Bolaji Odofin

Something blue is walking backwards. The woman laughed. I ate the duck. Fire engine red is standing on her head. He brings a tray. The thin bite bites. They watch me as I take the spoon, from the corners of theirs eyes they watch, and so the bees must come: Bzzzz…bzzzzzz… bzzzzzzzzzzzzz…
I am standing between the trees. Eyes are everywhere. They sparkle when I glare, they sparkle when I turn my back, they sparkle, not with tears, but with a certain dreadful knowingness; a tiger’s happy grin.
A tiger’s-- No, no, no; bad metaphor, down boy.
The grounds are almost deserted. I relax and watch the sun touch a boulder behind the outpatient building. To think that weeks ago the same sun might have kissed it, might even, with some encouragement, have painted it gold; but as all else has been reduced to the pretty mundane, to the barest reality necessary for it to pass muster, it follows then that so must this.
Watson, observe the boulder. It is soot-coloured and large, and has a chip on its shoulder. A patient had managed to get onto the roof and, laughing his fright and his defiance, jumped. He’d jumped, Watson, and smashed his head on that rock yonder; just pffff, and… splash.
And the blood-- there’s been…so much blood. They’d scrubbed and scrubbed but they couldn’t …they kept missing a spot…kept missing…
On the grounds had been collective breath sharply drawn, the nothing-thereness of a missed heartbeat, overtaken by the dinner bell and a rush to the cafeteria for plantain and beans.
Sometimes I think, if I let my eyes come together to observe my nose, I might, if I’m patient, receive a revelation: the vast, mysterious inter-connectedness of things, wheels within wheels, a monstrous machinery with billions of bolts and moving parts, dispensing milk and grading papers.
The sun is warm on my hands and face.
"Here," she said. "Go and buy a bucket of water."
I shake my head. I sigh.

Damola lost her father when she was eight. Within three years he’d been replaced by a man with a paunch and a sweaty half moon smile.
"I don’t like him," Kemi said. She said this often. "I want Papa. What did he have to go and die for?"
The two sisters were on the balcony of their upstairs flat. It overlooked busy Odeku Street.
Damola lowered her book. Here was an opportunity not to be missed. "It was his time," she said mysteriously.
"His time?" Kemi was doubtful. "He wasn’t old. He did not have white in his hair. He wasn’t old."
"What do you know?" Damola snapped, irritated at being questioned. "You’re only nine. Keep quiet." Remembering a line she’d read someplace she suddenly boomed: "Listen to the voice of your elders!"
They watched a man with a ladder walk by. A little boy trotted alongside, carrying a yellow-splattered can of paint. As they turned the corner Kemi said, "I miss Papa."
Damola wasn’t listening. "Look!" she cried. "Kemi, look!"
It was a caterpillar tractor, a rarity in these parts. It rolled slowly and marvellously past. The girls squealed with excitement until it vanished from sight. Pedestrians took over the street once more.
Damola could not resist. Quick as a cat she hoisted herself onto the cement partition that stood between her and a twenty-foot drop, and bellowed: "From up here you all look like ants!"
"Get down from there!" an alarmed neighbour shouted up at her. "What kind of stupid game is that? Get down before I come up there and deal with you!"
Damola hopped down with a pout. Now that wasn’t in the script, the story that was forever writing itself upon some murky half-glimpsed screen in her mind.
"Stop looking like mumu," she snapped at her sister. "Oya, go and wash all the dirty plates in the house."
"But there’s no water in the house," Kemi whined.
Damola brought out a five kobo coin. "Here," she said. "Go and buy a bucket of water at Mama Tunde’s well. Don’t forget to collect change. Oya, oya, go."
Kemi took the coin and left. Damola could hear her singing as she descended the stairs. She hung about uncertainly for a moment before going into the bedroom the two sisters shared.
It was a depressing blue, peeling in places. There was a badly torn carpet, a mat and a mattress. Clothes tumbled from a large metal portmanteau in the corner. A calendar hung from a nail on the wall.
Damola dropped her book on the pile near the mattress. She picked up another.
The paperback books cost anything from one to twenty kobo. Some she borrowed and ‘forgot’ to return. There were dozens of them now. Dozens. Kings and queens and pirates, orphans, herbalists, dwarves, dragons, wizards, tortoises, spells, smoke, swords, warriors, princesses, thieves, drunkards, rockets, forests, men, women, heroes, villains; they belonged, one and all, to her, and she to them. When a hero was deemed brave and just she determined to be nothing else. When another was serpent sly she crept about serpent slyly. It was the same with television. Damola knew her people. Damola was her people.
Her hand lightly caressed the books. It hovered over Nkem Nwankwo and Arthur Conan Doyle-- her favourites-- then came abruptly away.
Strong afternoon sunlight poured in through the room’s tattered green curtains, painting, it seemed to her, the entire scene in gold. She was possessed of a dark restless energy. Search though she did for a line to capture the moment, none would put itself forward.
Her fevered gaze fell on a tiny stack of new notebooks. School opened for the year’s second term in a week. Her mother had purchased supplies. Damola’s name and a class subject had been written in capital letters on the cover of each notebook. Seizing one, she rummaged in her schoolbag and brought out a Bic Biro. Drawing a thick careful line through HOME ECONOMICS she thought: The brave girl fought with the creature called HOME-ECONS, and killed it.
Satisfied, she sat back. The subject line now bore the legend: Damola’s Adventures In The Land Of The Djin.
She flipped the notebook open. A shining white page dazzled her. Slowly she began to write.
The king died.
"Why did he have to die?" the little princess asked. "There was no white in his hair."
The queen wiped away a tear. "It was his time," she said.

"Good morning."
"Hello doctor."
"Well. And how are you today?"
"I’m fine. You’re a great doctor."
"Hm. Have you anything else for me besides that cryptic smile you’re sporting?"
"It’s my Mona Lisa smirk. I perfected it in secondary school."
He considers that, then gives me a smirk of his own. "What are you writing?"
"Nothing," I say. "Nothing much. " I close the notebook.
"Hm." He cocks his head to the side like an inquisitive puppy. "We’re still working our way towards a firm diagnosis. Your symptoms are…confusing. The tentative diagnosis is schizophrenia. Do you know what that means?"
"Oh. My. God. Doctor," I ask in a small voice, "am I going to die?"
He is not amused. "You are not co-operating with us in your treatment, Mrs Filani."
"I’m a possible schizophrenic," I say absently. "What did you expect?"
"What are you writing?" he asks again. "Here, let me see that."
"I think not."
He sighs. I smile. "Don’t worry about me, doctor," I tell him sportively. "Like beauty, sanity is in the eye of the beholder."

