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in a warm smile, as if life were eternally ticklish. If she scowled, it was only in mockery, momentarily pulling a face before dissolving into throbbing laughter. Life around Abeni was a series of delicious meals. She made Ifasen adalu – yellow maize cut off the cob and cooked with beans, all smothered in pepper soup. She would place a pitcher of water with lemon slices and ice next to his plate, in case the pepper caught in his throat. She plied him with snacks of chin-chin , scotch eggs and small meat pies. On his birthday, before he awoke, she always prepared moyin , grinding the beans into a paste and mixing them with tomatoes, peppers, thin slices of fresh meat and vegetables, then mixing it all with egg and spices, cooked slowly in foil in a heated pot. By the time Ifasen awoke, the expansive house was filled with its fragrant breath. His gifts would wait, and he would hold back his excitement, first cutting chunks of his birthday breakfast and gulping fresh juice. His family shook their heads at his appetite, and Abeni lurked at the door of the kitchen, watching with an approving smile, her arms flopped across her chest.
    Ifasen missed the simplicity of familiar tastes and the regularity of meals that had defined his home life. The memories of his childhood hung like pegged cloth, each recollection held in place by a taste or fragrance that conjured the moment in his mind. He sometimes felt that his family had been held together by Abeni’s cooking and that, but for that, they would have broken apart far sooner than they did.
    He longed to give his own child something of that culinary experience, but it was difficult to find the ingredients in a foreign country. There were no yams for ikokore or iyan , no cassava for gari , no cola nuts to chew, no oro seeds to boil for ogbono or even plantains for dodo or to bake whole as boli . No vanilla zobo to drink, no palm wine, no home brews. Only beers with many different labels but the same thin, bitter taste. The restaurants served up foreign meals: pasta, pizza, curry, chicken with hot spices that made the flesh orange. The shops sold tightly packaged containers of food in cold aisles filled with metal trolleys and lonely faces. He longed to plunge his hands into a hessian sack of speckled beans, to pour a cup of brown rice over his fingers and into a paper bag, to hear the shouts and laughter of the traders. Sometimes – most times – it felt that he was not in Africa at all, this purgatory where he waited, not returning but not leaving.
    He pushed open the door and lingered at the threshold, taking in the cramped flat and allowing the smell to fuel his yearning. His feet hurt from a day of standing at the intersection and he longed to take off his shoes. But he waited, letting the sounds of his home calm him. He could hear his wife talking softly with his son, telling him what she was cooking. He knew his boy would be sitting on the scratched floor of the kitchen, wax crayons scattered about him and the white page in front of him splashed with colour. He felt his heart open out to them.
    ‘Okeke,’ he said gently, as if he were intruding, ‘I am home.’
    ‘Hello, Ifasen,’ Abayomi replied, equally softly. She looked up to him at the doorway and smiled. Neither would ask after the other’s day. ‘I am making obe – and Sunday found some fish for us.’
    Ifasen’s face darkened at the mention of the man who shared their apartment, but Abayomi had turned back to her soup and did not notice.
    ‘Michael,’ she continued, half-turning to the little boy sitting cross-legged on the linoleum floor, ‘say hello to your father. He has come home to—’
    ‘I wish you would not call him that,’ Ifasen interrupted. ‘It is not his name. You know that it upsets me.’
    ‘Ifasen,’ Abayomi said sharply, drawing in breath, ‘you must not start this again. Chei! He will never get anywhere in this country if we carry on calling him Khalifah.’
    Her reaction was