Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © Michael Donkor 2018

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Michael Donkor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

‘Michicko Dead’ from The Great Fires: Poems, 1982–1992 by Jack Gilbert, copyright © 1994 by Jack Gilbert. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008280345

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008280369

Version: 2019-04-12

Dedication

For Patrick Netherton and Grace Opoku

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Twi terms, phrases and expressions

December 2002

SPRING

1

2

3

SUMMER

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

AUTUMN

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

WINTER

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Twi terms, phrases and expressions

Aane – Yes

Aba! – Exclamation of annoyance, disdain or disbelief

Aboa! – You beast!

Abrokyrie – Overseas

Abrokyriefoɔ – Foreigners

Abusuafoɔ – Extended family

Adɛn? – Why?

Adjei! – Exclamation of surprise or shock

Agoo? – May I come in?

Akwaaba – Welcome

Akwada bone! – Naughty child!

Amee – Please enter

Ampa – It’s true

Ewurade – God

Ɛfɛ paaa – Very nice

Fri hɔ! – Go away!

Gyae – Stop

Gye nyame – Traditional symbol meaning ‘only God’

Hwɛ – Look

Hwɛ w’anim! – Look at your face!

Kwadwo besia – An ‘effeminate’ man

Maame – Miss/Mistress

Me ba – I am coming

Me boa? – I lie?

Me da ase – I thank you

Me nua – My sibling

Me pa wo kyew/me sroe – Please (I beg you)

Me yare – I am sick

Nananom – Elders

Oburoni – White person

Oburoni wawu – Second-hand clothes (‘the white man is dead’)

Paaa – Sign of emphasis

Sa? – Really?

Wa bo dam! – You are mad!

Wa te? – Do you hear?

Wa ye adeɛ – Well done

Wo se sɛn? – What did you say?

Wo wein? – Where are you?

Wo ye … – You are …

Won sere? – You won’t laugh?

Yere – Wife

December 2002

The coffin was like a neat slice of wedding cake. Looping curls of silver and pink, fussy like best handwriting, wound around the box. It waited by the gashed earth that the men would rest it in. The mourners admired, clucking. Belinda made herself look at it. Her phone vibrated in her handbag but she let it rumble on. She brought her ankles together, fixed her head-tie and straightened her dress so that it was less bunched around her breasts. She passed her hand over her puffy face and then saw that eyeliner had rubbed onto her palm in streaks.

Belinda’s inspection of her messy hands was interrupted by the shouting of the young pallbearers on the opposite side of the grave. They stripped off and swirled the cloths that had been draped over their torsos moments before, then called for hammers. Three little boys, perhaps six or seven years old, flitted back with tools heavier than their tiny limbs. The children hurried off with handfuls of sweet chin chins, nearly falling into the hole not meant for them and only laughing light squeals at how narrowly they had avoided an accident. Belinda wondered if she had ever laughed like that when she was their age.

The men started to thud away the casket’s handles, eager for the shiniest decorations, the ones that would fetch the highest prices in the market. She knew it was what always happened at funerals, and that the bashing and breaking was no worse than anything else she had seen in the last few hours – but as the men’s blows against the handles kept on coming, the sound became a hard hiccupping against Belinda’s skull. Her chin jutted forward like it was being pulled and her whole body tightened. Belinda tapped the heel of her court shoe into the red earth, matching her galloping blood. Soon, wrenched free of its metal, the coffin’s surfaces were all marked with deep black gouges.

Someone tried to move Belinda with a shove. She remained where she stood. The pallbearers strutted and touched their muscles. Some yelped for the crowd to cheer. There were whines from older mourners about sharing, relatives and fairness.

‘Sister!’ an excitable man said, pushing a brassy knob towards Belinda. She let it fall from his grasp and roll at her feet. It was not enough.

SPRING

1

Daban, Kumasi – March 2002

Belinda fidgeted in the dimness. She sat up, drawing her knees and the skimpy bedsheets close to her chest. Outside, the Imam’s rising warble summoned the town’s Muslims to prayer. The dawn began to take on peaches and golds and those colours spread through the blinds, across the whitewashed walls and over the child snuffling at Belinda’s side.

All those months ago, on the morning that they had started working in Aunty and Uncle’s house, Belinda and Mary had been shown the servants’ quarters and were told that they would have to share a bed. To begin with, Belinda had found it uncomfortable: sleeping so close to a stranger, sleeping so close to someone who was not Mother. But, as with so many other things about the house, Belinda soon adapted to it and even came to like the whistling snore Mary often made. On that bed, each and every night, Mary slept in exactly the same position; with her small body coiled and her thumb stopping her mouth. Now Belinda watched Mary roll herself up even more tightly and chew on something invisible. She thought about shifting the loosened plait that swept across Mary’s forehead.

Belinda turned from Mary and moved her palms in slow circles over her temples. The headache came from having to think doubly: once for Mary, once for herself; a daily chore more draining than the plumping of Aunty and Uncle’s tasselly cushions, the washing of their smalls, the preparing of their complicated breakfasts.

Dangling her legs down and easing herself to the floor, Belinda quietly made her way to the bathroom. She stepped around the controller for the air con they never used and around the remains from the mosquito coil. She brushed by the rail on which their two tabards were hung. Belinda remembered the first time Aunty had said it – ‘tabard’ – and how confused Mary’s expression had become because of the oddness of the word and the oddness of the flowery uniform Aunty insisted they wear when they cleaned. Belinda would miss that about Mary’s face: how quickly and dramatically it could change.

Under the rusting showerhead, Belinda scrubbed with the medicinal bar of Neko. Steam rose and water splashed. In her mind Belinda heard again the sentences Aunty had promised would win Mary round. She yanked at a hair sprouting from her left, darker nipple, pulling it through bubbles. The root gathered into a frightened peak. She liked the sensation.

Returning to the bedroom, in the small mirror she was ridiculous: the heaped towel like a silly crown. For a moment, she forgot the day’s requirements, and flicking her heels she pranced across the thin rug. Would Amma like that? Might jokes help heal that broken London girl? Or perhaps Belinda would be too embarrassed.

Mary shot up from beneath the covers and launched herself at Belinda’s chest. Belinda pushed her off and Mary lost her balance, fell onto the bed.

‘What is this? Are you a –? Are you a stupid –’ Belinda lifted the towel higher. ‘Grabbing for whatever you want, eh?’

‘What you worried for?’ Mary arched an eyebrow. ‘I have seen all before. Nothing to be ashamed for. And we both knowing there is gap beneath shower door and I’m never pretending to be quiet about my watchings neither. You probably heard me while I was doing my staring. Even maybe you seen my tiny eye looking up,’ Mary squinted hard, ‘and you’ve never said nothing about nothing. So I think you must relax now. I only’ – Mary tilted her head left, right, left – ‘wanted to see how yours are different from mine.’ She pulled up her vest and Belinda quickly rolled it down. A ringing quietened in Belinda’s ears.

‘And, and here is me ready to speak about treats for you,’ Belinda began.

‘You mean what? Miss Belinda?’ Mary folded her arms. ‘Adjei! You standing there in a silence to be so unfair. Adɛn? I want to hear of this my special thing. Tell of it!’

‘Less noise, Mary! You know Aunty and Uncle they have not yet woken.’

‘Then tell the secret and I will use my nicest, sweet voice.’

Belinda headed towards the mirror and adjusted its angle slightly. ‘Number one is that we have a day off.’

‘Wa bo dam! Day off?!’

‘Aane.’

‘Day. Off. Ewurade. When, when have they ever given us one of those?’ Mary rubbed her hands together. ‘Today no getting them nasty stringy things from the drain in the dishwasher? No scrubbing the coffee stain on Uncle’s best shirt again, even though everyone knows the mark is going to live there forever and ever amen!’

Mary laughed but soon stopped to count her stubby fingers. ‘You said number one. And you said treats not treat. I know the thing called plurals. You speak as if we also having two and three and four and even more. So you have to complete please, Miss Belinda. What else?’

‘Many great gifts from Aunty, Uncle and their guests Nana and Doctor Otuo. Many. But, but I will let them know they should change their minds and their plan. Because why should a naughty little girl get good things?’

‘That question is too easy. Nasty people get nice all the time. Look at Uncle. He is farting in the night and afternoon, and then blaming it on Gardener or anyone else passing.’ Mary threw up her arms. ‘But he still got treasures from the UK and this massive palace he lives in with his own generator, own two housegirls in me and you and all kinds of rich visitors coming in.’

‘Ah-ah! Your Uncle never, never farted! Take that one back.’

‘What else is my treat?’

‘Wait and see,’ Belinda said.

2

Later that morning, under the fierce sun, for what felt to Belinda like hours they waited at the end of a long line outside Kumasi Zoo’s gates. They stood behind three nurses who had powerful bottoms and who passed the time by repeatedly humming the old hymn about the force of God’s constant love. Mary played with the green baubles Belinda had tied into her hair after she had promised to never again spy on Belinda showering. As they continued to queue, Mary crunched shards of dead banana leaves under her sandals and chattered away. Belinda tuned into and out of that overexcited flow of words: one of the larger clouds above, Mary was convinced, was shaped just like a fat man bending to touch his toes.

When they reached the stewardess in the crumbling admission booth, Belinda peeled and counted out cedis from the bundle of notes Nana and Aunty had given her. As Belinda paid, she became aware that Mary’s talking had stopped. Belinda watched Mary stare at the stewardess. The cool seriousness of Mary’s gaze made her seem much older than eleven. The little girl’s grave eyes moved; to the young woman’s hands that rested on a stack of brochures, to the polished things on the stewardess’ shoulder pads, finally stopping on the stewardess’ cap.

‘Madam,’ Mary said, suddenly beaming, ‘I have to tell you, this your hat is very fine and well. So smart and proper. I like this golden edge it has a lot. Big congratulations on wearing it.’

‘This is a most righteous praise.’ The stewardess leaned forward, and with her face now poking out of the booth’s shadows, her features were more visible to Belinda; the unusual fineness of the nose and cheekbones, the glossiness of her weave. ‘What a polite and best-mannered young lady we have on our grounds this pleasant day. Wa ye adeɛ.’

Mary stood tall. ‘The hat it looks like they made from a very beautiful and special material. Is it true? Can I please have one touch? I will not do any damages on it.’

‘Aba!’ Belinda tugged Mary’s shirt. ‘We not coming here to cause a nuisance or distraction for this officer. Let us go, please.’

‘Is not a problem. I see no other visitors behind you at this time,’ the stewardess offered.

‘See, is not a problem.’ Mary imitated the stewardess’ casualness perfectly, shrugged and reached out. Belinda saw how much the hat’s stiffness and texture seemed to please Mary. Mary began asking the stewardess how long she had had a job at the zoo, and what her favourite and worst things about working there were and which animals were the most annoying. Belinda jiggled her shoulders and pulled at the silly flouncy dress Nana and Aunty said she should wear because it was an important occasion. But even though she knew there were things to be done and things that she wanted done quickly, Belinda let Mary carry on. It seemed only fair.

The stewardess removed her fancy hat and placed it on Mary’s head at an angle. The hat was far too big. The two of them found this very amusing. Now the stewardess whistled and called for one of her colleagues – a thin man with a square afro and sore patches around his mouth – to replace her in the booth, and she then offered to give the girls a tour. Mary did a wiggling dance of joy before marching forward. Belinda pulled at her dress again but stopped herself in case she ripped it.

Belinda wished having fun was more natural for her. When Nana and Aunty had called her out to the veranda earlier in the week to have the conversation that had started everything, the two women told her her face was too long. Nana and her husband Doctor Otuo had been staying at the house for a fortnight. Throughout their visit Belinda had been intrigued by the novelty of their preferences, how happy they were when tea was the exact ‘right’ temperature. But, as Belinda stood at the end of the veranda on that Tuesday evening, holding her hands behind her back, she was more confused than intrigued by Nana’s advice that she ‘be more lightened up’. Belinda saw no reason to relax: usually, once Belinda and Mary had taken the dinner plates away and cleaned down the kitchen’s granite and marble, Aunty dismissed them. Then they had two uninterrupted hours of recreation time before lights out. Belinda had never been asked to return to the table after the evening meal was over. So she assumed she had made a mistake: perhaps the egusi stew had not been seasoned properly.