Damola wrote. From the pristine pages of her notebook came words that spilled over and fanned out, like shimmering blue ink cobwebs, into ladders that connected everything. She appropriated events and tailored it to her size. Parents, neighbours, friends, teachers; all became the unwitting cast in a stage production on which the curtain never fell. And they were good. They had no idea, they didn’t know how good they were.
They were brilliant, but there was only one Star.
Lying on her back in the dark, staring up at nothing and seeing tomorrow’s events today, Damola didn’t hear the voices at first; but it finally penetrated her technicolour fog, and she sat up on the mattress and listened hard.
"Shut up! Keep your mouth shut!"
"I should shut up, ehn? I should shut up. Useless man. Look at the time-"
"Leave me alone!"
"Look at the time. Is this the time your age-mates return home to their families? There’s no food in the house and he comes home reeking of beer."
"Don’t touch that! Don’t touch that!"
"Don’t touch what? You were with that Baba Laide again, weren’t you? Until that blood sucker sucks you dry you won’t be satisfied."
"Leave him alone. Leave… ohhh…my head…you stupid woman…why don’t you ever shut up…"
Damola’s eyes narrowed in the gloom. In one fluid movement she was on her feet. She knew what she had to do. She would Intervene. She would be The Selfless Child With An Adult’s Wisdom. She, Damola, would Save The Day.
She had to hurry, though. Someone’s tone was already getting annoyingly conciliatory.
Damola dashed into the hallway and burst into her mother’s room. The duelling pair stared at her in surprise.
"Damola! What are you doing out of your bed at this time of night? Why aren’t you asleep?"
At first the words wouldn’t come, and she panicked.
"Are you deaf?" her mother demanded. "Am I not talking to you?"
"You mustn’t fight!" Damola said in a breathless little rush.
"What? What did you say?"
"I said you must not fight," she quavered. "Your voices woke me. Why are you fighting? Why? You must…live together in harmony." A brief pause and then, in a stronger voice:" You must not fight!"
Her mother and stepfather first gaped at her, then began to smile at each other embarrassedly.
"Look at that. Listen to what this child is saying…"
"Out of the mouth of babies…"
"This is exactly what we deserve…"
Then the Wise One said ‘Good night,’ and they patted her and hugged her, overcome.
"Good night," Damola said demurely.
"Ah, good child." Her mother came over and hugged her, then released her with a pat on the head. "Good night, my dear."
Damola fought a smile.
She returned to her room and fell on her mattress. She was almost instantly asleep.

Walk the walk and talk the talk, you big bad talking drum, you. Cats are bolts of lightning, and swing from purple trees. The cassava must be got out, and very quickly too. Ba-dum, da-tum, ba-dum da; the music of discerning angels. Follow the man with the ribbon in his hair-
"You have a visitor."
God.
Bzzzzzz…bzzz…bzzz-
"Your husband is here to see you."
Oh.
Well. In that case, I’ll leave the bees, the busy busy bees, and follow the nurse, who’s decked out in white.
He’s sitting on the couch in the Visiting Room. His face lights up when he sees me, and he gets to his feet. "Damola," he says, squeezing my hand warmly.
"Fela." I royally present a cheek to be kissed. "How are you?"
He sighs. He drops my hand. We sit facing each other.
There is a little silence into which the clock chimes the hour. I can feel his eyes searching my face.
"You look well," I say flippantly. I frown. My voice is too loud.
"I miss you," he says quietly. "I love you. I wish our places were reversed so I could go through this for you. I…I spoke with the doctor-"
I raise an imperious hand. "How’s Kemi doing?"
"Much better," he says after a pause. "I see her every day that I can. The firm’s got a contract for the construction of a new stadium and-"
"Where?"
"Where? Oh. Here in Lagos."
"That’s marvellous news. We go wash am o."
He smiles. "So I’m busy. But I go to see her. She has so few visitors. And, well, she’s not… strong… like you. I hold her hand and we talk. I like her, but I suspect she merely likes my banga soup." He gives a mock scowl, which dissolves into a grin.
He tries so hard. I touch him and say, "You’re a good person."
He stares at me.
I try to hide my confusion.
Sometimes he does that; he takes me by surprise. He leaps at me and looms large, and is somehow magnified so I see his fine wrinkles and his pores, and the sweat trickling past his nose to his jaw, and I ache, so terrible and so inevitable does he become. But at other times he is just a man in a dark suit, prematurely grey at the temples, with soft black eyes and an easy grin, and I am not afraid of him at all.
"I am, am I?" His gaze drops to the floor. "Is that a line from a play of a film or, Lord help us, your precious notebooks?"
"It is," I tell him coolly, "whatever you want it to be."
"You’ll never change."
"Most people don’t. You come here to spar with me, do you?" I pout. "Don’t you care about me? I thought you cared about me."
He looks impatient, is about to say something pointed, then doesn’t. "I have to go. I’m picking Tokunbo up at two. You remember her, don’t you? Your daughter?"
"Of course," I say indignantly. "Tokunbo mi. How can I forget my angel? Really Fela, you go too far." My voice rises. "I am her mother!"
"Nice." He applauds delicately. "Very nice, considering you never speak of her."
"I…I think of her. That has to mean something."
"She’s always pointing at your photo and-"
"Oh, enough with the guilt." I wave my hand about irritably. "I know guilt. We Africans invented it."
‘What?" He is incredulous. "What? What are you talking about?"
I say nothing.
"All right. Suit yourself." He is on his feet once more. "I have to go."
Suddenly, I don’t want him to. "Don’t go," I murmur. "Don’t leave. I don’t want you to leave."
He blows an exasperated breath through his mouth. "I won’t be drawn into some second-rate high noon drama with you, okay?"
I glare annoyedly at his retreating back.
Second rate?

