Celeste was on the phone making promises she couldn’t keep. There were the school fees of extended relations that needed to be paid, a cousin who wanted to start a business, and someone’s daughter who was due to get married in a few months.
In the run-up to the funeral the house had been vibrating with activity and guests, but just one day later it felt deserted. The creaks coming from above suggested an auntie still lurking, perhaps packing her things for her flight back or planning how to make the most of the remaining weeks of her visitor’s visa, but apart from their mother spouting pledges into the landline, the Akíndélé residence was still.
The twins resumed the TV marathon that had been interrupted by the drive to Peckham, while Faith hovered in the center of the room, passing the envelope containing the death certificate from hand to hand while she waited for her mother to end the call. Glory slid past and into the kitchen to find a drink.
She was no stranger to clutter. She had grown up in the house of a first-generation immigrant whose survival instincts saw potential in every piece of bric-a-brac or pound shop find. She was used to benign hoarding, but the assortment of ruin that filled the passageway between the living room and the kitchen was quite different. Glory could make out piles of shattered crockery, a row of empty plastic milk cartons, and, curiously, a nest of knotted video tape that she assumed came from the broken VHS tapes heaped under a pile of newspapers. Less a calculated stockpile, more the debris of an unsettled mind.
In the kitchen, she ran the tap and drank a glassful of water without stopping to take a breath. She could hear Faith’s voice getting louder and more agitated in the living room, so she lingered, filling another glass and pushing each new gulp around her mouth as she leaned up against the counter. When this second glass was finished she headed back into the fray.
“. . . but you can’t afford to. We haven’t even finished paying off the funeral and you’re—”
“Is this how you talk to your mother? I’ve just buried my husband but you want to kill me too—”
“Mum!” Faith threw her hands in the air, exasperated. The twins paused their mild bickering for a moment to look up, eyes darting between their mother and grandmother. Celeste snorted and turned her back to her eldest daughter, pushing past Glory toward the kitchen. Faith followed her.
“Your father had life insurance through his work, when that comes through that will help.”
“That’s meant to pay off the mortgage, Mummy, to take the pressure off of you. It’s not meant to be distributed to every family member who comes begging. They’re taking advantage!”
Celeste held up a hand, an attempt to silence Faith that went ignored.
“We really need to sit down and look at the finances, I don’t want you to lose this house on top of everything else. You might need to get a lodger to help with cash flow around here. Especially if you’re going to take more time off work—”
“Lodger, kọ́?” Celeste snorted again. “So that a stranger will kill me in my bed?! I’ve watched that show on Sky—what’s it called?” Celeste clicked her fingers in the air trying to recall whatever true crime series she had seen last, but gave up.
“Anyways, Olọ́run má jẹ̀ ẹ́—God forbid!”
Faith sighed, admitting defeat in this instance, and left the kitchen.
“Where do you want the death certificate?” she called behind her, but when there was no response, Faith tossed the envelope onto the coffee table and slumped into an armchair.
“I’ll put it in Daddy’s folder,” Glory offered. She picked up the envelope and headed up the stairs taking them in a leap, two at a time.
To her right she could hear the bed creaking in the room she and Faith shared until Faith left for university. Further down was the family bathroom and across from that Victor’s small bedroom. To her left was the largest bedroom, where her parents had slept side by side for nearly three decades. It looked out into the street, so as a teenager any thought of sneaking out and back in at night, the way her peers boasted about, was ridiculous.
From their bedroom her parents could hear everything happening in the living room directly below, from whispered quarrels between the siblings to the theme tune of forbidden TV shows. When they were smaller their mother would tell them that even when she wasn’t watching them, God never stopped, and he fed her information when she prayed. When Glory reached secondary school she realized that her mother’s omniscience had more to do with the thin floors of their 1970s home, but the feeling of being watched never quite left her, especially when she was out in and around Peckham, where anyone in a sprawling network of family friends and church members could gather intel.
When she had lived at home, the most common reason for Glory to visit her parents’ bedroom was to be disciplined. Outside of that there was rarely any other need to cross the threshold between her life as a child and the mystery of her parents’ interior lives. At her most curious, she would press an ear against the closed door to listen in on muffled arguments and tense discussions before whatever verdict Daddy had come to, and her mother eventually agreed with, was delivered to the children like a commandment carved in stone.
As she pushed open the bedroom door now, she marveled at how hard it was to shake these associations, even as a woman in her twenties. She half expected to find her mother sitting on the bed with a stern expression and a Bible open on her lap, ready to rebuke the middle daughter who gave her so much trouble. But the bed was empty and unmade, the air was stale, and the heavy curtains were drawn tightly. They looked like they hadn’t been opened in weeks.
Glory switched on the light and an offensive yellow filled the room from the bare bulb in the center. The side of the bed on which Glory’s father had slept was piled with clothes in the vague shape of a body. Most available surfaces were covered in books, or tattered copies of Nigerian society magazines, and plastic bags—lots of plastic bags filled with rubbish, and other mysterious things that contributed to the fermented smell in the room.
