Under an Emerald Sky

UNDER AN EMERALD SKY

Olukemi Amala

A

CKOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank my family and friends, whose support, love and assistance have been invaluable.

Alongside this, I honour my Nigerian foremothers and fathers and the stories of their lives that came before me.

Finally, I wish to thank my editor, Lynn Michell, for her courage and commitment to hidden women’s voices, the second story of women’s lives, which all too often occupy the margins of reality and struggle to access the world of publishing.

In this work of fiction, I have included Yoruba terms and descriptions. I apologise for any inaccuracies and omissions in language and detail

Olukemi Amala.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Umberto Eco

© 2011 Olukemi Amala

Published by Linen Press, Edinburgh 2011

1 Newton Farm Cottages

Miller Hill

Dalkeith

Midlothian

EH2 1SA

Email: lynnmichell0@googlemail.com

Website: www.linenpressbooks.co.uk

Blog: linenpressbooks.wordpress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright owners. All images have been reproduced with the knowledge and prior concent of the artists and no responsibility is accepted by the publisher for any infringement of copyright or otherwise arising from the contents of this publication. Every effort has been made to ensure that the credits accurately comply with the information supplied.

ISBN: 978-0-9570050-8-2

Cover photographs: Lukas Vasilikos (www.lukasvasilikos.com)

Cover design: Submarine, Edinburgh

Table of Contents

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

B

OOK

O

NE

CHAPTER 1

Ola lurched and screamed on the hospital bed. Reassurance from her sister Ayo and Nurse Sylvia grounded her. Ayo held her hand. ‘Come on, Sis. You’re doing well.’

‘Pant, pant, pant. That’s it, Ola,’ said Nurse Sylvia.

Three years previously, Nurse Sylvia had delivered Ola’s first baby, Aina. Then, the pain had continued relentless and unremitting because her daughter, in her haste to arrive, had the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Despite the protracted birth, Nurse Sylvia had been calm and up-beat. Ayo had sat with her then too, along with Ola’s husband Curtis and her mother. This triad of light had anchored her. Olumu had anchored her mother.

Like all ancient Yoruba tales of great women, Olumu was riddled with embellishment and superstition. Many who rebuffed Olumu said it was simply a misspelling of the name of a large rock over Abeokuta City. Others called it the delusions of possessed women. Still others called it witchcraft. For believers, it meant hushed stories of women able to see and hear at night with the ease of fruit bats. Or of women transforming into giant swallowtail butterflies and flying on golden wings. These Olumu women could occupy two places at once. Often, the stories went, They were seen snoring in one room, their babies beside them. At the same time, night workers had talked with these women on the roadside. By day, they traded in medicinal plants in Abeokuta, but after dark they roamed dense forests with jackals and cheetahs. Sometimes they existed as silhouettes and shadows. Little girls frightened their baby brothers, if they were naughty, with tales of Olumu women haunting them with night-terrors. Because no one knew what was true, everything was probable.

Olumu consciousness touched females typically once every few generations. Olumu had made Ola’s mother one of these special women in their family. Ola relished her mother’s fantastic tales and swallowed hard at her words of caution. Her stories were magnificent and terrifying. Through her birth pain, Ola remembered her mum’s cautionary words: Olumu can create envy and betrayal in sisters.

Ola’s mother had described the Olumu journeys as flights. Later, as decay wrapped around her flesh, on her final flights, her mum witnessed traumatised disembodied beings trapped in their Earth-bound hopes and unfulfilled dreams of previous lives. She wept with these spirits.

Her mum had seen Death often in those final days, his slim, sliding form holding a wooden staff in one hand, with a cockerel and a scorpion in the other, and had followed her around for minutes at a time radiating dark blue, cobalt-coloured light. Sometimes Death came as a shadow, a midnight-coloured shadow that cast a purple mist over her mum’s skin.

At this time, her mum reported visions of human hands as wide as lakes. Red-eyed tree frogs feeding on dragonflies in flight whose insect wings balanced great oceans. Her mum said death opened a different realm where even her own competent grasp of Olumu was simply ordinary.

‘Dying expands you even more than Olumu,’ her mother had said. Expansion of this magnitude brought her fear because despite Olumu’s revelations, she wasn’t ready to die and she feared she hadn’t prepared well for the transition.

As expected of a dying Olumu elder, Ola’s mum spent her final days linked with her child’s energy field, conversing with her unborn grandchild’s spirit about Earth lessons and discoveries. Her baby had kicked less during these times.

Ola named her unborn baby Yewande because even before her mother died, the great Yemoja had told her that her mother would be reborn.