Waiting to hear her fate, a little dazzled by the stars decorating the sky and the candles she and Mary had placed everywhere at Aunty’s request, Belinda had tried her best to be more at ease. She placed her arms at her sides loosely and tilted her head. In response, Aunty and Nana did sharp laughs at one another. Their chunky bracelets clattered and their wicker chairs creaked. They took sips of Gulder before falling silent. Every now and again, Belinda watched the oleanders in the garden as they trembled in the breeze, but then she worried that might seem rude so she focused on the two women as much as she could. Aunty complimented Belinda’s hard work and effort, which made Belinda’s tabard feel less restricting.

Nana nodded, her indigo headscarf wobbling a little as she did so. ‘You doing really very well here, that’s true. I have seen your greatness for myself during our holidaymaking here. Even before I came to this place you should hear how your Aunty she praised you in every email she sent from her iBook PC, telling me of how she doesn’t even have to lift one tiny finger ever, and of how you show a fine honour in all you do, how you making their retirement so beautiful and wonderful. I am so pleased for my dearest friend.’

‘Me da ase,’ Belinda said softly.

Aunty invited Belinda to sit, so Belinda did.

Nana went on, ‘Especially the way you are with Mary. This sensible, calm way. I think that is really very good. You guiding her and caring for her. Is a blessed thing to watch.’

‘Is so very nice to hear this. I thank God for all the blessings we receive in this house. Aunty and Uncle have shown a big kindness to me. And to Mary also. Is miracle my mother saw the small card for this job in Adum Post Office. Miracle paaa. I believe the Almighty helped them choose me.’ When she finished speaking, Belinda felt breathless. Even the briefest reference to Mother could make her throat dry and strange.

For a time, no one spoke. Aunty flicked her Gulder’s bottle-top. Belinda sucked in her lower lip. Eventually Nana tossed a napkin onto the table like it had offended her. ‘Belinda. I will talk to you as a grown woman. Is that OK? No beating on bushes, wa te? I have to come direct to you because is the way of our people and will always be our way, wa te?’

‘Aane.’

‘Me I have a daughter in London. Amma. She is seventeen, very close to your own age. Maybe your Aunty has spoken of her. She is my one and only.’ Nana unclasped her earrings and rattled them in her palm like dice. ‘Let me tell you; she is very beautiful girl and the book-smartest you will ever find in the UK. Ewurade! Collecting only gold stars and speaking of all these clever ideas I haven’t the foggiest. They even put her in South London Gazette once because of her brains!’ Nana shook her head in disbelief. ‘And when she has a break from doing her homeworks or doing paintings, we shop together in H&M and have nice chats. And she makes her father very proud so he doesn’t even mind that he lacks a son and he never moans of how dear the private school fees are for his bank balance.’

Belinda took the napkin and folded it into quarters. ‘Daznice,’ she said. ‘Sounds very nice for you.’

‘It used to be nice.’ Nana sighed, put down her Gulder. ‘Past. We have to use past tense because is now lost and gone, you get me? As if in the blinking of a cloud of some smoke she has just become possessed. Not talking. Grumpy. Using just one word, two words for communication. As if she is carrying all of the world on her shoulders. Me, I am always trying to understand and asking her questions to work out what is happening to her, but I get nothing back. Only some rude cheekiness.’

‘Madam. I am very sorry for this one.’

Nana hissed. ‘And every stupid person in the world keeps talking to me about her hormones, hormones, hormones, but is more than this. I feel it. A mother knows. And her pain is paining me.’ Aunty patted Nana’s shoulder in the encouraging way that Belinda often did to Mary.

So Nana started to explain, drinking a little more and fussing whenever mosquitos came near her. When Nana spoke, she kept saying ‘if’ a lot, and saying it very slowly, as though Belinda had a choice to make. Nana talked and talked of her daughter’s need for a good, wise, supportive friend like Belinda to help her. Smiling with excellent, gapless teeth, Nana listed the opportunities Belinda would enjoy if she came over to London to stay with them, said that Belinda could improve her education in a wonderful London school and get a future; said that, like Aunty and Uncle had, she and Doctor Otuo would send Mother a little money each month to help her because they knew Mother’s shifts at the bar didn’t pay enough. The talking about Mother’s job at the chop bar, the thickness of Nana’s perfume, the idea of moving again – all of it made Belinda feel weightless and sick; like her chest was full of strange, drifting bubbles.

For a moment, Nana turned to Aunty. The two women held hands, their rings clicking against each other and their bracelets jangling again. ‘Belinda,’ Aunty exhaled, ‘is a total heartbreak and pain for me to let you go. Feels too soon. Like you have been here some matter of days, and already –’

‘Six months and some few weeks.’

‘What?’

‘Mary and I have been here six months and maybe two weeks in addition.’

‘Yes,’ Aunty said, now touching the papery skin at her throat. ‘And that is a heartbreak. But this is what my great friend says she needs and what Amma needs. So, out of a loyalty and from a care, I let you go.’

Belinda traced the silver pattern marking the napkin’s edge. The cicadas played their long, dull tune. She had so many questions but found that her mouth only asked one: ‘You mentioning just me. What of Mary? She stays here?’

‘Yes,’ Nana said without eye contact, ‘she stays here.’

‘Oh. Oh.’ Belinda concentrated on the napkin again but its busy design became too much for her.

Nana and Aunty behaved like everything would be easy. Belinda worried it would not be. Even so, she nodded along then got down on her knees to thank them because she knew her role and place, understood how things should be. And, at their feet, she bowed her head and gave praise in quiet phrases because getting further away from what she had left in the village was more of a blessing than either Nana or Aunty could understand.

It was decided that Belinda should take Mary out for a day trip to tell her the news. Let her have a bit of sugar to help swallow the pill. It was decided that a visit to the zoo would be just right. It was decided that they had struck on a great plan. And so, in a voice faraway and unlike her own, Belinda told them Mary would like the zoo, especially seeing the monkeys, because Mary loved the cleverness of their tails.

But now, as Belinda and Mary stopped at a water fountain near the snakes’ enclosure to wait for the stewardess to take a gulp, Mary seemed much more interested in ostriches than monkeys.

‘So, where are they hiding?’ Mary demanded, pointing at a grainy picture of the birds in the brochure.

The stewardess wiped her mouth and admired the lushness in front of them, a wooden stick clutched under her arm. Belinda studied the view too. Sighing, Mary snapped away with the tiny camera borrowed from Aunty. The zoo was beautiful, rich with orchids shooting from dark bushes like eager hands, thickening the air with sweetness. Cashew trees were everywhere, loaded with leathery fruit. Even the lizards here seemed different, striped with hotter colour. Small streams cut across the land, flickering with unknown fish. Every now and again, the tops of trees rang with cries.

‘The ostriches?’ Mary asked firmly.

‘If you revise your memory of the noticeboard encountered on your entry, you will recall that we have sadly to inform you of this suspension of this ostriches. They have been removed from our care due to budget cut. Me, I’m not supposed to be revealing to you such. I’m to declare this ostriches has been loan to a Washington Zoo, in United States of America, so it gives us a prestige and you feel proud your nation’s zoo-oh, giving its animals to the West.’ The stewardess pushed the sweaty licks of hair from her eyes. ‘Sorry. Is lie. We have sold our ostriches. Sold. Because how can you be keeping grand big birds in country like this when too many here still have no simple reading, writing and such things?’

‘Cro-co-diles here!’ Mary pointed to the words on a sun-bleached arrow. Belinda’s arm swung as Mary released her grip and skipped up a dirt track.

‘Careful, oh! He come from the Northern region – and we have left him unfed for some four days – budget cuts!’ The stewardess headed in Mary’s direction.

Following, walking through foliage, Belinda bit her nails, spitting out the red varnish that broke onto her tongue. Belinda wanted the right sort of place: somewhere hidden; theirs for that moment. But visitors busy with their own intimacies occupied all places the path led. An Indian couple wearing matching baseball caps, necks looped with binoculars, sat on a bench. A father near the porcupines opened his briefcase in front of three waiting children. The three nurses from the entry queue unlinked their hooked arms; one stopped to rub her hip. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there were no pockets on Belinda’s dress, and so after Mary got a generous share of the cash Belinda had been given to pay for the day, Belinda squeezed the remaining cedis into her bra, giving herself an uncomfortable, monstrous breast. The high-heels Aunty and Nana said made her feet ‘feminine’ pinched her toes and were more painful than stomach cramps.

‘I face the most severe of high recriminations if the girl comes lost. Akwada bone! Wo wein?’ The stewardess hopped, checked the air around her, shouted in the direction in which Mary had sped off. ‘This crocodile will be bearing the most emptiest of stomachs, small child. He will come, snapping for even your no-meat ankles. You must exact caution!’

Mary jumped up from behind a tree. Belinda leapt with shock.

‘Why does budget cut have to mean bad signs?’ Mary asked the stewardess. ‘I mean how long we have been walking for and have I seen one cro-co-dile? No, Mrs. No even one of them to snap at my size-five feet.’

‘This one has so much lip!’ The stewardess became suddenly playful, extending her hand to Mary.

‘You will take me?’

‘I will take you.’

Mary asked the stewardess her name, then asked if she was married and about being married. Behind, wrestling with the layers of her long gold dress, Belinda remembered what women claimed about fat-cheeked babies who did not cry when they were passed between relatives. ‘Oh, he is such a good boy – he goes to anyone!’ Though she would have hated being compared like that, Mary had that same ease. Belinda wiped away something sticky from her neck, fallen from the canopy above. She considered beginning with reassurances about the smallness of the loss. There would be a new Belinda soon, surely. Another plain girl from some bush-place, come to clean Aunty and Uncle’s fine-fine retirement villa nicely. All Mary needed to do was introduce herself politely, show this housegirl where the towels and things were, and then they could start. It would be easy to go to this new Belinda. Good for Mary, even. Yes. But Belinda knew Mary would ask if she herself was so replaceable; if a new Mary would be found so easily. Belinda could not mention Amma.

Ahead, through the heat’s shimmers, the stewardess ‘Priscilla’ lifted her staff, pushed a curtain of leaves aside and ushered Mary beneath. Belinda stumbled forward. Tired fencing and browning grasses ringed the swamp. Dragonflies and midges rose and fell in the steam. Broken wood and lengths of something like soiled rope drifted across the surface and Belinda understood their slowness. Peaks of mud forced up through the water. A dripping sound worried the silent air and the sickly light.

‘Ladies and no gentleman, I am presenting … Reginald!’

Mary applauded, but soon Belinda saw her face squash when it became obvious that the clapping fell deafly. Cross-legged on the wet soil where Priscilla joined her, Mary said, ‘I don’t like Reginald for a crocodile’s name. Tell me his local one. On, on which day was he born?’

‘He arrived here some three years. Big men brought him in a truck all far from Bolgatanga.’

‘Which. Day. Please?’

‘I believe the delivery came on a Tuesday, so –’

‘So we will say that. Let us call for Kwabena. Come.’ Belinda made her way to them, cursed the shoes, squatted as the other two did, and clapped towards the water. ‘Kwabena?! Aba! Eh? You want to be shy? Adɛn?’

Nothing. Nothing but stillness.

‘There are, erm, tarantulas also for us to show you? Erm.’

‘I hate spiders. And anyway, I have spiders at my house, at my Aunty and Uncle house where I do clean, we do cleaning, Ino be so, Belinda? They, they come into bathroom. They don’t mind the cockroaches. Neither do we.’ Mary shifted her attention between Belinda and Priscilla dizzily and then became strict. ‘They not our real Uncle or Aunty, by the way. But you know how we have to use these words for our elders out of a tradition and respect and I am a 100 per cent respectful child.’

Belinda wondered what sort of companion she would have chosen for herself, if a choice had been offered. Half a year ago, when the driver took Belinda from Adurubaa and from Mother, then made his unexpected stop near Baniekrom, what if some other girl had stepped into the car and gently introduced herself?

