Jess closed her eyes and thought about TillyTilly, glad that she hadn’t gone shopping with her mother. Should she ask Ebun about her? But she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to ask anyone, she wanted to keep TillyTilly. TillyTilly was nothing like Dulcie or anyone in Jess’s class; TillyTilly was barefoot and strange, and wanted to be friends.
Jess could hear Aunty Funke’s laughter ringing down the corridor above the sound of popping, puffing cassava pieces in the black iron cauldron that sat on a big gas ring in the kitchen. Her father was in the kitchen, teasing Aunty Funke. No, Aunty Biola was there too; both of them were laughing at something her father had said in an excited tone of voice.
Aunty Funke called her.
Jess did not reply, didn’t even move. She only stirred and opened her eyes when she realised that her grandfather was emerging from the study. She scrambled up and threw her arms around his waist as he emerged, his slippers shuffling out of the carpeted room and onto the linoleum, where she had been sitting. He laughed with surprise and, dropping the key into his pocket, passed his hand over her hair, which was now neatly cornrowed, thanks to the efforts of Bisola.
“So you were waiting for Baba Gbenga! Will you drink with me, madam?”
She nodded furiously, and he laughed again, beginning to move towards the kitchen although she didn’t release him. Her mother or father would have detached her, her father gently, her mother with an exclamation of mild annoyance, but her grandfather struggled good-naturedly into the kitchen and ordered Aunty Biola to bring him a Powermalt and a Fanta from the cold crate.
“My granddaughter and I are going to drink our health,” he said.
That night, something woke Jessamy. She wasn’t sure whether it was a sound or a smell or an abrupt sight in one of her various dreams that made her suddenly open her eyes and stare around. For the first time since arriving in Nigeria, she felt a gaping disorientation; for a split second she couldn’t even remember where she was, and everything was dim and out of focus.
Then clear images came tumbling back into her vision and she looked to where Ebun lay, breathing shallowly.
Then she remembered.
Tilly Tilly.
Was she too late?
She glanced at the window—it was still dark. She sat up as quietly as she could in the bed, then slipped out of the room. As she ran to the staircase leading to the balcony to watch for the light in the window of the deserted house, she heard a sound in the shadow behind her.
Not a voice.
She looked back down the corridor, saw nothing but doors and squares of floor stretching out before her.
There it was again.
A creaking noise.
Like . . . a door.
The noise stopped just as suddenly as it had started, and Jess walked down the corridor, hurrying slightly now, checking each room. She could hear the creaking sound in her head now; it didn’t need to be real.
The parlour door—shut.
Her mum’s and dad’s door—shut.
The storeroom door—shut.
Her grandfather’s door—shut.
The study door—partially open, a little space between door and doorpost exposing only more darkness.
What?
Breathless, she gave it a push, just a little push, with the tip of her finger, and slowly, impossibly, the door opened. She felt a thickness in the back of her head somewhere. Her tongue? Her
brain
? How could this door be open?
A face appeared around the edge, and Jess smiled with a deep, wondering joy.
It was TillyTilly, who had broken into her grandfather’s study.
“Come in,” whispered TillyTilly. Jess could hardly hear her over the other sounds of the night. She saw Tilly’s eyes shining.
“It’s dark in there, TillyTilly,” Jess whispered back, still unable to stop herself from smiling. They both knew they couldn’t put a light on in there. In case someone saw, and wondered.
“Don’t worry,” Tilly whispered, and held out her hand. Jess took it, feeling Tilly’s cool fingers link with her own, and then Tilly drew her into the darkness, and she wasn’t at all afraid because someone was holding her hand.
SEVEN
“Wait a minute.”
TillyTilly let go of Jess’s hand and Jess heard a thin, scratching sound, then saw a flare of light go up. A little flame danced atop a candle in a saucer in Tilly’s hand.
Jess gasped quietly.
“You’re the candle thief!”
The two of them smiled conspiratorially at each other in the candlelight, Jess noticing how the flame held up to Tilly’s lean face highlighted the triangles of shadow, the hollows of her cheekbones. Her eyes seemed even darker.