Hibiscus bloom between the trees. The grass is green and smells of rain and earth and freshly-minted beginnings.
I sit a lotus between the trees and hold a mirror to my face. It had been easy to pretend I’d brought the mirror along for reasons not unconnected to vanity-- I’d added a tube of lipstick even-- but deception had taken me this far and, unable to go farther, deposited me here.
A face a delicate oval…honey-coloured skin…eyes large and dark and shining with… what?Humour? Religious fanaticism? I have no idea.
We stare at each other, this person and I. For one giddy instant I almost believe we have achieved some kind of truce, but in the next there is heat and a jarring whiteness, there is a long wet trumpety blare of sound threatening to blow my head apart.
Teeth savagely clenched I fling the mirror away from me.
It travels an arc, and smashes against the black boulder.

The half moon rose and began to shine upon Damola when she was twelve. The self-absorbed star of countless impromptu stage productions and titled notebook episodes-- She Did Her School Proud, Fistfight at Tom-Tom Corral, A Narrow Escape, Jollof Rice In The Night-- it took her a while to notice the sweaty moonbeam about her head and shoulders, but notice it she slowly did.
She met it at first with a sort of incredulous mental snort. "Watson," she instructed, "observe yonder my grinning pot-bellied stepfather, glistening with pomade. I do believe he wants to have carnal knowledge of me."
Damola could not believe her luck. Here was opportunity opening up before her like some daredevil flower to a strange stimulus, announcing itself, in case she'd suddenly been struck blind, with the loud arthritic creak of their bathroom door. Here was the most novel stage yet for one of her performances. She would be The Victim of a Wicked Stepfather. Wan, she would wander listlessly through the four rooms of the flat, refusing food, shunning comfort, banishing friends and family. She would be sorely persecuted in the long cold months ahead but, as befits the heroine of this here piece, she would bravely take her medicine, and be rewarded with a rousing victory in the end.
"What's the matter with you?" Kemi nudged her. The two sisters were sharing a bowl of eba and egunsi soup. Kemi's fingers worked through the soup bowl in restless search of pieces of ponmo.
"Me?" Damola slowly raised her eyes to her sister's face. "Me? Nothing." She sighed. "Nothing."
She watched her stepfather with a shrill, dreadful fascination. He was her mother's husband, her father’s replacement, the family breadwinner. He was a mysterious being with whom she co-existed from a humble distance, an unknowable absolute to be obeyed without question. Now he was stepping from his domain into hers, into a place where she was no fresh-faced ingénue but an experienced old hand: the initiatrix. He had no choice but to take his cues from her; he would come, he would see, she would conquer.
Damola waited for her wrists to be enclosed in her stepfather’s undoubtedly steely grip. Her icy defiant stare-- in the best Female Rebel tradition-- would defeat him. If that failed she would beat back his evil intentions with a stick, something that worked extremely well with snakes.
Nothing happened, however.
Though she waited and watched and was determined to be clever, her stepfather seemed to take no more notice of her existence than usual.
With a sigh Damola turned back to her faithful supporting cast; her mother, sister, neighbours, friends, teachers, classmates.
"Stupid chick!" she hissed exasperatedly one Saturday afternoon. She usually spent the day prowling the neighbourhood with friends, or absorbed in the family’s black-and-white television. Now rain had been falling heavily for hours, and there was no electricity. Even her sister was out, gone to the market with their mother before the rain began, while she was stuck miserably indoors.
Pressing a glum face to her bedroom window she’d spotted the little chick darting about in a vain bid to escape the rain. This thing’ll drown, she thought. I must get it out of the rain.
It took fifteen minutes of wet pursuit to catch the panicked chick and return it to its surprised, grateful owner. Soaked to the skin, shivering, she returned to her room for a change of clothes.
It did not once occur to her to scribble down this episode. It was a thing natural to her, commonplace, undeserving of a mention in the history notebooks.
Vigorously wiping at her naked body with a towel, she began to feel the unexpected but welcome return of happy spirits.
"Dum-dum-dum, dum-dum," she sang, and did a little up-and-down wriggle to juju beats only she could hear. "Dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum-dum!"
Her eye was caught by the contrast between the dark towel and her fair skin. She was just beginning to think ‘Art’ with the cynicism she fancied she'd recently adopted, when large sweaty hands came around her and covered her budding breasts.
In those first horrifying instants she seemed to feel something warm and vital detach itself from her chest, grow wings with which it beat at her face, then fly away, leaving her frozen and lifeless, a stone statue.
They stood in silence while those hands roved over her, while silver and onions filled her nostrils, while the thin red wrongness of it crowded her head.
Her thoughts tumbled over each other, humming wildly, making no sense.
Something pressed against her back, something hard.
She knew what it was, and that knowledge catapulted her into such dizzying heights of terror she pitched forward and began to retch.
The front door was suddenly slammed shut. Voices could be heard in the flat's tiny hallway.
Damola felt the man behind her start.
Kemi and her mother had returned from the market. They were laughing. Damola caught the words 'rain' and 'fish' and 'mud' before the voices retreated towards the kitchen.
A mad dash, a thud and a curse as he collided with the door, frantic scurrying feet and then… nothing.
Damola was alone.
A thin synthetic smell overwhelmed the silver, seeming to take her sight with it. There was a dull roaring in her ears. Trembling, she reached out a hand, and fell to the ground in a dead faint.

He is perusing some sort of file and does not acknowledge me as I am led into his office, as I seat myself in front of him.
He dismisses the nurse with a nod.
I slide down the chair a little, fold my hands across my ankara-clad belly and wait.
He does not look up, but continues to read. He is being rude, and I get impatient. "Doctor Shehu, I presume?"
"One minute," he says crisply. "I'm coming."
He drums on the table with a finger: tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap. I wonder if they’ve got a medical term for that.
I wait a little more.
Finally he sets the file aside and straightens up with a professional smile.
"Was it good?" I inquire with exaggerated politeness.
"What?"
"Whaaaaaat." Though I’ve been here before I let my eyes wander over his office in a sort of slow roll.
"Well." He cocks his head to the side. "And how have you been this week?"
I turn a narrow gaze upon him. He’s joking, right?
BzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZ!
I bring in the bees…