The water tore apart. The three of them staggered backwards. Diamonds jumped and splashed as Kwabena dashed forward. He snapped at the fence and Belinda gulped. His roaming eyes were massive, dark planets. His fat, knobbed tail whipped, sending up water again as Mary screamed. His long jaw flipped and crashed shut with a sound like falling bricks or breaking glass. He scuttled back.

‘I didn’t even get to be taking one single picture,’ Mary moaned, pointing the camera at the ripples Kwabena had left. Belinda did not breathe. He was enormous. He had not yet shot out of the water but she knew he could leap and reach high enough to brush the trees and drop onto her, onto all of them. They would be crushed. Mangled beneath his rough belly.

‘You see that bucket over there? Listen, do you see that bucket over there?’ Belinda heard Priscilla softening. Mary, giving in to her tears now, sobbed. ‘Listen: in that bucket are bits of meat – collect it. I didn’t want to waste, but …’

Belinda said nothing as Mary ran to a nearby hut and returned with a dripping chunk.

‘Good girl! See your friend? Not so courageous and bold like you. She seeming like she has come across a ghost, or is in preparation for the vomiting.’ Belinda tried to find it funny. ‘When he comes up again, you throw this meat at him, OK? OK then. Here we go. Kwabena, Kwabena –’

Priscilla paused, tapped Belinda on the shoulder. ‘Help me, madam? Madam?’

Belinda added her calls, irritated by a wavering in her voice that wouldn’t shift. Within seconds a blur of grey, brown, pink and green rose again, thrashing even more this time.

‘Throw, throw!’

With a bark, Mary launched the meat. It hit Kwabena’s snout and he began tearing at flesh before he and the red block disappeared into bubbles. Belinda gasped.

‘That. That. That. The most brilliant thing!’

Belinda looked over at Mary’s cheeks. They were streaked with tears, mucus, sweat, water, blood.

The zoo’s canteen was a long, narrow room painted in sludgy tones, filled with rows of wooden tables. Each bore a matching island of condiments, bent cutlery and a miniature Ghanaian flag. Rusted ceiling fans dropped dust on the customers below. No one complained. A plump attendant wearing a splattered apron manned the till beneath a calendar, which, for the month of April, showed Jesus bursting through light. A chewing stick drooped from one corner of the woman’s mouth. A thin cat lay at her feet. Somewhere in the back a radio crackled silly jingles into the oiliness.

Beneath their table, Belinda crossed her ankles, hoping to control her quaking thigh. Her plan seemed to work until she started fidgeting with the ketchup’s lid instead. She rattled the can of Coke and watched Mary push Red-Red around her plate.

‘Finish all, Mary, to grow up big and strong, eh?’

‘You know Red-Red it always take me a long time to eat because –’

‘Mary – eat not talk, wa te?’

Mary wriggled off her seat. She began bouncing the ball Priscilla had convinced them to buy from the gift shop, along with mugs, rubbers, T-shirts, posters, bracelets, catalogues and sun hats that were all stored in heavy bags that spilled at their feet.

Boing. Catch. Boing. Catch. Boing. Catch.

Belinda considered taking the ball away, though the waitress who delivered more serviettes appeared undisturbed by Mary’s playing. And now Mary bounced it on the vacant table opposite. The ball knocked over a pot of salt. Mary ran to tidy up, then continued to bounce it on an empty seat.

Boing. Catch. Boing. Catch. Boing. Catch. Pleasure shone across Mary’s face.

‘You are not hungry, Mary?’

Boing. Catch. Boing. Catch.

‘Mary?’

Two old men sat to the right of Belinda, one much larger than the other, both engrossed in Oware. They lifted and dropped the grey counters delicately. Each of the bigger man’s moves began with a chuckle. Arching forward, his competitor hummed. Belinda noticed the piled pesewas between them. A group of white tourists pointed at the game. There were five of them, possibly students, nibbling boiled groundnuts off a large map. She heard them talking about how friendly the ‘locals’ were. Mary’s rhythm slowed as she threw the ball at the ceiling, zigzagging around the fans.

Boing. Catch. Boing. Catch.

Belinda shovelled steaming rice into her mouth and saw the slimmer player getting up from his seat and pacing around the table, checking his lot from different angles.

Boing. Catch. Boing.

Mary, at the counter now, made the cat screech. The waitress hummed. Belinda cracked two knuckles. Mary got one of the white tourists to his feet. His blond hair flew up as Mary threw the ball and he followed it.

Ta. Ta. Tap. Boing. Catch. Boing. Catch.

‘When you came from your mother’s vagina,’ Belinda heard, ‘it is pressing hard on your own head and making your brain stupid – too easy for me to win this!’

The slimmer man bobbed around, his fat challenger flaring his nostrils.

Boing. Catch. Boing. Ca–

The student leapt forward now, his loose, tie-dyed shirt inflating as he picked up Mary and chucked her into the air. The ball rolled outside. The mad cat pursued it.

‘MARY!’

Mary landed. Everyone stopped. The white man stood still. The old men forgot their game.

Heat ran across Belinda’s chest. ‘Come. And. Eat.’

Mary apologised to the student, who blushed and shook Mary’s hand.

‘Where’s the ball gone?’ Mary asked as she sat.

‘We can get another one, eh? For now, you just eat.’

‘OK, OK. I don’t know why you talking all rude and quick to me.’

‘Sorry. I don’t mean to. I don’t mean to at all.’

‘Hmm.’

‘And that, my friend, is a win!’ the fat man roared.

‘Is Oware in a way same like our Connect 4 only different? Do we have an Oware at Aunty and Uncle’s that they may let us borrow? My father use to –’

‘Mary, you are nearly a grown-up now, aren’t you? Almost twelve years?’ Belinda began, with false brightness.

‘I can stand up to anyone who is even trying to come close to fighting me. I will even beat seventeen-year-old you if you try. If that’s what you talking about?’

‘Part of it. Part.’

‘What else are you meaning then?’

Belinda flattened rice on the plate. ‘Being a grown-up is about needing less then less. As you get older, things get taken away. But you are OK with it. With losing the things, because you can sort of – you can make up for the lost thing yourself. You can be looking after yourself. The teddy bear goes. The mum and dad go. And is not problem.’

‘I don’t know if I really understand it, Belinda. And – from your face – I don’t think you do either.’ Mary wiped orange grease from the corner of her mouth. ‘Can’t we go back for one more ball?’

‘No we cannot. We cannot.’

‘But, Belinda –’

‘You won’t always get your own way. As adult, you won’t always get your own way. Wa te?’

‘The opposite. Adults have –’

‘You get strong by being disappointed sometimes. I know that is a truth.’

‘What?’

‘It is for best.’ Every part of Belinda’s body readied to run out of the canteen. She denied each one. ‘This Nana who has stayed in the house for some weeks now?’

‘What of her? I told you: out of ten, I think I would give her about five and a half. She’s OK and I really like all the nice dresses she wear and her nice lighter face, but she also a bit weird? I know she is a Ghanaian truly, but is as if all those years over in the Great Britain for working like Uncle and Aunty did something crazy-crazy to her mind. She keeps looking at me with a funny eye when I’m only offering her more Supermalt or something. Or maybe is even only because she is getting old and that is the reason she cannot hang on to all of her marbles.’

‘She and the husband have said for me to travel from the house. They will take me to their London, eh? You, you have it? Aunty and Uncle, they say yes. They know is a great thing. I will not come back. You. You will not see me. It is for the best.’ It was right that the words came out slowly.

‘Tomorrow? You leave tomorrow, eh?’

‘No. We wait for papers – they have to pay someone at the Embassy. Something like this.’

‘I. I knew that we would not be forever. I knew one day it will happen, but.’

‘Aane.’

Mary stopped to fish ice cubes out of her Coke, then looked up. ‘You? You, you’re RUBBISH, hearing me?’ Mary stood and pointed. ‘You so … RUBBISH! And you right, I don’t need you. Not only because I’m adult. But because I’m better than you.’

‘Mary –’

‘So go take your stupid self to London. You go do it, I don’t care. I’m not even crying one tear.’

The white man came over. ‘Is everything cool here?’ He fingered wooden beads at his neck.

‘Perfect and fine. Please, good day.’

‘I was only …’ He shuffled back to his muttering friends.

‘I am not clever enough for London, or something, eh? My letters and number not so excellent like yours. Eh? Not pretty enough? My hair is too rough for London?’ Mary grabbed the baubles on her head, tossed them, loosened the two bunches. ‘I am sorry Aunty and Uncle did not pay for me to go to hairdresser to get nice plaits like you to show off at Nana and the husband. I am sorry no one is giving me shiny dress to wear!’

Belinda reached towards her.

‘You don’t come near.’

‘We –’

‘I said YOU DON’T EVER COME NEAR ME.’

The white people were gathering their backpacks. The radio had stopped.

‘You been lying, isn’t it? All of this, when we together, like we doing this all together, that’s how I thought. Only now I see you just a smelling liar. You been thinking I am most rubbish girl, ino be so? Been laughing with Nana. Been counting days until something like this is happening, yes?’

Mary’s nodding frightened Belinda; it was as if the electricity that sometimes pulsed through her own body had been passed on.

‘You don’t care what is happening to me at all, do you? You have nice flight to London, they get you husband and a palace. And me? They will send me back.’ Mary paced. ‘You bloody –’

‘Swearing! Who is teaching you swearing?’

‘FUCKING. FUCKING. No one is FUCKING ever coming to see me from my home village. No Papa. No Grandma. And now, you telling me Uncle and Aunty will drive me back there, push me out of the door and leave me? That is what going to be happening, Belinda. Because they don’t want only me. We came as two. Two.’ She flopped to the floor like a cheap doll.

Belinda crouched down.

‘I –’

‘FUCKING. And also, SHIT. You. Your dress is ugly and I hate your idiot shoes!’ Mary lashed out, pushed an unsteady Belinda and ran through the coloured strips of plastic in the doorway. Splayed on the linoleum, Belinda wanted to shout after her friend. But nothing came out.

Encumbered by the bags, Belinda found Mary sitting on one of the security guard’s stools at the zoo’s exit.

‘If you misbehave, they may beat you,’ Belinda panted. Gravel crackled under her feet. ‘For your own benefit and peace, I say this to you.’

Belinda stopped, caught her breath and squared herself for Mary’s next insult. But Mary only hopped down from the stool, ran up to the bars of the main gate and stroked them. She tried to fit her head through one of the loops in its rusting pattern. Belinda knew she would be unsuccessful but thought it best to let her try.

‘Mary, you don’t –’

Mary returned to the stool, pulled herself up, kicked her legs backwards and forwards. Neither of them were skilled at fights like this. Mary started well but continuing was difficult. It was true what she had suggested: Mary wasn’t clever enough. She was incapable of creating some plan to keep everything safe and the same.

‘You don’t have to carry my things. They are mine. I will carry.’ Belinda watched Mary hop off the stool again and come forward to struggle with the shopping herself. ‘We should go.’

Mary walked on, leaning down towards the fuller bag, limping with the weight. ‘When we are late and Aunty wants to coming finding a person to be blaming, don’t push me up. I am doing hurry hurry and you want to be waiting and playing. Not time for one of your daydreaming now.’

Led by a tall woman with a clipboard, a snaking line of loud schoolchildren marched past, two by two, pristine in their blue and white and straw sun hats – not the usual brown and yellow most wore to school, and that Belinda had been so proud to wear in Adurubaa. Blue and white meant somewhere expensive. Their scrubbed faces and clean feet in matching blue sandals, agreed with her guess. Belinda watched Mary hobble to one side to make way for them. Then a hunched Mary turned her thinking face to the sky, to the showy swallows dipping and dipping there.

3

That evening, back at Aunty and Uncle’s, Belinda twisted the kitchen tap firmly and was amazed again by the water’s purity, so different from the gritty coughings of the communal pump back in the village. She picked up her terracotta asanka, its complicated decoration of interlocking diamonds matching the design of the kitchen’s smart grey tiles, and placed the bowl beneath the tap’s steady flow, tilting it so shallow waves skimmed its grooved inside.

