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.
“D’you speak English?” Jess asked, as the thought suddenly occurred to her.
“D’you speak English?” the girl said, perfectly naturally, as if she was the one who had thought to say it first.
The feeling clung to Jess that
she
was being asked the questions, and that there was perhaps something more to them, that she was actually being asked something else entirely. Yet the girl’s face betrayed no flicker of understanding. Jess began to feel bewildered.
She swayed a little on her feet, tired from the sun, and sat down on the bottom step, looking thoughtfully at the girl. Clearly she had to ask something that would make her give an answer instead of another question.
“Where Do you live?” she asked, on impulse.
“Where Do you live?” It was said almost blithely, with a not-quite grin. A veritable Jessamy-echo.
Jess laughingly threw her hands up towards the sky. “What’s your name?”
Again, that listening pause, as if someone was saying something to her, someone speaking on a frequency just higher (or lower?) than Jess could hear, and Jess wondered if the girl had some kind of hearing difficulty. There had been a girl in her class who was partially deaf and had that same concentration and focus when listening to someone speak.
Then the girl spoke, almost without moving her mouth, as if reluctantly: “My name is Titiola.”
She shifted from foot to foot, then finally shone a smile as beautiful and fleeting as it was sudden. If Jess hadn’t kept her eyes fixed on her she would certainly have missed it, because that glow wasn’t waiting for anybody and had vanished in a millisecond, leaving the sober, solemn expression behind. Jess felt as if she was finally getting somewhere. She couldn’t help but smile in return as a sort of offering in homage to that now-absent radiance of the girl’s.
“Titi . . . sorry, I don’t want to say it; I’ll say it wrong, and I know your name means something. Um. What’s your surname?”
Silence.
Jess spoke awkwardly now, feeling as if she wasn’t being understood. “I mean . . . you know! My surname’s Harrison. And yours?”
Silence.
Except that this time the girl spread her hands in a strange gesture, her palms turned upwards, her hands stretched out flat. She didn’t look at Jessamy, but at her hands. Jess laughed because she didn’t know what else to do.
“Um. OK. I don’t know what to call you. Titiola?”
She pronounced it
Tee-tee-yo-la
, wincing as she said it, knowing that it sounded all wrong in her mouth, jarring.
The girl’s head snapped up, her eyes widening.
“Titiola,” she said sharply.
Jess could see that this wasn’t going very well. The girl didn’t seem to like her, and for some reason it was important to have her liking.
“How about,” she said, almost desperately, one hand rubbing against her leg, seeking out the drying mosquito bite, “I call you Tilly?”
The girl withdrew her palms and folded her thin arms, seemed to consider.
“Well, Titi doesn’t sound that much like Tilly. Tilly has all L’s and not enough T’s . . .”
The girl watched her, the corners of her eyes wrinkled up as if she was about to smile again.
“TillyTilly? Can I call you that? TillyTilly, I mean? It has two T’s . . . and I don’t want to get your real name wrong, and anyway, you call me Jessy when I’m actually Jessamy or just Jess, so Jessy isn’t really my real name either . . .”
She trailed off as she realised that the girl was laughing. She didn’t laugh like the other kids in Jessamy’s class; her laugh was a dry, raspy chuckle that sounded like wheezing. Jess found that she liked it.
Jess laughed too, glad that the two of them were there, one standing, one sitting, in the sunshine, glad that she had been so eager to be friends with somebody for once. It was a peering through good and pretty coloured glass, this gladness, this feeling that someone had been around the compound, knowing who she was, and wanting to talk to her. She had never been sought out this way before. It was funny and pleasing, like a bubbling fizz growing in her stomach.
The girl paused in her laughter, and then looked over her shoulder. Curious, Jess looked too, but couldn’t see anything except the Boys’ Quarters, which stood tall and grey and empty. Beyond that, she supposed, was only the car park and the back road that led to the rest of the houses in Bodija.
“I need to go,” the girl said, saying “go” on a winding-down breath, as if she were about to say something else, say what she had to go and do, but she didn’t.
Jess leapt up from the staircase and was surprised to see the girl shrink as if expecting a blow. She began to back away, moving faster with each step.
“Wait! Um. Wouldyouliketobefriends?” Jess asked, anxiously.
The girl stopped stock-still for a few moments, then spoke softly and almost as quickly as Jessamy had.
“Yes.”
Another swift, illuminating smile, then she added hastily, “Watch for a light tonight.”
She turned and hurtled away from where Jess stood, moving past the Boys’ Quarters and around the back of the car park in what felt to Jess, who could hardly follow her figure for the sheets of sunlight wobbling down, like seconds.
Jess thoughtfully climbed the steps up to the middle floor. The air smelt like a mixture of toast and baking bread. Aunty Funke was supervising Tope, and Akin was grunting as he poured cassava from one huge pot into another; they were at the final stage of the
gari
making in the kitchen, and steam billowed from the open kitchen door. Her mother had gone shopping with a carload of old friends. She had tried to persuade Jessamy to come along, but Jess, who had been to the amusement park with her mother, father and these same friends the day before, demurred. It had been almost, but not quite, as bad as the zoo.
In the parlour, she could hear Aunty Biola attempting to teach her father Yoruba, collapsing into helpless giggles whenever he mispronounced his vowels, giving them the flat English sound instead of lifting them upwards with the slight outward puff of breath that was required. Jess couldn’t speak Yoruba to save her life, but she somehow had an ear for it, and could hear when it was spoken properly, even catch a little meaning in it. She crept closer to the beads that formed the door curtain and peeped through them.
“
Orukọ mi ni
. . .” her father began, then stopped, confused when Aunty Biola fell about laughing again. He had said
orukọ
, “my name,” through his nose, as if it was a weird kind of sneezing sound.
“
Orukọ
,” she stressed gently as soon as she had recovered.
Her father shrugged, grinning.
“That’s what I said!”
Aunty Biola slapped her hands together in the typical Nigerian gesture for helplessness, exclaiming, “What am I going to do with this man?!” Then she fell back onto the the sofa as another fit of laughter overtook her.
Jess watched her father fan the two of them with a copy of
Tell
magazine, then she continued down the corridor. She paused outside the closed door at the end, her grandfather’s study. Ebun had told her, in the quiet of the night, lying in their beds, when the two of them had begun to speak as they did when they couldn’t see each other properly, that the door was always kept shut and locked—ever since the time that Bose, with her hands coated with spicy
adun
, had nearly destroyed the wine-coloured leather bindings of his specially commissioned copies of
Things
Fall Apart
and
A Dance of the Forests
.
She hovered outside the door, longing to enter, just to glimpse just once, the rows of shelves Ebun had described to her, and the desk with the official-looking seal on it and to see her grandfather. Since the day she had gone into the entrance of the Boys’ Quarters, he was always wanting to know if she was happy, always wanting to make her happy, not in the anxious way of her English grandparents, who kindly, unintentionally made her feel abnormal, like a freak, but in a powerful, questing way that seemed to put her melancholy under a microscope and make her fears appear groundless. And so she quietly seated herself cross-legged on the clean, shiny squares of the floor outside the study, her back against the wall.