The great Orisa Yemoja walked beside Ola on a sunny July day and together they sat by the rugged and rocky hills near the Ogun River. This divine mother appeared first youthful then old, this mother of children. The great Yemoja told Ola that a baby girl lived inside her. Yemoja shared a vivid image where her unborn daughter sat beside her old mother’s dying body and inhaled her last breath. With cowries in hand, Yemoja held her unborn daughter and dripped Ogun’s cool waters on Yewande’s lips as she screamed from the hot flames of Grandma Abeni’s final breath.

Ola turned her head from right to left. Mum and Curt should be here. Her sweaty hands stretched into the cool antiseptic air. Against the soft pads of her fingers, the sterile unoccupied air flowed vacuous and inane. Month-old cold and pain festered in her body alongside memories of Curtis’s strong arms around her waist. Her mother’s confidence and laughter.

Despite her denial and bargaining, Ola’s husband and mother were dead and no amount of self-deception could change that. Even Olumu’s wisdoms could not change it.

Confident words filled the room.

‘Just one more push and baby will be out.’

Ola gave Sylvia all the push she had left and, unlike her first birth, there was no need for forceps or floppiness. Yewande screamed, unlike Aina. Ayo and Sylvia shouted in unison as Ola rested. Aina had come into the world almost strangled by the umbilical cord, unable to cry out. In contrast, baby Yewande bellowed from her first intake of air as the cooling waters of the Ogun River dried on her lips.

Ola stared at the rapid rise and fall of her daughter’s chest and her contorted face. Her infant’s distress continued for a long time but finally she relaxed. Ola stroked her newborn. Yewande opened and closed her eyes. Her daughter found the nipple and started to suckle. Her baby had the sweetest bow to her lips, just like Curtis’s side of the family.

‘Ayo, look. She’s got Curt’s sweet mouth bow.’

‘Curtis lives on, Sis.’

Ola stroked Yewande’s lips. ‘Hello, Sweet Mouth.’ She remembered again her mother’s words: Olumu can create envy and betrayal in sisters. These thoughts clouded her happiness.

‘Ladies, she has strong lungs and is mighty hungry,’ said Nurse Sylvia.

These relaxed words displaced Ola’s fear. She held her infant. ‘Yewande, yes… Name suits. Pure molasses, like Mum.’ Dark brown eyes looked back, unfocused yet sturdy.

Ayo clapped and grinned. ‘True true, Sis. Mum has come back. Mum has returned…’

Nurse Sylvia gazed at Yewande’s face. ‘You’re so right. You’re both so right.’ She stroked Yewande’s rich cocoa cheek. ‘The wonderful Mama Abeni Daramola has indeed returned.’

Nurse Sylvia pronounced ‘Abeni’ right, with the correct emphasis on the ‘ben’, unusual for one not versed in the Naija way. Nurse Sylvia’s grandfather had originated from Senegal and she said his love played an important part in the shape of her jaw and teeth and the dexterity of her tongue. Sylvia liked this dual heritage and was happy not to be just plain English.

Ola gazed at her baby, born so soon after the loss of her mum and Curtis, and wondered how new life could follow such gratuitous death without apology. Her child continued to suckle.

‘Hi, Sweet Mouth. Been waiting for you.’

Soft words hugged her daughter. Yewande’s fingertips stroked her chest. As her daughter fed, heat poured into the frozen part of Ola. Brine hung at the corners of her mouth as she watched her daughter suckling. She swallowed her warm tears.

On the day when both her mother and husband had died, sleet followed by freezing rain then ice had preserved what she had left of her mother and Curtis.

‘God has the glory! God’s glory!’ Screams penetrated Ola’s room from another.

‘Don’t worry, your work is finished,’ Sylvia laughed, and twisted her lips to one side. ‘What am I saying! Your work has just begun.’

Ayo clasped her hands together and chuckled with the nurse. Ola gazed at the new life on her chest.

‘I am your servant, Lord!’ called the same voice.

Nurse Sylvia’s calm words appeared incongruent with her acquired shrivelled face. ‘Don’t worry, it’s just another mum having a hard time.’

The auditory invasion persisted.

‘Go, Edward, go. Pray for me. Pray for me. Pray for our first born!’

Another voice came in response. ‘Mrs Johnson. Please… Please, reconsider pain relief. You’re suffering.’

‘My suffering is for the Lord. He asks of me… I will not, no, I will not reject his command.’

Ola sighed when the noise stopped. She rested. Then another loud scream filled her room.

‘Nurse Susan, take it away! Take it away and bring my baby!’

The my in ‘my baby’ emerged like an order, as if what Nurse Susan had just delivered didn’t please this mother, such was the sharpness of her voice. Ola shook her head. Her mind filled with pictures of cleft palates and club feet.

A tall, thin, Mediterranean-looking man with limp black wavy hair and a shiny beaming face emerged and paced the corridor outside. He held an infant against his chest. ‘God is good. God is good. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord.’

