‘What you reading?’
Marie looked up and moved her hair back over her ear with a finger from where it was falling from her face to the page. The strands were long and black, and catching light from the tall window up to the top landing. The stairs were where she went to be by herself, but she let me sit beside her if I kept quiet. I wasn’t supposed to speak, but I could see she was coming out of the dreamy spell when only her lips moved, with the one finger she used to curl over and turn the pages.
‘The Count of Monte Cristo,’ she said. She was older than me, she knew how to read really well. I could see the words but they weren’t real like the streaks of light in her hair or the pale skin where the hair parted in the middle. Her wrists were long and skinny and so were her fingers, when she pointed at something on the page it felt like she was there and happy in what she was reading. I didn’t want her to stop. ‘Look and see if it’s clear.’
I scrambled down the stairs and looked over the banister to the hall and scrambled back up to tell her there was no one and she could run down without being seen.
I sat up on my own after she’d gone and thought about her. The dust was still swirling from where she’d stood to run back to her room at the bottom, the book under her arm and her hair swaying from the awkward way she stepped from side to side going down the stairs like she wasn’t used to how long her legs were growing. I could smell the soap she used and feel the warm patch on the carpet where she’d been sitting. The Count of Monte Cristo sounded like numbers and reading at the same time, I wanted to be able to see what she was thinking and what was making her face look so still and her breathing soft.
It was Sunday morning and everyone was having baths, only I hadn’t had mine because I’d been sweeping the top stairs down to the front room. Busola said I had to do that landing too, but that was her job, she had to do it along with the front room and the bedroom on that floor. My mum told her to jump in the bath because they were going to church and Busola dropped her brush and ran, so I had to do it when my dad came and shouted at me and I was fuming. By the time I finished, Marie and her dad were going to the bathroom and I felt sticky and dirty and had to wait as he waved his soap at me in the hall. He was tall and gangly and looked like a gangster in the films with hairy arms and shoulders in a white vest tucked in to high-waisted trousers. Even his toes were hairy in his flip-flops. Everyone thought he was handsome, my mum said it to Marie’s mum, but he had a lot of hair and it flopped over on one side of his head where he combed it to a point. It was thick and glossy and black, and made the smile of his teeth look really white as he waved at me with his head leaned over on the same side as his hair. I wasn’t sure if he kept his head down because he was shy or because he was too tall for the doors. But when he was drinking he lifted up his voice and his arms and told stories and argued with people who weren’t even there.
Marie said he was West Indian from Guyana and I knew her mum was Irish like mine, but he got on with my dad and my mum liked him except when she went down because he’d stormed out and left them, and my mum had to talk them out of packing up and going as well and not telling him. ‘He’ll rue the day he’ll look and ye’re out of his reach,’ she said, ‘but leave it to God.’ Marie’s mum cried a lot and so did Marie. Their room had boxes piled up against the walls and wardrobes and they sat on the bed crying because there wasn’t much room to move. My mum cried too when they killed Bobby Kennedy, sitting on the bed with Marie’s mum, but a man came round with framed photographs of the three Kennedy brothers smiling and one got hung up in the room in a gap between the boxes. We had one too, so it was always smiles and tears when I thought about Marie’s mum being married to Jimmy Singh and my mum talking about the sacrifices you had to make to be with a man you loved.
When Manus put his head round the stairs and said it was our turn to have a bath, I told him to go first and Connor because I was still on the top stair sulking. I knew it was going to be lukewarm and have dirty rings round it after them, but it served my mum right if I turned out dirty because she shouldn’t have let Busola get away with just running off. But that’s when Marie came up – her mum had gone to church without her.
‘Can I stay here and read?’ she said.
It was only my stairs because I’d swept them, but it made me feel good that I could move out the way and let her sit where it was clean.
‘Can I stay with you?’
She nodded and sat down two steps where the light could fall on to the book, and I sat beside her.
‘What’s that?’ I said, but she put her long finger to her lips and started reading. I could have waited until the bath went cold with her reading and hooking her hair back behind her ear and the strands falling one by one slowly back on to the page.
‘I’m going to get my revenge,’ she said, shutting the book when I told her it was clear to go down. And that’s how she flew downstairs, with her hair swaying from side to side.
