Ayo
It was early morning after a day which had begun innocently enough and the house seemed to hold its breath. The sun came into rooms still scarred from the afternoon before. There had been some clearing of the worst by then, some semblance of order restored, and Ayo’s mother was in the kitchen making noise with the pots and pans, a deliberate hum of activity asking to be thought ordinary but which could feel like solicitude. Ayo was leaving her bedroom when the pots and pans fell silent, and she heard her mother calling her name. Her mother’s voice today was different from the one she used with yesterday’s guests to the compound. It was lower now. Raw. And tentative. Ayo approached but did not enter the kitchen. Instead she dithered at the threshold. At least the kitchen still looks and smells as it always has, she thought.
‘Ayo, go wake your little sister.’ That was what she was expecting to hear any second. In fact, she had already started to half turn when she heard her mother say something else.
‘What?’ said Ayo, turning back.
‘Ayo, come here please,’ Toyin repeated softly. Then, when her daughter did not, she walked over and leaned down and held the little hand that had been worrying the hem of a green pyjama top.
‘Did you get some sleep? Are you hungry?’ She searched her daughter’s face as she spoke. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t hungry. After yesterday. What happened. But you really should get something down you.’
Ayo did not move. ‘I’m okay,’ she said, rubbing an elbow with her free hand. ‘I wasn’t hurt.’
‘To God be the glory! You were very strong. You know, your father and I spoke on the phone last night. We had a long conversation. About yesterday. About our future. We made some decisions. And now there’s no reason to be afraid, none at all, because it won’t ever happen again.’
Ayo, who had been looking down at the floor as her mother spoke, said nothing for a moment. Then she said again, very quietly, ‘I wasn’t hurt.’
‘No. But you could have been. Your father agrees with me. What happened here was the last straw for us. Ayo, look at me. The only thing that matters is your safety, yours and your sisters’.’
She couldn’t return her mother’s gaze for long. A memory from the afternoon flashed through her mind; she was on her elbows and knees, panting, hiding her little sister under the bed. The sister was too young to understand. ‘She’s still sleeping,’ Ayo said now.
Toyin nodded, released her daughter’s hand and straightened up. ‘Go wake her, please.’
✲
Ayo Sokale spoke, in 2020s fashion, to the recording camera of her phone. Behind her stood only the beige wall that served as a neutral background. The camera shook as she spoke; no one had thought about a tripod. She was wearing a black turtleneck and an expression of sustained concentration. ‘There’s no one look for an autistic person,’ she was saying. ‘We don’t all look the same.’
Ayo is a civil and coastal engineer. She is not yet thirty and lives in the Thames Valley, in Berkshire. ICE, the Institution of Civil Engineers, uploaded her one-minute clip, one of several, to its video channel in the spring of 2021. Exactly twenty years after she and her family left Nigeria.
By chance I came across her clip one day, while watching videos on the Internet. I probably shouldn’t say ‘by chance’. Probably the clip reached my screen on account of my recent viewing history, of some algorithm which – this time at least – had successfully read my thoughts.
‘We don’t all look the same.’ It felt familiar to me, a neurodivergent writer, this modern exercise of ‘raising awareness’, and the reason it felt familiar was that I had similarly lent myself to it in the past. Speaking to a camera, in 2000s and 2010s fashion, with a TV cameraman manning it. Using a word like ‘Asperger’s’ – as was employed then – to describe a life, a way of seeing and being in the world.
But that was as far as the similarity went. I had no clear idea back then that I might be ‘speaking out’, or braving the attitudes and expectations of viewers. And, unlike Ayo’s generation, I had felt neither the consolation, nor the responsibility, of belonging to a group. It would never have occurred to me to say ‘we’, only ‘I’.
She wasn’t hard to find. She had a website. After I had been in touch, after showing my credentials and earning her confidence, we got to talking on a semi-regular basis. The Ayo on our video calls was the same Ayo I’d seen in the clip: articulate, thoughtful and candid. And there was something else beyond these qualities, attractive and essential as they are, that had made me want to write about her. She was vibrant.
She would find thirty minutes for me here, three-quarters of an hour there. Even that took quite some doing – pretty much every waking hour of her day being accounted for. She has only to look at the time to be told where she ought to be.
I had no plan as such and few prepared questions. As much as possible, I wanted to keep our conversations open-ended. I thought we might talk about her engineering career, then jump back to her childhood move to England, then who knew? But that’s not quite how things turned out. Our exchanges took sharp, surprising detours – disorientating and fascinating in equal measure.
I had thought her brave; I hadn’t known the half of it.
✲
Dr Sokale worked for an NHS hospital in England, and when his wife’s waters broke, one freezing February day, he welcomed the arrival of their second daughter, Ayo.
Toyin brought the baby home to her native city of Ibadan. Her husband, like many Nigerian doctors who work for the NHS, would visit his wife and children two or three times a year.
