Now I could hear voices from the living room – male voices, deep and restrained: the twins and their father and the other man. The doctor had left. And renewed wailing from the women. One of them stopped wailing and began to lament in a lilting, singsong voice. When I closed my eyes, and my mind, the voice could be that of Ma Bola. But it was only my fancy playing. She was dead, lying beside her husband and pretty eighteen-year-old Peju, who had wanted to be a presenter on TV.

I must have drifted off to sleep, my head on my arms on the window ledge. One of the twins woke me up with a plate of rice. It was three in the afternoon.

‘Daddy’s gone to Ibadan, to be with Lola,’ he said. I took the plate of rice and kept it on the floor. I was not hungry.

‘We are all going to meet him tomorrow – with Bola.’

‘Paul, do you…’ I began, but he interrupted me with a smile and said, ‘Peter.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It is OK. Even Dad has trouble with that sometimes. What were you saying?’

I had forgotten what I wanted to say, so I asked, ‘Did you see Lola? She wasn’t badly injured, was she?’

‘She wasn’t, just shocked. She was unconscious.’ That meant she might not be aware of her parents’ and sister’s death. I lowered my head, thinking of the pain waiting to spring upon her. Bola turned and kicked a leg and muttered.

‘The doctor said he won’t wake up till tomorrow,’ Peter said.

After a while he left me and returned to the living room. I pictured him and his brother seated at the dining table, staring without appetite into their plates of rice. The red stew would appear like blood to them, and the white mound of rice beneath it like… like brain matter, perhaps, scooped out of a wide-open skull. When my legs grew heavy from sitting, I got out of the room and took the back door, through the kitchen, to the backyard. I paced for a while on the grass, smoking a cigarette, keeping close to Bola’s window, an ear cocked for the slightest sound. When I got tired of pacing I sat down on the soak-away pit slab, watching the birds watching me warily as they went about their straw picking.