Leo did not glance in her direction. His eyes held a glint of malice that suggested he’d been waiting for this moment, and I worried that he’d come across my Twitter.
‘Yes, Ego?’
Ceri shook her head at me frantically but I’d never been one to take good advice; there was only one man I feared and we shared a name.
I straightened my back and held Leo’s gaze. ‘The policies are inhumane,’ I said simply.
He laughed, mockingly. ‘Inhumane? You think it’s humane for immigrants to come over here and deny hardworking British citizens resources their taxes pay for?’
‘People just don’t leave everything and everyone they know behind and brave such conditions without reason, you know that, right?’ My voice shook as I struggled to get my rage under control; it was possible to bottle anger without knowing it.
‘I take it you’re speaking from experience,’ Leo said, a sneer on his lips.
I bit the inner corner of my lip, refusing to take the bait.
He waved a dismissive hand. ‘It isn’t our fault their countries are corrupt,’ he said drily.
‘He thinks he’s one of them,’ Ceri said to me later with a sad tut.
‘Who?’
‘Rayan,’ she clarified. ‘He thinks he’s not working class anymore because he rubs shoulders with Leo. He’ll learn the hard way.’
Where I’d viewed the conversation through the lens of race, she’d only seen class.
‘Who does he think he is?’ Eriife fumed when I recounted the exchange to her over the phone. ‘Are you not almost British? You pay your taxes. By next year you will get your papers.’
I chuckled at that – almost British – like it was a status to grow into. Would I become like Rayan when my new passport came in the mail?
‘You see this is why I said you should come back home. You not only deal with nonsense from clients but this as well? Why will you stay in a country that treats you like a visitor?’
She sent me articles after that, headline after headline saying I was unwanted. Addicted to suffering, I clicked on them and picked my way through the comments – anonymity meant people were the worst versions of themselves.
Go back to your country, they screamed, and each time, I came away feeling exactly as Eriife had described: a visitor.
Back in ’98, Sister Bolatito’s boys’ quarters smelled like bleach, and the soap-marked smudges on the windows indicated that they’d been cleaned in a hurry ahead of our arrival. But it was the best we had.
On the way there, my mother had stopped by a NITEL call centre to call her mother to let her know we were not coming home. She returned to the car with red eyes and a running nose, indications that the call hadn’t gone well, but she did not say anything, and we knew better than to ask. Instead, my sisters made fun of my low-cut hair as my mother drove in edged silence; when we stopped at a red traffic light, we bought plantain chips from a hawker with change my mother kept in her glove compartment, filling the car with noises of tearing sachets and crunching.
Sister Bolatito stood in front of her gate to welcome us, and as we approached, she screamed for her gateman, an elderly man with a limp.
‘Welcome, welcome,’ she said, sounding out of breath, opening our car doors like we were august visitors.
To me, she gave special attention, assisting me from the car and looking me up and down, staring at the scar on my head.
‘How are you feeling, my daughter?’ she asked. Before I could respond, she was at the boot of the car, helping my mother pull out the belongings we’d brought along.
The boys’ quarters was a bungalow at the back of her compound, sitting behind the main duplex where she lived. It was in England I learned that boys’ quarters were a colonial relic; where the servants stayed while their masters lived comfortably in the main house. But in Nigeria, they were the norm, extra rooms for the help and where extended family members stayed when they visited.
We scrubbed the place in her absence, starting with the smudged windows. And when we were done, we unpacked our belongings in the living room and two boxy bedrooms.
‘The two of you can take the larger bedroom. Ego and I will share the other room,’ my mother said, and the twins squealed like we were on holiday. As they rushed to their room, we could hear them arguing over which side of the bed belonged to the other.
‘Teenagers,’ I grumbled, like I wasn’t one myself, and my mother smiled tentatively, the first smile I’d seen from her in a while.
Sister Bolatito’s house was nothing like my father’s. There were no marble sculptures gushing out crystal water, no gardeners pruning away at foliage at the crack of dawn, and no steward to prepare continental dishes at her whim. But she had a buxom woman, Mama Yejide, who took care of the running of the household. In the mornings, Mama Yejide knocked on our door to inform us that breakfast was ready and told us when the washman was coming so we could bring our dirty clothes out for laundry.
My mother expressed excessive gratitude for these gestures. She’d always been a polite person, but she seemed to wear a new skin. I recognised it – it was the same one of perpetual servitude my father’s workers wore – I’d just never thought I would see it on my mother.
Money commanded respect, sometimes for oneself, and my mother didn’t have any. The night we arrived at Sister Bolatito’s place, she assembled us in the living room of the boys’ quarters to inform us of her obvious decision.
‘I feel it’s important for you to know what’s going on,’ she started, then cleared her throat. She pulled at the sleeve of her blouse, looking unsure and we stared at her in pensive silence.
It wasn’t the first time we’d assembled like this, but that was over ten years ago and then she’d lied, told us we were going to spend time with our grandparents. But even back then, I’d known the truth.
‘I’ve left your father,’ my mother said finally and my sisters gasped. ‘We’re not going back,’ she announced with finality.
‘What about school?’ Nwamaka whined. I turned to stare at her nose. It was how I told them apart: Nwamaka was the one with the slight crook at the edge of her nose that mirrored my father’s, the only blemish in his features. As children, Nkechinyere had been the one to mirror my father’s temperament but at some turning point between child and teenagehood, they’d switched personalities.
‘You can keep going to school. I’ll take you myself every morning,’ my mother said.
‘Are we going to live here forever?’
My mother blinked rapidly, like she was trying to calm herself. ‘No, we won’t live here forever. We’ll find a solution, I promise.’
‘Did we leave because of Ego?’ Nkechi asked, pointing at the scar at the side of my head. It was her turn for us to stare at her.
My mother had always done her best to shield them from the reality of my father, even when he made it almost impossible. As the first child, I’d been the one to bear the responsibility of knowledge.