The half moon stopped shining on her.
Damola stopped playing The Game with it. It was nothing she consciously decided. She did not say, "I’m going to stop playing The Game with my stepfather." No. It was something that came, somewhat of its own volition, to a sudden shuddering halt because, for the first time in her twelve years of life, Damola Kayode was afraid.
She was afraid of his paunch and his haircut and his full-fleshed profile. She was of afraid of the sound of his voice; she started when it boomed too close. She was afraid of his smell-- garlic and beer and cheap cologne-- and the look, when no one was looking, she imagined in his beady eye.
A foul miasma seemed to hang like dirty curtains over every inch of the flat.
She never forgot that horrible day, when she’d come in from the rain and he’d …he’d touched…he’d almost…well. The memory did not wrap itself in some dreamy cloak, to drop discreetly out of sight; it remained clear and close and awful, and terrified her.
One day, while having her hair plaited for school, Damola discovered she could not meet her own eyes in the mirror. This puzzled her exceedingly. She’d done it hundreds of times before, after all, without a thought. But now she found she could no longer do so. Something seemed to be lurking in those eyes, something dull and dreadful; she knew she did not have the strength to confront it.
It did not occur to her to tell her mother all these things. True, the power pyramid was rigidly structured and hostile to certain kinds of truths, but she herself did not enjoy a confiding relationship with her mother. They connected, through the business of living, in the most basic and superficial of ways. It was not until recent, however, that the girl thought she might be missing something.
The half moon stopped shining, but Damola was not deceived. A lull in the storm it might be, but it was a storm, she determined with all her might, that would not sweep her away.
She hid from it.
There were a lot of good hiding places. There were trees and marshes and uncompleted buildings; there was roaming the streets with friends and the television of neighbours; there was playing deaf behind the locked door of her room.
She came in for quite a bit of flogging for ignoring her stepfather, for not heeding his calls or going on his errands. "This is Yorubaland," her mother would hiss as she administered the cane. "Your conduct and character is everything."
Damola did not mind the flogging at all. She hid, and wrote, with a vengeance.

"You’ve been here, what, two months? Do you realize, in all that time, you’ve volunteered nothing of your childhood?"
I raise a careless brow, and say nothing.
"You won’t talk about it. May I ask why?"
"Elementary, my dear Watson. There’s nothing remotely interesting about my childhood."
"I disagree," he says pleasantly. "I think some kind of trauma is buried in there."
I laugh heartily. "Doctor," I cry, grinning hugely, "this is Nigeria. Childhood trauma simply does not exist here. We do not indulge in psychobabble. Your parents do the best they know how, and you do the best with who you are and how you were brought up. You can’t blame anybody for anything."
"Blame? Blame anybody for…what? Give me a for-instance."
"I have no for-instances."
"You used the word ’blame’."
"It’s allowed," I say bitingly, "in making conversation."
He lowers his head and gives me a look. He’s playing doctor again, and I inwardly roll my eyes. "There were no painful childhood memories? Words, events, that you never forgot, possibly never got over?"
"Sorry to disappoint, but no."
He hesitates and then says: "I wish you’d trust me with what you’re writing. Won’t you let me see it?"
I say nothing. A disinterested professional and you can’t tell him the truth. You feint right and left; you do fancy footwork.
Shehu leans back in his seat. "All right. Tell me about your childhood then. You grew up in Lagos?"
"Yes."
"How was it?"
"Happy."
"Hm. Your parents? What did they do?"
I cup my hands behind my head and recline in my seat. "Daddy was a policeman. Died in active service. My stepfather was a supervisor at a textile company. My mother sold rice at Oshodi market."
"Siblings?"
"A sister. My mother lost a third pregnancy."
"Oh? How old were you at the time?"
"I don’t know. Thirteen."
"How did you feel about it? The miscarriage?"
I blow a hard breath. "I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. It was just one of those things."
"What kind-"
"Yes, yes, but what’s the point?"
"Aren’t we making conversation anymore?" He cocks his head to the side in that dog-like manner of his. "Mrs Filani?"
"You’re barking up the wrong tree." I close my eyes and let a smile play about my lips. "Growing up was…perfectly fine."

"What are you writing again?"
Damola looked up. Kemi was glaring belligerently at her from the living room doorway.
"A story," she said.
Her sister snorted derisively. "E pele o, iya oni story."
Damola sighed and closed the notebook. She’d neglected her sister of late, and the latter was getting more impossible by the day. "Wait. Let me go and keep this, and then we’ll go out."
Kemi’s face lit up. "Okay."
Damola hid the notebook and they left the house to explore Odeku Street.
Christmas was everywhere; in the air and the smiles that people wore, in their own walk and the taste of Mallam Kano’s brightly-coloured candy. They caught the flicker of lights from windows. Carols and King Sunny Ade spilled from record players.
Kemi nudged her. "What’s your favourite Christmas song?"
Damola thought about it. "God rest ye merry gentlemen let nothing you dismayyyy…"
Kemi laughed and skipped happily beside her. "What do I want with that one, when there is jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way…?"
Sudden commotion broke out behind them. A crowd was gathering around a car. The two sisters ran to the scene to see what had happened.
It was a dog. The car had hit it. It lay broken and small in its own puddle of blood.
"Look," Kemi whispered. "It’s Riro, Baba Bricklayer’s dog. God," she exclaimed. "Look at its intestines."
Damola’s chest felt heavy. There was something very cruel and very sad about death in the middle of the road in atmosphere such as this. She turned and walked away.
"Where are you going?" Kemi called after her.
"Home," she called back, quickening her pace.
Kemi did not follow.
Damola took out her notebook from its hiding place beneath the bedroom carpet. She flipped it open, thought a moment and then wrote:
He was very young, this dog with the loud bark and the rolling tongue and the merry white thumping tail
The words appeared as if by magic, conjured out of nothing. She bent to her task, and felt like God after there was evening and morning-- the first day.
Her progress was rapid, her absorption total.
She was turning a page for the fifth time when a thin synthetic smell drifted like a column of dirty smoke into her nostrils. She froze and, for an instant, stopped breathing.
Her eyes went to the door.
There was nothing furtive about the eyes that crept like a loathsome insect all over her body. Staring dully at the man in the doorway she realized she hadn’t been the only one hiding cleverly. Her mother had gone to the market, Kemi was prowling the streets; there would be no saving her this time.
Damola watched as he approached, as he clamped a rough hand on her shoulder. Her mouth fell open, gulping in air. Her eyes rose helplessly to his face.
The half moon came out behind the clouds and shone upon her, and this time it obliterated the world.

