Loose Ends — Chapter 40: Two Houses and a Long Road

Chapter summary

Bayo senses his parents’ separation and draws two homes linked by hope, distance, and love.

BAYO

Thursday night Bayo was eight and a half and he did not believe in being put to bed.

He lay under the sheet with the big torch on his chest, switched on, pointed at the ceiling, making a white moon on the plaster. Deji was asleep in the other bed with one arm flung over a paper sword. Down the corridor the new girl, Mrs. Ngozi, was watching a Nollywood film with the volume low. The house made its night sounds. A tap. A fridge. A long way off, a dog.

Mummy had said that she would not be home until he was asleep. She had said it in the voice that grown-ups use when they are telling you a true thing in a nice way. He had noticed that the voice was different from the Christmas card one. The Christmas card voice was higher.

He got up. The floor was cold. He went to the desk and took out the card that he had made for Daddy, Happy birthday Daddy come back soon from Dubai, and he looked at it by the light of the torch.

Daddy was not in Dubai. Bayo had known that since Tuesday. He had seen the way Daddy held his bag in the driveway, not like a man going on an aeroplane, but like a man carrying something heavy to a place where he would have to put it down. And Mummy had said Go well in a voice with no corners in it. He did not know what was going on, but it was a thing with no corners, and he did not like it.

He turned the card over. On the back, with the marker, he began to draw a picture. A house with a door and a chimney. A man and a woman and a big boy and a small boy standing in front of it. He looked at it for a time.

Then he drew a second house, a little way off. A bigger one, with a round roof like a hat. He moved the woman and the two boys across to the second house and left the man in the first. He gave the man a sword.

He thought about it. He did not know why he had done that. It looked a little sad, so he drew a long road between the two houses, with a very large sun above it, and a car on the road with its lights on.

He fell asleep at the desk with his cheek on the card and the torch still shining at the ceiling, and Mrs. Ngozi, when she looked in at midnight, switched it off, and carried him to bed.

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Continue to Chapter 41

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