19 

Our mother showed us her wedding ring: a yellow, flickering band. Memuna tried it on. It hung loosely on her finger, but she held out her hand like an adult woman checking her manicure. Our mother laughed at her eldest daughter's poise.

When we three were alone, I asked: ‘Isn't Mummy married to Daddy?’

‘Not any more, I don't think,’ Sheka replied. ‘Now she's married to Uncle Win.’

‘What about Daddy, then?’ I asked.

‘I don't know,’ he said. He stood up and walked away.

Our mother was back from Mexico, where rock stars and actresses went to shed their partners, like old skins, before they wed new ones. Our mother married Winston Prattley, a United Nations official who came from New Zealand and was sixteen years her senior. She had met him in Freetown during our holiday; they had sat next to each other at a dinner at the British high commission while my father was abroad and their relationship started shortly afterwards. Winston Prattley followed us back to Aberdeen and proposed to our mother, promising her that with him she would never need to work again. His offer met with satisfaction: from both the romantic and the pragmatic side of our mother's nature.

It was the summer of 1969. Britain was in the middle of a heatwave. The world watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in fuzzy black and white. In Mexico our mother's wedding plans were delayed by twenty-four hours while the public officials took a break from conjoining foreign couples with careworn faces and stayed at home instead to drink tequila with their families. In America anti-war protesters claimed the walk was phoney, staged in a TV studio to divert attention from the killing in Vietnam.

Back in Scotland we three children spent the week in a farmhouse with a lady called Tessa and no television. Instead Tessa, who was a friend of my mother's from college, had a splendid cottage garden, full of strawberries that were just beginning to ripen. We picked all the red ones, swallowing them with illicit pleasure, licking the transparent pink juice from our fingers. Then, unable to resist, we pulled off the ones that were still pale and ate them, too.

Afterwards our mother and Uncle Win collected us from Scotland and he treated us all to a holiday in Yugoslavia. The first night we slept in a castle in Dubrovnik, where the air drifting through the open window was like warm breath flavoured with herbs, scents of wild rosemary, oregano, thyme and bay. I had never been in a country that smelled as sweet as Yugoslavia.

Mornings we spent wandering through the cobbled streets of the old town, where cars were forbidden and old ladies in shiny, black clothes pushed mules along in the aching bright sunlight. A stand sold strawberry and vanilla ice cream, more delicious than any I had ever tasted. Uncle Win treated us all to one almost every day. Afternoons we went for a drive or swam in the sea, where I learned to hold my breath and open my eyes underwater and once watched in wonder as a turquoise sea horse bobbed in front of my nose.

One afternoon we rented a motor boat. My mother stood at the end with a fishing rod in her hands wearing a crochet bikini. The nylon line winged through the water after the boat. In a while it snagged, loosened and pulled taut again. She gave a small ‘ooh’ of excitement and began to reel her catch in slowly while we all crowded at the end of the boat. Everyone, including the boat's driver, who switched off the engine and threw his cigarette into the water, waited to see what she had caught. The whining pitch of the reel slowed; the water bubbled and the surface split. I saw vivid shades of purple, blue and green, like an oil spill, shimmering strands that trailed off into the wake of the drifting boat. There was silence.

‘Medusa,’ the driver pronounced. ‘Jellyfish. Very dangerous.’ He drew his hand across his throat. I thought he meant we were going to kill it and I wondered how. My mother held onto the rod while we drove the boat out to sea, far away from the shore and the swimmers, and there the boatman cut the line.

On the way back to the beach my mother explained that the Portuguese man-of-war was the most dangerous jellyfish in the sea: its tentacles grew to seventy foot and the sting from them could kill a man. Why was it all different colours? Had anyone ever been stung? Why was it Portuguese? We mouthed questions at her, while Uncle Win gazed at his new wife with pride and slowly stroked the copious hairs of his black, walrus moustache.