Spoons clatter. Liquid is slurped. There is little conversation in the cafeteria.
Over there is Obi Maduegbuna, a former lecturer at the University of Lagos. He spends his days farting and covering the walls with chalk.
Tolani Ojo is wearing her lucky colour-- red. She has been training for the Olympics for seven years.
Apaimi Pepple, when he’s done tucking in his yam and eggs, will rise to his feet and walk to his room backwards. The day he faces his direction is the day fire will fall from the sky and burn him to ashes.
There are many of us here. I look at my pale blue robe and wonder that it blends so well with the hospital’s cream- and-blue colour scheme. It really shouldn’t. I alone of all these people do not belong here. I’m …I’m not crazy.
A few of us wander into the lounge after supper. It boasts comfortable chairs, a magazine rack, cassette players, an ayo table, and colour television. A movie is on, featuring American soldiers gritting teeth and dying American deaths all over the place.
I change the channel and find a gem: The Village Headmaster.
Quickly I find a seat. Quickly I am absorbed in the images flickering across the screen.

Damola was disappearing. Something seemed to be crumbling and falling away, like a centuries- old ruin, on the inside of her.
She stopped eating, she stopped talking; she stayed in her room and wrote.
Her mother and sister would often interrupt. Damola would watch their faces and listen, astonished, to the everyday ordinariness of their voices.
He interrupted less often. She would lie there while he went about his business, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, as un-being as if she were dead.
Sometimes, for no reason, she would start to her feet and run in a panicked half-circle, then stop in utter confusion. When she bestirred herself and spoke her lines it was not for kicks but for her very life, for it propelled her to a time and a place where the sun did not set, where the air was garlic-free, where she could love herself.
Damola could not, would not, bear the sight of herself.
"Stir the ogi well," her mother told her.
Damola moved the wooden ladle in circles through the corn gruel on the stove. Her mother was frying akara.
The girl stared at the precise lines of her mother’s shuku braids and hated it, and hated her.
Disappearing. Bits and pieces of her eluded her frantic hands and turned to dust, widening the yawning emptiness inside of her.
Damola gripped her pen with deadly desperation-- everyday she gripped her pen and tried to fill it up.

"Fela." My tone is solemn.
"My darling." He kisses me. "How are you? Here, I brought you these."
It’s a satchel full of books. I bring out an old favourite, Perpertua and the Habit of Unhappiness. "Thank you," I say happily.
He kisses me again, and holds me close. He smells wonderful. We might not be in a hospital Visiting Room but in our own lushly appointed living room. God, I miss home. Perhaps it’s time to affect a cure: ‘Look, Ma, no hands!’
"What’s funny?" he murmurs in my hair.
"I feel good," I say.
"You are good," he tells me.
How sweet. I feel I must reciprocate. I say: "I love you."
He says nothing, but his arm tightens painfully around me.
"It has always been you," I whisper. "You’re the reason I do what I do. I do it all for you."
I stop. I frown. He freezes against me. Carefully, as if I were made of glass and he did not want to break me, he removes his arm, stands up and stares uncomprehendingly into my face.
"What?" I ask, my heart beginning to thump. "What is it?"
"That," he says quietly, "is a line from a song. It’s…it’s a song. You even said it the way he-"
He stops. How very sad and distant he looks!
"Fela," I begin hesitatingly. "I…I didn’t mean-"
He turns away.
"Fela. Please-"
"You know, I’m not at all certain any of this is real to you. Nothing is real except your books and your films and your precious writing." He turns around. "Nothing is true, nothing is real; not me, not our marriage, not our child. We’re just matchstick figures orbiting your exalted existence. We don’t exist unless you say we do." He rubs at his forehead. "I didn’t believe this illness of yours at first. I thought you badly needed a break and this was your unorthodox method of getting one. Now it occurs to me that perhaps this part is real, perhaps you’re sick after all."
I stare at his face, stricken.
Without another word he turns on his heel and leaves the room.
I think to the ticking of the clock.
How had Fela and I gotten to this cold, cheerless place?
I shift uncomfortably in my seat. I know the answer well.
Wrapping my arms around myself I rock slowly back and forth.

It was his goodness that did it. A celebrated journalist, Damola knew enough to follow her nose.
Everything has a scent, its own box, a tangible shape: Lies and pain and pleasure, ambition, evil, deception, love.
Goodness is a woman with child. It is black soap, it is wrinkled old hands, it is a cow contentedly eating grass.
Fela Filani smelled of that, and more. He smelled of muffled laughter in the dark, tomatoes ripening in the sun, the sound of puppies barking, the taste of stolen fruit.
He was thirty-six-- eight years older than she-- an architect. They’d met at Kemi Kayode’s traditional wedding ceremony. The bride was a caterer, and his firm was on her list of clients. Since the two sisters had been orphaned five years earlier-- their mother and stepfather had been killed in a road accident on the way back from the latter’s village-- Damola had stood in as Mother of The Bride.
She and Fela had hit it off immediately. He was intrigued by her silence and the expression in her dark, burning eyes. She was fascinated by his smile and the unusual smell of him.
Before she was ready for it, before she could prepare a script for them to follow, they had fallen completely in love.
Two months after she’s written he did, he proposed to her and she accepted him.
The wedding took place a year and a month later, on a clear Saturday in March. Everyone marvelled at her shimmering iro and buba, at her glowing beauty. Exceedingly pleased, her new in-laws swarmed around her, wanting to be noticed by her. They enveloped her in warmth and Yoruba culture, which smelled like old, worn leather.