Tunde came again with his dad. It woke me up from thinking about Marie. I heard the front door and my dad called out from the front room, ‘Answer the door!’ I just listened and let Connor come out the bedroom and go downstairs to get it. I thought I could quickly go down and get in the bedroom, but my dad came out and saw me on the stairs and frowned. I still had my dirty clothes on and he told me, ‘Go and wash.’ Tunde and his dad were on the stairs with Connor coming up behind them so I stood back in the bedroom doorway to let them pass. Mr Lawal came up on to the landing with a suitcase and did a stoop to kneel to my dad and Tunde came up after without looking at me and went past to follow them into the front room. He was younger than me and dressed in Nigerian clothes with a hat that was too big for his head and sleeves that covered his hands so he had to keep folding them back on to his arms. He had a watch on his wrist. He looked weighed down and it served him right. Connor was trying to push past me to get in the bedroom out the way and finish dressing. My dad leaned out the front room again before he could get away and said, ‘Yinka, bring beer,’ so he had to turn back and go to the kitchen. Then my dad looked at me and said, ‘What are you still doing? Go and bath!’
The water was cold and all the towels were damp. I put my hand in and swirled it round and the black marks stayed stuck to the side, so I pulled out the plug and sat down on the towels. They left the bath in so I’d have to clean it up. I always had to do everything. Florence and Mr Babalola weren’t even up yet, and I didn’t know where Mr Ajani and the others were, so it was just me cleaning up for everyone else and watching the flat, soapy grey water sink down in the bath. Marie said I could look at her books when she wasn’t reading them, but I couldn’t go and get them because I wasn’t allowed in her room. Only my mum could go in, and I had to try and follow her, but then she told me, ‘Don’t touch anything.’
The whirlpool was starting to form over the plughole. I tried to put my finger in without it touching the sides. There was one book with a picture of the Three Musketeers looking like a fairy story with hats and curly feathers and buckled shoes, but I couldn’t turn over the page to see what was next because Marie was in there looking at it and closed its cover on the bed. My mum was marking the rent in a book and Marie’s mum was counting money out of a small bag and saying she’d get the rest back off Marie’s dad as soon as she could, and they set off talking again. Marie wasn’t letting me see what was in the book, she was twisting a strand of her hair in both hands with her long feet poking off the edge of the bed and frowning. ‘Can I look?’ I said, and she shook her head looking angry. It wasn’t even at me, it was at her mum saying it wasn’t her dad, it was those other fellas, he’d got in with a bad crowd, an Indian fella and a black fella, they were leading him astray, and there wasn’t room for drink and a family, he’d have to stay out, but he’ll lose that job, then where would they be if she hadn’t her own little trickle of money coming in, out of time and out on the street for the price of her own self-respect and stupidity. ‘Soonest mended,’ my mum said, because when she looked up from the rent book she saw us. Marie was scowling and her eyes were wet to the brim, angry and lit up. The look changed suddenly and she kicked my hand off the bed where I was leaning like she was blaming me.
The door banged on the latch and made me jump. The bath water had run out and it was Mr Babalola trying to get in, ‘Ah! Everybody’s at home? How long now?’ He knew it was me and I could hear Florence in the background talking up to someone in the top kitchen from the backyard, so I said, ‘Out in a minute! Just rinsing!’ There wasn’t time for a bath so I got undressed and cleaned the tub from the inside, crouching down and splashing some water over me and using one of the damp towels to dry off. There was lots of water on the floor, so I put another towel down to wipe it up and got dressed again in my old clothes. ‘Coming!’ I said, and undid the latch and swung the door open. There was no one there, so I let it bang shut and quickly cleared the towels up in case they complained and I got in trouble.
