INTRO
One balmy Thursday evening in January, I was not expecting you for another month at least and you would not know that they’d sacked me from my last job and that I was stacking shelves for a friend of mine, then got a job in Dorking once a week to keep body and the soul together, gist sef dey inside small, from the way my stereo blasted Fela through my open window and the wind in my face and my ears, not my hairs, that would be a fiction too far, you would not know. Surely not. The sun was low in the sky and I had the visor down and the windows open.
I bounced through the door at home, ready for supper. My weekends start on Thursday. Thursday is my Monday and my Friday because I work one day a week. That is another story. Another tale. I digress petty. I bounced in for supper and cast a quick glance at the table in the kitchen for clues to what we are going to have. Couscous or garlic bread I am not allowed to say what I like best because Michelle my Belle may take offence. No time to digress.
There was no supper. The kettle steamed. Ah, there is hope. Michelle my Belle wore a long face and was standing in the door, between me and the kitchen. ‘Ring John,’ she said.
I smelled trouble. ‘What is it?’ I said. My brain itched.
‘Ring John.’
I called your dad. He said your mum was not well. My scalp itched as it often did when I had scabies aged four. He said operations may be needed and he would let me know. He was curt. I was worried but tried not to show it. I didn’t know what questions to ask without making everyone feel worse. I postponed supper indefinitely until Michelle ma Belle insisted that I would need my legendary strength to get us through – marital flattery to fatten any ego. Michelle my Belle went to bed whilst I waited. And waited. We are living in an age when books other than the Bible are considered weapons of mass destruction and must be bombed or tariffed into oblivion. The only authorized instruments of mass instruction? Bombs and guns and starvation. So I got my laptop out and began to write. When I finished one cup of coffee, I got up and made another one and went on writing what I could remember of the story I’d always intended to write for you.
My dear little petty in the world. I must embroider my story first with its embryology. It was late July, a Saturday afternoon in Surrey. Smoke from the barbecue watered my eyes and baking heat shimmered down from a cloudless blue heaven, bounced off the flagstone patio and crawled, stinging, up my legs and bones. Feet away, on a ledge beside an empty silver tray, my friend Fela’s Water no Get Enemy played on the radio. Behind me on the far side of the straw lawn in a babbling baby pond, under the useless glare, sadly, of the plastic heron, in the shade of the tented black netting, my surrogate daughters, our surviving koi, gobbled the grub their daddy bought for them. Michelle ma belle appeared in the kitchen doorway. Was it not too hot for my endless massacre of her innocent foxgloves, geraniums, dahlias and ivy in the futile pursuit of the culprit wasp that stung me on the tip of the elbow she asked? The carving knife in her hand looked convincing so I backed off to lock up my chainsaw in the shed.
The barbecue fire had just got going when I heard car doors slam. We raced through to open the door. Your mum and dad had dropped in on their way back to the States where they’d been working for the last three months. Your granny, Michelle ma belle, beat me to the first hugs. Before I could clear my throat to stop her the green goddess of comedy was off, indulging her strong delusion that she was a great loss to British comedy. Now, petty, if we’d heard the recycled one about her novelty kitchen gloves once we’d heard it a thousand times. ‘You can talk,’ she said, when she saw me grinning. She pointed an accusing finger at me because, as is my wont, I was wearing two shirts, one of them back to front. But petty, they sacked me well before my time. What else was I to do with my pristine dress shirts and ties but wear them out in the garden?
But to return to embryology, I noticed that your mum looked a bit peaky. Was she already missing her mum and dad? But she only saw them the day before. Was she coming down with something? Was it the trip from the States to Scotland then to London? Surely she couldn’t be teething. I’d read of a supermodel growing a mandibular molar which had to be pulled up for being surplus to photogenic requirements. And it weighed too much. I opened my mouth to ask what was wrong, saw the warning glint on pain of impalement in a pane of Michelle ma belle’s left eye and clamped my gob shut.
