Prologue
Surulere, Lagos, March 1997
Ayomide’s POV
Three months of dating Lekan Adeyemi had taught Ayomide small, exact things: that he could not forgive lateness, that he took his tea black on Sundays and would not touch coffee before noon, that he only spoke when he had something worth saying. The drive to Surulere passed in his usual economical silence, and she filled it by checking her lipstick in the visor mirror, twice too many times to pretend she wasn’t nervous.
“You don’t have to look so nervous,” he said, eyes on the road.
“I’m not nervous.”
“You’ve checked your face six times since Ikoyi.”
“I was making sure my lipstick hadn’t run off somewhere.”
“It hasn’t.”
“You didn’t even look.”
“I don’t have to.”
He said it the way he said most things, like a fact filed and closed, and something in her chest loosened a little at the certainty of it. She smoothed the cream silk of the dress she’d bought two days before from a boutique in Gbagada, conservative at the neckline, expensive at the seams — the kind of dress, she’d told the shop girl, a man’s mother could not find fault with.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mrs. Adeyemi was at the gate before the gateman had finished dragging it open, arms out, voice already climbing.
“My daughter! So this is the famous Ayomide.” She hugged her. “The one who has stolen my son’s timeandhis silence.”
Ayomide’s face burned. “Good afternoon, ma—”
Lekan sighed, long-suffering. “You’ve embarrassed her already.”
His mother pulled back, grinning. “I’ve barely started.”
The laughter that followed was easy, effortless. Ayomide felt some of the tension in her shoulders uncoil.Perhaps this wouldn’t be so difficult after all.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The sitting room was cool, shaded by louvred windows, the ceiling fan turning lazy circles above a glass coffee table stacked with that morning’sGuardianand a half-finished crossword. Ayomide perched on the edge of the sofa, her knees pressed together, while Lekan sat beside her and tapped her leg gently to reassure her. It was a beautiful house that was well lived in; framed pictures of Lekan through the years, his siblings, and a white and black picture of his parents on their wedding day lined the walls. The radio in the corner murmured Fela, the bassline a low thrum beneath their polite chatter.
Then there was laughter from the kitchen, young and unguarded, and Seun came through first with a tray of chilled Fanta, and behind her a girl Ayomide did not know — small, light-skinned, sixteen or seventeen at most, in a plain white T-shirt tucked into denim shorts, her hair in neat cornrows, gold studs and nothing else. Nothing about her tried. That was what struck Ayomide first — a prettiness with no effort behind it, and therefore no defense against being looked at.
“There they are,” Seun said, grinning at her brother. “Brother is home.”
The girl looked up at Lekan, and something crossed her face too fast to name, and was gone before it finished arriving — her mouth arranging itself back into an ordinary, well-mannered smile.
“This is my best friend,” Seun said, tucking an arm through the girl’s. “Our neighbour. Imade.”
“Good afternoon,” Imade said.
“Good afternoon, Imade. Nice to meet you.” She put her hand out.
Imade took it at once. “The pleasure is mine.”
It was a perfectly correct thing to say, delivered perfectly correctly, and Ayomide could find nothing wrong with it and yet felt, faintly, as though she’d been handed something rehearsed — a warmth measured out to the exact permitted amount and no further. She could not have explained why she noticed. She simply filed it, the way Lekan filed things.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over drinks, Lekan asked after both girls’ results the way he always did, university being, in this family, a subject that outranked weather. Seun answered first — “surviving,” as always — and then he turned.
“And Arike. How did it go?”
Ayomide looked between them. Seun had introduced her as Imade not five minutes before.
Something went out of Imade’s face, just slightly. “It wasn’t—” She stopped, looked at the floor. “I missed it. My GPA. I wanted three point five.”
He didn’t ask how far she’d missed it by. He reached over and drew her in against his side by the shoulder, an easy, unthinking motion, the kind you make simply because you have made it a hundred times before.
“You got what?”
“Three point three five.”
He laughed — actually laughed, a sound Ayomide realized she had heard perhaps twice in three months.
“You tried.”
“I should have tried harder.”
“And you will, next semester.” He said it the way he’d said it hasn’t about the lipstick — flat, closed, not up for argument. He gave her shoulder a small shake. “You hear me?”