Our mother's new husband was based in Nigeria; when they met he had been in Freetown on a visit to oversee the local office. From Yugoslavia we went back to Scotland, where my mother packed up the caravan for the last time and sold her yellow Mini. She was leaving Aberdeen for the second time, and once again she said few goodbyes. We flew to Lagos and the four of us moved into Uncle Win's spacious home in a neighbourhood colonised by embassy workers and oil company staff. Far away from the seething, sweating swarm of Lagos, the white-painted wooden house was surrounded by a beautifully tended garden with lawns like green felt and borders full of flowers. There were uniformed staff: a cook, a gardener, a driver and a house boy. Inside the house were rugs, polished wooden floors, even a separate dining room and a wide staircase leading to the upper floors.

Even though the house seemed to be so big, there wasn't room enough for all of us. So while my mother moved into the master bedroom, the three of us shared a room on the other side of the landing. It contained only two beds, and so a sofa was brought up the stairs and put at the foot of the other two beds. That was where I slept.

A few days after we arrived my mother called us to her. We gathered around her in the sitting room. She had something important to talk to us about, she said. ‘Uncle Win is your father now. So what do you think you would like to call him? You can carry on calling him Uncle Win, or just Win if you like. But if you want to, it might be nice if you called him Daddy.’ She looked at each of us in turn.

I thought for a moment. I liked Uncle Win, I remembered the ice creams. And the thought of calling someone ‘Daddy’ felt good.

‘Sheka?’

‘I'm going to call him Win, Mummy.’ I was surprised at my brother's choice. I thought he was brave to call an adult by his first name, bare and unadorned. To my ear it sounded impertinent without some sort prefix or another. Like going into a church without a hat. I could never do that.

‘That's fine. What about you, Memuna?’

My sister plumped for ‘Uncle Win’. It was my turn, the youngest.

‘Am?’

I said I would call him Daddy. My mother was pleased. She smiled her special smile for me, a sudden brilliant flash, and hugged me, pressing my nose against her soft breast. ‘Good girl!’ she said, rolling her ‘r's in the way she did: ‘Good gurrl!’

I tried, I really did. But it didn't stick. I would forget, and when I remembered I couldn't quite form my lips round the word and push it out. Instead I dropped my voice and whispered, tagging it onto the rest of the words at the end of a sentence – ‘Daddy?’ The word hung suspended in the air as if I might open my mouth and let it slip back into the warmth. No one else seemed to notice. Not even Uncle Win, who didn't react one way or the other to whatever he was called. So I stopped. I went right back to calling him Uncle Win, which probably was no more appropriate than calling him Daddy, but it would do.

Can-can in combat boots. Past our house the soldiers strode, ten abreast across the width of the avenue, legs flung high as chorus girls, blank eyed as paid performers: young men who had sold their bodies for an infantryman's wage. They wore fatigues and heavy black boots drawn tightly at the ankle with laces woven in and out of dozens of eyelets. I, who had recently learned to tie my laces, found them compelling.

In Nigeria the war in Biafra was reaching its terrible zenith. Two years earlier the Christian Igbo people, who lived east of the delta of the Niger river, declared their independence from the rest of the state, threatening to spark the break-up the Nigerian Federation. Many African states supported General Gowon's military government in Lagos and Britain supplied him with military hardware. Tanzania and the Ivory Coast recognised Biafra's claims and France shipped arms to the secessionists.

The military might of the government in Lagos dealt the Igbos a series of swift and successful blows, but the Biafrans clung on for two years, refusing to surrender their dreams of a homeland. The war had disrupted food production and gradually the stores ran out. General Ojukwu, the Biafran leader, refused to allow aid supplies into Biafra if they had been shipped through federal Nigeria. The war officially ended after the New Year. Ojukwu fled to the Ivory Coast. By then more than one million Igbo people had slowly starved to death.

In Lagos we were far from the fighting, yet the signs of war were there. The secret police dumped bodies in the sea which sometimes washed back up onto the beaches or floated into the harbour, arms bound at the elbow, the marks left by their final torture still evident upon the bloated bodies. My stepfather was a keen sailor and a member of the Lagos Yacht Club, a popular meeting place for ex-patriates. On the weekends the sailors raced each other round orange buoys in the harbour and drank Heineken on the terraces. During those competitions yachtsmen sometimes sailed past the nameless victims of tribal persecution with whom the police had finished.