In the tro tro on the way home from the zoo, Belinda had done her best to enjoy Mary’s sulking silence. Mary’s quietness as they went through Bekwai and Melcom should have given them both a moment to calm; time for Belinda to realise the threat had passed. She had told Mary that she was leaving and so the worst was over. But Mary’s silence had not been calming at all. Mary’s eyes were narrowed, her jaw set, her mouth mean.

Mary seemed slightly less distant when they arrived back in Daban and they returned to the familiarity of their routine. In their room Mary unpacked the bags, arranging everything they had bought in rows in the small cabinet by her side of the bed. Belinda listed the tasks that needed doing in preparation for the evening meal and Mary listened to and acknowledged each clear order. They both slipped out of their clothes and then put on their matching uniforms at the same time.

Belinda’s swilling of water round the asanka, the rhythm of Mary scouring saucepans at the kitchen’s island and the drain’s glugging were disrupted by a shout. Another shout came and Belinda glanced through the window’s louvres. Near the pool, lit up by the sunset, Uncle was thrusting tilapia at Aunty. Aunty was screaming and clutching her breast. Shaking and stroking his bald head, Uncle threw the fish onto the barbecue, then waved towards Aunty until she fiddled with something in her hands. Belinda recognised the voice that soon came from speakers as Sarah Vaughan’s because Aunty and Uncle played this CD so often. The woman’s voice spread and slid and spread.

‘Aba! They always causing a complete racket when we try and concentrate,’ Mary pounded her fist. ‘Don’t they know that we like to have a peace when we make them eto?’

Since Belinda arrived in Daban, Uncle often told Belinda he planned to make the most of his retirement, laughing his roundest laugh as he said it. ‘Making the most’ seemed to mean eating, listening to the trumpet man Miles Davis or the lady Sarah Vaughan, sleeping in the day, drinking, and playing pranks like that one with the fish. Mary kept on scouring, Uncle bullied a reluctant Aunty into dancing with him and yet again Belinda found it difficult to imagine that man handling all the big monies they said he dealt with in London. He must have changed himself a lot between there and here. Pulling the tough green skin from four plantains, she wondered if she could change so much in her own lifetime. Tossing the peelings in the rubbish, something made her flip the louvres down. She laid the pale plantains side by side on the chopping board, like tired infants ready for sleep, then sliced them fast.

‘And so please start the boiling, me pa wo kyew.’

‘I shall do that one, Belinda.’

Belinda turned her attention to the Scotch bonnets, using the knife to scrape out some but not all of the peppers’ seeds, allowing the meal to keep its fire as Aunty and Uncle liked. Belinda heard pleasing grunts of effort as Mary carried the heavy pan to the stove; heard the click of the kettle, the clattering as the little girl rested the pan on the hob, the crackle as she lit the match, the whispering of poured hot water and salt, the plop as she let the eggs go.

‘Now, Belinda, pass me plantain, please.’

With a nod, Belinda did as she was told, watching Mary drop the plantain pieces into the water too.

‘You know the story of this one?’ Belinda asked, pulling the roots off two onions.

‘Wo se sɛn?’

‘What eto is for.’

‘You tell me.’

‘Is the egg, really. That’s the important part of it all.’

‘How is that?’ Mary stood on the tips of her toes to reach the shelf with the seasoning and tall bottles on. She grabbed the deep red palm oil and set it on the side.

‘So on the wedding day they will give the eto to the bride. In the morning, perhaps; I don’t know. And they will give it to her as we will to Uncle and Aunty. I mean that after it has been prepared – we’ve mixed together the mashed plantain, fried onion, nuts and things – they will place a boiled egg on the dish. Then all the elders and everyone will watch the bride. Because she has to eat the whole egg in one go. Without biting or chewing anything at all. Swallow in one.’

‘Adɛn?’

‘The elders’ rule is that if you consume it all in one then you will have many, many children. But if you bite even one small bite into the thing then is like you are eating into your unborn child and you will never have any children ever and after. Is their word.’

‘Sa?’

‘Aane. Is what they have always said. Now collect the roasting groundnuts, I beg.’

Mary bent down to the oven, waved away heat and pulled out the tray, nuts crackling against the foil. Belinda busied herself with chopping the onions, the heels of her hands wiping back hot tears.

‘Miss Belinda, I have some feelings about this one you have told.’

‘Of course you do. I will be pleased to hear them.’

‘Thank you kindly. So I don’t believe the story is a truth. Boiled egg to tell of later babies? No, I don’t agree with this one. And, also, sound to me like a horrible thing to do to a lady on her wedding day when you are already full of nerves and fears. Adjei! Why ask a girl to stand in front of the publics to watch her choke and become ashame? And, also, what if she choke so much on the egg it comes up from her mouth onto her princess dress? Can you imagine? Where have I placed the salt?’

‘Your mind is a sieve. Is over there. There, by the pan.’

‘You are correct. There it is. Is always the same: Belinda always right; Belinda never fail.’

The sharpness of Mary’s comment hung in the air. Belinda worked the pestle in the asanka, using her weight against the ingredients, grinding together the slippery onion and pepper. She stopped.

‘Yes, it sounds funny to me also. I don’t think I would ever be able to do it myself. My mouth is too small and not well equipped for such a thing. Look.’

Belinda turned round and opened her mouth as wide as she could, her lips and neck strained and stinging, embarrassment fierce across her cheeks. Mary laughed. Belinda liked that and began to cool.

‘You’re a nonsense, Belinda.’

‘Only sometimes.’

‘Yes. Only sometimes.’

Mary interrupted Belinda’s grinding to add a pinch of salt to the spicy paste forming. Dusting off her fingers, the little girl coughed like Uncle did before giving an instruction and let her shoulders fall. ‘I have to do an apology. I suppose.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘For what? I don’t mind. Truly.’ Belinda moved to the teak cupboards to find the frying pan. She placed it on the hob next to the boiling water.

‘You do, Belinda. You do. I think you hate things like a big shouting like I was doing in the zoo. You not use to it. So I have to say sorry. Because I know you hate that one.’

‘I don’t hate anything, Mary. Hating is very, very evil. That’s why it hurt me so badly when you used that word about me. Saying how you hate me. Adɛn?’

‘But it was my true feelings in that minute. Now: not so. Then: it was my God’s honest. You, you prefer me to lie as Pinocchio? Pretend I was really the happiest?’

‘No, but –’

‘You will want me, like me better if I didn’t speak anything at all? But I find that a difficult one.’

Belinda smiled to herself, placing a flat palm just above the frying pan to check its readiness. She tipped in the palm oil then tested the texture of the boiling plantain and the eggs, to find they both needed longer. ‘You seem to do a very good job of not speaking on the tro tro, me boa?’

‘Not really.’

‘Wo se sɛn?’

‘In my head I had very long talk with you. Very long.’

‘Sa?’ Belinda scooped the contents of the asanka into the frying pan and took a big step back while the oil hissed.

‘The conversation did not go good at all. You, you kept on trying as if to make me feel better. So annoying to me. So I got bored and I took some ice water from off your bag and spill it all over the top of your head. Sorry about that one, also.’

Mary did a small bow and Belinda went at her with a tea towel. The little girl pretended to have been wounded by one of the swipes. She pouted, winked, then returned to the high shelves to find plates, water glasses, place mats.

Belinda took the frying pan from the flames and poured the freshly fried ingredients into the asanka where they would wait for the plantain. Before seeking out her pestle again, Belinda checked on Mary, who was inspecting the crockery like Aunty had showed them to do on the first morning they had arrived.

There had been so many things to take in during that morning when Aunty, queen-like, had patted her headwrap as she showed them the house and its grounds, walking through echoing white corridors and grand arches and perfect gardens; past chaise longues and chandeliers and flashing glass-topped tables. So many rooms that Mother would have been jealous of but that left Belinda’s stomach feeling like it would fall through her feet. Throughout the tour, Belinda remembered, Mary had stared at the faint marks her flip-flops left on the squeaky floor, and Belinda had nodded while memorising Aunty’s endless notes about brands of bleach and meal times so she could recite them to Mary later, in the comfort of their new bedroom, when she hoped the girl might be less frightened. Now, as Mary polished silverware, Belinda wanted to offer her praise and kindness. She could work well. That was important and deserved to be recognised. So, smiling, Belinda opened her mouth, but then Mary dropped a fork. Mary did not flinch. Instead, staring ahead at the cupboards with their spotless, bronzed handles, Mary began to speak.

‘Once, in my hometown, a boy called Akwesi from a compound nearby to ours he won some test at Sunday School. Test or competition. Something like this. So he had been handed a reward. That day, I learn the foolish word for the prize he was getting. They call it a hula hoop. So much hu hu hu. Funny to me. Anyway, the boy was a selfish. He never said yes if any neighbour children we did ask to play with the thing. He only knew to refuse us.’ Mary picked up the fork, started wiping it. ‘It was pretty, Belinda. They made the hula with all rainbow colours and they even tied ribbon to some parts. But I didn’t mind too much that I couldn’t play on the thing because I got to watch Akwesi using it. He use to stand, in the middle of the yard, with all us children clapping and clapping. And he will spin so quick with all the colours flying up and all over. And when he was spinning like that my heart it went running and running and my smile was really smiling. Because how beautiful. Wa te? And I thought I could never feel anything nicer or happier than watching Akwesi in that way. Then. Then I met you. So.’

Mary took out a slotted spoon, dipped it into the water and transferred the two eggs into her hands. She yelped at the heat of the things bouncing in her palms. She blew on them and hopped. Struggling, her fingers tried picking off the eggs’ shells by jabbing. Defeated, she rolled the eggs onto the black worktop and whimpered. Outside, Sarah Vaughan held a low note for a long time then melted into nothing.

Belinda straightened her spine, hunched her back then straightened it again. In a scrunch of kitchen towel, she gathered up the two eggs carefully and pressed them against the worktop until cracks appeared across them. She picked at the first one with patient fingernails until she could uncurl the whole shell with a few swift pulls. Then she repeated it on the next.

Hoping it would be enough because it was all she had and all she could do, Belinda stepped forward and held Mary’s wrists gently, feeling the slight bones there, as well as the little girl’s latest insect bites. Turning the hands over, it was good to see no scalding, only one or two pinker patches in places.

‘You brave to grab those eggs so fast, Mary.’

‘No, stupid.’

Still clutching her wrists, the boiling pot rumbling away, Belinda walked Mary to the tap and ran her fingers under the cold, just to be safe. At the sink, their four eyes fixed on the shut louvres behind which the evening sky now glowed. Droplets dripped down the tiled splashback, and Mary’s obedient palms cupped water. The two girls remained like that for much longer than they needed to.

SUMMER

4

London – August 2002

A gentle voice came down in a different language. Then another. And then another.

A loud child was silenced with a sweet that crackled out of its wrapper.

Strip lighting overhead, black arrows on yellow, corridors with moving floors.

A scared man reached into his pocket for an L-shaped plastic tube, sucked hard and brought colour into his cheeks.

Queuing.

Strip lighting overhead, black arrows on yellow, corridors with moving floors.

A demanding woman – probably a Nigerian with all that around her neck, in her ears, in her nose – had lost the passport, oh! Lost the passport, oh! Yey, has lost dis here the paaaaassport, oh-ho!

Being watched by a white lady with a man’s tie, then watched by a black eye on a stick.

Holding back blinks. Stamp.

Strip lighting overhead, queuing, corridors with moving floors.

The beeping.

The thing to do next: reach the gathering at the tracks that went in a big loop. Stooped older women stood beside concerned men. Bored toddlers harassed teddies’ limbs. Lots of tutting at watches, followed by sighing when suitcases came through the lazy mouth. Belinda pulled her luggage to a trolley. Directed by the movement of crowds, she found an exit. Squeezing the trolley’s handle was settling.

Busy shops and families waited on the other side of a long silver rail. Where was Nana, wearing one of those bright, swirling dresses Belinda so loved, so unlike anything Aunty might wear; dresses that, over Nana and Doctor Otuo’s fortnight in Daban, had shown Belinda parrots, peacocks and toucans?