Here was something new.
Damola entered into the union with her eyes narrowed-- the better to see her marriage with. Every word, thought, action and sensation was magnified and minutely analysed. She felt herself feeling, saw herself seeing, listened to herself as she talked. Happiness found and surprised her in the midst of all this effervescent activity. Fela was everything she’d dared to write he was: generous, kind and extraordinarily compassionate. He cried when he was sad and laughed, long and infectiously, when he was happy. He was smart and funny and good, and he loved her.
Damola had never written so much in her life.
The abyss kept widening but now, for the first time, she could almost keep pace with it. She had to act, she had to write; it was the stuff of her very life. Love did not dull that sobering fact for an instant. Give it up and the roaring darkness would overtake her; she would wink out into nothingness.
Sometimes he watched her while she frowningly concentrated on her task.
"Hey," he exclaimed one day. "Mama said that. ‘When are you giving us twins?’ She said that yesterday before she left."
"I know," Damola replied, calmly closing her notebook.
Her husband was terribly amused. "You mean you write down every single thing we say? You’re recording our life together, maybe?"
"Maybe."
"Fa-sci-na-ting," he drawled. "Tell me, how will you put this one? ‘His long tapering fingers slid up her thigh and-’"
"Stop that!" She swatted at his hand.
"Now that I know you’re recording," he told her innocently, "I have to supply plenty of material…"
She gathered her notebooks and fled, giggling. Fela did not mind that she wrote so much, or that she was sometimes almost exaggeratedly theatrical. He was charmed by it.
"She’s crazy," Kemi often told them both. "Madness of the village market variety. Nuts."
"Eccentric," Fela would counter. "The woman writes, see."
Kemi would pretend to consider that. "Crazy," she would declare again.
Fela rarely missed a cue. He interpreted his roles superbly; he was a natural. Damola wondered what she’s done right to deserve such a man.
"Your mother keeps talking about grandchildren," she told him sourly one day. "What can she mean by it?"
"It’s been two years," he said. "Tradition demands she talks that way. It doesn’t really surprise you."
"Tradition," she scoffed. "Tradition demands it, and we must follow tradition like we’re blind and it’s our seeing-eye dog." Her voice rose. "We’re not blind, Fela!"
"Damola," he said quietly. "My mother isn’t an issue and you know it. Don’t hide behind her. I would like, very much, for us to have a child."
She stared at him. "Who’s going to raise it? Ehn? My job takes me all over the place. You work all hours. Who’s going to raise this child you would like very much?"
"If I’d gotten a wife from the village like my mother wanted we wouldn’t be having this conversation." He scratched his ears. "Education and women shouldn’t mix. It complicates things. For men."
Damola grinned.
"We’ll raise our child," he told her, serious now. "We’ll find a way. "
Damola rubbed at her forehead. She closed her eyes. She sighed. Persecuted: Has anyone ever been as persecuted as she?
Fela watched her and waited.
"I don’t know," she grumbled at last. "Nine months is a long time."
"First babies sometimes take as long as eleven," he informed her solemnly.
They caught each other’s eye and began to snigger like drunken teenagers.
"I guess I can cut back some at work," she said falteringly.
He showered her with happy kisses, to which she grudgingly submitted.

"I’m not eating that," she announced imperiously.
"You’re not?" Her husband raised a brow. "Why not?"
"It contains fish."
"It’s fish pepper soup. It’s supposed to contain-"
"Fish dream."
"What?"
"Fish dream. They flap their little tails about in the water, and sleep, and dream like crazy."
"Really?"
"I’m not eating dreaming fish."
Fela sighed. He’d heard about pregnant women. "Beef nko? Or ogufe?"
"Goats, cows," Damola sniffed, "they all dream."
"Well…there’s ogi-"
"Ogi is made from corn."
"Corn dream too?"
"Plants sense things," she pronounced.
"Wonderful. I guess it’s sand, air and algae from now on."
"Algae-"
He raised a hand. "Don’t tell me."
"Well I’m not eating that," she said stubbornly.
Fela watched as she turned her nose west and radiated sensitivity. Suppressing a grin he kissed her affectionately. "Now what shall we do for food?"
He was nuzzling her neck when she started to her feet and ran an abrupt half-circle across the room. The sheer panic on her face brought him in a shambling run to her side. "What is it? What’s wrong? What’s the matter? What is it?"
"What?" Now she was staring confusedly up at him.
"What’s the matter?"
"The matter?" She frowned. "Nothing. Nothing."
She returned to the dining table, picked up a spoon, and absently began to eat.

The following April brought rain and, for the Filanis, a perfectly formed beautiful baby girl.
Fela was beside himself with joy. "A Daddy!" he crowed, jumping up and down. "A Daddy! Oh you goddess! You…you…you miracle!"
"E take e easy o," a nurse chided, smiling in spite of herself. "O ti re won."
Fela danced the nurse about the room. Laughing, she extricated herself and herded him out.
"I’ll be right outside," he told his wife. "Right outside. Let me know if you want anything."
Damola was tired. She hadn’t had an easy time of it, but she was glad about the child, glad the ordeal was over. Now she was that most venerated and mysterious of beings: a mother. Now she may be complete, healed, made whole.
Damola held the small squirming creature in her arms and waited to be transformed.
Nothing happened.
"A mistake?" she murmured. She waited some more, wanting to be sure.
The moment finally grew too heavy and too awkward for her to bear. Sighing, she set the child aside.
Her wandering gaze fell on one of her notebooks. It was on the hospital’s tiny bedside table. Her eyes lit up. Fela, she thought. Smiling, she slept.
She woke up hours later to eat, after which she picked up a book, ignoring the bustle around her, ignoring the infant in its crib.
Hungry, the baby cried.
Damola lay the book aside and peered disinterestedly into its face. Then she sat up and reached for the notebook. Gripping the pen like a weapon she frenziedly began to write herself into feeling. Finally, at three o’clock in the morning, tired but triumphant, she lifted the child out of its crib and stuffed a nipple in its mouth.
My baby, she thought tenderly. Tears came to her eyes. My child.