Our mother told me how, hanging out on the trapeze of Uncle Win's Flying Dutchman, she had hit a corpse. One minute she was skidding over the waves like a flying fish, the next she felt a bump. The corpse and she came back to back, like two people on a dance floor, just for a fraction of a second – and then the motion of the boat swept her away.

At first we watched the soldiers march past from the upstairs balcony. One day we crept down and crawled through the hedge and stood in the street. The next day we moved closer. And the day after that. We edged in until, at some point, our passive curiosity transmogrified into a game of chicken with the stamping feet of the soldiers. We crouched in the street until we could feel the first vibrations thudding through us. At that moment my stomach tightened. Then I saw the dust swirling at the end of the road. The soldiers were on their way. We held our positions right in the path of the approaching juggernaut. Our bodies were coiled tight as cobras. At the final moment, just when I thought I was about to feel the heel of a boot on my back, we hurled ourselves out of the way and scrambled through the hedge back into the safety of the house.

Our mother stitched brown and white checked dresses for my sister and me, and bought brown shorts and a white shirt for Sheka. We stood for our fittings on the landing at the top of the stairs, where my mother kept her desk, papers and her sewing machine.

Every Sunday we lined up in the same place, dressed only in our knickers, one behind the other. Sheka, Memuna, then me. Our mother checked us front and back for small red pimples and when she saw one she put a dab of Vaseline petroleum jelly on it from the family-sized pot on her knee. A few minutes later a pinprick of white appeared and when my mother squeezed a creamy, fat maggot, no more than a few millimetres long, slid out. We called them tumbu boils. The insects laid their eggs in the fibres of clothes as they dried on the washing line and even though the servants ironed every piece carefully, right down to the last sock, sometimes eggs survived the hot iron and hatched in our skin. The glutinous Vaseline cut off the oxygen, forcing the larva out for air. Afterwards our mother gave us our pocket money, a thrupenny bit, with a picture of the queen on it, just like we used to get in Scotland.

In September we started at Corona School, and on the first day it was evident to me our dresses were all wrong. They were the same colour as the other girls’ dresses, granted. But while everyone else wore a broad gingham check, our checks were narrow. Not only were we new, with no friends, but our dresses were different. The other pupils glanced at us from the safety of rings of their friends. We lined up on the playing fields next to the long row of classrooms; no one spoke to us, so we in turn pretended to ignore them.

The pupils at Corona were a mixed group; the mass of black faces was speckled with white ones. Most of the boys and girls were Nigerian, but the school's good reputation made it the first choice among the overseas business community.

Mrs Sami, my teacher, however, looked as if she came from somewhere in the South Seas. She had glossy black hair swept upwards so that it framed her broad forehead and high cheekbones; at the back of her head the hair was pulled into a sizeable chignon. Her son Eddie was in my class and I was put into the seat next to him. It was soon evident that he was eager to become my friend. Eddie had skin the colour of butter, a quick grin and a spiky fringe of the same dead-straight black hair as his mother. I never asked myself why he wanted to be friends, or wondered why the desk next to him was empty. That his mother was our class teacher didn't worry me. At that time I had only two ambitions. The first was to catch up with my brother and sister. The second was to become a boy.

At home I made parachutes for Sindy just like the ones Sheka had for his Action Man, only mine were made of handkerchiefs and string. There was a flat roof above the kitchen where we secretly played and melted our wax crayons under the sun, creating giant palettes of psychedelic colours. From the roof's edge I launched Sindy on her missions into enemy territory. Not once did the chute open and Sindy broke both her legs; they dangled at odd angles beneath her well-endowed torso. Later I took to borrowing my brother's shorts, so much better suited to sliding down banisters than my own little skirts. I wanted to be a boy and being best friends with a boy was a fine start, so I smiled right back at Eddie.

Those first few weeks of school we were always engaged in some project or another. We were told to ask our parents for a black-eyed bean. The next day we put it into a jar with blotting paper and water and over the following days we watched our beans germinate, the shoots race up the glass towards the light. Next we were asked to bring an insect into class. All weekend I laid piles of breadcrumbs on the floor and hovered out of sight with a jam jar, but all I did was encourage lines of ants into the house. On Monday morning I sat ready for school, my empty jar in my hand. As I waited for the driver to arrive I noticed on the white wall in front of me a walking twig. I moved closer. It was a creature of brilliant green: perfect oval head, black eyes, long, slender legs, wings like curled new leaves. At school Mrs Sami said my insect was called a Praying Mantis. She explained how, after mating, the female devoured the male. We stared at her. None of us believed a word of it.