Tight smiles, wet eyes and wrung hands sprang open. Embraces were long. How would she greet Nana? Perhaps she could kiss her on the cheeks – one on each, neatly timed – like she had seen the women do on Aunty’s The Bold and The Beautiful. It would show how grown-up she planned to be. Belinda’s eyes stung.

‘Over here! Liam, over here! Ohmygodohmygod.’

Belinda checked again, trying not to be distracted by the shouting, by WHSmith, The Body Shop. Moving to the side of the wiggling queue of passengers behind her, she dug out the emergency numbers scribbled in Aunty’s parting gift, a leather notebook. Belinda scanned for somewhere to make that first call. Then her eyes stopped on the sign.

She’d never seen her name written like that. The seven letters were cut from a special kind of paper, bordered with something glittery, like the hems of expensive christening gowns. Pretty and sugary, the sign hid a face. Its holder had a tatty mound of plaits tied with ribbon. Cubes drawn in scratchy purple and black lines covered the girl’s top; colours to match the plaits. How satisfying to wash a pattern like that. Mary would have marvelled at it. Belinda moved closer and saw that the fingernails spilling onto the ‘B’ and ‘A’ were painted purple and black too. There were dark scribbles – letters? – on the wrists.

‘It is … me? You are Amma?’

Her name disappeared. The girl’s skin was as rich as Supermalt, darker even than Doctor Otuo’s. Though the girl’s eyes were puffy, their quickness was obvious. Her breath, Belinda noticed, was stale and bitter like Uncle’s if he returned home late from the city. Amma pointed in the direction for Belinda to move and soon they stood opposite each other like old enemies ready to resolve a grudge. Belinda considered leaning forward. Even though she had never learnt how to do them from Mother, Belinda had started to be better at ‘hugs’. She had recently begun to drop her shoulders during them, and to almost enjoy the sensation of someone else’s warmth coming through into her own chest. Belinda coughed, tilted her body and Amma returned the embrace just as mechanically. Then, in one clean motion, the girl took Belinda’s bag.

‘Here we are then. And – to get this done ASAP: Yes, my hair is messy. I know that. And it might be inconceivable, but I do quite like it like this. So.’ Belinda stared. ‘Let’s head, yes?’

Scrambling behind as Amma marched off, Belinda wanted to praise the girl’s beauty – her good height, cheeks, bottom, all better than Belinda’s. But now the girl frowned, grabbed her stomach and stopped outside Boots. After a pause she started to walk again, trying for a smile, muttering: ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ Belinda wanted to reassure her that there was no need for apology, but then sliding doors parted, they were outside and Amma’s hailing hand swept the air.

In the taxi, Amma didn’t bother to soothe Belinda’s fear that London was one big black road with cars. The motorway gradually thinned out into smaller roads, where there were stores selling rows of plastic bodies – some naked, some clothed – frozen in the middle of dances. People pushed prams and pressed buttons on their cell phones. Some children had hoods on their heads, and some men sat begging for money underneath boxes in the wall where others queued. Why so much queuing if things were supposed to be modern and working here? The cars drove more slowly in this non-motorway part of London and spent too long at traffic lights. Amma slept and sometimes lolled onto Belinda’s shoulder, only to bob up seconds later, refusing to meet Belinda’s eyes, preferring instead to stroke her seatbelt or hunt the dirt beneath her nails.

Belinda concentrated on the meter and its blinking from 33 to 34. Then they zipped across a bridge over slack water, and then to somewhere the signs called Clapham Junction. Clapham, she was pleased with herself for recalling, was where the Otuos had recently bought an extra house which they weren’t intending to live in, which made little sense to her, but had seemed to make Nana very happy. A plain of green opened up to the right. On it, a man with sunglasses pointed to a pink diamond of cloth floating in the sky. Others were lobbing balls around. Others slept on blankets like the matted tramps at Adum. Some ate lazily from baskets. Many of the girls appeared to have come out dressed incompletely, in colourful knickers and bras, so Belinda folded her arms over her chest. Was it the Brockwell Park Nana had told her about?

‘We are almost near, not so?’

‘Yeah.’ Amma stopped, the seatbelt fascinating her again. ‘Yeah, nearly.’

‘That place it looks … it looks very nice. For playing. Relaxing. And you lucky, to have such things. We don’t have such like this in the middle of Kumasi.’

The driver turned a corner and they lurched into each other. Belinda felt Amma stiffen.

5

A strange white flower bloomed on the ceiling of the front room in which she waited. Beneath her feet, wooden floors – wide strips, scarred with pale patches. To her left, through a folded back partition, was the dining room, a dark, bloody cave with a long table set as though guests were expected soon.

Belinda had had such grand visions of her new home. She was unsurprised that the reality matched none of them. Aunty and Uncle’s house was so much wider; in Daban the houses of all those other bogahs, consultants, accountants, lawyers, returned from overseas had been, too, with rooms coming out from everywhere, rooms that had no purpose, bathrooms for guests, for no one; annexes and servants’ quarters to the back and sides. Didn’t Nana and Doctor Otuo feel boxed in or too small here? Why did the cars pass right in front of the house – where was the perimeter wall? The swimming pool?

Unlike Belinda, whose fingers now pinched each other until she pushed her hands away, Mother had been calm when the biggest change came. On the last day of the Easter vacation, Mother should have returned from the Comm Centre in the middle of Adurubaa with the yellow Western Union receipt to put with the others in the battered tin. She didn’t. Her return to their room that afternoon was ghostly. Belinda was distracted from the Jollof on the stove by the tinkle of keys. Mother waited in the doorway for a moment, very still, very stiff. Mother’s sweep of hair, turning brownish from sitting in the sun, perhaps seemed more wild than usual. Mother dropped onto the bed and kept her stare on the blistered wall.

‘It concerns you, also,’ Mother had said, evenly.

Belinda turned the temperature down and flipped the dishcloth over her shoulder. The paper in Mother’s weak grasp was blue and the first example of her father’s handwriting Belinda had been allowed to see. Her first real evidence of his existence. On his Aerogramme, his words came in writing more girlish than her own. The careful characters made the letter’s news bite even harder. Though short, it needed to be read again and again: the noise of the Akuapem children next door, playing their stupid clapping game, always as loud as though in the room with them. Mother had sighed, and sighed, and sighed, and then rose to scrape the bottom of the pan, Belinda assumed, to check that it had caught slightly, for added smokiness. The note ended without even an attempt at apology for no longer being able to pay the school fees. Mother turned the dial down lower so the flame sputtered. Her eyebrows were raised, and her whole face tightened when she had turned around to conclude, ‘That’s that then. We find something else for you to do.’

Now, under the huge white rose, Belinda snapped her knees together to stop herself from thinking. She picked up the remote control, then put it down. Nana was taking far too long in the bathroom. Belinda’s attention fell on a sticky brown ring on the coffee table. The sun seemed to show a grey film on all of the surfaces.

‘Nana? Amma?’

Belinda approached the mantelpiece, extended a finger and dragged it along a shelf, drawing a deep and perfectly straight line. A ball of fuzz gathered. Certainly, it would be an intrusion and a rudeness, but returning to the sofa? That would be a laziness. Walking out, she found herself in a corridor, the end of which was lit up from below. The steps moaned at her heels and took her into an airy kitchen, everything here a hospital-white impossible to achieve in dusty Kumasi. So much white: cups, plates, floor. One unplastered, crumbling wall shouted difference. But, perhaps not a hospital at all, instead more like a factory: the polished metal of the cupboards, the cooker, the upside-down chimney above the hob, the fridge, the bins, the clock on that messier wall reminded her of cruel machines. The kitchen lacked wood, pottery – anything homely. Beneath the sink, sprays that smelled safe and familiar were carefully arranged. The man on Mr Muscle was good. Belinda lunged for it.

Back upstairs, she wanted to clap as the foam’s bubbles crackled over the splodges on the table and the coiling in the small of her back stopped. She heard a muffled shouting somewhere and then the slamming of a door. Belinda shoved away the cloth and can. Tell-tale Mr Muscle rolled out from beneath the table, grinning at her.

‘Sorry! I’m only –’

‘No, it’s me. I caught her upstairs and … we talked.’ Nana flopped onto the sofa. Belinda copied.

‘OK.’

‘What will it take to have her sit? You, you see how she leapt off from the cab as if please, as if thank you and hello they gone out of fashion?’ Nana froze with the tiny folds around her eyes stretched and her hands begging. ‘She apologises to you and must have a lie down because of this late returning last night. What kind of introduction?’

‘I don’t mind. She has been so very kind and helpful to me in the taxi, on the way. So.’

‘It was this AS results yesterday and so she has to celebrate with the friends or whatever. All A grades. That’s all I hear her shouting when she ran from this house, to leave me reading about her success from some small paper on the side. All A grades.’ Belinda liked Nana’s soft chuckle. ‘I want to even sit her down to announce how joyful we are, and, and we give a great thanks – but will she come and talk as we do now?’ Nana pulled her red cardigan tighter over her white shirt.

‘She –’

‘Maybe your first of the mission is to find out her last twenty-four hours for me, eh? I am, I am certain she has done nothing … untoward? But, I need to … be informed of such things.’

‘Mission sounds too big for a, a small one as me.’

‘Sa? For me, mission is exact and right.’

‘I –’

‘Praise God your Aunty she released you for this – even as she wanted to keep you and your fine work to herself. But that, my dear, is what loyalty truly mean. You sacrifice for one another when is like that, you get me? You have to.’

‘Aane.’

Nana shifted the tiny tail of her lizard brooch so it sat more proudly on the swell of her left breast. ‘Always sticking together. From day one, our Confirmation ceremony.’ Nana’s earrings danced. ‘We were something so beautiful. Special.’

‘I am sure of it.’

Belinda chewed the inside of her cheek. Nana moved the lizard’s tail back again.

‘And. And you can be Amma’s good friend too. Eh? Show her your goodness. Tear her out from whatever making her behaving in these ways. Tantrum. Silence. Crying.’

Belinda stared at her palms as if checking the lines there would not somehow reveal something. She sat on her hands.

Goodness? So good that her mother, creator of such goodness, sent her away without doubt or hesitation. So good that her father didn’t wait around to see what the goodness he bred looked like. Had she ever seen goodness back home when she was growing up? For her and for Mother the village had offered little in the way of anything like that. The village was a place of turned backs and rolled eyes, suspicion, spit. Goodness. Belinda knew she would always have to struggle hard to get anywhere near it. But she would never let Nana know that. Nana did not want to know about that. Belinda forced her weight down onto her hands more firmly.

‘Adjei! I’m doing it, aren’t I? Don’t o-ver-whelm. They put it like that, your Aunty, my Otuo, both of them. O-ver-whelm was their term, and I was all like, no, I’ll be playin’ it cool, cool. This is not cool, is it? I must be making you hot, eh?’

A rolling Mr Muscle encouraged her near her feet, but everything was too much and too fast for Belinda to work out how to respond.

‘Listen to me! I’m so jumbled up and excited!’ Nana tapped her knuckles against her forehead and raised perfect eyebrows. ‘I meant to start with it, my great plan. Sorry sorry, eh? Bad Nana. Call me that one. Rap my wrist. There, there is this excellent occasion to introduce you to our community here, to present you nicely, in some weeks. Amma she complains I shouldn’t demand so much of her time but perhaps you might ask her to – or tell her you will like to observe the Ghanafoɔ. Ghanafoɔ is our –’

Belinda was grateful for the door’s click, the rush of cars and wind, the footsteps bringing in Doctor Otuo. He muttered about being stuck up a tube, said underground was terrible. Belinda breathed and her chest felt like it might expand endlessly.

‘My succour and splendour,’ Doctor Otuo bowed to his wife and she replied with a curtsy. ‘Our new daughter? Akwaaba. You are more than welcome.’

He seemed thinner than he had done during their visit to Daban, more tired. He slapped Belinda’s back and the weight of his man’s hands was a whip to her. She shot up, took his briefcase and the jacket slung over his arm.

