Hold

‘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.’