If her husband noticed anything odd about her attitude towards the child he did not comment on it. Propping up the infant as an excuse she semi-retired from active journalism and stayed home to work on her book. The book sought to establish a relationship between certain aspects of Nigerian culture and the Nigerian woman’s damaged psyche. It was being co-authored by Nana Uchendu, a professor of psychology at the University of Ibadan .
The child often watched her as she worked.
"You have no imagination," Damola accused it one day. The toddler was sucking its thumb, the picture of rude health, deficient only in taking a hint. She had no idea what to do with it. "Interpret, child," she urged. "Interpret!"
The little girl smiled.
Damola was beginning to smile back, thinking, It’s not so bad after all, when the child’s face suddenly sharpened into focus. The mouth…that smile…those eyes…she’d seen that face before…she’d seen-
Bile came up her throat in a hot putrid rush. She fled to the bathroom and vomited in the toilet bowl.
After that it seemed they never stopped fighting, Fela and she. It was always about the child: she would not touch it; she forgot to feed it; she forgot it at its nursery school; she shoved it and it fell; she screamed at it all the time.
Grim, Damola wrote.
The book, The Secret Journeys of Women, was launched with great fanfare. It met with greater success than its authors could have predicted. Numerous television appearances and speaking engagements followed. Life for Damola was a continual bustle. It was in the midst of all this that Kemi fell ill.
She was diagnosed with AIDS, and admitted into a hospital.
Damola was shocked. "Your husband too?" she demanded on a visit to the hospital.
Kemi nodded weakly.
Damola turned a baleful eye on her. "Why didn’t you tell us? You must’ve known for weeks, maybe months, maybe…maybe even years. Why didn’t you say something? Ehn? How could you be so wicked?"
Kemi began to cry.
Fela gently shushed her, wiping away her tears with his fingers.
"How," Damola demanded again in ringing tones, "could you-"
Fela turned and stared at her so long and so strangely that she was subdued into compassion for her sister.
"I’m sorry," she said, touching the sick woman’s hair. "I’m sorry. Pele."
Everyday they visited, bringing along all sorts of delicacies to tempt Kemi to eat.
Damola would gossip with her sister for hours, hiding behind rapid-fire chatter and laughter as bright and hard as a false coin. While she couldn’t say she enjoyed the performance she could acknowledge it as one of her best.
AIDS, she kept thinking. My sister has AIDS. Incredible. Millions of people in the country, and it had to be her. It had to be me.
Fela travelled to Abuja a few weeks later to attend a workshop.
Damola was alone with the child for almost a week.
She patiently bathed it, fed it and took it to school, but whenever it toddled towards her for something more she would cry in something akin to panic: "What? What is it? What more do you want?"
She was dozing fitfully on the sofa, exhausted after one of her daily visits to the hospital, when the child wandered over and placed a wet pudgy hand on her knee.
Damola froze.
She took the hand as if it were a loathsome thing and flung it at its owner. The child was insistent, however. It kept touching her, blabbering at her.
Damola pushed it away from her. It fell and immediately began to cry. The tears turned to enraged shrieks when Damola further ignored it. It kicked its legs and writhed on the floor while the screams rose in volume.
Face virulently twisted Damola grabbed a fistful of baby shirt and jerked it to its feet. She stared at the thing in her hand and wanted to destroy it, to stamp it into oblivion, to smash it into pieces.
"Shut up!" she said through gritted teeth. The wailing continued. "Shut up!" she screamed and shook it violently. "Shut your mouth! Shut up!"
There was a silence in which the child’s eyes bulged at her.
Traffic hummed in the distance.
Shocked, Damola released her hold on the toddler.
My God, she thought. I’ve become some sort of…some kind of…I’m a monstrosity.
She stumbled to the bedroom. She quietly shut the door.
A week after her husband’s return Damola checked herself into a privately funded psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Lagos. The rooms were large and attractive, the grounds extensive and heavily wooded.
It’s just for a few days, she told herself. It’s all gotten too much for me. I’ll rest here for a little while. Here I’ll be…perfectly safe.

Doctor Shehu is in his fifties. He is short, bald and thickset, and wears clay-coloured plastic-rimmed glasses. Kemi is a frail-looking light-complexioned woman with kinky close-cropped hair and twinkling brown eyes. My father, though Oyo State born and bred, looked Hausa-Fulani with his fair skin and finely chiselled features. My mother was plump, tar-black, and heavily cicatrixed. She laughed a lot. Her teeth were big and very white.
Fela is tall and wiry. He has a lean boyishly handsome face, hair a little grey at the temples and a smile that is somehow both roguish and sweet. When he’s excited his words tumble over each other, he talks so fast you can’t keep up, and when he laughs, in his mother’s words, you can see all the way down his alimentary canal.
His assertion that the people in my life are nothing but props, ‘matchstick figures’, lacklustre black-and-white sketches within which I shine in living colour, is simply not true.
It’s not true.
I am sitting between the trees. Birds are nestling in the branches directly above my head. They talk a lot. I don’t mind.
Fluffy white clouds float placidly across the skies. Squinting, I wonder what the view must be like from up there. I try to catch this beautiful day like an infectious disease, but cannot. The black boulder draws my eye like death draws a lonely wayfarer travelling an evil road. Like an extra in someone else’s dream I walk like one without a will towards it. A man had cast his life upon this stone, had washed it with the blood that flowed from the pain on the inside of him.
I touch it. I slowly lick it with my tongue. I embrace it.
Centuries pass and we remain like this, the rock and I, sun and wind and salt between us. Imitation peace steals over me; to this obvious fake I cling with all my might.
I will stay here for eternity, for my grief is a thing that stretches on and on, and has no end.
"Damola."
I close my eyes.
"Damola?"
I take several deep breaths, then turn around and smile brightly.
"Fela," I say. "Doctor Shehu. How nice. What are you both doing here?"
Fela’s eyes search mine. "The doctor thought I might visit with you here today."
"Oh?" My tone is elaborately casual. "What’s the occasion?"
Shehu issues a benign smile. "Take your time," is all he says before he leaves.
We are alone, my husband and I.
He looks about him with interest. "I hear you come here a lot."
His shoes wear green grass, hibiscus peek over his shoulders, the trees are not far away, and yet, something seems to be wrong with this picture.
"How’s Kemi?" I ask.
"She’s doing well," he says. "I thought…Might I bring her home- to our home- until she’s back on her feet?"
"And her husband?"
"Well-"
"Handsome. Charming. Irresponsible. He can take care of himself, just not of her. A walking cliché." I sigh. "Yes. Take her home."
Suddenly his hand is warm on mine, and his lips, and I close my eyes and breathe his breath.
"I’m sorry," he whispers. "What I said the other day. I’m… I didn’t mean-"
"It’s all right," I murmur. My mind wanders, covering enormous distances in little jumps. I think of my daughter, who is the spitting image of me. A lump rises in my throat. When you’re born female the battle is half-lost.
I tear myself out of his arms. I walk away, into the trees.
He follows.
I stop to watch a butterfly pass by, seeming to float on the afternoon breeze. My, but how bucolic. It is like a scene from a movie, or something I might have written.
"Damola," Fela says behind me. "Everything is going to be all right."
"You sound like one of those desperately motivational motivational speakers." I strive to keep my tone light. My lips are trembling.
His arms come around me.
Suddenly the zeitgeist of a time long past falls upon us like rain: Innocence in clogs, highlife music, tales under the moonlight, a wild incautious optimism; but even in this divine envelope my life weighs down heavily upon me, and I cannot bear it.
"Help me."
"Damola-"
"Help me!" I whirl around, teeth clenched. "Why are you just standing there? Why won’t you do something? Why won’t you help me?"
I am shaking with sobs.
Fela’s eyes are haunted, half-crazed with his love and his grief, and the knowledge that lay between us like a savage third person, that he cannot save me.

