At first I revelled in this learning, for I perceived that I might be able to contain the sounds that threatened to engulf me. I discovered in everything Father said a certain way of compartmentalizing the world. Where once the sounds had segued together, now, with my father’s teachings, I learned that each object and every sound had its opposite. I discovered that East and West repelled one another. I understood that Cat and Sparrow were coupled in mutual hate. And yet it struck me that, even as this conception of the world made it easy to know, name and thus understand, it also made the world unfree. And, of course, on all sides resounded the tick-tock of the pocket watch. I recoiled instinctively, since my inclination was to play. I found renewed joy in acrobatics. Night after night I was subject to my father’s noisome words. It was then I decided to remain in the womb, quiet in my submerged cavern, where miracles daily occurred; there, amid the amnion, I was free to tumble and dream.
Meanwhile, on the outside, Mother lay supine on her reclining chair. She sipped camomile tea. She ate limes. An ostrich-feather fan relieved momentarily the sticky fly-midden of heat. By the eighth month of her pregnancy, the weight of me was too great; fat-bellied, immobile, she would call for Ade — our servant-boy — to press wet cottons to her forehead and footsoles. In the day, when Father was at the Executive Board, Mother would clasp her arms tightly around her abdomen, crushing me into a half-portion of the womb. Sometimes she exposed me to the daylight, and I felt nearly poached and I twisted and sobbed. There were occasions when she would feather her stomach with lightly nerved fingers and call me her ‘little hatchling’, her ‘bald dove’, her ‘stubborn splinter’. Her courage would suddenly leave her. She voiced fears: that her slim hips — ‘boy’s hips’, Father called them — might prevent me from slipping out whole, or else squeeze me into horrid shapes. At night came the temporary relief of darkness, and all my energies came to the fore. I would kick and flail, testing my new subtlety of movement. It was then, overcome, she would weep silently into her pillow. She cursed me under her breath, then Father for his pleasure that had brought this about. She began to call on saints and whisper prayers, although she had no religion. Father would rise from his bed heavily, aware that he could not better the situation, and fumble for the border of his mosquito net. He would climb out and stand over Mother, who was wet with perspiration, not daring to lift her netting. ‘Are you safe, Evelyn?’ he would say. And, ‘Is he coming now? Shall I call the doctor?’ We were like enemies, Mother and I, joined, but in mutual loathing.
I was, I believe, an unreality to her. She tried to understand children and called for Ade.
‘Play, Ade. I want to know about games.’
‘I play outside.’
‘You’ll kindly adapt.’
Ade would visit her during the long, hot afternoons. He showed her how to fold a square of paper into a point, press a thumb along each edge, then snap one’s fingers and transform the paper into a white aeroplane. He made telephones from empty cans and lengths of string. He broke bread into pieces and threw them from the window; all at once Hoopoe birds arrived and snatched the morsels from the air. It was learning about play that shifted her idea of me. She understood that soon I would be a presence on the outside. And when she understood this, she wanted rid of me. Until then we had been indissolubly tied to one another. I was nourished by her; equally, my mood and vigour or weaknesses affected her so finely that it changed her skin colour and textures and dictated her eating patterns as well as her body’s shape. So we both understood that we were one thing and not a pair. But then, once I had reached the eighth month of my womb-term, and had manoeuvred into the birth position, Mother began to endow her swelling with the aspect of a recognizable form. And she wouldn’t have me inside. It was a crushingly hot morning in May. Father was at Ibadan for three days. Mother, dressed in a white wrapper, left the house with Ben — Ade’s father and our cook and driver. They drove west along the Ikoyi Road, which ran between the golf course and the European cemetery, crossed the Macgregor Canal and on past the Brazilian quarter to the law courts. There, at Tinubu Square, Mother instructed Ben to let her out of the car. Walking through the dusty labyrinth of streets, she came to a lane where a clay hut lurched against a wall. She found them inside: mother, father and idiot son. They stood in the cluttered room, utterly remote from one another, their skin cracked and veined with mud. The man and the woman each held a teacup from England, the large, breakfast kind, flower-patterned like the cloth which covered the old woman’s swollen hips. And the cups, which also lined the shelves, were cracked like their faces, with dirt also in the veins and without handles so that the pair — though not the son, who hadn’t the grip to hold anything but the flowery rag he wrenched between the fingers of one hand — encircled them, tenderly, as if the cups themselves, and not their contents, were precious. Now and then a lorry passed by on the road outside, which caused the cups on the shelves to rattle and also the supply tins, cut in half and their tops discarded, which it seemed held the family’s possessions — seeds, dried potatoes, gin, nails, nuts and bolts, clippings from The Times, resins, amulets, medicines, but also weirder things: shrunken monkey’s heads, chameleon skins, white rooster feathers. The old woman shifted her cumbersome weight and gestured Mother to a corner of the room where tins of many-coloured liquids stood. Mother paid for a blue vial and pocketed it away.
I had not heard it at first, perhaps because of the whine of the traffic, but gradually, as I had become accustomed to the stillness of the room, not stillness but something weightier, viscous and blank-dark, I had started to hear a low yellow groan, a continuous whine voiced not out of conscious despair, nor anything thought-of, but simply to occupy the quiet. Later, when Mother was back at our house in Ikoyi, I understood that that strange groan had come from between the toothless gums of the idiot boy.
And it was that same unyielding naked moan that accompanied me during the following days, days in which every other sound was eclipsed, those shattered fighting days. Mother had swallowed the blue liquid and spent the next morning climbing stairs, and in the afternoon sweated hours in a hot bath. She went to bed after and shuddered, sobbed openly. The rainy season had begun, and I too was weeping, clamped limpet-like to the womb wall. At times Ben came in from the kitchen, bringing food and limewater. He said he was going to call the doctor, he knew what was coming, but Mother shooed him away, it was all right, he was not coming now, it was only a dress rehearsal. It felt like I was being forced by a vast sea, the indrifts came with pain, and I fought hard against Mother and her poison’s will. But I knew I had won when her muscles relaxed and she cursed the old woman for giving her a weak drug.
When Father returned he found her in bed, still weeping. She shouldered him away and refused his touch lest he upset her and me inside. ‘What have I done?’ she whispered.
I do not know whether the poison was designed to finish me or simply to induce the birth. Whatever her intention by taking it, it made me more determined to stay put. Soon I had dwelt longer than nine months. Mother now lay motionless in the day, occasionally dozing. Father dared not leave her and spent much time chattering. His talk was different than before. Now I heard the Arthur Ransome stories, the adventures of the Arabian Nights. He read aloud portions of certain novels. I listened with puzzlement, although never with indifference. And the longer I delayed my birth, the keener my sense of hearing became.