‘Madam, we have prepared something for him to –?’

‘I have leftover okra and fish –’

‘We cannot let him be hungry, eh, Ma?’

Belinda zipped off, put the Doctor’s things on hooks and clattered into the kitchen. The busy washing machine tickled the whole room.

‘Belinda!’ Nana yelled.

Belinda bobbed beneath the swinging saucepans, flipped open the fridge and dismissed tins with lids curled back, wilting greens and brown sauces in Tupperware. Then, yes, a glossy orange stew. Without even tasting it, she knew it would need Maggi and the rest.

‘Belinda?’

Doctor and Nana’s approaching footsteps stirred a feeling within. She searched for cayenne, nutmeg and a little ginger. Pinch, pinch, pinch from each. The feeling flung itself between her kidneys, liver, unable to escape through the belly button even though its head butted and tried to pierce.

Doctor shook his head. ‘Calm, child. Calm yourself down.’

She scraped the pan, careful to get the delicious bits from the bottom, scooped a man-sized portion onto a plate and brought the rice closer. Not enough pilchards in this stew, not enough at all. Slam, bang: the dish thrust into the microwave, her fingers skipped over the numbers and the bowl spun, and now Mary would have done the same, spinning in circles until she collapsed, giggling.

‘Belinda? You, lady, are quite the dervish. I was expecting to come down to a pigsty, the amount of noise.’

‘You are a hardworking, sir. That is one that Uncle told me of you back home. He had me learn it; that I am never to see you in your house because there will always be a big money crisis for you to repair, or you are with some book until late in the study reading even more of this tax laws. He tells me on top of this I am to treat you as well as I treated him. And I will honour, for this is the greatest kindness you have shown me. In having me here. Isn’t that right?’

The feeling bounced high and landed on its back, its legs tickling Belinda’s diaphragm as Doctor Otuo hummed and slid a cell phone and then a booklet across the table in her direction. The booklet’s cover showed a young woman with unusually large glasses. The glasses had no frames. The woman focused on a cylinder; a metal candle. Upside down, Belinda read Abacus Educational Centre. Beside that, in similar but smaller letters, Committed to your boldest future.

‘We want you here for learning, Belinda. No cooking-cleaning-ironing-cooking. You must learn, eh? Eh hehhn.’

6

It probably would be a ‘good idea’ for Amma to do as Nana had suggested the day before and ‘think about her room’ and the slippery leggings and exhausted knickers on the floor. But as Golden Belinda stuttered the Lord’s Prayer or whatever downstairs, Amma sat at her desk, rested her head on peaked knuckles and promised she wouldn’t open the little trinket box to her side. She pulled her baggy black sleeves down as far as they could go and pushed her thumbs through the holes torn for them. Her insides sloshed again. She groaned.

Yesterday had been AS Results Day: Amma and all the other prefects had been garlanded with As. Clutching certificates they did a show of being surprised, relieved. Going home after the results was not an option. Party! Max from Alleyn’s! With his fat house near Dulwich Village? Off they went. Max’s dad laid boxes of wine and buckets of beers on the long dining table before high-fiving his son on his way out.

As soon as the door shut, before anyone could protest, Amma swiped the Beaujolais. She ran to the basement, slipped off her Converse and stationed herself in the corner of their library to hide. Until the Addie Lees and faggy final kisses at 5 or 6 a.m., Max’s front room would sweatily ripple with skaters in children’s jewellery, students from Camberwell doing Art Foundations, adjusting dungarees and wearing tiny hats, and the chavvier girls in jeans revealing a tasty inch of arse crack; the Stella-ed up young Tories, thick of lip, expansive of forehead and primed for showy debate. On the edges of the dancing and grinding, over fuzzy Drum’n’Bass, conversation would offer nothing of importance or comfort. It never did. So if you ever came across someone whose words stopped the passage of time – that someone needed keeping. There hadn’t been anything, or any conversation like that since Brunswick. The icy February half-term on which everything rested seemed far away. Amma ran her finger back and forth inside her collar to soothe herself.

Last night, in Max’s parents’ bookish hollow, Amma dodged the enquiries of wide-eyed heads-round-the-door. Music rumbled above her and she ploughed through the wine with gusto, liking its poetic blackening of her tongue, reaching up for Lorca, Yates, Bowen, whoever. She read random pages to herself. She scribbled the names of writers new to her on the inside of her wrist. Of course, she knew she was being a dick; it seemed impossible to stop that.

Ignoring the trinket box’s fussily carved lid, Amma rubbed at the smudged names now. She picked up a hair grip from her desk and sucked its ends until the little black buds came off, then spat them at the glass: tiny bullets. Perhaps last night was equally about Belinda, about her coming. For Amma the idea of a visitor itched at her. No privacy. Someone watching, asking questions. Someone else to think about. She shifted on the cushion. She could have tried harder with Belinda in the taxi. Amma had sometimes even wondered what it might be like to have a black friend. But, as they’d travelled from the airport, in her peripheral vision Amma had seen Belinda’s face – the generous eyes, the ample mouth, in fact almost everything slightly too big – flicker and flicker and twist, fighting to stay controlled.

The interruption of Mum’s voice was no shock. ‘Amma? Amma Otuo? Adɛn! Your own father comes and you leave it for a guest to do greetings. Maame; you need to reconsider that one.’

Amma got to her feet. She would have to leave the safety of her desk for three people downstairs who hadn’t the tools to understand her. And perhaps they couldn’t really be blamed for that. We’re born where we’re born, led to believe what we’re led to believe. The second part of that construction was particularly problematic. She pulled on her black and purple plaits to yank herself out of the mood.

‘Coming, Mummy dearest,’ Amma said, sarcasm the most immediate and pathetic of refuges.

7

Belinda broke the conversation, taking a long breath to ease the kinks as she spoke into the receiver. Using a casual, easy-going tone with Mary proved difficult. She tried again.

‘And, and, how is our Aunty?’

‘Our Aunty is very fine. But I think you have spoken to her before me, isn’t it?’ Mary said.

‘Yes.’

‘Then you could hear she is fine for yourself. I am looking after her well well. Uncle also. You are not for to worry.’

‘I do not … Worry.’

‘Dazgood, for you. Lucky and nice. To not have worrying. In your English castle.’

‘And you? You are fine, also?’

‘Yes, Belinda, me I am doing absolute OK.’

She imagined Mary by the veranda, cradling the phone. Mary sounded different, even though it had only been three days.

‘I cannot hear very clear, Belinda. Belinda? You gots to be speaking it loud or else I will not be getting you.’

‘I did not say anything.’

‘Oh.’

‘I –’

‘I –’

They giggled. ‘You before me, Belinda.’

‘I can’t believe that I’m here. And seeing it without you. So much.’

‘Tell me all now.’

Pleased to hear something like enthusiasm from the other end, Belinda straightened the phone’s coil.

‘Is, I don’t know. So … the exact place in London where they stay is called Herne Hill. Even though I have seen no hill yet. And I have asked several times. And … And … every road has tar. And there are many poor, poor people sitting in the street. And I have seen churches like castles, bigger than even Central Post Office. And post? Mary, the letters come to your door. Each day. No catching tro tro or taxi to collect it from town and queuing.’

‘Sa?’

‘The cats? They sleep in the bed with the white people. Adjei! Like a small child. And, Mary, this one would be disgusting you-oh: on the television they kiss the animal as if it hasn’t roamed the town eating sewage.’

‘It cannot be!’

Mary cackled and Belinda leant on the landing wall, drinking in the scratchy sound.

‘I. I feel a big guilt and a sickness. When I think about you.’

‘That’s not polite if I give you a sickness.’

‘I thought you might still have rage. Sometimes. Anger is hard to die.’

‘My sister, I’m too busy for such things.’

‘Eh-hehhn.’

‘Only reason I might be coming angry is that you missing it out.’

‘You mean what?’

‘I mean you talk all long as this and can’t even mention the girl, not even one time? Cats and Post Office? What of your new princess friend?’

‘Oh. Amma.’

‘“Oh. Amma.” Yes, Amma. When you said to me you were going there to meet this Amma princess friend I thought: wow wow wow! That will bring you a great fun paaa.’

‘I remember.’ When Belinda had finally told Mary that the Otuos had a teenage daughter, Mary was, to Belinda’s initial relief, interested rather than envious as she had feared. Mary had bounced up and down on their sunken bed, shouting Amma’s name repeatedly until Belinda made her stop.

‘Tell me,’ Mary continued now, ‘tell me about her face, the face of this Amma – what is it like? Very black? Black like me? Black like you? Or a fair one?’

‘She is black.’

‘Ah-ah! Come: Does she have different smell from you and I? How is it? How is her smell? Is coming like flowers, I bet that.’

‘I haven’t. I haven’t been up so close I am putting my nose against –’

‘OK, OK. But, maybe if not that one, what about her voice? Her white voice? Do her white voice as an impression so I can learn it to show Gardener tomorrow. He will like it very much.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why? You holding all back.’ Mary tutted. Then she began to whisper loudly, ‘Oh! She standing too near so you have become shy and have to do it as secret. OK, OK …’

‘Is not that. I. I haven’t even heard her speaking many times.’

‘Sa?’

Belinda thought her statement sounded unbelievable too, but in the days since arriving mostly Amma had been ‘out’. The longest she had spent with Amma was in the taxi: a memory that brought a tackiness to the roof of Belinda’s mouth.

‘The girl, she. She seem to be very quiet. Which is no problem, of course. If that is how she like to be. I don’t have a right to force her. Is only … Well, nothing. Is too early to –’

‘Spit out, Belinda. We haven’t the whole of the day for it. The phone card will beep soon.’

‘I only feel sometimes as if is when I speak – to do thank you at a dinner time, or, or asking about weather because Aunty told me they will like this type of conversation – when I do this, is almost like Amma does a noise similar to laughing. Laughing at me. At my expense. Is not a big laugh. Not louder than, maybe, a cough showing you fever comes. But I hear it. And yet I have offered no funny words. And then I think about the sound again, in my own time, and I wonder if it is a rudeness. Why rudeness at me? She hasn’t had a cause. I give her none. I. I feel scared enough to do any speaking here. In case I get it wrong. Or say a thing they won’t like. And this Amma’s weird noise it isn’t helping me. Wa te?’

‘If I was there, I would like to take one of those Science Magnification glasses and put it up on her.’

‘Still so silly, eh?’

‘If we check it again, you are the silly thing: What? You going to sit there and not even ask the girl one question about why, and why she behave as this?’

‘Will she even answer me? She doesn’t have to.’

‘My sister, if one is a quiet, you have to find clever tricks for to stop them being as that. Sneak into her to make her chat properly.’ Mary kissed her teeth. ‘Everyone always tell me you are the clever one, with your old schooling. Now seem as though it fell from your head on the plane.’

‘And what do you know of planes? Oh, I forgot, you are in aeroplanes all of the time, isn’t it? Like a smaller Naomi Campbell.’

‘Aboa!’ Mary laughed. Aboa was Mother’s insult of choice too; it was what Belinda had expected to hear the evening when Mother lurched towards their room after work and found charred fabric on the pillow. How stupid of Belinda to wait for that mean sound. Of course Mother had only quietly brushed off the pile of ash, then padded over to the sink to clean the black stuff off her hands. Belinda remembered listening to the water and the scratching of the sponge, thinking that no amount of washing could help Mother now.

‘Never. Do. Swearing, Mary. Is bad.’

‘You think of that as a swear? I have a lot better swears than that one.’

‘Promise me to never. It show you to be a wicked person, and is not true of you. You are better. Promise it. Never.’

‘Stop being all this weird and drama, and go for to talk with the girl. I want to find out about her. If you can’t even do that then I should never have allowed you and said is all right for you to go in the first place. Is waste of everyone’s time if you not collecting good information.’

‘Maame? You allowed me?!’

‘Agoo! Me pa wo kyew, agoo!’