Our mother had dropped her teacher training course when she married our stepfather, but she did not waste all her new skills. Every day after school she gave us additional classes. It was during these extra-curricular hours that I learned to write. I joined Sheka and Memuna as they practised their handwriting and while my mother worked with each of them I entertained myself copying out rows of arbitrary letters. One day I lay on my stomach opposite my sister on the floor; her books were fanned out around us. On my blank piece of paper I traced three round, looping letters: C-A-T.

‘Look, Mummy,’ Memuna exclaimed. ‘Am can write. She's written a word. She's written CAT.’

My mother, working at the table with my brother, came over to have a look. ‘Clever girl.’

I warmed to her praise like a tomato in the sun, without being at all certain what I had done. The production of this word had been entirely a fluke, but now here I was being told I could write. I didn't say anything. I smiled at her. I thought: she must know. After that my mother began to include me in the writing classes, where from that day on I wrote and wrote and wrote.

A few years along I learned to ride a bicycle in just the same way. Clutching onto a low wall, pulling myself forward at a painful, wobbling pace, my hand slipped suddenly and the bike spun forward down a small incline. A few seconds passed before I managed to land one of my feet on the ground.

It was Memuna who, for the second time, announced my triumph prematurely. ‘Am's riding the bike. She's riding the bike!’ In a moment the whole family had come out to see me do it. And so I did. I had to. I got on and rode the bicycle up and down for everyone to see.

During break one day Eddie and I were playing on the scorched grass of the school fields, in the shade of a large tree. We were performing rolls, squatting on the grass, tucking our heads in and rolling over. I could do handstands, too. I flipped my legs up over my head and stood, ever so briefly, upside down. In time I noticed I had attracted the attention of a group of the bigger girls, who were watching us from a distance. Encouraged, I executed a few more handstands. From my inverted position I saw a few of the girls smile. They began to walk towards us. I sat down on the grass with Eddie. I was sure they were coming to ask me to teach them to do handstands too, and I pretended not to notice. But inside my head I'd already decided I would agree to show them. After that Eddie and I would be able to spend break with their group, playing skip rope and standing around talking the way they did. I could feel them close behind; I turned expectantly.

‘She just wants to show him what colour panties she has on . . .’

And they were gone. The words floated on the air behind them, like an unpleasant odour, along with the sound of their laughter. Four of them swept off in the direction of the classrooms. I felt the heat in my cheeks; shame buzzed in my ears. I glanced at Eddie and our eyes met for a moment, then slid past each other. We sat there in silence. The bell went.

‘Come on.’ Eddie scrambled to his feet. ‘Let's go.’

At home I had begun to watch my stepfather with growing interest. He was, in the main, a remote figure who left our day-to-day care to our mother and the servants. In turn I paid him scant attention, until one afternoon. The three of us were playing alone in the garden. A man slipped through the hedge. He wasn't young; he had skinny legs and leathery skin. In his hands he was carrying a large hoop and a gourd. He didn't appear to notice, or perhaps care, that we were watching him as he crossed the garden. At the base of one of a pair of palm trees he opened up his hoop and slipped it around the trunk and around his waist. Then, as we watched with growing wonder, he leaned back, pushed himself off and ran straight up the sloping trunk of the tree like a cat. At the top he took out a knife and cut a V deep into the bark of the tree, below which he fastened a gourd. He dropped down the tree even faster than he had climbed up. He loosened his hoop and clasped it around the second tree. When he came back down he was carrying a gourd: this one was full of palm sap.

In the evening when our stepfather came home we told him what we had witnessed. Uncle Win said he was a thief. Our eyes danced with the thrill of it. A thief?

‘What will we do if we see him again?’ we asked all together.

