She sounded odd when she said this as if her tongue had doubled in size, so that it stumbled over even the most ordinary words: ‘please’ and ‘take’ and ‘leave’.
‘Is dat all?’ Now it was the gunman’s turn to shout. ‘Na lie! Abeg no try me, I dey tell you.’ He levelled the gun at Ayo’s temple as he said this.
And yet Ayo at gunpoint remained calm, extraordinarily calm. It didn’t enter her head to budge. Sitting so deadly still and silent hardly went against her nature; on the contrary, gripped as she often was by some lengthy daydream, or Bollywood film on TV, she would do just that – sit and stare ahead into the near or far distance, sometimes for hours.
Though this was different; what she was seeing here was not one bit of her choosing. Nor to her liking. She did not know these men, knew only that they were ‘bad men’ and wished so hard that they would leave. Leave with the purse and the jewellery, her sister’s dolls and her toy trucks, leave with the roof and rooms and all the trees too if they could carry them off but leave. And yet still she could not bring herself to see the most frightening side of the situation. The bullet (assuming there was one) waiting inches from her temple. But how could she see, or feel, a thing when she was no longer there? When she was, as she was in that moment, entering some new knowledge of herself. Some secret but necessary steeliness; also a lightness, lifting her far, far away. A dimension of resilience.
‘Dem get plenty plenty paper.’
It was the gunman’s accomplice yelling from the adults’ bedrooms. He had laid his gloved hand on the family’s green passports. Let loose sheaves of letters from a distant husband, stamped the children’s birth certificates with his grimy boot, scattered photos – the girls with their grandmother; Ayo in her first school uniform; Toyin and the doctor’s big day.
The passports were enough to pacify the thieves, who could sell them on for a good price. As the late afternoon faded into evening, they turned on their heels with their modest haul and fled, leaving behind the pulled-out drawers, rifled-through clothes, smashed toys and other debris.
Toyin released the latest breath she had been holding in.
Once their warm cups of Bournvita had been drained, and pyjamas squirmed into, the sisters were tucked in – by the light of a bedside lamp that stayed on – and closed their eyes tight and did not sleep. Until, at long last, they did.
Weeks later the Sokales collected their newly issued passports and boarded a plane bound for England.
✲
At any one time, Ayo will have a dozen or more tabs open on her phone. A dozen is on the low side for her; many days, it’s more like scores. Scores and scores, as many as her phone can manage. One takes you to a page about Fallingwater House. Another to the website of Welwyn Garden City. A third to a long list of motivational quotes. But often and before very long she will leave all these for other pages around a common theme. A name.
She has only to begin googling tomorrow’s weather or a T-shirt in her size or to graze the T-key with the tip of her finger, and the search box guesses ‘Tesla’. The name relegates every alternative her phone auto-suggests. That goes for ‘TV’ and ‘takeaway’ and ‘tax return’ and other common results that start with English’s twentieth letter. The search engine’s algorithm likely takes her for some nervy shareholder with stock in Tesla Inc., or an electric car obsessive hunting for the latest model, but the truth is she doesn’t hold any shares or care particularly about this or that brand of car. Each time she types the name into an online search she means the person who made it famous. ‘Tesla’ as in Nikola Tesla, inventor and – like herself – engineer.
She must have looked up his story a zillion times already. A zillion times gone to the Internet to read about his inspirational life and work. Her phone knows the details by now, forwards and backwards and inside out. His dates, 1856–1943, and his birthplace, the rural village Smiljan – so easy to misspell – in what is today Croatia. His unusual mind, vast learning and vaster imagination, which speak so powerfully to her. Hundreds of patents, inventions galore. The X-ray, radio, neon tubes, even the smartphone she is holding.
On a web page of a science institute she has come across a fabulous photo of him in his laboratory. The photo is in black and white, but she can’t help seeing it in colour – the branching violet sparks from gigantic coils flashing above his pomaded head. Like the bolt of lightning that flared over his family’s roof just as he was born.
As a boy, Tesla developed a prodigious gift for envisioning contraptions that did not yet exist. Ayo has read that he would envisage every nut and bolt, put them together in his head and leave the device running in some corner of his mind, only to return to it weeks or months afterwards to check for any wear and tear.
She taps other tabs, gets up other pages on her screen. She reads how Tesla swapped Austro-Hungary for America, sailing to New York at her age, twenty-eight, with barely a dime to his name, in one pocket his passenger ticket alongside a pair of gloves – their fingers crossed, at least that is how Ayo imagines them – the other pocket containing a letter of recommendation dated May 1884 and addressed to one Thomas Edison.
‘The Wizard of Menlo Park’ hired him, but Tesla would not see a cent of the $50,000 of funding Edison had promised. When he tried going it alone, men in suits made further profits on Tesla’s naivety; they stole his patents, reducing him to digging ditches in wintertime for two lousy dollars a day.
It was Edison’s rival, Westinghouse, who allowed Tesla to shine. With his backing, Tesla helped to build the world’s first large-scale hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls – it delights Ayo no end that his turbines ran on fast cascading water. How green and renewable and ahead of his time! She has always marvelled at the lengths, the heights, the depths that water can go to. She thrills at the Falls’ size and flow urging Tesla’s turbine motors to turn, and turning water into watts – the energy so harnessed electrifying whole cities.
Of course, that snake Edison was fuming. He cursed the competition. A popular science magazine article that Ayo clicks on describes his cunning scheme to discredit Tesla. Reporters were summoned to take down Edison’s words. Gentlemen of the press, my rival uses alternating current, not direct current as I do. See what happens when I pull this switch: and he sends thousands of A/C volts through a dog, a calf, a horse (even, years later, an elephant). As if electrocuting animals weren’t shocking enough, he set his sights on a prisoner, and financed the making of what became the electric chair.
