The Icarus Girl Read Online Free PDF

that they looked as if they had been sewn at the corners.
    “Hmmm,” he said. “Hmmm. I see you are the same.”
    They both laughed. It wasn’t true, of course.
    “Anyway, listen. It made me . . . I couldn’t . . .” Her grandfather pounded his chest and let out a loud sigh that sounded the twisting of his heart.
    “But didn’t you want her to be happy?”
    Her grandfather didn’t answer her question, but arranged the splinters of toothpick on the table. Jess presumed that one or other of her aunts would soon appear to clear them up.
    “Wuraola, your mother had no job, she was living far from home, and she was writing and saying that she would find some work and pay for her studies! Such nonsense! I can tell you that I was afraid of witchcraft. I was frightened that some enemy had laid a curse on her head so powerful that it had stolen every single bit of sense from her head.”
    “It couldn’t have been that bad,” Jess ventured.
    Her grandfather exploded.
    “She left her home, and she went to England, and studied English stories, and gave up her own, and gave up all her talk of healing people, and married some omugo oyinbo man who knows nothing, nothing at all—” His words slowed and he heaved a deep, snuffling sigh when he saw that Jess had dropped her adun ball on the floor and was staring at him wide-eyed, her mouth half open.
    “What does omugo mean? Is it bad? Was that a bad thing you said about my dad?” Jess questioned, sternly. It sounded bad.
    Her grandfather shook his head slowly as Aunty Funke reentered and swept up the toothpick shards.
    “Just forget. Forget I said that. I mean . . . that I don’t know who your father is; I don’t know his people, I don’t know what his name means and where it comes from. Harrison—what does that mean, Harry’s son? Harris’s son? Now take Oyegbebi—it means ‘kingship lives here.’ ” He tapped his breastbone. “Here. Here is where kingship lives. I am a princely man, and my children therefore should be proud and strong. Everyone who hears my name and knows my people should know that. I don’t know your father, I don’t know his father, or what his people have done. It is something about your mother that made her do this, marry a man that she didn’t know.”
    Jess made no reply. It was so breathtakingly obvious that knowing someone’s name didn’t mean that you knew them that she didn’t even attempt to protest. He thought her name was Wuraola, but he was wrong.
    “She didn’t just take her body away from this place—she took everything. Nothing of her is left here,” Jess’s grandfather said, sounding more ruminative than upset. “But I must be vain. She dedicates two books to me, and I forgive her.”
    Jess laughed, then stopped when she realised that her grandfather wasn’t laughing with her. He closed his eyes for a few moments and his mouth slackened.
    “You are a fine daughter,” he said, helping her up from the floor.
    “That thing is not in you,” he said, as they wandered outside.
    One afternoon, Aunty Funke took Jess, Bose and Femi to the zoo.
    “It’s sponsored by the University of Ibadan, so most people just call it the UI zoo,” Jess’s mum explained to her at breakfast. Her grandfather’s driver was Gateman’s brother, and Jess was finding it difficult to tell the difference between them. She sat in the back of the car, carefully keeping her knees from touching Bose’s, and stared at the driver’s face in the mirror, trying to differentiate him from his brother. She was also, of course, keeping an eye on Bose, who was speaking in a low voice to her little brother. Femi was tiny, the tiniest four-year-old that Jess had ever seen. He sat in the car in his khaki-coloured shirt and shorts, clutching a round, sweet, yeasty bun left over from breakfast, not eating it. He stared at her more than Bose did.
    She focused once more on the driver, whose name she did not know. If his brother was generally known as