Moonlight poured in through the room’s parted curtains, painting everything in it a ghostly white. Damola lay on her back in the brightly bed-sheeted single bed and stared up at the ceiling.
Why can’t you let it go, the memories, the hatred diving and conquering you like a malignant cancer?
Despair has you by the throat, as dull and deadly ad a blunt knife, and still you hold on to it.
Why?
A hoarse little chuckle reverberated in her head. Whispered a dry cackling voice she vaguely recognized as her own: Perhaps the memories are too precious…too precious by far…
Damola sat up. How do you mean?
They afford you a guilty, jolting electric pleasure, do they not, those memories? Be honest now…
A spasm went through her. What are you talking about?
Little Girl Brutalised By Sexually Abusive Stepfather. It is so very dark, so very dramatic. You wouldn’t trade those damp, dirty memories for anything in the world. You hold on to them because…you love them…
Damola’s mouth fell open in horror.
No! That is not true!
Laughter rang like demented bells in her head. Clutching her head she rolled about to escape it. As it had between the trees, the rest of her life passed before her eyes; hours, days, weeks, years sauntered past in a hateful grinning parade.
Damola wept.

The dazzling whiteness hurt her eyes.
She blinked.
Everything slowly swam into focus.
A man was seated by her. His hair was unkempt. His eyes were bloodshot.
"Fela?" Her voice was husky. She felt light-headed. It took a tremendous effort to speak.
He shot to his feet. "Damola? Damola!"
"What…what happened? Where am I?"
"Shhh." He kissed her forehead. "Shh. Don’t talk. Don’t talk. I’ll get the doctor."
"Fela--"
He was gone.
Squinting, Damola took in her surroundings. She was in a hospital, the regular non-psychiatric kind.
Had she fallen ill? What was she doing here?
Her wandering eyes fell on her wrists, on the thick white bandages there, and she thought: Oh my God.
It all came rushing back.
Fela returned, followed by a doctor and two nurses.
"We’re awake, are we?" the doctor said kindly. "You gave us a bad scare."
Damola remembered. She remembered the mirror smashing against the wall and she-- gritting her teeth at the awful drama of it (like a scene from a bad horror flick it was)-- taking a shard of glass and…the surprising pain as it bit first into one wrist, then the other…and the blood…she remembered the blood…there’d been so much blood…
I can’t even be rid of myself.
Her husband’s eyes met hers.
Bitter, she turned her head away.

Damola was summoned to the Visiting Room. She dully followed the nurse’s starched blue uniform.
Fela was waiting for her.
He was not alone. Tokunbo was in his arms.
The little girl stared at her.
Fela did not say a word. They hadn’t really spoken since her attempted suicide weeks ago. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. Whenever they met they murmured, they smiled, polite as strangers.
Damola looked at the child, at the oval face, the widow’s peak, lips that, smiling, produced a comma-like dimple in the left cheek; a face, in almost every respect, like her own.
"Fela," she said quietly. "There’s something I have to tell you."

The air is heavy with the drugged perfume of flowers. Rust-coloured birds flit to and fro across my vision.
Fela looks right, left, right. Quietly he says, "I want to kill him."
"He’s dead." My voice is toneless. "Dead. Dead. Dead."
We are sitting between the trees. Tokunbo is asleep in his arms.
"I’m so ashamed," I whisper.
He is outraged. "You did absolutely nothing wrong!"
"I hear what you’re saying." I stare at the boulder. "I just don’t believe you."
He sighs. "What happens now?" he queries softly. "What happens… next?"
I’ve been thinking about that.
"I want to stop…stop hiding…hiding behind…" I falter.
"Your notebooks?" he prompts.
Slowly, I nod. "I think…I want…I’d like to cut my reality from the same material as everyone else. Play it by ear, so to speak."
There is a silence in which he ponders that. "I get what you mean," he says at last. "That couldn’t have been easy to say. Will it be easy to do, you think?"
"I don’t know. I don’t know."
"Here." He passes the sleeping child to me.
I cradle her in my arms. I gently rock her back and forth, peering into her serene face. Nothing stirs on the inside of me. I feel as I’ve always felt about her. Now, however, I am determined: I will cross this bridge. I will get to the other side.
"Twenty years," I murmur. "He’s taken twenty years of my life. Some people are not lucky enough to be alive that long. Twenty years. And I handed it to him. I let him have it."
I exhale loudly.
"Don’t you cry," he warns. "Don’t cry." He kisses me. I hold our child tight and rest my head on his shoulder.
He murmurs something I do not hear.
"What?"
"Let it go."
"What?"
"You have to forget him."
"Really?" I am dripping sarcasm.
"Do it," he continues raggedly, "for yourself, and yourself alone. Forgive the bastard… or you’ll never get a life."
I mull that over.
"Forgive him," he says softly. "And forgive yourself too."
Myself? Forgive my-
My eyes slowly widen.

"It’s a beautiful day," Damola said.
Doctor Shehu gave her a thoughtful little look.
"A perfect day," she went on, "for departures."
"Hm." Shehu cocked his head to the side. "So it would seem. Your recovery is nothing short of…of miraculous."
Damola said nothing. For myself, she thought. For myself alone.
"When will your husband be here?" Shehu glanced at his watch. "It’s almost four o’clock."
Damola shrugged.
Shehu’s eye fell on the notebook on the ground beside her. A sudden breeze had flipped the cover open. He caught the words blue is walking backwards… I ate the duck…fire engine red is standing on her head… It looked like the beginning of something.
"So." He raised his eyes to her face. "What have you been writing all this while?"
"A story," she told him. The ghost of a smile played about her lips. "I’ve been writing… a story."
Shehu helped her to her feet. They left the gardens.
Damola read a book while she waited in the lounge. It was The Adventures of Api.
Time passed.
"I’m sorry we’re late," Fela said, hurrying towards her with Tokunbo. "We got stuck in a traffic jam at Obalende."
She closed the book. She gave him a kiss.
"Well," he said a little breathlessly. "Are you ready?"
She nodded.
They left the building.
Damola was descending the hospital steps when she looked up, and stopped.
A huge garish technicolour sunset lay shamelessly sprawled across the skies.
She glanced at Fela. Their eyes met. Both of them were suddenly convulsed with laughter.
Oh but this is going to be hard, she thought, whooping with merriment.
Carrying her daughter in her arms she walked towards the sunset, outside the hospital gates, and into her husband’s waiting car.