Nigeria Revisited, a 'The Icarus Girl' Fanfiction
Chapter One
The Night before Lagos
Zzziiipppp went the grating of the zipper to the last of Jessamy Harrison's large and stuffy black luggage box as Daniel begged for the bouncy eight-year-old to sit still on the next box. It was only five o'clock and they'd almost finished packing their luggage for the trip. Vacation had only begun three days ago but the Harrisons were already prepared for it, passports and other travelling documents secured in a special bag. Mostly…if anything didn't go wrong, this trip would go smoothly. Daniel and Sarah had spent the last few days cleaning and dusting down the house so that it would be clean upon their arrival back home. Today was exclusively for last-minute packing with no time to spare; Daniel was still in his tie and blue dress shirt from work.
'Oi Jess, please don't swing that duffle bag around It has the camera in it!' Daniel huffed, blowing up his sandy-blond fringe, secretly fretting for the $700 Nikon camera almost smashed to bits by the hands of his daughter, who was rocking it near one of the sitting room side tables, disturbing a tall brass reading lamp from its stiff, luminous slumber.
'Sorry, Daddy,' Jessamy winced and set the dark padded bag on the nearby coffee-hued cloth sofa, and sat on the maroon-coloured rug below it. She turned on the television and grabbed a nearby pillow for comfort. She fiddled with her lanyard bracelet and stared at the floral Timex watch on her left wrist. Avenger Penguins reruns would be showing about now. There was something pleasing she enjoyed about older cartoons than, say, one would find pleasing about seeing a film at the cinema, or ice skating at the local rink. She couldn't explain it, though.
'That's alright, love. Just don't do it again, hm?'
Crossing the room, Daniel stabled the tipping lamp and had closed the sliding glass doors leading to the backyard. Sarah would be in hysterics if any flies got into the house.
Jess could smell her father's constant whooshing between his packing and going to the storage room to grab a few extra bath towels, Camay soap, white paper bags of cotton wool and disinfectant and other toiletries. His whoosh smelled lemony, purely her mum's doing—or perhaps all the Sunlight washing detergent and aerosol sprays.
Earlier, Sarah had laughed about how adamant Daniel was on packing an immense amount of toiletries for their trip. 'You don't need all of that, Daniel! In Nigeria, most people wash themselves with water, not cleaning their rear ends with paper rolls.'
To which he replied, 'Well I'm not— I can't be like a Nigerian. I mean, it would feel immensely weird, don't you think so Jess?'
Jess, finding this conversation both awkward and stimulating, because her parents rarely let her voice her opinion on more mature subject matter, left the room, shoulders shrugged.
Tomorrow was their trip abroad to Nigeria for the first time for Jessamy and her father Daniel, for Sarah since university, and yet, Jessamy couldn't help but feel that she'd been to Nigeria before…somehow perhaps in a dream?
Once the Avenger Penguins theme tune ended and she'd realised it was the same episode from yesterday night, Jess disgruntled, turned off the telly and went to the parlour to skim the bookcases and grab a book, any good book. Once in the parlour, she felt her white-socked feet glide across the smooth brown laminate floor onto the carpeted centre, and felt the breezy summer cool climb up and down her navy blue and grey-striped sundress. She wanted to turn on the light, but the switch was rather high and her father mustn't know she was in here. She decided to work by the bits of streetlight streaming in from the dusty Queen Anne's lace curtains shrouding the tall windows. After skimming a series of advanced accounting, calculus, history, and critical essay books, she cheerfully picked out a massive hardcover of a Brothers Grimm collection. The pink-red of her lips turned redder as she bit down on her lower lip because the cover was moth-eaten and looked interestingly frightening. Unlike Dulcie, she hadn't learned all the nursery rhymes and English fairy tales simply because her mother said it was no use trying to read stories of which are not about your culture, or of girls who look nothing like you. So for even deciding to take this book, she was already in some sort of trouble. She hoped that Dulcie wouldn't bother to call her after they both had eaten supper like she'd planned, because no matter how much the two cousins tried to best each other about the latest pupil crazes and fads, Dulcie with piercing green eyes and all, could read Jessamy like a book.
Feeling intensely that she'd be caught, Jess grabbed the book and shoved it under her dress, tiptoeing around the bend and upstairs to her room. Closing the door softly, Jess turned on her room light and pulled the elastic hair scrunch from her ponytail of light brown, fluffy ringlets and curls to unveil a mass of back-length hair that needed to be plaited. Plaintively, she ran a hand through the mass and gloomily shivered on the thought of the Denman brush warming her hairline and scalp, her mother's large hands raking hair food pomade, spraying water and combing it smooth until it rendered a detangled wavy state. She imagined hives sprouting in her scalp from the hairdo.