A smile got loose from her despite herself.
“There,” Mrs. Adeyemi said, pleased. “I keep telling him — Arike is not a child anymore.”
“This one?” Lekan looked down at the girl still tucked against him. “This one will always be my baby.”
The whole room laughed, Seun loudest of all, Imade ducking her head into her own shoulder as if she could hide the colour coming into her face. Ayomide laughed because it was the thing to do. Underneath it, she was watching Lekan the way she might watch a stranger wearing her boyfriend’s clothes — the same face, the same voice, doing something with tenderness she had never once seen him do for her.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Adeyemi arrived before they sat to eat, pressed a hand warmly to Ayomide’s. “I haven’t laid eyes on you since ’94. Your father still tells everyone his daughter abandoned his company for an Oil company.”
“He always says that?”
“He reminds me every chance he gets.”
Lunch went easily enough until Mrs. Adeyemi, with the timing mothers seem to be issued at birth, set her fork down and looked fondly at her son.
“So. When am I becoming a grandmother?”
“I’m working on something first,” Lekan said, not looking up from his rice.
“You’ve been working on something since university.”
“What’s this mysterious project,” his father said, “that keeps outranking my grandchildren?”
“I’ll tell you when I’m ready.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When the plates were cleared, Imade reached for Lekan’s first, without being asked. “Should I?”
“Yes, please.”
Nobody looked up. Not Mrs. Adeyemi, not Seun, not Lekan himself, as though the question and its answer had been exchanged in that exact order a hundred Sundays running. Later, when she came back with bowls of pepper soup, his went down in front of him before anyone else’s, and he thanked her without lifting his eyes from his food, the way you thank someone for a thing you’ve stopped noticing is a kindness.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The album came out after the soup, the way albums always do, and the afternoon dissolved into the usual archaeology of missing teeth and school uniforms and birthday cakes gone slightly wrong. One photograph stopped Ayomide’s hand mid-turn: a boy of twelve, unmistakably Lekan, holding a baby high over his head, the baby’s whole face turned to him and nowhere else, her small hands reaching down towards him.
“That’s Imade,” Mrs. Adeyemi said, leaning in. “Five months old, no more. The moment he came home from boarding school, she reached for him — my brother grabbed the camera before anyone could stop him. That’s where the name started. Arike. It simply stayed.”
Ayomide looked from the photograph to the young woman now perched on the arm of Lekan’s sofa, deep in some quiet conversation with him that had nothing to do with the rest of the table, and understood, in the plain unhurried way one understands a fact that has been sitting in front of you the whole time: Imade was not simply Seun’s friend who happened to live next door. She belonged to this house. Not by blood. By something older than blood, or at least older than Ayomide.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The drive back to Ikoyi went a long way in silence before she let the question out.
“What happened with Imade earlier? Her results?”
“She wanted three point five. Got three point three five.” He said it lightly, eyes on the road.
“That’s what upset her?”
“She thought I’d be disappointed.”
“Would you have been?”
“I’ve always pushed her academically. She takes it hard. I’m not actually disappointed, but as big brother, I have to act it.”
“You were very gentle with her.”
“I’ve known her since she was a baby.”
“I noticed.”
“She practically grew up in that house.” A small smile, private, not meant for the car. “I was the only one who could hold her without her screaming the place down.”
Ayomide laughed despite herself. “So she’s family.”
“She is.”
“You don’t treat Seun quite the same way, though.”
“Don’t I?” He considered it, or pretended to. “I hadn’t noticed.”
The silence that followed had a different weight to it than the one before. Ikoyi Bridge went under the tires. She looked at the side of his face for longer than was polite, then out at the water instead.
“What were you two talking about, after lunch?”
He was quiet long enough that she thought he might let the question pass altogether. Then, “She said she thought you were beautiful.”
“Really.”
“She was worried you wouldn’t like her.”
Something in Ayomide’s chest, which had been holding a shape all afternoon without her quite noticing, let itself go slack. She settled back into the leather and watched Lagos go by in the dark — the roadside suya stands lighting their coals, a molue slowing to take on passengers, the gutters running with the day’s last rain — and told herself, quite reasonably, that there was nothing here to hold onto after all.
