When Glory brought home the dress that Faith’s tailor had made for her, a fitted floor-length gown with an off-shoulder neckline, her mother changed her mind about attending Tabitha’s wedding. Celeste fingered the red fabric, checked the exquisitely laid seams and asked if Faith had bought any aṣo ẹbí for her. Celeste’s ìró and bùbá were whipped up in a couple of days and the three Akíndélé women were good to go.
Faith was so excited by the prospect of their mother socializing that she arranged for a makeup artist to come to the house to sculpt their faces and tie their gèlè beforehand. When the woman had finished working her brushes over Celeste’s face, Celeste posed patiently as the artist took photographs and video for her portfolio. She fluttered her eyelashes, even giving the camera a coy smile. She looked beautiful.
Then it was Glory’s turn. She vetoed the glittery eyeshadow and asked for a more muted shade of blusher but accepted the bright red lipstick and thick false lashes that made her eyelids heavy. When the woman had finished tying the stiff aṣọ òkè on Glory’s head, Celeste asked Glory to take full-length pictures of her outfit on her phone. She turned and twisted under the lights, the sequins shimmering and her eyes bright as she stood next to the large portrait of Glory’s father, his face hovering over her shoulder.
When Celeste had finished posing by herself, she turned the camera on Glory. She directed her daughter this way and that, pushing and prodding her with impatient fingers. After a change of earrings, a change of background, and a series of increasingly uncomfortable poses, Celeste had the desired shot of her daughter.
“Don’t complain, this one will find you a husband,” she said, grinning into the screen when she caught Glory rolling her eyes.
In the car on the way to east London, Celeste pushed in a tape of old Nigerian praise songs and sang for most of the journey. Glory sent Julian one of the pictures her mother had taken.
“Nice,” he replied with a smiling emoji, but left her follow-up messages unanswered.
They arrived late, which was intentional. Traditional engagement celebrations, or traditional weddings as they were often viewed, were long and unwieldy affairs and despite their lateness, proceedings hadn’t even started. They found seats with a good view of the center of the room and got comfortable. On each table was a bowl of chin chin, and Glory crunched her way through two handfuls until her mother hissed at her with a sharp look.
A man in a Liverpool football shirt was walking around with a camera slung from one shoulder, and a large stack of bound dollar bills balanced on the other.
“Buy me some dollars,” Glory’s mum said, pushing money into her hand and pointing her in the direction of the multitasking entrepreneur. Glory exchanged some British notes for a small wad of dollar bills and when she turned to go back to the table, she saw her mother in conversation with two other older women. Not wanting to be besieged by prying questions, she snuck off in the opposite direction.
Glory passed elders she vaguely recognized, smiling and ducking into quick curtsies in return for satisfied nods. She walked by a group of men whose conversation slowed as she approached. One of them greeted her, each of them watching her with lowered eyes. She smiled politely and kept on walking, feeling their eyes follow her path.
The banqueting hall stretched on and on. Tables laid with red satin, gold charger plates and elaborate centerpieces fought each other for attention. A laptop and CDJs stood unattended at one end, the speakers pumping out a playlist of Afropop hits.
Out in the corridor, people were dashing by with coolers of rice and tightly wrapped hampers of cooking equipment that would form part of the gifts the groom-to-be would present to his fiancée during the ceremony.
Glory walked around until she found the toilet, a queue of women in red spilling out of the door and commandeering the accessible toilet as well. A chair was set up directly outside, with women taking turns to have their gèlè tied or retied and makeup touched up by a woman in black.
“Good evening, ma!” Glory greeted one of the women who she was almost sure she knew.
“Ah, good evening, darling! How’s your mum doing?”
“She’s fine, ma. She’s here.” Glory smiled, acknowledging the other women waiting.
“We have missed her. How are your children?” The auntie took a seat and offered up her face to the woman in black.
“Oh, I don’t have any children. You must be thinking of my sister, Faith.”
The woman pulled her chin from the makeup artist’s hand, studying Glory’s face from where she sat.
“You and your sisters look so similar,” she said and turned back. “I’ll come and see your mum when I’ve finished.”
Sisters? Glory thought, her stomach lurching.
“OK, ma,” she squeaked and she turned and left the queue, returning to the banqueting hall and her mother.
“I see you’ve been parading around the room,” Celeste said as Glory sat next to her. “We will be planning your own traditional in a year’s time in Jesus’ name!”
“Mummy, please.”
“Ah! Say amen now! If you keep complaining I will send your picture to my cousin to go and find you a husband from our village!” Celeste teased, giggling at Glory’s horrified protest.
The host for the evening took to the mic, warming up her vocals with a few “one, two”s and greeting the hall in Yorùbá.
“Or I could tell the MC to advertise you during the break. You can do your little parade walk up there like it’s market day.” Celeste pushed her lips into a mocking pout and shook her shoulders.