She wondered if changing into her hated bright yellow sleeveless nightgown, the same one of which Sarah had packed the lilac and second(accidentally bought again from Debenhams) yellow sets for the trip; hiding under covers, refusing supper and feigning illness, would suffice for her not to get her hair done. Thinking over this, she stared at the irregular red blotches on her milky-brown arm from black fly bites. Her father had put disinfectant and cortisone on it earlier, but it still itched ever so badly. The Hepatitis C, Yellow Fever and influenza injections that she'd got from her GP yesterday afternoon still hurt her as well. She screamed until hoarse at that appointment and her mother had gently dragged her out of the clinic to the car, sheepishly apologising to the doctor and other stunned parents, only to beat Jessamy severely when she got home. Daniel frowned at Sarah's decisions to discipline their daughter in this manner, but it was the only way she'd learn.
She pulled open the cracking cover to the Brother's Grimm book and picked the story of Rumpelstiltskin because the accompanying first painting looked intriguing and the miller's daughter looked pretty. After finding out that the daughter had to give up her first-born child for spinning bales of straw into gold, Jessamy cried and hid the book into her closet. Some things, she realised, were better left undiscovered. Today wasn't a good day at all.
Jess finished buttoning the last of the white pearly buttons to the nightdress and huddled defensively under her quilts and blankets. She heard the loud, familiar thud of the front door reverb from the foyer, and two twacks of plastic clogs being removed at the front. Her mother was home. Jess crept out from her bed, shaking her head upon realising her room door was open.
'Daniel, where's Jess?'
'She's— Jess? Maybe she's upstairs. How're the Cokers?'
'They are well. Poor Tunde's got the chicken pox, so I promised Busayo I'd bring some pepa soup. Almost done with the packing?'
'Yes, and I can't wait to see Nigeria. It's such a beautiful country that makes such beautiful women.' Jess heard a break in her father's speech, presumably for him to kiss her mother. 'Maybe Jess is just over-excited?'
'Hm,' Sarah half-grinned, rolling her dark brown-hued arm around her husband's waist. 'We can have the left over jollof rice with ham tonight. I'll go to check on Jess now.'
'Mhm,' Daniel gave a toothy half-grin, his blue eyes glittering rather large behind the slender titanium spectacle frames and returned to his packing.
Jess, hearing her mother advance the carpeted creaky stairs, pulled on her bath robe and smoothed out her springy curls. The compressed heat from under her blankets plus her sweat provoked a bright red hue of blush to spread from the apples of her cheeks to the temples of her round face. Her mother smiled half-heartedly at her daughter's bemused and frightened expression and asked what was wrong upon seeing the flush of her face and the glisten of tears in her pale hazel almond-shaped eyes.
Jess offered a clumsy 'I'm rather sleepy,' but followed her mother downstairs into the dining area where her father, who'd set the table, was waiting to eat supper.
Jess hadn't much an appetite; she even refused her dessert of cold peaches and ice cream. She decided to take a bath and head to sleep while her mother made phone calls and her father worked tediously on spreadsheets while half-watching the eight-thirty BBC news update. A rich woman in Surrey had given a large sum of money to a charity for child hunger in Sierra Leone and Indonesia.
Jess found the news all together very boring, and went to the upstairs toilet to ready herself for sleep. Staring at the old cuckoo clock on the wall opposite of the bathtub (she was too small to take showers in the stall, her father protested), she wondered what Nigeria was like as she patted the coconut-scented bubble bath around her, washing her face with the warm water. Why did Mummy have to buy all lavender and cream coloured stuff for this bathroom? Jess wondered. Even the fish shaped terry floor-mat was lavender purple. The walls were painted with matte lavender number 64, and the baseboards a simple cream. The colours made her feel sickly, and after draining the cream-marble tub, Jess towelled herself, brushed her teeth, plaited her hair and dressed for bed.
Her father already went to bed, tired of straining his eyes at spreadsheets and multivariable calculations he'd made all day. Sarah laid out Jess's outfit for tomorrow morning on the vanity: an orange and white button-up polka dot top, transparent orange jelly sandals and white chinos 3/4 pants.
Her mother sternly warned her before heading off to sleep that she'd have to take the anti-malaria pills tomorrow for skipping them today, and more importantly not to shame her or Daniel at Heathrow tomorrow or she'd get it once they got to Lagos.
Sadly Sarah's words were nothing but blind smoke because Jessamy was already asleep.