‘Take your time,’ Florence said as I got in from the backyard. She was sitting in the downstairs kitchen with the door open, and Mr Babalola in his pyjama bottoms and vest boiling a pot of water for breakfast. My mum said they weren’t married, but they looked like they were. He smiled at me and flicked water from the wooden spoon he was holding under the tap, because that’s what he did when he wanted your attention. It got me in the face and dripped down my front. ‘Number one, omi ko l’ota, you can’t fear water,’ he said. ‘Number two, godliness will go together with cleanliness. Number three, how are you this morning? Number four, greet your mother for me.’ I bowed down and was going to go when Florence said something to him in Yoruba and he shushed her. I wasn’t sure about her, sometimes she was nice, when my dad was there, but sometimes she said things and you couldn’t tell what she was saying, even in English. My mum watched her and didn’t ever say anything. Florence laughed and bit down on her chewstick, using both hands to fold her wrapper up under her arms. ‘Don’t mind her,’ Mr Babalola said, banging his wooden spoon down on the edge of the pot of boiling water, ‘she’s just jealous.’ She waved the stick out at me in one hand then clenched it back between her front teeth and smiled, ‘You can go.’
I had to get changed, my skin felt itchy. Upstairs in the bedroom Manus was going through my mum and dad’s things in their drawers and listening to the voices in the front room. Mr Lawal was being loud, telling my dad a long story that he wanted Tunde to come and stay with us again. ‘He can clean! You can clean, abi?’Manus was looking at my mum’s jewellery, holding it up to the light. One of us had to go and sit with Tunde while my dad and Mr Lawal were talking and I didn’t want it to be me, so I didn’t say anything. I got open our drawers and got out clean clothes. They smelled of mothballs as I put them on the bed. Connor was already there in the front room with them, I could tell from the way Manus was keeping quiet and ignoring me and not getting dressed properly. ‘What d’you think of these?’ I looked round at Manus standing up on my mum’s high-heel shoes, his face set like he was going down a steep slide and he didn’t care what happened when he hit the bottom. He looked tall and bossy, so I ignored him and got undressed and put on the new clothes thinking I could get out quickly to the backyard to see if Marie got let out. But Manus jumped out the shoes and up on the bed in his underpants and jabbed his finger at me, ‘You’re gonna have to squash up with him!’
I didn’t want Tunde to stay, there wasn’t room. Now there was rain coming in to the big room upstairs, our bedroom was my mum and dad’s, and we were squashed up to sleep in the front room, so he’d be in there with us and no one liked him. ‘Just one, two, three weeks, I will come!’ Mr Lawal’s voice was growly, the words exploded out of his chest in English and sounded like they were laughing everything off in Yoruba. I didn’t like him. He always dressed in smart English clothes, with dark glasses and a big parting in his hair that looked like two cliffs wedged into his head. My mum said he was a playboy, he didn’t want to look after Tunde because he was too busy running around. He talked a lot when he wanted everyone to be on his side, but then he sat around being silent and moody. I did like him though when he smiled, he looked like a shark and he knew it, and he’d do it for you and you wouldn’t let him near you, even though he always kept his teeth together to keep you on edge. I felt sorry for Tunde when he came because he lost his mum in Nigeria. He didn’t know where he was, he only knew us. On the first day he went round the back of the television set to see where the man was, and kept wanting to play with the ice cubes in the fridge. He was all right until we realised he was staying and he wet the bed. He couldn’t really speak English until we started teaching him Bob’s yer uncle and cor blimey and thingamajig, but my dad said no swear words, and then without anyone saying it he started fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that and smiling that he could get us in trouble. Slag! Shit-’ole! Cunt!It started coming out, but he couldn’t say everything. Wakka! ‘What?’ Wakka!
I didn’t like the way he kept following my mum around. We had to share our food but he kept picking bits off the side of our plates with his hands and he didn’t know how to use a knife and fork. Once, when we were all using our hands to have eba and okra with tripe and cow’s foot from shared plates, he picked his nose and put it on his side of the eba to stop us taking it, he sucked up the pepper off the tripe and put it back, and that meant we couldn’t eat any more, but he denied it when my dad came in and made us finish the leftovers. He made it so you couldn’t like him. And his dad kept not turning up, so even his dad didn’t like him. Connor kicked him playing football when he kept getting in the way to stop the game, but that left a bruise and my dad whacked Connor on the bottom for it. So we started spitting in his milk, but he didn’t care, he still drank it. ‘For God’s sake, are ye animals?!’ my mum said. She found out what was going on when me and Busola pushed him off the bunk bed and he went head first into the potty she put there for him to use. He came up crying with the pee dripping down and the potty covering his head, so when my mum heard the bang and came in she found us laughing from the top bunk at the way the sound was muffled. She lifted it off and some blood started to drip down his forehead. ‘He’s someone’s child!’ She slapped me hard and that frightened me. Busola said it was his fault for pinching us and my mum picked him up and hugged him and kissed his head to get him quiet and searched his hair for the cut. He clung on to her with his arms and legs and I stopped and held my breath at the thought he wanted her, she kept him alive, and it was my fault he nearly died, and that I was afraid of him and hated him at the same time.