Edison’s mud, though, wouldn’t stick. Tesla’s reputation survived. He had no appetite for fame and fortune, in any case, and let both dwindle, shying away from people and prizes as he got older. In his later years he dreamed of free energy for all, and technology that would make war impracticable. Ayo is moved by the audacity.
She has turned off her phone and is in her kitchen seeing what there is for dinner. As she puts the water on for the rice something comes to her, an anecdote remembered from her scattered reading about the inventor. Whenever he sat down to eat, he would always work out how many grams there were on his plate. She takes her phone’s word for it. She does something a little similar herself, come to think of it, with the rice and so on. But she doesn’t eat alone as he would do. Alone, she assumes, because he was so sensitive to certain sounds that pass most people by unnoticed – their chewing and swallowing and slurping. And not only sounds, certain shapes and textures too: he was repelled by pearls; the very sight of them curled his toes – even the most beautiful woman in the world he would send packing if she happened to be wearing pearls. For that matter he abhorred all the jewellery that men and women wore, the chains and bracelets and the jittery earrings and the rings clinging on various fingers. He ate his dinner late for Americans (but perhaps not for Austro-Hungarians) – Ayo remembers the exact time: 8.10 p.m., always ten minutes past eight in the evening because 810 can be divided by 3, and then again by 3 cubed (3 × 3 × 3). Ayo is the kind of person for whom this makes beautiful sense.
It is hard to explain but she feels protective towards him, absurdly so she knows, for what could her protectiveness mean to a man eighty years dead and, for most of them, forgotten? Not so forgotten these days. Not now that the devices running in his head for decades are being rediscovered – ideas that, in some, court wonder; in others, bafflement.
A loner, she has read some call him, an oddball, an eccentric.
Eccentric he might have been, she thinks, but at least he is our eccentric. When Ayo says ‘we’ – the ‘we’ of her neurodiversity clip – she includes Nikola Tesla.
✲
Why did you leave Africa, Ayo would be asked when, months after the burglary at the compound, she found herself in a playground in Eastbourne, a pebble’s throw from the eroding edge of southern England.
She knew better than to say anything about guns.
What kind of a name is Ayo anyway, the children enquired as they flocked out of the gates after class. And her hair, talk about frizzy! Girls snorted at the jumpers she wore even in sticky June. Always following us around, like she don’t get it. So blank and stiff.
They had her all wrong. They never heard her singing along to her mother’s radio in the kitchen of her new home, or saw her grooving, between giggles, to the music as it played.
If she laughed, she thought, if she laughed and did not wince, the pupils would see that she was only Ayo and not the ‘weird Black girl’ they thought she was. And the next day she flashed them her brightest, widest smile. But no, that did not help things – the girls’ tongues lashed her into corners with playground insults which she took, dazed.
She might have daydreamed then of returning with her mother and sisters to Ibadan, to get away from all the bullies and stop being Black. To be simply herself. A Nigerian again.
But in England were the smooth asphalted roads, those amazingly smooth asphalted roads which extended for miles, rounding hills, bridging rivers, making even vast cities approachable. (And with no cops pulling over cars to haggle for bribes.) Here pylons towered in smart long rows and water, hot and cold, gushed on tap. She knew never to take the water she drank or washed with for granted.
Ayo’s patience with the Eastbourne girls, her wish to please them, was not limitless. Nevertheless, for a while she persevered. During a playtime she tried her foot at their hopscotch, since she liked anything to do with numbers, anything you could take away with you afterwards and play around with in your head. The distances between the squares. The optimal arc of the throw. She had thought the girls who usually played would join in, but when she tossed the stone on 1 and hopped up and down she saw that none among them would. Was she doing something wrong? While they were gathering round to watch she noticed their faces turn to masks of derision.
‘You really don’t get it, do you?’ said one of her spectators. They made her out to be Miss No-Mates. Finally, they turned their backs in a great show of cold contempt, so cold that it doused and numbed Ayo’s desire to befriend them. But she never would forget any of their names.
When the boys walked into class, into maths, say, and saw her hunched over compass and ruler, only a few would give Ayo a shove, or a snarky look, and this made them an improvement on the girls. It just so happened that in those days she was reading Alanna: The First Adventure about a girl who passed for a boy. Alanna rode horses and fought knaves and did many other things girls were not supposed to do. Ayo felt an elating jolt of recognition as she read the story, though reading did not come easily to her. Words in print seemed never to remain steady on the page, they bulged and flowed every which way before her eyes and pulled and pushed her bobbing gaze along their currents; the effect on her was to read more slowly, more laboriously. Punctuation was a pain. For the longest time she couldn’t take in capital letters or full stops, she couldn’t work out where a sentence began and where it ended. And yet despite all this, she read Alanna’s adventures with something rather like pleasure and imagined that she, too, might escape restricting herself to girlish ways. In class she was soon setting herself apart, sitting closer to the boys who, by and large, left her alone and some of whom, the spectacle wearers, could be as studious as she was. This was the beginning of Ayo’s journey to engineering. Like Alanna, she would dare to do what most girls daren’t. Advanced maths. Science and technology.
Stifled laughter could sometimes be made out from the boys at the back of the maths class. They were playing with their calculators, punching in 80,085 and giggling at the display.
Ayo didn’t think 80,085 was lewd at all; if anything, she thought it rather weighty and handsome – handsome as numbers went. Slot it into one of her graphs, and it would fit right in. She was aware though that, to several of the boys, numbers had no value beyond money. A pair behind her were fooling around, speaking their mind. Every daft, immature recess had its say.
‘That’s my future salary that is,’ said one to his friend, showing him the calculator display. ‘Eight thousand and eightyfive pounds.’
