice, felt the air shift as he drew closer to her. She clung harder to her father.
“Is somebody doing something to my child that I can’t know about? What is happening? Why can’t you be happy in my house? Tell me and I will make it right, now!”
To that there was, could be, no reply. She gave a long, shuddering sob, almost a howl, and didn’t lift her head.
“Jess,” her father said quietly. “Jess, little girl!”
She sniffled, shifted her head and wriggled a little so that her wet cheek was up against his dry one. He smelt of aftershave.
HEllo JEssY.
Jessy?
The second time. This was the second time that someone had called her something that she had never been called by anyone before. First Wuraola, now Jessy. She’d always been Jess or Jessamy, never a halfway thing like Jessy.
Who was there, hiding in the Boys’ Quarters, who called her halfway Jessamy?
She sighed, a faint, snuffling sound, the sound she always made when calming down, drifting off into the reverie that inevitably followed her panics. Her father was still there, and he still held her. She wondered if he wanted to ask her what was the matter. He probably didn’t; he probably wanted her to tell him.
Be my daughter, Jessamy. Tell me.
He carried her into the parlour, closely followed by her grandfather, who was making distressed clucking sounds with his tongue. He set her down on the sofa then sat beside her, allowing her to crawl onto his lap and curl up against him. She closed her eyes for a second to draw more breath, still trying to think about the matter in hand without actually, really thinking about it.
She gave up.
In the darkness behind her eyelids, she could still see those words drawn by the unknown finger, drawn when her back had been turned, done noiselessly and quickly. Someone had been there, in the corridor, looking at her, knowing her name, writing her name. Then they had gone.
SIX
Jess was lying on the concrete floor at the bottom of the staircase that ran through the centre house, but she didn’t look up at the sky because she was concentrating on the patches of warmth that were playing along her face. She could feel her eyelashes trembling slightly. She felt the fuzzy light disappear as if someone had stepped in the way, felt a hand brush against her cheek and then withdraw. She mumbled an incoherent protest and prised her eyes open.
A girl was standing silently above her, looking down at her with narrow, dark eyes, so dark that, to Jess, lying on the ground, they seemed pupil-less. There was something about her that was out of proportion. Was she too tall and yet too . . . small at the same time? Was her neck too long? Her fingers?
Jess hauled herself up, her hands dragging across the rough concrete, and shielded her eyes, squinting at the girl.
The girl had stepped back as if alarmed, although her face was calm. Her head was tipped to one side and she stood, thin legs apart, like a bird poised for flight; observing a dangerous animal that was about to lash out.
With the shade of her hand over her sun-dazed eyes, Jess realised
that this was just an ordinary girl around her own age. She gave a huge, gusty sigh, feeling her shoulders moving back with the force of it.
“Hello, Jessy,” said the girl. Her voice was heavily accented.
Jess started, then scrambled to her feet.
“Y-you?” she managed to say.
The girl repeated, “Hello, Jessy.”
As if it was all that she knew how to say.
Jess looked at the girl carefully. She was slight, and her bushy hair was tied into two big, round, springy puffs, one behind each ear, with what looked like trailing, dirty white string. She was barefoot, and her toes and feet were whitened with gravel scratches and sand, and, Jess was sure, dust. Her dress was slightly too big for her and looked uncomfortable, the button-up collar tight around her neck but the brown-and-white, checked cloth hanging off her narrow shoulders and ballooning out around her until it trailed off just below her knees. The skin on her knees and elbows was ashen and greyish in patches.
The girl stared at her and did not smile.
Neither did Jess, but she felt a smile coming as her relief grew. So this was the person who knew her name, who had written it on the table, then sped shyly away on her small, light feet when she had seen her coming. The girl had probably heard Jess’s parents calling to her while she had been exploring the compound on her own. She smiled, finally, as the last piece of understanding fell into place. She took a few steps closer to the girl, to make herself better heard.
“Do you live in the Boys’ Quarters?”
The girl hesitated, as if listening for something, then said, very quickly, in an exact match of Jess’s voice, “D’you live in the Boys’ Quarters?”
She waited, eyeing Jess apprehensively, her mouth half open, breathing through her nostrils as if she had just made a great exertion. Jess laughed aloud with surprise, giggling into her hand as she took this in.
The girl continued to contemplate her seriously, standing still with her hands by her sides, although as Jess made the involuntary movement that accompanied her laughter, she saw the girl’s hand move slightly, as if she, too, wanted to put a hand to her mouth.
The Icarus Girl Page 4