We gathered round the rattan table on the patio. My lower spine is a trifle less supple than the rest of me, which is as flexible as set concrete. Wincing, then wrinkling my nose against the smoky barbecue fumes I bent over to heap the crumbling briquettes back into a glowing zigurrat. Kutuwenji help us, the last thing I wanted was your dad yet again decrying my barbecue skills. You see, petty, your dad fancies himself as a bit of a chef. When your dad and I go away together, say to watch the Toon, I don’t miss Michelle ma belle because, like her, he’s always on my case. But again I digress. As a vicious and oily spat between the burgers commenced on the fire, still in a crouch I leapt away from the grill to tend the drumsticks sizzling on a platter, I thought I heard your dad intone, as if announcing a goalless draw between part-timers in the basement league say that your mum may be pregnant. Up shot my leporidean accessories, too grand merely to be called ears. What did my boy mean by may? From memory, check AI, if you don’t believe me, or your mum, it’s not an indeterminate state, you cannot be nonbinary, you are either positive or negatively charged with child, end of, in my pensioner opinion.
‘Oh, aw, that’s lovely, great news,’ said Michelle, ma belle, clasping hands to her chest, her blue eyes sparkling like bejewelled dentures on Oscar night. I got you just where I want you, pregnant,’ she cried. I am going to use that line in a book. Anyway, I digress. My brain spun. Did I hear him say a baby? A baby? Steady on Yaro. It’s not quite now let your servant depart in peace, mos def the reverse. I had to hang around to see your unfold. Because my dear little petty, you probably looked like a crayfish, but no need to fret, we’ve all been through the same fishy amphibious saurian ancestral stages. It’s evolution done it, like. Or, to put it another way, to grow, parts of us have to die. Please meiosis, please don’t pass on my penchant for endless digressions and getting lost in spite of Satnav, for starting an argument between short planks, for blowing fuses and wrecking toys and tools because instructions are for lesser humans. One thing I can do is rock you to sleep. You don’t believe me? I was once the go to man for baby sitting. Give me a book and a piece of cheesecake and I was yours. To paraphrase, many of those babes in my arms are now leaders in their own fields.
My dear little petty in the world. In my days as a babysitter I told many stories. Snack or mealtime stories, keep awake stories for mealtime, bedtime stories, stories to go with the muffin game, and after the dehydration and Bargain Hunt game, stories of the wicked Bad Babo and of elephants with windpowered turbo charged trunks and desperate improvisations for when my little proteges grazed a limb joint but howled as if they’d lost it in a sawmill. Mind you I’m just as guilty myself.
But I digress. I’ve written before A Quest for Solace but in case I’m not here when you arrive I am going to write you a story. When or whether mummy and daddy will ever let you read it, I don’t know. But for Stephen King who says not to write with the door open, I’d ask Michelle ma belle to remind me to flag up upsetting scenes or flash photography, but she’ll only ruin it by asking me to squeeze in her one and only joke, so I will just have to take the chance that you will have the constitution to bear to take everything I write in the stride or glance of a 5 to 6 year old, the demographic at which this missive is aimed.
Unlike the Bad Babo stories, this one is virtually true, yet as I have a justifiably low impression of my memory, the feeling is mutual, gist sef must to dey inside small. What is gist? Look it up. And if someone on “socials” or your nursery teacher, in the long and honourable tradition of letters to the editor nitpicking, says, looking down their nose, that Lagos didn’t float its own currency until five minutes after I described it in the book, or that the danfo buses were painted yellow ochre not the colour of palm oil, tell them grandpa Yaro or Sola says, to quote or paraphrase Sebastian Barry, that they should go tup a billy goat, because it’s not effing granulated history. Or, to paraphrase Achebe go write your own, abi dem force you read my book? And petty, if you want reflections on the changeable hues of the moonlit canopy refracted through the silk strip draped over the chrome handle of crying child’s rocking crucible as seen through the virtuous complexity of a munificent Madonna, close this book. Go and read Jakespear.
Petty, I don’t know when you will be reading this. Most of this is indescribable yet has to be put into words. Alas, I was not always called Sola. and the places I write about were not always called Lagos or Nigeria. That was the work of terrorists with fancy sobriquets, coats of arms and cannons.
It was sometime between 1976 and 1980 and I was in a room in a suburb of Lagos known as Idiaraba, which in English means the foot of the Cotton Silk tree. My fanimorous female companion, in her final year of medical school and to me the most perfect woman in the world, was called Remi. The table lamp, set up on a tower of thick medical textbooks bathed the bedroom in a lubricious red glow, the humming fridge in the left corner, harmonising with the ringing in my ears, legacy of battery by the goons who for good measure cracked my skull open in search of secrets about an abortive military coup. You see my little petty, misguided elements, otherwise known as treasonable conspirators, tried to kill the man I called the Invisible Signalman our Head of State, for reasons that will emerge, if I tell this story well, was the last man in the world I wanted dead, by any means foul or fair or natural.