The local carpenter’s daughter’s braying in the background behind Mary’s chuckling, deepened Belinda’s smile. ‘Greet Afua for me, w–’

‘So I’m going now because my little friend is here for a break. She beat up some small boys down in Sokoban who call her ugly or some like this, and she took their football as a revenge. So now we have a ball for fun. Is a bit busted and old, maybe why come they let a girl take it without proper fighting. I don’t care. We never have a ball before, did we, Belinda? I cannot be more excited than I am.’

‘Well done.’

‘Eh eh? Listen to this heavy heavy speaking voice now. Well done: you sound as a big old dog would or a big old man. You don’t have to be as miserable. Even though you have no football as me, you still have a chance to play games with your Amma.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes. I know it. Trust your Mary. I never lie.’

8

The following afternoon Belinda asked Nana for the kitchen scales. She wasn’t frightened when informed they were ‘electronic’ while Nana tied her into an apron. The small glass shelf presented to her was mean-faced, like the calculator from SS2. Belinda squared her shoulders at it.

‘Me pa wo kyew, leave me please to shape and fry the bofruit, and you please ask your Amma to join us for a taste of these in perhaps half an hour. In that upstairs living room, or whatever you have call it before. For a change? And I will prepare the coffee in the special pushing-in thing I’ve seen she uses.’

Belinda wondered if their hopeful smiles matched. Perhaps that possibility kept the smile there long after Nana had gone, and Belinda was alone, tapping eggs against the bowl, licking swipes through leftover batter, dropping sweet dough into blipping oil. With the cooking done, the grin remained as she arranged the grainy globes and fanned napkins. Her hands slipped into the breakfast tray’s rounded slots, a feeling that reminded her of teaching Mary to carry properly and not to balance food on the head any longer. The grin stayed as she transported the doughnuts and coffee, each step an effort against the jangling of porcelain. Her cheeks contracted as she saw Amma.

Amma’s head faced the ceiling, ignoring the crouching mother in front of her who struggled up to full height. Amma’s skyward expression was of concentration, set on the plaster vines weaving the whiteness above.

Belinda pressed her lips together, then slowly relaxed them out and breathed. ‘Shouldn’t, shouldn’t be surprise to you? You got them in all the rooms. But me, I never saw anything like these patterns and designs and things on the ceilings before. Is very pretty, but I’m almost thinking how did someone come up with the idea to put them up there? Who was the first one to do it and why?’

‘You won’t help your sister, eh? She has prepared for you this special, and so –’

‘Belinda, totally. Yeah. Thank you.’ Amma took the tray from Belinda’s strict grip, lowering it to the coffee table. Belinda thought the girl smelled so clean and flowery, despite all the dirty shades of black and mud and grey she wore. ‘This is very kind – thanks – and there’s no need to be so utterly patronising, Mum.’

‘I’m only trying to get you to –’

‘We don’t need to have a discussion about everything.’

‘OK, Amma. That’s OK. No one is trying to be difficult here.’

‘I’m not trying to be anything. It appears that I just am.’

‘No. No. Belinda has prepared something for you to enjoy. That is the thing for now. To enjoy. Do that, eh?’

The stretched final note made Belinda play with her earlobes, as if touches to their softness would help. Amma rolled on the armchair towards the food. She rested her elbows limply on legs splayed like a man’s, then pulled herself forward to press the cafetière’s plunger.

‘I don’t suppose you want some, Be?’

‘No. I mean, no thank you. Is very strong for me, even if I know you like it as such.’ Amma’s forehead moved, dipped slightly. ‘I hope you like it well.’

‘Sure I will.’ Amma splashed in milk, eased back and seemed to wait for the next move, next sentence. In its absence, Amma shook her head and sucked shiny wetness off her little finger. She reached out and bit a bofruit. Belinda almost felt sorry for the doughnut collapsing under the assault. Although, of course, she felt sorrier for herself.

The decoration of this upstairs room, Belinda thought, might have been the reason why the conversation between the two standing and one sitting snagged. The second living room seemed silly, not for living in at all. Belinda had only been allowed to a museum once: a compulsory Cultural History trip Mother saved hard for. This was another museum. Kente scarves meant for celebrations were flattened behind glass, rainbowing walls. Alongside them, huge paintings of bloody sunsets and kola trees, women loaded with pots, curved elders relying on long sticks for support. But the black figures in the pictures were wiry and stretched, and the backgrounds painted in something smoky; these were images of a place so much dreamier than Belinda’s recollection of that world.

Rather than books, the bookcases were for ornaments and framed papers. One set of shelves presented several documents, bordered with complicated black swirls. Each was marked with shiny holographic stamps, like sweet wrappers. Most had Amma’s details written in important letters, the middle name Danquah misspelt in different ways. On remaining shelves, jutting their arms, rows of akuaba stood to attention. The fertility dolls’ inflamed heads and pinched features always seemed odd to Belinda; ugliness for objects meant to bring a pretty, fat baby into the world seemed wrong.

‘You see how Belinda is fascinated by our traditional things? You enjoy my collection? The dolls?’

‘Is a very big one … very unusual to have.’

‘They’re, er, very – very surly, aren’t they, Ma? You almost want to pick up the little darlings and ask them what their bloody beef is,’ Amma said, mouth full.

‘Bloody beef? What is a bloody beef to do with these, Amma?’

But Nana interjected, ‘I suppose how the whites they sometime collect these stamps, buttons and whatnot, this is my version. I told myself every time I went back to our homeland I will collect one or two to bring back, trying to find something nice that will complement the ones I already have, you know? First it was a bit for juju as well, I cannot deny that.’ Nana flexed her golden fingers and rearranged some of her loose, greying curls. ‘Even after all these years of collecting and hoping and praying, when my little girl actually came, I still kept getting more, because I … they give me a sense of protection. Or something along lines like that. You get me?’

‘Hanging on to the past, Mater. Get rid, non? I’m sure Oxfam would be delighted to receive a job lot of these lovelies – and what a beautiful symmetry there’d be: African gems saving African lives. Et cetera.’

‘A big-time joker. That’s good for you. Congrats to the comedienne. If your father wasn’t in his work, I’m sure he will be here with you, also laughing it up and having a great fun. But when I talk of that time before you? Me, I can’t find any funny at all. A hard, hard time to wait for you, Amma – my very, very hardest time.’

Her hand waved Amma’s reply aside. Nana bent down for a napkin and nestled it and a doughnut in her palm. Belinda wondered if she should have added a dash of lemon juice, to sharpen the taste.

Nana seemed amused by something. ‘Maybe the third or fourth time when I’m starting to gather all the dolls, I go home for a visit; my mother was unwell deep inside her back. Complaining and coming up with such horrible ideas: how the spine is rotten off and will soon fall out. Adjei! Can you imagine this nastiness? Anyway, when I was staying in the compound that time, everyone was joking of this kwadwo besia who had passed through the village – eh, Belinda, how can we explain kwadwo besia for her?’

Belinda blinked several times, tugged the striped strap of her apron and then shrugged.

‘Is like one of those … sissies. Those, erm, Lily Savage, Edna Everage. Amma; I used to ask you if Margarita Pracatan is one? Anyway, anyway: they told me he carried his own akuaba on his back as though he is a real woman, wanting a child like I. And I thought; no, they are lying about this one, it cannot be like that, you can’t take the mimicking so far. But on one afternoon, I saw him! Is like when you see a Father Christmas for the first time in the shopping centre. He was knocking on someone’s door to beg for change. Adjei, I never knew anything such as this, Belinda. More than six feet and with a dress for a nightclub with sparkles, only covering his buttocks and let you see all of the big legs – and his hair? A wig like he has fetched it from the roadside. Trampled. And a massive one of these dolls strapped to his back in our normal way as if he is a normal. We laughed! We. Laughed. My mum had been bedridden for weeks and moaning moaning, suddenly she is laughing so much we fear that she would urinate! All the little ones came with sticks and bad pawpaws to throw at the him–her, and as he is running away, the kwadwo besia cannot even get out quickly enough because he can’t walk in the women’s shoes!’

Nana stopped to chomp and wipe away a pretend tear of laughter. Belinda wished that Amma hadn’t turned to the ceiling again, with her jaw even more fixed. Belinda wished Amma wasn’t closing her eyes, making her face so peaceful and breathing so steady when Belinda sensed that those were not the girl’s actual feelings.

‘I only thought kwadwo besia was on the television. For comedy. Not in real life. It must be very great to encounter one in the flesh,’ Belinda tried.

‘And why you so serious, Miss Otuo? I think that’s one of my favourite tales. Not even gonna do a little smile for me? Tough crowd here, innit?!’

‘Kwadwo be-sia. Kwad-wo be-sia,’ Amma whispered, before adding with force, ‘I’ve got memories of Ghana all of my own.’

‘Yes! Good! Share with your sister Belinda also. Excellent.’ Nana settled into one of the armchairs and invited Belinda to take the other. ‘Seem like you not interested in back home matters. You giving all your excuses not to come at Easter when you could have met Belinda at your Aunty’s fine place – some parts of Kumasi now are so beautiful you even feel as though you are in Los –’

‘I bet you don’t remember this one, Mum.’

‘We are all ears.’

‘I was in Year 2, or something. It might have been your hometown or Dad’s we were going to. And I insisted you gave me the plastic bag with all the money in for the relatives; there was tons of it. So we were, like, walking, and I was being all bossy with the bag and probably trying to show off with the, like, two words of Twi I’d picked up, because showing off was totally my thing back then.’

‘Back then?!’

‘We were getting closer to the actual village and I saw all these orange clay or mud or whatever houses next to each other. They had these slits for doors that I thought were really small, and I said to you something, like, about how Ghana was only for skinny people or something equally insensitive, I’m sure …’

Belinda watched Amma stretch the ripped thumb-holes in her jumper.

‘We kept walking, and then this massive queue, like, appeared? Everyone in it was all, like, jostley and impatient. And facing the queue – sort of like everyone had come to see him – there was this little boy and he was crying. I think he was probably about four or five because I wondered if we could be friends. That’s when I noticed his hands and feet. They were tied up. And the dude at the front of the queue, like, whipped off his, his, flip-flop, his – challewate.’

‘We pronounce as cha-la-watt –’

‘And went completely psycho all over the little boy. Laying into him with it. Even when he screamed and shit –’

‘Amma –’

‘And then, like, yeah, I got that everyone else in the line was getting ready to do the same: they were all bending down to take off the one shoe. And we walked past and made small talk when all the uncles arrived, and they said nice things until you handed them cash.’

‘Amma.’

‘So that’s probably the thing I remember most about Ghana. Yeah.’

‘I don’t think that’s a very good story.’

‘No?’

‘Is it necessary, Amma? Eh?’

‘For, for the bofruit, I used a recipe I have known since I was a small girl. My trick is adding the vanilla. Is expensive, that’s why people they don’t like to add, but if you have only one pod, and you use only a few of the small small beans in it, is sufficient. It will give plenty of flavour. In your cupboards I noticed you have many vanillas. So. No problem.’

Outside, the still, white sky seemed to be the sigh Amma released. ‘It doesn’t matter. Really. It doesn’t. None of it does.’

The words travelled lightly from her, along with other, more muttered phrases. Amma stood, walked out, and Belinda’s hands flapped, forgetting how to hide in pockets. Nana’s head was bowed, and she let herself hang like that for a while, as if dragged by the small pendant at her neck, and Belinda reassured herself by looking at the exposed, biscuit-coloured nape, knowing how soft it must be to touch. Belinda wondered if Nana had ever found somewhere quiet and hidden to cry, like she had done in the early days at Aunty and Uncle’s. Crouching in the tool shed, with an oily rag in her mouth and the tears unable to come out was the worst one, on an airless Wednesday. She had ironed and stored Uncle’s handkerchiefs for three hours without stopping. The instructions were that they needed to be folded identically. After attending to at least fifty, it came on her: a falling, falling feeling that had her scuttling around until she found safety, away, breathing fast amongst spanners and wrenches and nails.

