Chris Abani - Becoming Abigail

“But my father needs me,” she said. “Besides, won’t it get crowded with the other relatives you’ve taken to live with you already?”

Mary needed her, Peter explained. All the other kids he had taken back had fallen in with bad crowds and run away. Abigail’s father wanted her to go back with Peter.

“Your life will be better,” he said, voice quiet. “London will give you a higher standard of education and living.”

She felt his sacrifice knowing that he was fighting his heart the urge to beg her to stay. But there was also the faintest shadow in his eyes, one that revealed rather than occluded. She shivered and crossed herself, arms and legs locked.

“Dreadful about Chechnya,” Abigail repeated over and over as she watched Bridget Jones’s Diary for the tenth time.

“Dreadful about Chechnya,” Abigail said to the sphinx, smiling at the memory. She had been trying to perfect her English accent. She realized pretty quickly, from the way she was treated at the shops and in the doctor’s office, that the English could forgive you anything except a foreign accent. The flat was silent other than the contortions of her voice.

She heard the key in the lock and paused the film as Mary came in. Abigail got up to help with the grocery bags. Chatting away in the kitchen as they put away the food, Abigail wondered absently if this was how it would have been if her mother lived. There was comfort in this simple task. The ordering of life in cupboards and refrigerator shelves.

Lingering over a cup of tea made in that special way (boiled twice in evaporated milk and ginger), she watched Mary, who watched the rain outside. The plastic climbing frame and slide set mourned in a corner of the garden next to the pink and purple Wendy house. Bought for a child who had died. Suddenly. Mysteriously.

“Do you miss her?” Abigail asked.

“All the time,” Mary said. Voice. Small. Distant.

“Me too,” Abigail said.

Returning to the present, Abigail lit another cigarette against the cold.

“Yeah, me too,” she said to the night.

There was a quality of silence. An awe in the face of mountains that had kept their secrets for a millennia. This drew Abigail to maps. Not all maps. Old ones. Printed on paper that was more parchment. Big ones. That unrolled with all the crackling promise of a flying carpet warming up. And lines. Rivers meandering lazily in blues and sometimes silver. Hills rising in red circles, uneven, thick at their bases and thinning toward the top; like balding men. The green ticks of forests and jungles. The brown sprawls of deserts. And the black lines of science, carving things into sections — longitude, latitude — pretending that here, at least, on the flat spread of the map, it was possible to have any kind of dominion over a landscape. Over things.

And sometimes the alchemy of her stare transmuted the parchment into her mother’s skin. The landmarks taking on deeper significance. The Himalayas marking the slope of Abigail’s forehead, spreading into the Gobi desert. The hook of Africa became her nose. Australia her bottom lip. And the islands between India and Tasmania became the fragments of teeth bared in a smile. In true cubist form, the Americas were her eyes. Everything else became the imagined contours of her inner life.

This was how Abigail spent many rainy afternoons, the cartographer of dreams. Of ghosts.

And this was the shape of her desire:

To be a white bird beating its wings against night. Beating until that was all. To be. Yet not the bird. Or night. Or the air. Or the beating.

To be a white bird.

She had felt caught in the sheath of men’s plans. From the time her father and Peter had decided that she needed to come to London. There had been the trip to Lagos in the long lean body of a bus. Then the flight in the cigar belly of the plane, and now, hurtling through the bowels of London in the subway, headed for Peter and Mary’s.

She studied the curious map of the London Underground system with interest. It wasn’t much good as a map printed the way it was on thick cardboard tacked to the wall opposite. It was nestled between a poem and an advertisement for Cadbury Creme Eggs. She promised herself she would try that as soon as possible. Turning her attention to the poem, she smiled. To what can our life on earth be likened?/ To a flockof geese,/ alighting on the snow./ Sometimes leaving the trace oftheir passage?/ Su Shi. I should burn that onto my arm, she thought, mentally searching to see if she had any room left.

These were good omens. The two main things she loved, here, at the moment of her arrival.

The map was a mass of lines — reds, blues, yellows, greens, blacks, browns, and even a deep purple. Laid out the way it was, it made her think London spread out in a neatly laid out geometric square. She would find out later that it was an old and untidy sprawl of rivers and canals, beautiful parks, old cobbled streets that still held the echo of horse drawn carriages, tired crumbling walls built by Caesar, and modern plazas of glass and chrome. There was the open pleasure of Covent Garden with its flower shops, vegetable stalls, colorful barrow boy calls, the new market with stall after stall selling trinkets that nobody needed to people who should know better. There were street musicians everywhere filling the hallowed halls of the Underground with their melancholic worship. But that would come later. With Derek. That and his tongue that filled her with a desire so deep it threatened to rip her apart.

For now there was just the clacky-clack of the tracks, the warm rush of air as they hurtled down one of the city’s many arteries, and the swaying that was a lulling to sleep. And the people around, careful to avoid their luggage sitting in the center of the carriage. Eyes never meeting. Reading. Bopping heads to music filtered through headphones. Nodding off to sleep. Packed tightly as they were, she still noticed the small island around everyone. And so many white people. Shades of white. She had never thought of it that way. But it was true. White as translucent as snow, making visible the veins running like green rivers just underneath the skin. Others that were denser, pinker, blood vessels spreading like tentacles of light. Others that seemed unsure whether to be a dirty ivory or a rich cream. And brown ones, tanned deep like the happy flow of a tropical river down a mountainside. She wondered what her mother had made of all these shades.

She studied Peter as he slept. In this moment of vulnerability, nostrils flared in a snore, drooling slightly, he looked like a child. She had been suspicious of him from the beginning. Not just because of what he had done to her when she was twelve, but because there was something about him that didn’t ring true. It was as if he hadn’t learned to occupy his body properly. Or perhaps it was his life that he hadn’t stepped into, occupying instead another one. One that was clearly uncomfortable. It made her uncomfortable that she couldn’t place it. Bad people didn’t bother her. Like good people they were a known quantity. It wasn’t even the loose possibility of these that bothered her. It was the struggle against either side. That was where the danger lay. What was it Abigail used to tell her? A house divided, that’s the dangerous place. She smiled suddenly. Abigail couldn’t have told her anything. Still, she didn’t buy Peter’s story about the other kids he took back having run off with bad company. He had done something to them, she didn’t know what, but she was going to watch him closely, make sure it didn’t happen to her. That was what Abigail would have done. She would have studied Peter’s face too in this moment of openness so as not to be taken in by it.