Tilly smiled.
“Let’s look around,” she said.
She took Jess’s hand and guided her slowly past each shelf. She passed the candle over the rows of leather-bound and hardback books, bringing the flame so close to some that Jess’s breath caught in her throat with amazement at her daring.
“You might set them on fire,” she warned, and Tilly looked at her seriously, the ends of the string in her hair bobbing as she nodded.
“I know!”
Jess carefully took some books down from the shelf, thick tomes of poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that sounded exciting, especially in the dark, with bookshelves and a window lit with faint moonlight.
“ ‘
And all should cry, Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with
holy dread, / For he on honeydew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of
Paradise,
’ ” she whispered to Tilly, who obligingly held the candle so that words were discernible but no wax would drip onto it.
TillyTilly nodded sagely.
“It’s a good poem,” she said, with a knowledgeable air. “Ancestral voices, and all that.”
She actually said
and all that
, with the unconcerned tone of an English person. Jess’s expression grew more incredulous when she remembered the first thing she had said, in that pure Nigerian accent:
Hello Jessy
. The girl was a mystery.
TillyTilly smiled almost wickedly, as if she knew what Jess was thinking, but persisted in her line of discussion.
“D’you like it? The poem, I mean? It’s called ‘Kubla Khan.’ ”
Jess nodded.
“I like it a lot,” she said awkwardly. Tilly had knelt on the floor and begun examining some books at ground level. Jess couldn’t remember the last time she’d told anyone what she thought about a poem, or a book, or anything much really. “It makes me think of . . . you know, when something’s so different and weird that when it touches other people it makes them different and weird too . . . It’s like what my mum told me about Sir Galahad, and how he was the perfect knight, but when he saw into the Holy Grail, he couldn’t do anything else but die, really, because of, well, holy dread.”
She stood still, upright, her cheeks flushed, deliberately not looking down at Tilly but concentrating on a book in front of her until the gold lettering of the title had blurred. She didn’t want Tilly to laugh or make fun or anything; she didn’t think she could bear it.
She heard Tilly turn a few pages, then say excitedly, “I know exactly what you mean. Look, it’s like here, in Isaiah, where he’s made all clean when one of the angels touches his lips with the hot coal.”
She had an enormous, expensive-looking edition of the Bible in her arms and was jabbing at a section with her finger. Jess sat down cross-legged on the floor beside Tilly, and they spent a few minutes going through other books that Tilly knew, looking for examples of “holy dread.”
“TillyTilly,” said Jess, after a while.
“Mmmmmm.”
“How come you’ve read all these books and I haven’t?”
Then Tilly said something odd, like: “
I haven’t read them, I just
know what’s in them
.”
Jess looked at her, wondering whether or not to believe her. Then, just to be on the safe side, in case she’d heard wrong, she said, “What?”
TillyTilly didn’t look up from her book, but smiled.
“I said I’ve had a lot of time to get to know what’s in them. Also, I’m much cleverer than you.”
“Oh.”
Jess thought of something else.
“So you sneak in here a lot? How do you do it?”
Tilly shrugged.
“The window.”
“The
window
? But my grandfather keeps the key in his pocket and ...”
Tilly put a dismissive hand up, turned a page, apparently absorbed.
Jess tried again.
“Unless there’s another key . . . ?”
A slight nod, but Tilly refused to add anything further. Instead she jumped up and ran over to Jess’s grandfather’s swivel chair, springing on to it with an expression of glee.
Jess heard it skid backwards on its wheels and put out her hands in a cautionary gesture.
“Shhhhh!”
TillyTilly laughed quietly.
“Push me around the room on this and then I’ll push you,” she offered, whirling around in the chair, her voice sounding slightly garbled as she spun.
“OK!” Jess eagerly scrambled up, then bent and gathered the books that had been left scattered on the floor a little distance away from the still-burning candle. She slid them back into place, trying to remember which gaps in the bookcase she and Tilly had taken them from. She suddenly grew apprehensive and began to think of explanations should her grandfather awake, and draw his key out from amongst his nightclothes, perhaps, and put the key in the lock . . .