The newborn was almost invisible apart from a brown head and loose black curls. The man stroked the baby’s hair. ‘You’re beautiful, Mary Johnson. Just like your mother. You’re beautiful and perfect, my baby girl. Yes, you are.’

So you had a girl child too.

He stroked the infant’s head and rubbed the tip of her nose.

‘That walk. You look familiar, eh.’ Ola squinted. She tapped the side of her bed. She spoke louder, ‘Chai! I know you. Eduardo Johnson. Grace’s husband. Eh, Eduardo Johnson.’

A shallow nod confirmed her words.

She glanced at her own baby and saw Yewande’s perfection. Ola remembered passages in the glossy hospital brochures. Crowndale Maternity Unit, in the town of Barring, a centre of excellence for obstetrics and paediatrics, producing many charismatic and talented professionals including Nurse Sylvia. She glanced at Eduardo Johnson again. Barring’s a good town for sick children. Yes, I hope betta will follow.

CHAPTER 2

Ola’s mother died a month ago. This death had been expected and, when it came, was almost welcome.

Ola’s mum had a mild cough. This cough had turned violent, so much so that her mum lost control of her bladder. Ola’s newly incontinent mum, the great Abeni Daramola, or simply Mama Abeni, had worn incontinence pads. Ola recalled holding her shaking mum when the first outdoor accident happened, terrible because her mum was proud in an elder and Yoruba way. Her once independent mum, who had hand-washed her underwear from a young age, became self-conscious. She had felt like stone in Ola’s arms because she realised, as Ola did, that she was not just sick but dying.

The deterioration had eventually required specialist medical support. Three weeks after she was referred to a urology unit, a very prim and proper white woman called Nurse Jenny, an incontinence expert, visited her mum at home. Nurse Jenny was renamed Nurse Jelly on account of her panic. Fearful of infection, the nurse jumped from her seat whenever Mama Abeni coughed. Nurse Jelly had given her nursing advice from a spot near the open door.

Then there had been the ‘next stage’. Both she and Ayo knew what her mum’s next stage meant.

Her mum’s inner fight for decency and dignity had meant a detachment from her own body. Only one person could offer her the intimate care she needed and that was Ola’s dad, Papa Ojo, but he was already dead. Mama Abeni’s cough had worsened after Papa Ojo died. Ola’s mother thus surrendered herself to humiliating medical hands where before only her husband’s had been allowed. Resonating above her physical plight became a moment-to-moment preoccupation for her. With each new personal boundary crossed, Ola’s mum removed herself further.

By the time Ola’s mother agreed to be admitted to hospital, her old wrinkled thighs had turned red and raw. The ward nurses changed her often, with a customary smile. They smeared on thick lotion with speed, efficiency and a chuckle or two, as if it was normal for a woman in her senior years to have nappy rash.

This dependency on nurses who seemed too young to tackle the intimate bodily functions of a woman in her 80s, and her mum’s quiet embarrassment at her lack of bodily control, had been enough. Ola had wept at her mother’s decay and old age. Old age and decay is natural, her mother said throughout her life. Mama was still scared. She wasn’t just losing strength. She was dying.

Seated beside her sister, Ayo, at her mother’s bedside, could whip even death into stiff sugary peaks, like chefs’ egg whites on a pavlova at a party, with the ice cream inside the baked meringue still skilfully frozen. The jokes shared between them broke into her mum’s anxiety. She laughed with Ayo until tears poured free.

Then, the word dying brought images of cotton-rich fabric from home in indigo dye pits that once completely stained, revealed circular and spiralled patterns. Wet cloth dried in the hot sun. Women with permanently purple fingers. The only definition of dying available to her was this dyeing of fabric in bright colours. Ola’s mother’s old body was dying but not in a sudden way and, just like the fabric from home, she gradually changed her colour, texture and smell. Her lungs filled with fluid and her playful mind aged as she drowned in her own lymphatic waters.

When Ola most needed space for reflection and time to grieve – to find balance – Curtis, her husband died. Unlike her mum’s death, Curtis’s was not expected.

CHAPTER 3

That first night, Ola held Curtis’s fast cooling hand. His body lay broken on the hospital bed. What she was listening for was a breath from her husband’s lips, but all she heard was the dashing about of doctors talking in low voices and making minimal eye contact. The hospital staff had gazed at her with their we did everything we could, sorry for your loss faces and shook their heads. On that first night of becoming a widow, Curtis’s fingers had cooled so much that Ola had rubbed them in her lap. Curtis was frozen and so was she, from head to heart. This refrigeration hurt. She tried to scream, but couldn’t, because her mouth had vanished, taken by Esu.