The only surface that remained unadorned by junk was Glory’s father’s desk. It was pressed against a wall but its size made it impossible to ignore. It was the kind of desk that belonged in a drawing room. Whenever she saw her father sit at it to write, he’d roll back the cylinder cover and unfold the desk to reveal a writing table of dark, polished wood.
“It’s an antique bureau,” he would tell Glory when she asked about its strangeness, and he took great pride in it. No one else was allowed to touch it, not even their mother. Glory’s hand hovered now as she kneeled before the drawers, waiting for a disembodied voice to rebuke her. She knew that Daddy kept an official record of their lives in a folder, somewhere, everything from her parents’ certificates of naturalization to exam results and school reports. But she had never actually seen where he kept it. She took a deep breath and opened the top right drawer. It contained letters, pens, and loose paper clips, and her heart fluttered at seeing her father’s handwriting scrawled across an old envelope. She quickly pushed the drawer shut.
The following two drawers were fruitless, containing documents to do with his work and a collection of newspaper clippings. It was the second drawer down on the other side that contained the old accordion file, bent and bulging. Glory released the latch and it sprang open. Each compartment was meticulously labeled, but there was no label for death certificates. She took her father’s certificate out of the envelope and held it gently in her hand. She didn’t want to cry again, but she felt she needed to do something. A prayer, perhaps? Or a final word to her father’s spirit as it waited above her, making sure she didn’t mishandle this, his precious desk?
Glory sighed and sat back on her heels, reading the certificate’s declaration. It was strange to think that the official record of a person’s whole life was confined to a single sheet of paper. The rich details of existence compressed into a few boxes detailing name, date of birth, place of death and other arbitrary notes.
She opened the file again and found the compartment that contained their birth certificates. She passed over Faith’s and Victor’s, and picked up her own. There was a sheet of paper clipped to the back of her certificate and when she pulled it away she felt something cold land in the pit of her stomach. Of course, it was her other sister’s birth certificate—or at least a photocopy of it. Her name, “Hope Kẹ́hìndé Akíndélé,” leaped from the page.
Hope must have had other names—Glory had at least three more than the two that were recorded on her birth certificate—but now they were lost to time. Maybe her mother remembered them, or maybe they had been swallowed by the silence that surrounded her twin sister’s death.
Glory filed away the documents with a catch in her throat, closing the lid on the quiet order of her father’s desk and returning her attention to the chaos around her. It was beyond her how her mother could live among all of this, and the lump in her throat was replaced with mild disgust. She hurriedly left her parents’ bedroom, almost colliding with Auntie Búkì at the top of the stairs.
“Good morning, Auntie,” Glory said solemnly.
“Good morning, my dear,” Auntie Búkì said warmly. “How are you?”
Auntie Búkì folded her hands, resting them on the soft round hump of her stomach, waiting for Glory’s answer.
“I’m OK, Auntie,” Glory said, trying to smile.
“Pẹ̀lẹ́, my dear,” the older woman said, patting Glory. “I wanted to ask you, when are you going back to Texas?”
Glory swallowed hard.
“I was in Los Angeles, Auntie, and I’m not sure yet.”
“Mmm,” Auntie Búkì said with a thoughtful nod. Glory recognized this listening look, and knew that some piece of unsolicited advice was sure to follow.
“You know, your mum only has you now,” Auntie Búkì continued, lowering her chin with a meaningful look in her eye.
“What do you mean?” Glory asked innocently, although she could work out the direction this conversation was going in.
Auntie Búkì cleared her throat and looked up to the ceiling. She exhaled through her nostrils, pressing her lips together. Glory thought she could see water collecting in her mother’s friend’s eyes, but Auntie Búkì quickly blinked and when she met Glory’s gaze again, her eyes were clear.
“You know, the Bible says that children are a heritage from the Lord, and your mother has tried so much with all of you. She has sacrificed so much, she is strong, but she needs you, ehn? With your brother and your sister gone, and Faith has her own family now, she only has you. You must honor her—Honor your father and mother so that it may go well with you—that’s what the Bible says, ehn?”
Glory nodded, trapped by the expectation of Auntie Búkì’s words.
“It’s what your father would have wanted,” Auntie Búkì said, suspecting the Bible verses had not been enough. The older woman smiled kindly, and moved past Glory to make her way down the stairs.
Glory closed her eyes. She could feel the walls closing in around her, and if she opened them she might find herself buried under piles of rubbish and all her mother’s broken things.
She drew in deep breaths and willed her legs to move. She took one shaky step forward and then another, before skidding down the stairs and straight out of the front door, into the evening air.
Glory could hear Faith calling her name from inside the house, but she needed distance. There was too much death, too much misfortune. Faith stood at the front door calling down into the street, but Glory carried on walking away.