He looked down his cigarette at me, screwed up his nostrils and spat out a bit of tobacco. ‘She’s an insult. To go down on the floor – as a woman – never! Unless it’s the dirty whore you will wipe your penis on.’

I wasn’t sure what he meant but I knew it wasn’t good. The trouble went on for the rest of the evening, and because no one was bothering about us we heard a lot and we saw a lot – there was a struggle between the men and the women – and it was one of the best parties ever. The whole town was in uproar and my dad was working hard to calm it, even though it was the women who did most of the shouting and Mr Lawal had to go when they started flinging wooden spoons at him. The house only stopped shaking later when people stopped to catch their breath and there was dancing that slowed to a rhythm like the sobbing before sleep.

Anyway, there we were in the kitchen, peeling and playing our game. Manus and Connor were off somewhere because it wasn’t their turn, and my feeling was it was something to do with them that people were coming and they were being kept out the way. Busola started giggling as a woman we didn’t know came in adjusting her wrapper and rolling up her sleeves. She had a baby on her back who turned and looked at us. She was the spitting image of her mum, with the same four lines of scars going back across her cheek towards her ears then turning sharply up towards her temples. There were also another three little scars standing upright on the lap of those bigger ones, over her cheekbones. We laughed because they looked like mummy scar and baby scar, except the baby winced at us and turned away, burying her face in her mummy’s back.

‘Oya! Don’t sleep!’ her mum said, and gave a shake with her shoulders.

We let that one go, but we made up for it by really laying into the other people coming and going. We peeled the rough shape of the head, leaving a patch of skin and tendrils on for someone going bald and letting some be monsters. But then we got down to the real work – tracing the different scars that walked into the room. If we didn’t like someone, we’d do a big cross over the face and drop them – plop! bang! – into the metal bucket. A beautiful person would take time, and you’d want to hold them in your hand longer than you should. No one noticed us until Busola nudged me finishing off a nice smiley man’s five scars on each cheek with a flat, squat head and big, bulbous nose. I showed her.

‘You’re so stupid,’ she said.