3 The Long Journey (2/2)

She looked as if her tears were about to start coming. Then she suddenly smiled, 'You are sorry . . . For picking up and leaving without a word to me? Or for telling the children that I asked you to leave . . . Or perhaps for coming back . . . You are sorry . . .'

'I am. For everything.'

When we tell our mother we are sorry, she says, 'Okay, promise me you won't do it again.' She didn't say that to him. She didn't say anything. She just picked her bag and went into the bedroom, their bedroom.

After an hour, he followed her. His smell, when he pa.s.sed us, was thick with stale cigarette smoke and old sweat.

Neither of them came back outside that night.

We stood at their door – they fought, shouting and throwing things that shattered with big crashes, then they made some wet squishy sounds, interspersed with whispers and moans, then laughed . . . When they finally slept, we went to our beds, and tried to understand it; we still couldn't.

In the morning, they came outside – he changed a light bulb, trimmed the hedge and read the Sat.u.r.day papers in his chair; she cleaned the house, washed his old clothes, cooked a huge, sumptuous breakfast. We all ate and laughed.

Kehinde and I went outside to play ten-ten and suwe.

Both of them went back to their room. They fought, moaned and laughed again, like last night.

Then there was silence – they slept.

When she woke up, she came outside and sat with us on the front steps, and sang us one of her happy songs; her voice was clear and filled with joy. She began singing a Christmas song from one of their records, and it was July.

We did not ask about him. He was still a stranger. He was still sleeping.

When it was time for us to watch Tales by Moonlight in the evening, two men came and carried him out on a stretcher, into a white bus that had AMBULANCE on its sides and back and blinking red and blue lights on its roof.

He hadn't woken up.

Two other men, in black uniforms, came and took our mother away; she went with them easily, as if they owned her.

Then our grandmother came and took us, to the village.

'Your father and mother have gone on a long journey,' she

told us.

'To find themselves?' Kehinde asked.

Our grandmother didn't understand. We didn't either. So we didn't cry, or laugh, or anything.

The journey to the village was long too.

Too long.

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