But it all changed when Mr Lawal turned up with a woman in tall blonde hair who was nice but nervous and smoked all the time with two fingers missing under the two she held the cigarette in. I asked her what happened to them and she said she lost them in a factory she was working in but she got the money and Sunday was going to live with them in their place – Tunde’s English name was Sunday. My mum was friendly and chatted to her a long time, but I never saw her again. Tunde left and didn’t say goodbye to any of us, only my mum, and his dad was being moody. But now they were back again and the woman wasn’t around.
We heard the front-room door open and Manus jumped down off the bed. We held our breath, hoping they’d go past to the kitchen or downstairs, but the bedroom door swung open and I started pulling on my socks. Connor looked round, holding the door handle, and said to Manus, ‘You have to get dressed. Daddy wants us to take Sunday down the park.’ Manus made a face like it was Connor’s fault for dragging him into it and he should have kept quiet. Connor shrugged and said, ‘They’re going to send him back to Nigeria.’
‘Yemi!’ It was my dad calling Manus from the front room. ‘Yes, Daddy!’ He started grabbing his top and pulling it over his head and trying to step into his trousers but tripping up on them. ‘Yemi, come here!’ Manus did a hop to get his legs in and move towards the door, and tucked his top into his waistband by stretching up on tiptoes in his bare feet and pushing it down inside, ‘Coming!’ Connor moved out the way for him and looked at me and put his finger to his lips. Just then, Tunde squeezed past Connor and stood inside the bedroom. He looked like he was trying to find my mum, his eyes didn’t even see me. ‘Ah, there you are!’ my dad said, and switched back to Yoruba to speak to Mr Lawal. I gave Tunde a nod by lifting my head up and his eyes focused on me. He was smaller than I remembered, and more frightened. Connor turned and went back into the front room leaving the doors open, so I could hear my dad say, ‘Eh-heh, they are all getting big. As you can see, there’s no much room.’ He wasn’t going to let Tunde stay. ‘Ni ile Baba mi, now,’ and I could hear Mr Lawal was still pleading. Tunde blinked and his eyes flicked round the bedroom like he was trapped into listening. His hands had disappeared under his sleeves and he looked wrapped up like he was already back in Nigeria and there was no one to take him in. ‘Wotcha,’ I said, and he looked at me once more with almost black eyes like I wasn’t there and darted back into the front room.
I slipped on my other sock and got in my sandals and crept out and down the stairs to get away. At the bottom, Marie’s door was shut but I could hear them moving about and the bed creaking. I didn’t feel I could knock, so I coughed by the keyhole and said, ‘I’m going out the backyard,’ loud enough for her to hear but not so it would go upstairs.
I waited outside by the back door a long time and no one came. The sun was warm and the backyard was full of flies from the bins round the back, lazy and buzzing off the walls and the concrete. They looked fat and blue or green, with brown blunt heads and black hairy bodies, wiping themselves down in front and kicking up their legs behind to clean under their wings. I couldn’t stop myself doing it even though I felt it was wrong, but I picked up one of the wooden scrubbing brushes by the buckets and started squashing them down hard where they were thickest by the drain. The bristles made a spongy thwack on the ground as I flicked the brush quickly before they could get away, and even though they lifted off and started to make a louder buzzing sound, they settled again, and there were always more that didn’t seem able to move. Soon there were little squashes of brown blood dotted all over the backyard and up the walls by the drainpipes. It was only that my wrist started to ache that I slowed down to do them one at a time and look at their squashed bodies with sometimes a wing waving out from the mush. I picked a wing off and held it up close to my nose. It was so small and see-through and brightly coloured that when it blew away I started only to do the bluebottles. They knew I was coming and kept hopping out of reach so I had to creep up on them. I got one on the bathroom step and the latch opened and Mr Babalola’s face looked down at me from inside the door. He didn’t say anything, but he’d caught me red-handed and looked at my brush and closed the door again. I put the brush behind my back and moved off to sit on the upturned metal bucket my mum put over the red rock by the backyard wall, only bringing the brush out if a bluebottle came in reach, but they knew it was there and flew off as soon as I started to move my elbow.