The Sokale sisters shared a large house in Bashorun, Water Reservoir Area, with their mother, aunt and older cousins. The house stood inside a compound whose walls were high, its gates surveilled. Bougainvillea brightened these walls, while palms and mango and guava trees flourished within – an intrepid cousin might occasionally fall from the lower branches, like ripe fruit. On Sundays, dressed for church, the three sisters would not climb a limb of any tree; they would be too busy curtsying to the grown-ups who lunched at the house after the service. Or, ahead of that, laying the table, or, helping out in the kitchen, or getting under the maid’s feet as they rustled and bustled. There was a rigour in the house, but guests were always a welcome sight. They would be ladies from the church, wearing wrappers and headgear, smiling broadly and smelling the beef stew, pounded yam and okra as they entered.
Ayo liked sitting up with the ladies, saying grace, watching the women eat, the eldest always first to begin, copying their fingers as they moulded the doughy yam into scoops, seeing the beef on the plates linger till the end before disappearing, as good table manners required. The beef was lean and spicy. When it disappeared, the women talked at last. They praised their host (after the Lord), shared recipe tips, complained about the rising prices. ‘You go to market with your seventy naira and when you get there they tell you it is now ninety or one hundred.’ Some talked about their husbands overseas, and others their children’s grades in class, and Toyin passed around the report cards that came to the house in her daughters’ satchels, each commending their cleanliness – grade A – and high marks, and stating, for instance, that Ayotunde is a well-behaved and diligent student.
The women had all known Ayo since her babbling days. Such a quiet and intent child. Older than her years. Always taking her toys apart and putting them back together again. Not dolls. Cars and trucks. They would tease her gently: did she remember the time she ran them ragged searching all over for her? Searching for what seemed like hours, they turned the compound upside down until, aah, at last, there she was snoozing behind the curtain in the living room, a toy truck beside her with its engine in pieces, snoozing all the time they’d been rushing and thumping from room to room calling out, ‘A-yo!’
She remembered. Or perhaps it was only the ladies’ story that she remembered, she had heard it told so many times.
‘Yes, Aunty,’ Ayo would say each time she heard the tale. ‘I was very small but I remember.’
She was glad to be drawn into their discussions. With the ladies she was not reserved. She comported herself like a little lady, a lady eight years old, and had learned what never to do. Speak up before an adult addresses you. Talk back. Draw attention to yourself. She could sit up so straight and still that you might forget that she was there. The women approved. None would ever think to say to her, ‘Go along and play with the other children.’ There was a feeling, unspoken but understood, that the child’s place was with them, more than with girls and boys her age. They thought of her separately, even from her own siblings. ‘Ayo and her sisters’, they would say.
One Sunday afternoon, the one that would change everything, after the ladies and maid left early, a mother and daughter called by. The little girl attended the same school as Ayo and her younger sister. (The eldest boarded in another city.) On this Sunday the compound found itself emptier than usual, the aunt and her children, and neighbours, all away for the weekend; even the guard ordinarily at the gate had the afternoon off. There were not enough eyes to go around, and so Ayo reluctantly agreed to keep hers on the playmates. She sat on her bed and watched the girls playing on the rug as they dressed and undressed their silly dolls. Now and then peals of laughter blurted out from behind the closed living-room door, and made her heart shrink. She felt a painful distance open up between her and the suddenly strange world of adults.
She could not know that these minutes were the calm before the storm. That soon after, the Sokales would have to bid farewell to the compound, to its bougainvillea and mangoes, trees bearing guavas and intrepid cousins.
It was an hour later in the afternoon that Toyin accompanied her guests out of the compound to their car, and waved them off. A little way down the road, where delivery drivers parked, two young men were waiting in a beat-up Volvo. Toyin didn’t give it or its occupants another thought until, on her way back towards the gates, she felt their pistol wedge painfully in her ribs. The armed man told her not to make a sound if she knew what was good for her.
And as they barged her inside the compound and locked the gates their features disappeared beneath bandanas, their hands inside gloves.
‘I’m coming,’ Toyin had said to her daughters as she went out, and by this she meant ‘back in a moment’. The sisters began to tidy their room, since homework beckoned. At a gravelly sound outside the house Ayo turned to the window and saw unfamiliar shadows approaching. Get down, she tried to say. Her little sister stood near her. A tide of fear picked her up then and swept them both under her bed. Not ten seconds later the front door burst open, then they heard a male voice, terse and threatening. They heard a man in the living room yank what sounded like the telephone from the wall. The voice grew louder and terser; the voice and the heavy footsteps that came into their room were those of no ‘uncle’ Ayo knew. ‘Comot,’ the voice shouted in Pidgin. ‘Comot from under dere or I go come get you bot’ self.’
Ayo heard her mother calling her name from the sofa. ‘Do what the man says.’
So the sisters did. They were taken to Toyin, across a floor covered with dirt and dust carried in by the burglars. In front of them stood the other man with his bloodshot eyes and his finger on the trigger.
For a moment the men said nothing, as if they were extorting only silence from the house. Then the one without the gun asked Toyin where she kept her money. Where, he asked again and again, always in the same words, when she answered that there was hardly a kobo coin in the house. ‘My purse,’ she said. Take my purse. It’s in my bag.’ It held her ATM cards. And there was her jewellery in her bedroom drawer. Also the wedding band she wore.