‘You come and find me, and I'll shoot him.’ Upstairs in a drawer on the landing our stepfather kept a pair of muskets. Sheka found them and showed them to us one day. They had curved wooden handles, decorated with brass studs, and long, dark metal barrels. Each one was wrapped in a soft cloth. I picked one up; it was very heavy, a dead weight in my hands. I had a sense that our stepfather was telling the truth. I began to hope I wouldn't see the palm-sap thief again. I didn't want to be responsible for his death.

From then on I watched my stepfather closely whether he was moving about the house or sitting going through papers from his open briefcase and drinking beer. I noticed that when he stood he put his hands on his hips, sometimes both hands, sometimes just one. He walked around like that, too, especially when he was looking for something. I thought it looked impressive, grown up. I practised walking the same way around the house; eventually I took my walk to school.

At Corona the toilets were at the end of the walkway that ran alongside the classrooms. One afternoon I excused myself from class. As I walked towards the toilets I practised my new walk, keeping one hand on my hip, when I spotted ahead of me the four big girls who had been so nasty the day in the playground. They were standing by the cubicles. Determined not to show I was flustered, but that I meant business, I put my other hand on my hip and advanced. They began to laugh. At first a titter passed from girl to girl, like the crackle of a bush fire sweeping through grass, then someone snickered openly. I wanted to run, but I managed to keep moving, forcing myself to place one reluctant foot in front of the other. I kept my hands right where they were on my hips. I dived into the cubicle just as they began to laugh out loud and I sat there in the dark until the bell rang and the girls moved off to their next class.

The next morning, as she rubbed lotion onto my legs, I told my mother what had happened. She picked up a wide-toothed comb and began to do my hair, working carefully through the tangles of my natural corkscrew Afro. Every time the comb snagged, I winced. My mother rubbed palmfuls of Vaseline hair oil into the mass to make it manageable. She reset my parting and combed each side, now shiny and slick, before plaiting it. All the while I described the unkindness I had suffered at the hands of the bullies. When I had finished she asked: ‘Were they African girls?’

‘Yes.’ Because they were.

‘I don't want you to talk to the African girls any more.’ She picked up a ribbon to finish off the plait.

My back was turned to her and I couldn't see her face. I wasn't sure I understood. ‘The mean girls?’

‘None of the African girls.’ She tied the ribbon in a bow.

I couldn't see at all where this was heading. I persisted: ‘Not to any of them?’

‘No, not to any of them.’ My hair was finished now. My mother turned me round to face her, and bent down placing her hands on my shoulders. She looked into my face. ‘I want you to remember that you're half white.’ She stroked my cheek. ‘You're better than those girls. Don't you talk to them or play with them. And don't let them upset you.’

I had forgotten that morning until, years later, I came across a letter buried within a pile of documents in a drawer. The letter was from my mother to my father, written either shortly before or just after their divorce. ‘You accuse me of having a colonial mentality,’ she wrote, denying it angrily in the sentences that followed. Further down the page she charged my father, in turn, with hating white people. I read through the letter, and as I stood there with it in my hand I glimpsed for the first time the whispering spectres that crowded in from the edges of my parents’ marriage.

No more brown bread, white bread. I was five. I was just beginning to understand, or rather to realise, what the difference was between me and the girls at school. And how that same difference separated me from my mother.

In Sierra Leone my mother's white skin earned her deference and contempt in equal measure. The poor people looked up to her, for she was educated and white. But there was no place for a woman like her among her own people: a woman who had chosen a black husband and birthed black babies. Far away from the city, in the simmering tension of Koidu, her skin set her apart, glaring hopelessly, shouting her presence to predators like an albino deer, with none of the camouflage of the herd.

In Nigeria her skin marked her as one of the elite, set her apart from the masses in the right way. It was like a protective barrier which diffused experience, allowed for adventures to be viewed as if from behind glass. She would travel the world by my stepfather's side, but never come close enough again to smell the rank sweat of humanity or suffer, like a contagion, the fear of the ordinary African who lives and dies at the mercy of his rulers and the elements.

I went back to school and ostentatiously turned my nose up at the black girls. I soon got into a fight. In front of Mrs Sami I defended myself: the girls were mean to me, and besides, they were Africans. I uttered the word with contempt: I fully expected her to understand. I couldn't believe it when Mrs Sami sent me to sit on a bench outside the classroom for the rest of the day.