Even as she thought about this, she heard the smooth, metallic sound of key being turned in lock, and an expression of utter panic crossed her face.
Then she heard Tilly laugh. She spun around to find Tilly leaning from the chair so that one of her hands was splayed out against the surface of the floor; she was in a sort of half handstand. As Jess stared at her, she slowly rotated the chair so that it made the soft clicking sound that she had heard before.
“Oh my God!” Jess stumbled backwards, her fingers allowing her nightie to flow back out around her, her hand moving to press her chest in an attempt to help along the stilling of her heart. “Don’t do that ever again!”
Tilly rose from her half handstand so that she sat upright in the chair again.
“Well, I don’t think we’ll be back in here . . . It’s sort of boring, don’t you think? All that anticipation!”
Somehow, Jess realised, Tilly had known how much she had wanted to enter this room.
When Jess woke for the second time, she turned over and lay on her back, basking in the morning sunlight that was pouring into the room. She only became aware after a few seconds that she was smiling from ear to ear.
She looked to her side, noting that Ebun had already left her bed, her sheets rumpled and tossed. She could hear bustling activity on the kitchen floor and smell cooking; it smelt like her Aunty Funke’s speciality of smoked fish, palm oil and spinach stew. Then she remembered that it was Sunday, and that it was her grandfather’s turn to host his Baptist prayer group. Her grandfather was a proud member of the Oritamefa Baptist Church.
She stretched her arms out to either side of her, kicking the covers off her body and pedalling her legs in the air while she thought about getting up. For the past two Sundays, her grandfather had dressed up in white-and-gold
agbada
, traditional costume, with a white embroidered cube-shaped hat on his head and the tail of his costume draped over his right arm, his left hand clutching a slim wooden cane which was purely an accessory, since he walked perfectly well without aid. Aunty Funke would hand Driver the Bible that Jessamy’s grandfather needed for his part of the discussion and prayer, and her grandfather would climb into the backseat of the car, careful of his clothes. Then her mother, or Aunty Funke, or Aunty Biola, would close the door for him, and the car would pull out around the back of the house and through the gates hastily pulled open just in time by Uncle Kunle and Gateman. Gbenga Oyegbebi’s head would always be held high so that he looked glittering and regal through the shiny windows of the car.
When he was gone, the rush to get ready for church ensued. Her grandmother had been an Anglican and had managed to convert all of her children to Anglican practices, so they were used to seeing their father off first so as not to incur his wrath at their “not praying together as a family.” Jess, her mother and her father were the only ones who weren’t involved in the scramble to prepare for the eleven o’clock service, since her mother had quietly “given up on organised religion” a few years after her arrival in England, a fact that she refused to discuss with Jessamy’s grandfather. She wouldn’t allow Jess to be taken to the service either, insisting that she was a gloomy enough child already without the Nigerian warnings of hellfire making things worse. Jessamy’s father had obligingly attended the Baptist service with her grandfather the first Sunday and had come back looking wilted, saying simply that the five-hour prayer session had been “tiring.”
But this week, her grandfather had left for the service early and was going to return with his friends for scriptural discussion, and these friends, Aunty Funke had warned, would need to eat and drink. Ebun had complained in a matter-of-fact whisper the night before, when they had been drifting off to sleep, that prayer meetings at the house always meant that she and Tope had to get up earlier to go and fetch water for their grandfather to wash with and for Aunty Funke to cook with.
Jess hesitated to get up because she wasn’t sure if getting up meant committing herself to meeting these prayer people.
When she heard the resounding
hisssssssssssss
of puff-puff batter being dropped into Aunty Funke’s big, dented red frying pan, she nearly fell out of bed and onto the floor in her haste to get up, then noticed something had fallen from the bed with her.
She smiled silently and with puzzlement as she picked up the battered copy of
Little Women
, turning it over in her hands. Could it have come from her grandfather’s study? She didn’t recall having seen any children’s books there, but then again, neither did she recall any children’s books at all in the house, other than the ones in the box that she’d taken from her suitcase and slipped under her bed.