They assumed the walk was over at that point. But she took off her boots, wrung out her socks, and said she was all right to continue. Someone had a spare jumper, and Ayo removed her waterproof over-trousers and looped them onto her rucksack to dry in the wind.
As Ayo squelched along the beach, they asked her why she had chased the wave out so far and put herself in danger.
‘The sea was calling me,’ she said. She knew they would not understand. Nor did she, not entirely, not yet. But she could not suppress a glowing smile.
They returned to Sennen along the cliffs and went for lunch to the Old Success, where a crackling fire was going. One of Tom’s old mates took their orders at the bar.
Warmed up, dried out, everyone then wanted to walk to Land’s End as planned. Was she really certain she could not stay for the weekend, the friends asked Ayo afterwards on the way back towards the car. They were thinking of stopping at Newlyn to ‘nerd out’ at the ordnance datum level and grab some fish and chips. But Ayo was certain. The no was more confident now, it came easily to her. ‘Thank you, I’ve had a wonderful day with you all, but no.’
On the return train the hours rushed by.
✲
I try to imagine
What the water wants.
There’s no knowing
That has every answer,
No smart expert
With a stock response.
Only measuring tools
To find deep down
How far thoughts swim.
How far thoughts swim
To find deep down
Only measuring tools
With a stock response.
No smart expert
That has every answer.
There’s no knowing
What the water wants.
I try to imagine.
✲
Ayo hasn’t often returned to Nigeria in the years since she left. The most recent occasion was her elder sister’s wedding in 2017. It was a sumptuous, joyous affair, assembling family and friends from many places and time zones. It brought the dancer out in Ayo, but also, days later, as if in delayed response to her fervour, the need for time alone, chair drawn up to a window, chin on the heel of her hand. This land had hosted the two high dramas of her early years. The second, in 2001, was the armed burglary leading to her family’s exile, in the course of which only courage and female solidarity had staved off the worst. But these virtues had hardly sprung out of nowhere; they were doubles of those found by the Sokales the previous year, early in the rainy season, on an evening which seven-year-old Ayo would never forget.
No one came that afternoon to collect her and her kid sister from school. They were sitting in their empty classroom (empty save for a teacher), a building on ground firm and high enough during the season’s wettest days to remain dry inside. The rainstorm showed no sign of relenting, the drops increasingly loud and heavy, knocking and knocking, harder and harder, on the door and windows as if saying, ‘Let me in!’ Their mother had been caught in the downpour as she returned from a trip to Lagos. She had assumed the family’s driver would collect the girls and bring them home.
It was seven in the evening when Toyin finally got in. ‘Where are the girls?’ asked her niece. An hour’s journey on foot in the dark – for the street lights were down, the local roads washed out – awaited her. On lower ground she had to wade through murky water that came up to her waist. All around her, cars and rubbish floated. In the days that followed, several people would be reported missing.
Ayo delighted as never before in her mother’s silhouette as Toyin clambered into the classroom and relieved the teacher. A dirty brown puddle swelled around her feet, and her blouse and wrapper were so wet they were see-through. Ayo had never seen her mother naked, or almost naked. For the first time she observed the outline of her mother’s breasts, the roundness of her hips and belly. The shock of seeing them, mixed with relief, subdued the shock of having been marooned.
Toyin carried the sisters on her back and side, as she had once carried each in her belly. Ayo held on to her mother for dear life as they waded back through the drenching dark; she was afraid, and her fear was not far from despair. She would not understand until much later what she was witnessing, being subjected to: the drains absent or in disrepair, clogged with rubbish, the poorly thought-out roads built too close to waterways; decades of diverting a nation’s wealth to line the Big Men’s pockets.
Then at last the compound appeared, a fleck of light in the distance. Almost home. Her aunt and cousin whooping, ‘Girls! You poor things!’ as they hugged and kissed them and rubbed them warm and dry and helped Ayo into her green Little Miss Mermaid pyjamas.
✲
She is her parents’ blood, of course, but she is also water. More water than blood in fact. Over half of her lean body’s weight is water (she has looked up the number on her phone); threequarters of her brain and heart is water.
A lifetime’s work to gauge these inner depths, to channel them; to conserve their strange and secret flow.
Danny
On the roof above the studio he stands and waits. All afternoon the studio floor is overbooked and surplus staff work where they can. A television camera stands with him on the roof, infinitely patient. The way it waits there it could be made of time. He – not so much. ‘Action!’ he shouts, and in short order the door to the stairwell opens and out step half a dozen spies, dressed in beige trench coats with their collars up.
Of course, they are not real spies, they are actors. Overdressed, ironic parodies of the Z-movie secret agent, sunglasses and fedoras concealing their youth and gender (all of them, twenty-something). They are taping a sight gag for children’s TV, they haven’t any plan as such to follow. They improvise, entrusted to their instincts, for the director knows to keep out of their way.
Enduringly famous, several of them, from our perspective, by which I mean big-name, autograph-book-level famous. They don’t know this, because they won’t land their breakout roles for another year or more. It is Friday the thirteenth in September of 1974.