In the months before Christmas rehearsals began at Corona for the end-of-term play. We were to perform The Pied Piper of Hamelin and the castings were held in the main hall. Everyone in the school would be given a part. It was to be a musical performance and Memuna and Sheka, who were in the choir, had the honour of being on stage the whole way through.

Eddie and I and the rest of our class went along to see what parts we might be given. There was tremendous excitement for most of us had never acted in a play before. In the end we were all handed not one but three roles in the play and kitted out with our costumes. We had loose brown tunics which we fitted over our heads and tied at the waist with a piece of string. These were to be worn in the first act, when we played the townspeople as they complained to the mayor about the rats. To identify us by occupation we had a our props; I was a baker and mine was a loaf of bread. On the night I would have a real loaf, Mrs Sami assured me, but for the rehearsals I carried a couple of books inside a brown paper bag. In the next scene I played a rat, and the piece of string doubled as a tail. Mrs Sami pinned it to the back of my dress and it trailed after me as I followed the piper out of the village, wearing a pair of cardboard ears. In the final scene I was one of the village children who follows the piper's enchanting melody into a faraway cave and disappears for ever.

As Christmas crept closer our mother and Uncle Win were out almost every evening, even more than usual. If they didn't go out they invariably entertained at home. In the evening after the steward gave us our bath and once we were in bed our mother, dressed for dinner or cocktails, came in to say goodnight. She wore dresses in vivid colours – tangerine or lime – and carried tiny, matching handbags. Her tanned skin shone against her neckline and her jewellery sparkled.

‘Mummy, you look beautiful,’ we cooed.

She kissed Sheka and Memuna first and me last because I was closest to the door, leaving us all with Careless Coral lipstick prints on our lips and noses. She sat on the low edge of my sofa and tucked me in. When the door closed behind her the scent of her perfume hung heavy in the air.

Our mother accompanied our stepfather to luncheons, garden parties, cocktails, dinners. While she was out the servants were supposed to take care of us, but they were no more interested in us than we were in them. They had plenty of chores and when they weren't working they went back to their quarters, leaving us alone in the big house. We played on the kitchen roof and in the street, under the boots of soldiers, and we raided the little pantry off the kitchen on the eve of dinner parties, stealing fancy foods and dainties prepared for VIP guests.

One afternoon Sheka called us out onto the upstairs veranda. On the green painted floor he had assembled a small pile of paper and twigs. In his hand he held a box of matches. Memuna and I knew what was coming; we knelt down, pushing our faces close to the miniature bonfire. He struck the pink tip of the match against the sandpaper and set the flame to the edge of a piece of paper. As it browned, a curl of smoke the shape of a question mark lifted into the air and released the delicious smell of burning. The smell was so good we sometimes lit match after match just to inhale it and my sister even ate the blackened ends afterwards.

We watched in silence as paper and twigs transformed into a leaping crown of orange and yellow before deflating into a pile of black ashes. Afterwards Sheka brushed up the cinders, leaving another star-shaped scorch mark on the floor. My mother saw them, knew what we were up to, but she said nothing.

On the weekend we went to the Yacht Club to visit Santa in his grotto. The temperature in Lapland was upwards of ninety degrees and the humidity caused the fake snow to slip down the window panes. I was wearing a skirt and so Santa gave me a blue plastic doll. Memuna, who happened to be in shorts, got a water pistol and refused to swap with me even when I pleaded. ‘But you don't even want to be a boy!’ I cried.

On the night of our performance I danced after the piper and hid in the wings during the closing scene. On the stage the people of Hamelin searched for their children, wailed and screamed with despair when they realised they were gone for good. They were doing a good job. I wondered where the children went to after the cave door shut, and the one lame boy was left outside. I imagined they would grow up in some enchanted kingdom deep inside the mountain where they would remain eternally young. I imagined the piper's enchantment would last for ever.

From where I was standing I could see all the parents watching their children. I searched for my mother's face. I wanted to wave to her, but we were supposed to be in the dark cave, the entrance of which had been sealed by a boulder. So I contented myself with watching her until after the curtain calls, when we all climbed down from the stage and ran into the audience to find our parents.

