Peter was apparently a successful businessman in London and was very generous to the villagers when he came home, paying for a hospital bill here, new glasses there, some child’s school fees over there, and so forth. Her father really liked him and had often told her about Peter and his trips when she got back from boarding school on breaks.
“He always takes one young relative back to London as well,” he used to explain. “Imagine how lucky those children are!”
The dog sniffed at the sphinx. At first, Abigail thought it was unaccompanied. But following closely, at the end of a long red leash, was an old woman. Abigail smiled as the dog lifted its leg and peed on the sphinx. The old woman waited patiently while the dog, a fluffy pink poodle, took care of business. All the while she stared at Abigail, though she said nothing. When the poodle was done, they shuffled past, the old crone and the dog, each leading and following alternately.
Overhead, a plane traced light across the dark. Abigail read in
Reader’s Digest
that all plane landings were controlled crashes. Like the way we live our lives, she thought. Bumble through doing the best we can and hoping that some benevolence keeps us from crashing. Lighting another cigarette, she wished the plane bringing her and Peter to London that day had crashed.
She felt a raindrop on her skin and looked up into the night. She couldn’t see any rain clouds and there had been no mention of rain on the weather report. She would have remembered. She always checked the weather before she went out. Smiling to herself, she realized how stupid it was to check the weather before coming here. Another raindrop fell, triggering old memories.
There was a time, it seemed to her, that she lived purely for the pleasure of rain. The way it would threaten the world gently, dropping dark clouds over the brightness of an afternoon, wind whipping trees in dark play. Then the smell; carried from afar, the lushness of wet, moisture-heavy earth, heralding the first cold stabs of water that seemed to just be practicing for the torrent that was about to come. And she, sitting on the dry safety of the veranda, wrapped in a sweater, watching the world weep as the Beatles in the background, tinny and small in the soundscape, asked,
Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play?
Glancing at the sky worriedly, she wondered if it was really going to rain. So far there had been nothing more than the first few drops. Well, can’t worry about that now, she thought, as she lit another cigarette and blew the smoke into the empty eye socket of the sphinx.
Peter was sitting in her father’s favorite chair. An old leather thirties armchair that was comfortable and smelled of the dreams of everyone who had sat in it. She wasn’t sure why, but Abigail felt a surge of anger at this when she walked in from school. Her father smiled at her from the sofa and she felt Peter’s eyes on her body when she passed by in the short skirt of her uniform. She went upstairs and changed into a pair of sweats. Coming back downstairs, she re-entered the sitting room. A quick glance revealed the men had already helped themselves to beer.
“Are you hungry, Dad?” she asked, pointedly ignoring Peter.
“Abigail, where are your manners? Offer our guest food first,” her father replied.
“It’s okay,” Peter said smiling. “I’m sure she didn’t mean anything by it. But thank you for your offer, I am kind of hungry.”
Shooting him a look, she went into the kitchen and soon the sound of pots banging carried through to them. In no time at all, she had made a big plate of eba and a steaming bowl of egusi soup.
“Lunch is ready,” she called as she set the kitchen table. Bringing their drinks in with them, the two men sat down and looked surprised when she joined them. They had expected her to eat later, or simply take her food to her room, while they discussed important things.
“You’re joining us?” her father asked. But it wasn’t a question. More a reprimand.
“Yes,” she replied.
“That’s just fine, because I am here to talk about you,” Peter said. “Mary has asked that I bring Abigail back on this trip to come and live with us in London. She can finish school there.”
“But my father needs me,” she said. “Besides, won’t it get crowded with the other relatives you’ve taken to live with you already?”
Mary needed her, Peter explained. All the other kids he had taken back had fallen in with bad crowds and run away. Abigail’s father wanted her to go back with Peter.
“Your life will be better,” he said, voice quiet. “London will give you a higher standard of education and living.”
She felt his sacrifice knowing that he was fighting his heart the urge to beg her to stay. But there was also the faintest shadow in his eyes, one that revealed rather than occluded. She shivered and crossed herself, arms and legs locked.
“Dreadful about Chechnya,” Abigail repeated over and over as she watched
Bridget Jones’s Diary
for the tenth time.
“Dreadful about Chechnya,” Abigail said to the sphinx, smiling at the memory. She had been trying to perfect her English accent. She realized pretty quickly, from the way she was treated at the shops and in the doctor’s office, that the English could forgive you anything except a foreign accent. The flat was silent other than the contortions of her voice.
She heard the key in the lock and paused the film as Mary came in. Abigail got up to help with the grocery bags. Chatting away in the kitchen as they put away the food, Abigail wondered absently if this was how it would have been if her mother lived. There was comfort in this simple task. The ordering of life in cupboards and refrigerator shelves.
Lingering over a cup of tea made in that special way (boiled twice in evaporated milk and ginger), she watched Mary, who watched the rain outside. The plastic climbing frame and slide set mourned in a corner of the garden next to the pink and purple Wendy house. Bought for a child who had died. Suddenly. Mysteriously.
“Do you miss her?” Abigail asked.
“All the time,” Mary said. Voice. Small. Distant.
“Me too,” Abigail said.
Returning to the present, Abigail lit another cigarette against the cold.
“Yeah, me too,” she said to the night.
There was a quality of silence. An awe in the face of mountains that had kept their secrets for a millennia. This drew Abigail to maps. Not all maps. Old ones. Printed on paper that was more parchment. Big ones. That unrolled with all the crackling promise of a flying carpet warming up. And lines. Rivers meandering lazily in blues and sometimes silver. Hills rising in red circles, uneven, thick at their bases and thinning toward the top; like balding men. The green ticks of forests and jungles. The brown sprawls of deserts. And the black lines of science, carving things into sections—longitude, latitude—pretending that here, at least, on the flat spread of the map, it was possible to have any kind of dominion over a landscape. Over things.
