The Icarus Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

Gateman, should he then be known as Driver? He was light-skinned and had a long nose. A thin slit of tribal marking crossed each of his cheeks, and as he drove, he spoke cheerfully to Aunty Funke, one hand occasionally coming up from the steering wheel to tug at his earlobe, rub the side of his nose. He was wearing the same squarish upright hat as Gateman; only his was dark brown to match his pressed trousers, whereas Gateman’s was green. She nodded once or twice to acknowledge this, because it seemed to her important that there be a difference between a person and their sibling.
    At the zoo, she wandered listlessly around, clutching a Gala roll her aunt had purchased from a street vendor on the way. She held it when they passed through the turnstiles and Aunty Funke paid their entry fees, explaining to the woman behind the glass screen that her niece from England was visiting. The woman smiled down at her and asked her how she was finding Nigeria. Yet again, Jess hadn’t known what to say.
    She still hadn’t unwrapped her Gala. It was supposed to be “just like a sausage roll,” but she couldn’t simply unwrap it and eat it as if it really was a sausage roll when there were all these people milling around her, looking at her so deliberately that she was forced to lower her head and look at the shapes her feet were leaving in the sandy-coloured gravel that lined the paths. She could barely even acknowledge the animals. Some monkeys were climbing around each other in a cage; she could hear them but felt a heaviness, as if she couldn’t lift her head under some burden. Here she was, half a world away, still feeling alien, still watching the ground.
    Perspiration formed on her cheeks and she put the Gala in the pocket of her three-quarter-length trousers so that she could wipe her face with her hands, momentarily hiding herself to feel cooler.
    The only thing that she really looked at was the enormous snake in the clear, reinforced glass box. It was dapple patterned, green and black, twined lethargically around a vast wooden branch, the forked ends pointing outwards to form a V independent of its thick, sinuous shape. Bose and Femi pressed their faces and fingers up against the glass, and Aunty Funke laughed at Jess, who stood as far back from the thing as she could. It was dark in the display room, and there was a smell of wet leaves and something tangier, more animal. She couldn’t take her eyes off the snake. She found her lips moving, she was praying, but not in English, or even Yoruba, but in some loose, gabbling language that was born from her fear. She just knew that the snake was going to form itself into a whip, launch through the glass, sending sharp, brittle pieces flying everywhere to get them all and make them pay for putting it in a place where it was the focus. Weren’t there supposed to be jungles in Africa?
    Aunty Funke looked at her and gave a surprised, concerned half laugh. She seized Jessamy’s hand and clasped it in her own for a few seconds, then gave the smaller, milky-coffee-coloured hand a pat before announcing that they were leaving.
    It was falling to dusk by the time they returned, approaching the main house, in which her grandfather reigned from around the back of the compound where Driver had parked. It was sort of, but not quite like, an old-style compound, the kind that Jess had read about in the bustling, preparing month of suitcases and anti-mosquito cream, the month before they had left. The old-style compounds were supposed to be groups of buildings that housed related relatives of male lineage. Her grandfather’s was organised this way, but built differently—his three-storey house, in which everyone congregated during the day, was in the middle, with Uncle Kunle’s smaller bungalow directly in front of it, the single-storey house where Aunty Funke and her husband lived to the right, and Aunty Biola’s to the left. The other houses stopped the light from reaching the centre,