Marie came out and looked at me. She didn’t see what I was doing, so I dropped the brush behind me and pretended I was just sitting there, even though it made a clatter on the side of the bucket. She moved a broken stool with a wobbly leg over beside me and wedged it up against the wall and wiped the seat with her hand and sat down.
‘What do you want?’
I wanted to rescue her, but I didn’t know how, so I said, ‘Let me look at your books?’ It wasn’t meant to but it sounded like a question.
‘I did,’ she said. ‘I let you read over my shoulder.’
I shrugged, ‘I can’t read that fast.’
She looked at me like I was smaller than she thought, ‘You should.’
We didn’t say anything for a bit. I got worried she’d start to see all the flies I’d done, the black, red-brown splodges everywhere on the ground and some on the walls. I got ready for it, that she wasn’t going to like me. I spoke to try and put it off, and because I didn’t know why I’d done it.
‘What’s revenge?’
‘I’m going to get lots of money.’ That’s what she said. ‘And I won’t have to live in your house. I’ll have my own house. And then anyone who wants to come in will have to ask me.’
I thought about it, and wasn’t sure. It felt like she was talking about being a grown-up, so I said, ‘You gonna grow up?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m going to be rich and I’m not going to be shut up. I’m not going to depend on you to get upstairs and read my book. I’m not even going to let my mum and dad in if I don’t want.’ She made a frowning look with her eyebrows that were thick and black over the pale skin. I noticed the hairs in between them where her skin was rumpled. She had no freckles, so when she didn’t frown her skin was completely smooth. But now she looked really pale in the shadow under the wall and her brown eyes looked reddish again as though she’d been crying. ‘I don’t care if it hurts.’
I wanted to know but I didn’t want her to tell me, so I didn’t ask. But then it came out, ‘What about me?’ She looked away and shook her head. ‘But I want to rescue you!’ I said.
She turned round to me and leaned forward with her head on one side to make sure I could see in her eyes. I could, they were blaming me again. ‘It’s because of you we’re shut up in that room. It’s your house.’
She was too old for me, I couldn’t follow. It wasn’t my fault she was squashed up, I was squashed up. It only hurt if you got pushed out. But I couldn’t make her like me if she didn’t want to. The Three Musketeers and the Kennedys and the all the grownups arguing crowded into my head, all the squashed flies lying on the ground and the ones buzzing around them, and it was my fault. The window opened from the bedroom on the first floor and we both looked up as Tunde leaned out. His hat fell off and bounced on the ledge of the ground-floor window. Then his leg came over with his white trousers pulled up as it scraped the ledge and he was hanging from one arm off the bottom of the window frame looking down at the ground.
‘Tunde! Tunde!’ My dad’s voice came down the stairs and out the back door, and from upstairs through the open window. Tunde let go and the white shirt he was wearing ruffled up as he fell.
‘Oh.’
He landed on his feet like a cat and his knee came up and banged off his mouth with the horrible sound of a clack. He stood up stiffly with blood on his lip and limped past us to the bathroom door. It was locked as he pushed at it because Mr Babalola and Florence were in there, so he went round the corner up the passage to the toilet and the bins. I could hear Mr Babalola in the bathroom shout, ‘Kilode? What’s going on?’ as me and Marie both sprang up to follow. He bolted the toilet door from inside and wouldn’t answer as Marie banged on it, ‘Sunday?’ I saw his feet move through the chink in the door at the bottom, then I raced back to tell my dad where he was. Mr Babalola came out the bathroom and looked at me sprinting past, but I didn’t stop. I bumped into Mr Lawal coming out the back door and fell back on my bum as his leg lifted over me. I could feel I’d sprained my wrist but I picked up Tunde’s hat that was lying there. My dad came out and the air came out his chest as he saw me lying on the ground. ‘I’m all right,’ I said because he froze and Mr Babalola was picking me up in his arms saying, ‘Kilode?’ I told them I could stand and wriggled my legs down to show I wasn’t hurt. Jimmy Singh came up behind my dad in the doorway and half pushed past and half held him round the shoulders as though my dad was going to fall over. It was all wrong because it was Tunde who’d fallen and it was Mr Lawal pulling and banging at the toilet door to try and break the bolt. ‘Where de noise?’ Jimmy Singh said, and I could see Marie had come away and was looking back down the passageway with Florence who was leaning out the bathroom wrapped in a towel. ‘Tunde! Come out! Open the door!’ Mr Lawal wanted to break the lock but he couldn’t.