And sometimes the alchemy of her stare transmuted the parchment into her mother’s skin. The landmarks taking on deeper significance. The Himalayas marking the slope of Abigail’s forehead, spreading into the Gobi desert. The hook of Africa became her nose. Australia her bottom lip. And the islands between India and Tasmania became the fragments of teeth bared in a smile. In true cubist form, the Americas were her eyes. Everything else became the imagined contours of her inner life.
This was how Abigail spent many rainy afternoons, the cartographer of dreams. Of ghosts.
And this was the shape of her desire:
To be a white bird beating its wings against night. Beating until that was all. To be. Yet not the bird. Or night. Or the air. Or the beating.
To be a white bird.
She had felt caught in the sheath of men’s plans. From the time her father and Peter had decided that she needed to come to London. There had been the trip to Lagos in the long lean body of a bus. Then the flight in the cigar belly of the plane, and now, hurtling through the bowels of London in the subway, headed for Peter and Mary’s.
She studied the curious map of the London Underground system with interest. It wasn’t much good as a map printed the way it was on thick cardboard tacked to the wall opposite. It was nestled between a poem and an advertisement for Cadbury Creme Eggs. She promised herself she would try that as soon as possible. Turning her attention to the poem, she smiled.
To what can our life on earth be likened?/ To a flockof geese,/ alighting on the snow./ Sometimes leaving the trace oftheir passage?/ Su Shi.
I should burn that onto my arm, she thought, mentally searching to see if she had any room left.
These were good omens. The two main things she loved, here, at the moment of her arrival.
The map was a mass of lines—reds, blues, yellows, greens, blacks, browns, and even a deep purple. Laid out the way it was, it made her think London spread out in a neatly laid out geometric square. She would find out later that it was an old and untidy sprawl of rivers and canals, beautiful parks, old cobbled streets that still held the echo of horse drawn carriages, tired crumbling walls built by Caesar, and modern plazas of glass and chrome. There was the open pleasure of Covent Garden with its flower shops, vegetable stalls, colorful barrow boy calls, the new market with stall after stall selling trinkets that nobody needed to people who should know better. There were street musicians everywhere filling the hallowed halls of the Underground with their melancholic worship. But that would come later. With Derek. That and his tongue that filled her with a desire so deep it threatened to rip her apart.
For now there was just the clacky-clack of the tracks, the warm rush of air as they hurtled down one of the city’s many arteries, and the swaying that was a lulling to sleep. And the people around, careful to avoid their luggage sitting in the center of the carriage. Eyes never meeting. Reading. Bopping heads to music filtered through headphones. Nodding off to sleep. Packed tightly as they were, she still noticed the small island around everyone. And so many white people. Shades of white. She had never thought of it that way. But it was true. White as translucent as snow, making visible the veins running like green rivers just underneath the skin. Others that were denser, pinker, blood vessels spreading like tentacles of light. Others that seemed unsure whether to be a dirty ivory or a rich cream. And brown ones, tanned deep like the happy flow of a tropical river down a mountainside. She wondered what her mother had made of all these shades.
She studied Peter as he slept. In this moment of vulnerability, nostrils flared in a snore, drooling slightly, he looked like a child. She had been suspicious of him from the beginning. Not just because of what he had done to her when she was twelve, but because there was something about him that didn’t ring true. It was as if he hadn’t learned to occupy his body properly. Or perhaps it was his life that he hadn’t stepped into, occupying instead another one. One that was clearly uncomfortable. It made her uncomfortable that she couldn’t place it. Bad people didn’t bother her. Like good people they were a known quantity. It wasn’t even the loose possibility of these that bothered her. It was the struggle against either side. That was where the danger lay. What was it Abigail used to tell her? A house divided, that’s the dangerous place. She smiled suddenly. Abigail couldn’t have told her anything. Still, she didn’t buy Peter’s story about the other kids he took back having run off with bad company. He had done something to them, she didn’t know what, but she was going to watch him closely, make sure it didn’t happen to her. That was what Abigail would have done. She would have studied Peter’s face too in this moment of openness so as not to be taken in by it.
She turned her attention back to the Underground map, mouthing the words of the stops as if they were a mantra that would reveal all to her. She let the vowels and consonants sink to the bottom of her mouth like the pendulous seed of a mango still holding the sweetness of flesh. She then dropped it down one more level and swished the words around the back of her throat as though gargling. Walthamstow. Mornington Crescent. Angel. Highbury &Islington. Finsbury Park. Tottenham Court Road. Oxford Circus. And on. When the train pulled into the lit-up tiled station bearing the legend
Seven Sisters
, Peter woke on cue and gathered the luggage. He stepped off without bothering to check if she was with him. Abigail hesitated at the gap between the door and the platform. In the sliver of darkness she saw a rat moving. It was oddly comforting.
“Come on,” Peter said.
“
Seven Sisters. Mind the gap
,” the station announcement said. “
Mind the gap.”
Landscape, in the sense of the sublime, might overwhelm the self.
Of course Abigail didn’t think that. Not in those words. As she smoked and squinted into the misty age of the river, the Thames, she thought: Thank God for maps. For a way to hold it all. She wondered how old it was.
Donkey’s ears.
She laughed. Mr. Ekwensi, her fifth grade teacher, always said that.
Donkey’s ears.
Old as. Why donkey years anyway? She lit another cigarette.
So much of love is memory, she thought, her mind tracing the outline of Derek. She had loved him so completely and he her. But what are the limits of desire? The edges beyond which love must not cross? Those were questions she had heard others discuss in these last few days. Discuss as if she was a mere ghost in their presence. Called this thing between Derek and her wrong. How could it be?