The Icarus Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

Her instinct that the conversation wouldn’t be a good idea was confirmed when Aunty Funke stood and began clearing away, muttering that it was about time that she cleaned the kitchen. The meal had been finished for half an hour.
    Jess’s mum began helping Aunty Funke to clear away. It looked strange, seeing her mum, dressed in a shapeless black vest and denim shorts, helping Aunty Funke, who was wearing a yellow boubou with green leaves on it. Even though the sleeves on Aunty Funke’s boubou were rolled up in a businesslike manner so that they bulged just below her shoulders, Jess’s mum still looked like the household help.
    Jess licked her adun ball, and said nothing.
    “Wait a minute,” her grandfather said, dipping his fingers into the big plastic bowl filled with water. Aunty Funke, who had bent over the table to take the bowl, froze where she was, waiting patiently for him to finish. Using his other hand, her grandfather unhurriedly paddled the water and dribbled it over his fingers, working at his fingernails to remove leftover bits of amala . Bits of speckled green okra were swirling around in the water as well. When he removed his hands from the bowl, he shook them a little, dropping water onto the rug. He made a vague, impatient gesture to the general atmosphere, and Aunty Biola came in from outside, as if on cue, holding out a rough green hand towel. He grunted, dried his hands and thrust the towel back at her before silently accepting the toothpick that Aunty Funke offered him and reclining in his seat once more. Aunty Funke left with the plates, but Jess’s mother hovered on the other side of the beaded door curtain.
    “Wuraola.”
    Jess jumped when he brought his hand down on her shoulder. She looked up at him, licking the corners of her mouth.
    “Mmmm?”
    “I said to you: ‘Do you know what your mother did?’ and you say, ‘Mmmm.’ Is that respect?”
    She squeezed one eye shut and peered at him with mock incredulity, and he laughed.
    “I was saying ‘mmmm’ because you called me,” she protested.
    “Even then, it’s yes, ‘grandfather’ . . . I mean, what is this ‘mmmm’?”
    Jess gave up.
    “I don’t know what my mother did.” (You’re going to tell me and she’s going to get angry. I can see it already because she’s all nervous.)
    Jess wasn’t sure whose side she was supposed to be on if her grandfather told her something really bad and secret about her mother.
    When her grandfather snapped his toothpick and didn’t say anything else, she prompted him.
    “Was it something really bad?”
    “It was just something that she did.”
    “Yeah?”
    (Good or bad?)
    He spread his hands. “This is how your mother really is. Sometimes I think that she doesn’t know what she’s doing at all, at all, but she follows some other person inside her that tells her to do things that make no sense. There is no other way that someone could be so very stubborn, and not pay.”
    Not daring to look up, Jess reached out on impulse and touched part of the trouser embroidery.
    “I sent her to learn medicine in England,” her grandfather told her, his voice a mix of amusement and irritation. “Listen, this is what your mother is like. She hadn’t even been there six months when she writes me a letter, telling me that she is now studying English. English literature! What job do you find in Nigeria that requires the knowledge of all these useless words? Different words for hot, for cold! Words describing white people, white things, every single story spun out in some place where WE don’t exist! It has no value; in my eyes, it is to confuse . . .”
    “Confuse, dissemble, obfuscate,” Jess whispered.
    “What?”
    “Dissemble and obfuscate—they’re two different words, same meaning: ‘to confuse.’ ”
    Silence. Jess heard her mother snort with laughter, then retreat, choking, down the corridor to the kitchen. She looked at her grandfather, whose lips were pinched so tightly together