It was difficult for Belinda to remember exactly what had brought on that sensation. If it was just the grinding nature of the work. Or a fear that she always had in those early days in Daban, that her dirty, village hands might leave a grimy trace or mark on the fine fabrics she was being asked to handle. Or fear that Aunty would ask her a question about Mother’s life and that Aunty’s clipped voice might make Belinda say too much. Or if the horrible feeling was prompted by the loneliness of being somewhere new, despite the small girl who shadowed her for most of the day. What Belinda could remember clearly was the pressure of the cloth in her mouth; the silencing, muffling force of the fabric on the back of her throat. Painful but comforting at the same time.

Belinda wanted to ask Nana what she should do next but was interrupted by Amma’s return to the room – a swish of loosened plaits, sweep of sleeves, stomp of boots.

‘These are fucking delicious, Be.’

Amma collected three more bofruit and swept away. Belinda’s stirring hands stilled.

9

Even though Amma found the idea of a ‘black Eve’ trite, and even though she didn’t want to be looked at, Amma had agreed to pose that Wednesday afternoon because it was Helena who had asked. Same old, same old: when they were at Prep School and Helena didn’t want to stand next to that girl in assembly or be the nurse again at playtime, there was a lilt in the enunciation of her requests or elegance in the fiddling of her fine, yellow hair that invariably won. So in Helena’s Dulwich conservatory, amongst arrayed yuccas, a coerced Amma found herself holding a Granny Smith at eye level, all for the sake of Helena’s Art coursework. Amma had never ‘sat’ for a portrait before, and the hot awkwardness as she suppressed fidgety itches was something she had no desire to experience ever again. Opposite, as if in response to Amma’s internalised disdain, Helena squinted. Amma watched her baroquely flourish the brush and dab the painting with finality.

‘And now for that promised hashy hash,’ Helena stopped to change the CD from De La Soul to Bob Dylan, wiped her hands on her faded T-shirt with Babar on it, then reached for the wooden pipe to her left and tapped ash from its bowl. She wrestled with her pockets. ‘The dark cloud hasn’t, like, lifted then, ma petite sœur?’ Helena said, peering into the retrieved baggie.

‘What?’

‘Obviously I’m talking about how you’ve been Lily Long-Face all afternoon.’

‘You told me I should “do pensive”, so I’m doing –’

‘– And what about how dry you were at Max’s? Mmm? I needed you there, man.’

‘I was there.’

‘Come on, Am. Support was required. Lavender needed controlling. She’s becoming a real joke. It’s like she’s forgotten that she’s actually, er, supposed to be a feminist?’

Amma rotated her neck until it clicked, then popped the apple on the nearest bookcase.

‘Yeah. You’re probably right. Definitely. Yeah.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Let’s not talk about Max’s. Please.’

‘Fine. That’s totally fine.’ Helena flicked her lighter, took a gulp and let out a luxuriant horn of white. ‘I don’t want you to do or say anything you’d be … uncomfortable with.’

Amma rolled her eyes.

‘Am, I’m trying to be nice. You’re acting like you need someone to be nice to you. Like you want that? So I’m doing my best. OK?’

Helena wiped her tiny mouth with a splattered sleeve and passed the pipe over. Amma inhaled a deeper lungful, then replied through strained exhalation.

‘Really. Let’s chat about something else. As uncharacteristic as it seems, the urge for the ordinary is pressing on me hard, dearest.’

‘That sounds really odd, and … disgusting.’

‘But I didn’t mean it like that.’

The two girls sat in silence, the milky sunlight playing with the air’s bluish haze. Amma rested the pipe by the apple. She wanted to leave, but that would be terrible. She closed her eyes and told herself she could start again. When she opened them, Helena was back at the easel, frowning.

‘What? What’s wrong?’ Amma asked.

‘You’ve really fucked the mood of this painting.’

‘How short-lived kindness and concern are with –’

‘Seriously. You’ve … like, infected it with some sort of weird Daria gloom and shit.’

‘What’s the one about a workman and his tools?’ Amma hopped up, lighter in the head, and walked over to Helena, muttering, ‘Workwoman. Her tools.’

Amma saw wildness on the canvas. Dragged, dripping bars of dirty brown and licks of red. Darker waves near the top. Scratched bits, etched with the pointed end of the brush perhaps. Mum would stand right up close to the thing and complain she couldn’t see what was supposed to be the fruit, what was supposed to be a leg, what was supposed to be an eye. To Amma, the swirl of wet colour in front of her, its indistinctness, the frightening sense that it might morph or become something more, was entirely familiar. She chuckled.

‘What’s funny?’

‘I was thinking to myself. Sorry. Nothing.’

‘Why don’t you think to me as well? It’s only right and proper.’

Helena’s eyebrows and forehead were working so much that the glittery bindi she had decided to wear slipped off. Amma picked it up, passed it over. She watched Helena press the dot back onto herself primly. Helena checked herself in one of the conservatory’s windows and Amma saw how pleased she seemed; how easily that pleasure arose.

‘When have you been most scared?’ Amma asked her.

‘Funny question.’

‘Try. Go on.’

‘What do you need to know for?’

‘Why so reluctant, ma chérie?’

Helena’s pinking eyes flashed. ‘When I thought I might drown. But you know about that. So you’re probably after something –’

‘Doesn’t matter. Keep going.’

‘So, OK, I was about eight or something. Mum was going out with that creepy cellist then.’

‘Eugh, yeah. With the teeth and the fingernails.’

‘The three of us were in Cornwall. He’d never been and Mum was, like, too happs about showing him everything and blah blah. Some afternoon we were on the beach and I swam in the sea. And I hadn’t swum out like crazily far or anything because I’m a good girl and know the rules –’

‘Indeed, indeed.’

‘And I, I had a cramp, like, winding round my leg, like squeezing it? I had no clue what was happening. Fucking terrible, man. Swallowing water. Yelling. It felt like I was doing that for hours, but that’s what happens in those, like, crisis moments, isn’t it? Time stretches? I bet it was probably only fifteen seconds or something before the cellist came and got me. So I suppose he was good for something.’ Helena laughed lightly, reached for a different brush.

Amma didn’t like what she was doing: forcing her friend to perform to prove a point to herself, a point she already understood and whose recognition would bring about no change. But the truth was unavoidable, as Amma watched the excitement with which Helena spoke as she recalled details. Fear was easy for Helena, maybe because it could be talked out, later. Amma could not breezily say what she wanted to; could not play it for laughs.

Amma coughed and shook her head when Helena offered the pipe. She returned to the raffia armchair and picked up the apple. ‘OK, let’s keep going then. Was it like this?’ Amma tried to replicate how her body had been. ‘Or this?’

‘What, now? We’re back on? I can’t keep up.’

‘More like this? H? More like this?’

Gravely, Helena cleaned her brush in murky water, sniffed and sighed, but Amma only half-heard, because she was looking at the apple’s buffed skin, wondering how Helena would react if she pressed in the three soft brown bruises on its surface: three tiny dips of disgusting tenderness.

10

Earlier that day, in Belinda’s new bedroom, Nana picked through Belinda’s belongings. Belinda looked on, tightly wrapping her fingers around her thumbs. Nana inspected each item, making disappointed noises in response to every T-shirt or pair of shorts. Nana started moaning about how she never got to have a girly, girly shopping time any more. Nana talked about Belinda exploring her new ends; she thought they should do it quickly, before the sticky weather broke. Nana promised they would have too much fun together.

So they headed out for Marks and Spencer. Belinda walked just behind Nana as they made their way along noisy Brixton High Road. Flat, late summer heat hung from Belinda’s shoulders. The sky was bored, the traffic was angry. Everything around them beeped or screamed. People on bikes turned around to swear at people in cars. Three striped white vans with swirling blue lights moaned. Buses bent round corners looking like sick caterpillars. Both Nana and Belinda were careful to avoid stubby black bins that choked on packets and bottles, and that made Nana hiss ‘Lambeth Council’ like those words were bad kenkey on her tongue. A tall man with wheels on his shoes sailed through it all peacefully. He overtook them until he became a thin, upright line between all the bodies in the distance. There was no space; the road was too full, the pavement too narrow to hold all the people pushing along it. Nana marched on, pointing forward with two certain fingers, swinging her yellow handbag with the little LVs on it. Belinda tried to match the pace but she kept nearly bumping into everyone because the surroundings pulled at her attention so much.

On her left, outside a huge shop – Iceland – a group of children played silver drums that were like the buckets she had used when fetching water from the stream when the village pump wasn’t working. The children’s music was a wobbling sound that shimmered on the air. Two women with flopping hats stopped to dance in front of the band, wiggling their bottoms and holding their breasts. Near an even bigger store – Morleys – muscled men wearing small vests had arranged themselves in a circle. They casually held big guns made from coloured plastic. A joke of an army. They pressed their pretend weapons into the ground as though steadying themselves. A larger circle of girls formed around the men. The girls picked at the small jewels growing out of their belly buttons, touched the drawings on their arms, talked to the little dogs at their heels that bit at nothing. Every few seconds one of the men pulled a trigger and water sprayed. The girls shouted like they were surprised, the dogs became furious and the men all shook hands. Nana muttered. Belinda wished she could make out the words but Nana seemed to be trying hard to speak very quietly.

Opposite Superdrug, Belinda tripped and landed on her knees. A girl in a red cap with a wad of leaflets in her hands helped Belinda back up. Through a giggle, the girl asked Belinda if she was OK. It took Belinda time to get to her feet and to understand what had been said because she was distracted by the picture on the leaflet: a black baby with squeezed eyes and tears moistening dusty cheeks. The girl asked Nana to do something about saving children for only £5 a month. Nana was not interested.

Belinda knew what crowds were like. She had battled through New Tafo. She had been in packs of brave pedestrians who ran across the crazy junction near Kwadwo Kannin Street. But it was different when so many of the rushing faces of the crowd were white.

Obviously she had seen oburoni before: Leonardo DiCaprio and Julia Roberts in the magazines Aunty left on the bathroom floor, the big men on the news, the silly young man in the zoo, the families at Heathrow. Belinda was familiar with the idea that their hair was weird, their voices weirder, like the sound ignored the mouth and came out through the nose. But here they were even stranger. They seemed so determined. Or focused. Yes, their pale stares were very focused on something important. And they themselves were important too, with their heads up and shoulders square and faces on the edge of anger. They were certainly too important to notice her. But if, for a second, they did let their gazes drop on her, would they dislike what they saw? Would the sight of her bring more red to their faces? Stepping aside for a child who was held back by a stretchy leash surely meant for one of the yapping dogs, Belinda wondered if Nana had ever felt the same foolish fear of whites. She wondered how Nana had quieted it. Because how could you live here with that prickling fear? How could you breathe, think, do anything?

Finally, they got to Marks and Spencer. As they passed through sliding doors, Belinda tried to find the source of the whining background music. Nana moved them on, drawn by various red signs. Belinda squinted in the hard light. Rails of dresses divided the space, blocks of shifting pattern. Alongside those were tables of blouses: some folded, others slumping messily towards the floor. Women grabbed things from hangers, checked tags trailing from cuffs before tossing the things back. Younger girls – the daughters of these women? – found everything funny and so kept laughing and showing tiny teeth held together by metal wires. Nana swung round and pressed a green top with only one sleeve against Belinda’s chest, smoothing it down with firm strokes. Belinda held her breath as Nana screwed up her nose, dropped the top then tried out a blue version. Nana didn’t like that one either.

They went on like that for a while; with Nana thrusting spotty, frilly, velvety things at Belinda. After what felt like ten minutes, with dampness collecting at the back of Belinda’s knees, Belinda’s eyes found the Childrenswear section ahead. It was marked out by a poster that hung down from the ceiling. In the poster, a mixed-race girl wore the stupidest of smiles. Many of the adverts here had mixed-race girls in them, Belinda realised. After Nana ushered Belinda into a changing room, Belinda snorted because she knew exactly what Mary would want to do. Mary would want to tear the picture down, stamp on it and tell ‘someone in charge’ that they should replace it with something much, much better: a nice photo of her. Belinda snorted again. The white cubicle around her was neat and tight, her reflection in the mirror was still. The shoppers’ chatter had reduced to just a swishing in the background. There was nothing but that silly thought of Mary and coolness around her ankles. But then a hand poked through the curtain. It clutched three denim shirts.

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