Towards the end of the following term, one day after school, we were playing in our room when we heard a voice coming from downstairs. It was deep, mellifluous and as familiar as my own face. We leaned over the balcony until we could see through the open sitting-room door. I saw a pair of legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle, grey trousers, dark socks and polished laced shoes. Daddy! We ran down the stairs and hurtled into the room, throwing ourselves upon him.

Our father was on his way through Lagos on an official trip. His position took him all over the world. In a year he had transformed himself from a medical doctor to a finance minister fêted as one of Africa's brightest and best. His speeches to the world banking conferences received massive ovations; he had spoken up for poor countries against the cartel of the World Bank, the IMF and the rich nations; he had been profiled in newspapers and West Africa magazine as the great black hope of our country and of our continent. We hadn't seen him for over a year.

He had brought us comics – the Robin for me, and copies of Look & Learn. Afterwards we all went swimming together in the pool at his hotel. Much later, but still too soon, after soft drinks and ice cream, he brought us back to the house and kissed us goodbye, promising to return soon.

My sixth birthday followed soon after. My mother pulled out all the stops and organised a celebration in the garden. It was the sort of thing at which she excelled. For my brother's birthday she had made a whole fire engine out of chocolate rolls. When it was my turn she asked who I wanted to invite and sent a card to every child we knew, including Eddie. She wrapped a parcel in dozens of layers of paper for a game of pass the parcel and hid bright boiled sweets among the colourful tropical flowers in the garden. From the moment I woke up to a pile of presents the day passed in a sugar-fuelled whirl until, at the end of the afternoon, for the finale, we were all sent scrambling in search of the sweets hidden in the borders. The next morning I found an orange drop, sticky from the dew, crawling with ants, but I brushed them off and sucked it all the same.

Three days later, in the early afternoon, Mrs Sami called me to one side of the class. I was led out to the front of the building, where our stepfather's driver was waiting; Sheka and Memuna were already there. We drove slowly through the streets and turned into the gate of our house. This was not exactly unusual. Our mother sometimes organised trips for us and collected us from school early. But as soon as I walked through the front door it was apparent that something was terribly wrong. There was our father, standing in the hall. Upstairs in the bedroom our mother was packing three suitcases.

The joy of seeing my father and the sight of my mother's tears overwhelmed me. Moments later she kissed me as she said goodbye. I nuzzled her neck, smelled for the last time the sweet, sugar scent of her skin, of face cream and perfume, tasted the salt of her tears. Then we climbed into the back of a large, open-top Mercedes Benz and I sat in between my brother and sister, my head tilted back to let the howls escape; tears flooded my eyes.

My mother's lips were moving, but I couldn't hear what she was saying to me. Everybody around me was moving so quickly. Our father climbed into the front and we pulled out of the gate, leaving her standing alone at the porch. I didn't even manage to wave goodbye.

As the car sped down the avenue the warm wind blew into my face. The sensation made me lift my head; briefly it chased away my misery. I stopped crying. Rows of trees, people, houses moved past. I looked around in silence and sat up properly, my tears dried on my face. I could see all around me, above and behind. I turned my head slowly and gazed at the disappearing road, looked up at the sky latticed with branches. All was forgotten for an instant. I was deeply, overwhelmingly impressed by the car.

We stayed overnight in a hotel in Lagos, where we all shared the same room. Our father unpacked our pyjamas and prepared us for bed. In the white, tiled bathroom he wanted to help me clean my teeth, but I showed him I could do it myself now. After we said goodnight I lay quietly between the cotton sheets and watched my father as he rummaged about in his own small suitcase. He had his back to me and thought I was asleep. I could see his hands as he brought out his night things: strong fingers with slightly spatula-shaped ends. My eyes followed him as he carefully closed the suitcase and put it on the floor and then padded across to the bathroom, trying not to make any noise. My mind was free of thoughts. I was fixated, engaged in a simple process: I was committing my father to memory again, in the same way I memorised my letters and numbers at school, by staring at them until they were imprinted on my mind. I watched him as he came back into the room dressed only in his boxer shorts. He didn't see me with my eyes open as he slipped in between the sheets of the bed next to mine and turned out the light.