The evening before, she phones her mum, and her mum puts the phone on speaker so she can talk at the same time to her dad, and she can’t find the words to tell any of it. How can she, until there’s something to tell? She chatters instead about the painted houseboats on the canal, strung with fairy lights, the little garden centre, the pink-and-white daisies she bought, their names already forgotten, which amuses her dad, a keen gardener, as it’s designed to. When her mum says, despite all this, You sound a wee bit flat, she just says, Oh, I’ve been a touch under the weather. Her parents have been married for thirty-two years, three children. At her age, her mum had her and was expecting her sister; they’d just bought a bigger, ‘family’ house. She knows they worry about her in London: not the knife crime, the drugs, the cost of things, but how hard it is to make room for yourself in the city, to put down any sort of roots. But London is Adjo’s city; he’d never leave. And she 113belongs, now, to where he is. And even though barely a fortnight has passed, even though it – whatever it is, or isn’t – is at best barely more than a sunflower seed, a grain of rice, they have already held each other close and talked long into the night about boy or girl, the colour of its hair, eyes, its skin.

Life, they tell each other now, will continue at the pace it was meant to: jobs, a nicer flat, their wedding. They’ve barely had a fortnight of these new sudden selves. This bright, implausible future.

114

All the People Were Mean and Bad

Two weeks after your cousin dies, you’re on a night flight back to London from Toronto. Your daughter, at twenty-one months, too young for her own seat, but too old, really, to be on your lap, is overtired and restless. Your phone battery is dead. With no more cartoons, all you have to entertain her while the plane taxis and waits, taxis and waits, inching towards the runway and its take-off slot, is the book your aunty gave her as you were leaving, a book from your aunty’s church. It’s the story of Noah’s Ark, illustrated for pre-schoolers, the first in a series self-funded and published by the church.

All the people, it says, were mean and bad. Except for Noah. Noah was good, and because he was good, God saved him.

You hate this book.