“Oh, Mum!” Glory hid her face with a hand as Celeste cackled and clapped her on the back.
“What’s the joke?”
Faith arrived at the table, a twin on the end of each arm with Michael in tow carrying her bag.
“Tell your mum to behave,” Glory said with her nose in the air. “She’s trying to auction me off.”
“Mummy, you don’t need to worry about Glory, one day she’ll surprise us all.”
Faith winked at her sister.
When the celebrations finally began, Glory was surprised by how much she enjoyed herself. She even joined her mother to spray the bride-to-be with crisp dollar bills, and the ease with which she wound her waist and dipped her hips to the guttural beat of the talking drum drew inquisitive glances from some of the groom-to-be’s friends. Given the occasion, romance was in the air, but it wasn’t just romance it was desire: a deep desire for sensuous connection with another human being, the kind that would turn out a community to celebrate the promise of a lifelong bond.
Glory sent another message to Julian, this time a looping gif of her blowing a kiss into the camera lens. He responded with a string of lovestruck emojis and the reply:
“Where are you? You’re gonna make me come get you right now!!”
Glory was happy with that.
As the night rolled on, heels were kicked off and replaced with flip-flops and sandals, headties loosened and slipped back on foreheads. The groom’s agbádá was abandoned when the tribal drumbeat of funky house pounded through the hall and his friends held him aloft like a conquering hero. When “Sweet Mother” came on, the bride and groom each danced with their mothers, swapping partners midway to toast their future in-law, and when the DJ commanded all other mothers to the dancefloor, Faith and Glory followed Celeste’s wiggling backside, fanning her and singing the lyrics shrilly: “Sweet mother, I no go forget you, for dey suffer wey, you suffer for me . . .”
When the song ended, Faith disappeared to the toilet while Glory and Celeste returned to their table, mopping their brows and gulping cool water. Everything so far had been perfect. Celeste was glowing, Faith was in a good mood and Glory felt, for once, in her element.
“Mummy? I went to see Mama Wawo,” Glory blurted out.
Celeste did not react, but continued fanning herself with a lace-edged fan. But as Glory opened her mouth to repeat what she had just said, her mother responded.
“What did she say?” Celeste asked, keeping her eyes fixed ahead.
“She gave me her telephone number. Hope’s. She gave me Hope’s telephone number.”
“She did?”
“Yes.”
Celeste breathed in through her nose, closing her eyes slowly and letting her breath hiss through pursed lips.
“I called, but no answer. I left a message. Well, two messages.”
Glory could swear she could hear her pulse echoing in her head, and she gripped the edge of the table with sweaty hands.
Celeste turned to Glory, unwept tears shining in her eyes and a strange smile on her face. She reached over and rested a hand on Glory’s fingers, which were clawing at the tablecloth.
“It is well, my dear. It is well.”
The warmth and weight of her mother’s hand felt comforting.
“Sometimes I think about how things could have gone differently.” Celeste was talking in a low voice, almost murmuring to herself. “If we had sold the house and moved to Kent when we were going to, then Victor would have had other friends and he wouldn’t have been with those boys.”
Glory remembered driving with her parents out to places like Chatham and Gillingham to look at houses with full-sized gardens and things called reception rooms. Glory had been adamant that she wasn’t prepared to move outside of the M25, but it wasn’t her refusal to get out of the car that convinced her parents not to move. Her father was sure that the price of their own house would increase more and the plan was to remortgage to buy the new house, so they could keep the old house and rent it out. The plan never materialized for reasons that a teenage Glory was grateful for, but didn’t care enough to investigate. Maybe this was why a faint pang of guilt was working its way across Glory’s chest now.
“We never had a chance to rest in this country,” Celeste continued, emotion thickening her voice. “From when we got here it was work, work, work, work. The pressure, the stress . . .”
Her mother chuckled, although it sounded like she was holding back tears.
“If we had moved to Kent . . . maybe we could have rested.”
“You did the best you could, Mummy, we all know that,” Glory said desperately.
Celeste gripped Glory’s fingers, her eyes still watery as she smiled at her daughter and shook her head.
“So many regrets. If God spares your life to live as long as I have you will have your own collection. But, you—my dear Glory. The detective.”
She laughed and a single tear shook loose and made its way down to her chin. Glory wiped it away.
“Anything you want, you always manage to find it. Ẹní bá ń jẹ òbúkọ tó gbójú, yóó jẹ àgùtàn tó yọ̀wo. Do you know what that means?”
Glory frowned and shook her head and Celeste searched her mind for a loose translation.
“It means when you have already done extraordinary things, of course you would do something like this. That is just who you are.”
Celeste removed her hand from Glory’s and smoothed her skirt.
“Anyways, I cannot question God. It is well.”
Glory cleared her throat and managed to croak a weak “Amen.”