At the beginning, the holidays didn’t pass quickly, as his mum had told him they would. Timi looked at the calendar in the kitchen every day, counting the number of nights until school would start again and he would go home.
The things that he mostly noticed at his auntie’s house were the sounds in the kitchen. His auntie loved to cook and, as she threw things into a pan, the heat and steam and the bubbling and the spitting made Timi think that the whole kitchen 53was alive, as though it were a dragon breathing fire and lashing its tail.
They didn’t go out very often, but there was a big window that looked down onto a largish park and at first Timi spent most of his time there, gazing down at the patch of the grass and the curly shapes of the tree leaves from above. He thought about his tree in the library and he also found himself imagining all the things that he might do 54if he were in that park. Perhaps he would feel the tips of the blades of the grass on his palm, so that it would tickle him. Maybe he would listen to the rustling sound the leaves would make when they were swayed by a breeze. He would grow quiet, sitting there at the window, by himself, imagining he was somewhere else.
But then Isaac, who loved building things, started to make the biggest tower he could, in the corner of the sitting room, and Timi got drawn into helping him. They used plastic bricks at the base and when they ran out they turned to bits of cardboard 55that his auntie was going to put into the recycling. They had to stand on chairs to add more to it and then, when they couldn’t reach, even when they stood on a chair, Isaac’s older sister and his dad joined in too. They worked on it every day and soon, without Timi realising it, the tower was skimming the ceiling and there was only one day left before he would be returning home.
‘We did it,’ Isaac said proudly, but Timi’s auntie said it was an eyesore. Isaac asked her what that meant and she said that it made her eye feel sore, that was what an eyesore was.
‘Oh,’ Isaac said. ‘Well, I still like it.’
Isaac insisted that it was solid, but everyone still walked past the tower very carefully in case it fell down. 56
He cried when Timi left and wouldn’t let go of his leg. He wanted to come on the long bus journey with them, but Timi’s auntie asked him who would take care of the tower if both he and Timi were gone and so Isaac stayed behind.
It seemed far longer than two weeks since he and his auntie had made the journey across the city, and Timi felt different inside to how he had when he’d sat on the bus on the way over. He was sad to say goodbye to Isaac and he wondered 57how long his auntie would let him keep the tower up in the sitting room. When he asked her, she chuckled and said: ‘I’ll give him one afternoon.’
Timi didn’t like to imagine Isaac with his tower gone, and was unsure of when he might see him again, but he was looking forward to seeing his mum. And Bisi too. Maybe she’d grown like the tree had – all in one go – and so she’d be able to play with him now and she wouldn’t just cry for milk.
And he wanted to see the tree in the library, of course.
He wanted to know if it had grown too.