My doll’s house subsides, my life’s work collapses,

would that they stay children forever, my babies.

Barbara Cartland has betrayed me, you see.

I blame myself, I blame Taiwo. You cannot love

by law enforcement, build by bashing foundations.

That’s it. No marriage for me. No begetting of sprogs,

dolls to beat when Humpty Dumpty feels bruised.

I despair of my mother’s melancholia, my helplessness.

She stands, a Russian doll, peering down the dark street.

My love is a towel soaked in bleach, too long; it tears

away into fragments of myself, then slowly disintegrates.

I see myself in there, waiting, a ghost from this past,

to haunt some future children with my sorry visage.

HIDDEN in the moist entrails of Atlantico,

the basement passage was body-wide, mildewed.

One medieval wooden door arched onto the coal hole,

now populated with a miscellany of saws, shovels,

sinks, enamel potties, antique telephones and lamps

that hung on the stone walls like exhibits in a museum.

To Ellen it was the fridge for birthday jellies and trifles.

Further along was Taiwo’s stuffy sanctuary. Shelves

bravely hugged walls, stretch-marked with dog-eared tomes,

newspapers fashioned into skyscrapers spired towards

the wrinkled yellow ceiling until he undertook the ceremony

of burning them in the garden with broken furniture,

branches and a supply of brown-papered sanitary towels.

His trestle-table desk was swollen with household bills,

a tool bag, a rubber plant, a record player. On a concrete

shelf sat a blue and white striped mug holding penny-a-time

black Bic biros, a plastic replica of the Eiffel Tower,

a framed wedding photo and two sullen Yoruba carvings,

his ’n’ hers, side by side, grey with dust foundation.

Sometimes, for some perverse reason, Ellen would

venture into this hostile territory, creep round the door,

groan ‘Good grief!’ and hurriedly exit.

‘THERE WAS a child went forth every day.’

Immersed in a slim volume of Walt Whitman, Taiwo

grappled with free verse. He preferred a good rhyme, really,

to chug a poem along. Still, this man took him places.

A tentative tap brought him back. He looked up.

‘Yes!’ he barked as Lara entered. ‘You said you’d tell me

about Nigeria, remember?’ / ‘Do I look like an imbecile

that I cannot recall what I say? Well, sit down, I will not bite.’

For a change, Lara thought. She squatted on a fresh pile

of newspapers dangerously near the two-bar electric fire.

Taiwo put his back to her, stretched his feet out onto

his desk, said to the window, ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything. Nigeria, your childhood, family, everything.’

He slid his hands around his neck, clasped them,

rocked backwards, closed his eyes. ‘Let me see now.

Lagos, she’s an island. Sea, river, lakes. Lagos means lagoon,

a Portuguese word but in my language we call it Eko.

They called it The Whiteman’s Grave because of malaria.

When it hits the European he knows about it. Ha, ha.