‘You useless man!’ Florence was out in her towel and took her flip-flop off and threw it down the passageway to hit Mr Lawal, ‘Leave him!’ He came charging back down the passageway at her, and Marie gave a little scream as he knocked Florence over the metal buckets and brooms against the backyard wall. She scratched him back on his face, keeping one hand to hold up her towel and spitting at him in Yoruba, ‘Oniranu’
Jimmy Singh got there first, and Mr Babalola let go of me to join in pulling Mr Lawal off Florence and hold him while she went on shouting and trying to hit him with a scrubbing brush. It got Jimmy Singh on the back and he had to duck his neck down under the blows, ‘You are the worst man and the worst father! Good-for-nothing you!’ My dad moved in to calm it down, and I saw Marie duck down and go back up the passageway to Tunde. ‘Otito! Please, that’s enough!’ my dad said. He looked up as the bedroom window opened some more and Manus and Connor both leaned out, ‘Go inside! All of you! Close the window!’ They banged it shut upstairs and I went in the back door, peering back round to see Mr Babalola bundling Florence back into the bathroom and holding the handle shut as she kicked and pulled it from inside. Mr Lawal looked like he was in tears pleading with my dad as Jimmy Singh was holding on to his arm and rubbing and patting him on the back. My dad took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and was shaking his head. I heard the sound of tapping and Marie’s voice down the passageway saying, ‘Sunday, Sunday ...’
I couldn’t sit up on the stairs because Florence would have to come past in her towel when they let her out. Connor was shouting down out the front window to his mates that he couldn’t get out, Danny had a ball, go and knock on his house, and Manus was peeking down through the curtain in the bedroom to see what was going on. He didn’t want me there in case I saw what else he was doing, so I went back down the half-stairs and sat on my own in the upstairs kitchen. The tap was running like someone had been waiting for it to turn cold. I knelt up on the stool and turned it off. The voices came up from the backyard of Mr Lawal and my dad trying to talk Tunde out the toilet. I couldn’t hear Marie any more, even though the window was open at the bottom and I could feel a draught on my face when I put my ear up against it. There was a shuffle of feet and Mr Babalola said, ‘It’s a bad business.’ Jimmy Singh made a puffing sound and said, ‘It have de devil in de boy?’ I shut the window and sat away from it round the far corner of the table where it was dark. The room looked long back to the closed door with the gas cooker beside it and the blue cabinet with plates and glasses squeezed into the corner. Stacked along the side from that corner to the sink and the window, the knife and fork drawer, pots and pans and the food cupboard were all in the dark too, with the white side of the sink catching light from outside. The ceiling folded over and sloped down to the window on that side so it felt the kitchen was getting smaller. I checked the door that it wasn’t closing in and felt like I was in a tunnel. All the chairs were squashed in round the table and it was only me there. It felt lonely and crowded at the same time. The picture of the Kennedys was up on the wall above me, smiling down. I couldn’t imagine me and Manus and Connor like that, we never played together. And then without knowing how it happened, I was outside myself looking down at the crowded table with the breakfast things still on it and me sitting there, and I thought this was something I should remember if I could just grab hold of something that could tell me why looking down at myself in the kitchen was important and how come the ceiling was folding over so my shoulders were having to hunch round. Marie didn’t like being squashed and I didn’t want Tunde to have to go back to Nigeria even though the room was getting cramped. And then I told myself, I had nowhere else to go.