Answer:
The story:
Step-by-step explanation:
When they arrived at the Bodija house, Jess’s grandfather calmly greeted her mother as if all the things that Jess’s mum had told her had happened weren’t true, as if it had been just yesterday that he had sent her to England to go to university, not fifteen years ago [...]. As if it didn’t matter that she had stayed away for so long.
Gbenga Oyegbebi’s stillness contrasted greatly with the constant movement of Jessamy’s two aunts and her uncle. Aunty Biola had been looking out for the car, and called Uncle Kunle to help her open the main gate […], and Jess immediately saw three figures jumping up and down at the gate, waving with barely controlled excitement before the car had even drawn close.
Jessamy’s cousins were slightly more reserved. The five older than her, Aunty Funke’s and Uncle Kunle’s children, greeted her with tentative but almost patronizing smiles; the two youngest, Aunty Biola’s children, stood as if in awe of her, surveying her clothes, her hair, her entire self with raised eyebrows, twisting their hands together. […]
There they all stood, an uncertain circle, and then her grandfather came forward, greeted her mother, shook hands with her father. Although he seemed mellower and smaller than the picture that her mother had painted for her over the years, Jess had a sudden and irrational fear that he might start shouting at her.
He looked at her, put his hands on his hips in mock consternation, and her cousins and her mother laughed. Her father, standing slightly outside the circle, smiled encouragingly at her. Her grandfather held out a hand. His hands were big and square, spade-like, the palms deeply etched and callused. She took a step towards him, smiling a wobbly, nervous smile that she could not feel on her face.
She did not know what was expected of her.
She had nearly reached him when suddenly, on an outward gust of air, he half said, half announced a name.
“Wuraola.”
Who?
She froze, not knowing what to say or do.
Of course, she knew that Wuraola was her Yoruba name, the name that her grandfather had asked in a letter for her to be called when her mother had held her Nigerian naming ceremony. Wuraola means gold.
She knew all this …
But nobody had ever called her Wuraola, not even her mother, whom she could now see from the corner of her eye making anxious, silent gestures for her to go to her grandfather.
Here, in this stone-walled corridor where the sunlight came in through enormous, stiff mosquito screens over every window and her clothes clung to her like another skin, Wuraola sounded like another person. Not like her at all.
Should she answer to this name, and by doing so steal the identity of someone who belonged here?
Should she … become Wuraola?
But how?
She could not make herself move forward, so she stayed where she was, avoided his touch, looked up into her grandfather’s face, smiled and said quietly, but firmly, in her most polite voice “Hello, grandfather.” […]
So her grandfather did have a face. It was a broad, lined face; the smile and frown lines ran deep into his skin, his eyes made smaller by the loosening flesh around them. He had the same wide, strong jawline with the determined set as her mother, and the same prominent cheekbones, although Jess could see that his were made more angular through the emaciation of age than anything else. He was quite short and moved about very quickly. He didn’t have a walking stick.
As Jess sat in the parlour, keeping very still so that she wouldn’t take up much space on the brown-and-white sofa, she allowed herself to stare openly and seriously at her grandfather, and he did the same. She felt as if she were a little piece of him that had crumbled off maybe, which he was examining for flaws and broken bits before deciding whether it was worth taking it to be reattached. It was impossible to tell what he thought of her.
She sat at a right angle from him, breathing out silence. He sat very upright (like her, she noted, with surprise), his hands on his knees, the crisp lines of his white shirt almost moulding him, fixing him still in her sight. They were both waiting, supposedly for her Aunty Funke to bring them some soft drinks (her grandfather called them “minerals”), but really Jessamy sensed that they were waiting to see if they would like each other or not. She stared at him wide-eyed, unaware that she looked overly anxious with her bottom lip jutting out slightly below the top one. She sensed herself on the edge of a screaming fit, already beginning to hear her breath coming faster than usual, feel the flat tightening at the bottom of her stomach. She tried desperately to quash it. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, mustn’t start screaming at her grandfather. He was not like her English granddad at all. He was … someone, something else, more hidden.