‘Oh, Echun,’ Aya says. ‘Echun, why? What’s wrong?’
‘Yeye,’ he says. ‘I know who I am. Shhh, I know. I know. But I have to be different. I have to be stronger. Needles and drowning; your Papa is trying to make me kill myself. But. . but I can’t let him take my ache, no, no, he cannot have it all, he must leave my ache with me.’
He opens the door for London — the Lagos door is nailed shut. And he has matches. The basement cloth is slippery underfoot, he has wet them with something moss-smelling, something unordinary. Aya goes to him, but he holds her away with terror, as if she is a chemical rag that will stain him. He keeps saying he wants her, but that she is her father’s eye. It is funny how afraid he is. Aya stops fighting him. She wants to spit at him, she wants to scratch him and hurt him, she wants him to die, she wants to go with him. She is drawn to him, sure and true, by her own instinct, the instinct of the runaway to be away, always away, always leaving, and running, running, running for home, hoping never to get there. Echun is beautiful, she sees that again. Of course it is because he is a trick.
‘Give me the matches,’ Aya says.
He does not trust her — he only gives them up to her slowly. He is ready to fight her. Without taking her eyes from his, Aya strikes and lights a match.
‘Go,’ she says, and drops it. Heat throws a swift and screaming shape between them. Aya strikes more matches. These flames are hungry, glad, lean. They move in colourless crests.
‘Shut the door,’ she says.
She does not see his face as he does; from behind the fire she cannot be certain whether he closes the door quickly or slowly. She thinks, Poor Echun. It doesn’t matter that he wants to keep his ache; her Papa will take it back. What matters is that Echun doesn’t want her enough to risk being found.
Greedy Echun. There is much that Aya would have risked for him.
Aya climbs higher to escape the noise of wood breaking beneath the flames. She dreams of what happens next, after the fire has taken her bones. She squints through veils of smoke, follows the trail to the top of the house, lies down under the sweeping glass ceiling. And Amy is there, Amy in her baggy dungarees, but she has changed. Aya pauses long and looks her fill at Amy in the Kayodes’ rocking chair: Amy’s Ochun-lips take a straight and sober line; her Ochun-skin, newly hazelnut, glows; her open eyes contain only the tenderest blessings of darkness; her hair is plaited into thick, shimmering vines. Aya doesn’t touch her — she leaves her be.
Fire climbs the stairs.
There is more time, but not much.
If you are lucky, you lose a mother to get another.
If you are lucky, you shed a body to climb inside another.
Sometimes a child with wise eyes is born. And some people will call that child an old soul. And that is surely enough to make God laugh.
This morning I wait for the plumber. I wait and wait and the plumber doesn’t come, and while I wait I try to mend the leak with my calm.
Indoor rain. It does not stop, I don’t know what it means — something has opened somewhere and the rain is just there. Raintalk.
I phone Aaron. He answers so quickly that I barely realise I’ve finished dialling and I think he’s called me. He says, ‘What’s wrong?’
I pace the sitting room, heel to toe. ‘Did you call?’
‘Did I. .?’
‘Aaron, did you call a plumber?’
He says, very slowly, ‘This is why you’re calling me?’
He is too loud. I wince and hunch my shoulders; my eyes are fixed to the phone pad, the imprints my writing has left on the paper beneath.
‘The plumber isn’t here yet. How come?’ I say.
‘Maja,’ he says. Disbelief brings him down to baritone. But I walk myself into the bedroom, asking him, asking him. He says, ‘Listen, I forgot to call. I forgot. I’ll do it tonight. I’m bringing back some stuff about Lamaze classes. I think you dismissed them too quickly when Dr Maxwell suggested them.’
I have found Aaron’s jeans, folded into his top drawer. He is talking about birth pain management, and in my palm I have my crumpled list of phone numbers from his pocket, the figures so small that they disappear into the crinkles. I have had to work at the paper with my fingernails to open it out. Aaron has folded and rolled my list of plumbers until it has taken on the hard, round unity of a shell.
This is how small my hysteric makes me; this is how far she takes me from speech when it is important that I speak. This is why she must be dissolved.
It is early, or late — 4 a.m. I watch Aaron shaving at the bathroom mirror; he hums the guitar undertow of a Kofi Amese song. And he is careful; his lip wrinkles thoughtfully as he stops after every scrape to consider his chin. It was Papi who gave me the impression of shaving as an early-morning dare-devil ritual, the will-he-won’t-he-slit-his-throat in a wash of soapy lather. Papi winked at the mirror-me, then turned his head from side to side, judging what work was needed. Then he tilted his head upwards, and flashed his razor up and over his jaw, flaying hair from his face in two or three simple strokes. I was certain that he would bleed — it was impossible for his skin not to open up under such provocation. He laughed when I squeaked and jumped high, holding out my hands with a will to catch his life and throw it back into him that way. Then he told me — in a deep African accent that I never tired of his assuming — that my mother had worked a very strong juju for him so that his throat might be cut but he would never die.
When Papi’s hands began to knot up and loll heavy on his lap, he said that he’d decided to accept the dignity of facial hair. His razor rusted in the bathroom cabinet because Papi wouldn’t let Chabella throw it away.
Aaron says to me, ‘That plumber’s coming back tomorrow.’
With one hand to his face, preparing his cheek for the razor, he laughs at me. He begins to say something else, but starts whistling another highlife song instead. When I come to kiss his other cheek, he smiles at the mirror-me as if he knew that that was what I was going to do all along.
Last night Aaron came home with a single nappy pressed flat in its plastic wrapping. It was tiny. I said, ‘There’s a child in the newborn bay that’s missing that.’
Remorse came into his eyes with a speed that made me suspicious. ‘I should give it back?’
There being nothing for me to say to that, he opened the pack and widened the nappy’s waistband with his thumbs. When he looked at me and held the nappy up for me to see properly, his gaze was sceptical.
I laughed at him. ‘What? You thought a baby wouldn’t be that big, or that small?’
His thumbs were still hooked into the elastic. He stretched them wider and said, ‘Maja, come on. To come to this from the womb, where there wasn’t enough space to properly wave your arms and legs about in the first place. I mean, look at this thing. Look at the shape of the leg-holes. And the way you have to tape the waist in. He’ll think he’s been moved to a higher-security prison. He’ll make frequent escapes and we’ll have to lock him up again.’
I remembered to tell him about the kick my son gave me in exchange for a song. He lay his head on my lap and murmured things to my son, things in Ewe not meant for me. Everything was still; everything in the room, every part of me was trying to listen to Aaron’s words and wanting to understand. I took his hand, ready to travel my stomach. But he sat up and said gently, ‘Maja.’ He meshed my fingers with his, touched his lips to mine.
I go home because Papi and Chabella want me to go to Tomás’s sports-day race with them. The first thing I do when I get home is go upstairs to my black and white bedroom. I stand at the window. What I like best about my room is that in the late afternoon, if I am tired, I only have to wait. Then, sunset. Since light refuses to waste itself, it slips onto me, all over me. I lie down on my bed and I don’t have to do anything else. Something else breathes for me. But Chabella will not let me stay in my bed. It is hard to know what is important to Tomás, so we should not take this risk, we should not miss his race.