Esu, the deity and divine messenger of choice and responsibility, sat at the crossroads of fortune and misfortune. Esu, the trickster and mischief maker, in a typical tall headdress bent like a hawk beak, appeared in male form, full of chaos, trickery and mischief. Esu, in his wisdom, knew a mouth severed from the heart could not scream and therefore this redundant organ, detached and useless, should find expression elsewhere, and in an instant he had taken it. Ola’s mouth had not just been invisible, although Esu could have done that too. Her mouth was not hidden from her at all. It had not shrunk in size, either. Esu knew the power of deprivation in personal development, so could have shaped her mouth in any way he saw fit. But her mouth had simply departed, leaving no trace, because Esu had decided with glee that, now superfluous to her requirements, it belonged to him.

In a moment Ola’s face had been transformed to brow, eyes, nose, ears and thin skin, like a facial graft over empty space. Her mouthless face and body had sat in one box. Her mind and all its contents had occupied a bigger one. One container took extended leave from the other.

Ola knew her mother’s death followed the natural order. Her husband’s death did not. Just twenty-nine years old and dead.

Curtis was her soul blanket of finest cashmere. Her Curt, with tongue sharp and sweet like ripe lemons. Her strong husband, her ‘puff-puff’ sprinkled with caster sugar, not granulated. Caster sugar that left fine crystals on her lips with each bite. Her sweet husband on her lips.

CHAPTER 4

Yewande scanned the blur of writhing masses to her left and right. Wailing permeated the warm air. She listened while the other newborn babies chatted, cried and fidgeted, and, like heroic explorers, spoke of the dangers and conflicts awaiting them. Their courage and adventurous spirit made them agree to the enormous escapades earthly life would bring, but bravery did not displace their longing for home.

These souls had all occupied flesh and bone before. For some, the previous rebirths read like a trilogy. For others, they filled library shelves with thick encyclopaedias of experience. Just like her, the new babies never experienced the new-birth constriction with grace. Legs and arms spread out as if trying to escape a tight-fitting jumpsuit.

A deep sigh escaped Yewande’s lips as she recalled distant memories of the glistening forest where her pre-birth life had been perfect. Too perfect for your own good, the bravest elder had proclaimed. A tear rolled on to her cheek.

She wailed like the others as her soul-eye continued to shrink. The dense scar tissue replacing it itched and burned. Details of her once elaborate home were becoming opaque. From previous journeys, she knew the pain would pass, to be followed by amnesia. Her real name would be forgotten as she adopted the identity chosen by her new family. The cycle of birth, freedom and rebirth disorientated her. This journey to primary school which the emancipated souls called the Earth Existence always felt like swimming in polluted oceans. With each earthly incarnation, her soul became heavy as though enclosed in bladder wrack whose weighty sliminess and lingering smell was all-consuming. She remembered snippets of a recent discussion with an emancipated elder, this conversation now almost dreamlike. The original reply had confused her and Yewande had asked her question again.

‘So what is reality then, wise elder?’

‘Reality.’ The elder’s form had turned from yellow to lilac. ‘Reality… mmm… a story, just a story.’

She sighed and listened to the others and like them longed for the eternal rest of home.

She hollered and touched her stomach, realising that an important part of her was still missing. She felt its absence – a feeling she called contentment. Contentment was her conductor. Sad memories stamped its departure. It was gone, and without contentment the ensemble of her emotions had no clear order or direction. Yewande was not emotionless. On the contrary, she experienced the total symphony of human feeling, but without a conductor to guide expression, she floundered – this way and that. A bit of this in a bit of that. Feelings never resonating clean. Feelings full of misinterpretation. The mild, sour taste of discontent in her mouth replaced earlier ease and she grieved as the sourness spread to her throat and stomach, where it seemed to rest. Without contentment and unable to feel satisfied, her mind grasped for emotional tit-bits to take the sharpness away. However, able now to feed and use earthly senses, she began to accept the army of resources available to dilute her discontent.

Feelings of contentment usually experienced at rebirth, clipped and rounded the extreme edges of her emotional map. Without the conductor to balance emotion she lurched around, cutting her mind on sharp ridges and in deep trenches, spending many moments dodging lightning and bullets. Her ecstasy and misery mirrored one another so well that she had difficulty distinguishing the two.

Just like everybody, her emotions were transient, but unlike others, she found hers jammed up and crushed against each other. Always intense, always urgent, and she hated it. Without a conductor to provide anchorage she could not rest and as a consequence she lived in two worlds which rarely overlapped, on the outside appearing normal enough but on the inside deficient, impaired. She craved completeness.

Bliss was Yewande’s overriding feeling as her mother’s warm milk filled her. This gave enormous satisfaction and she rested, believing herself once more complete, but her peace did not last. As the milk curds left her stomach, the familiar mild citrus in her saliva returned and she knew her Earth-life salvation rested in her ability to push the tang in her mouth to the level of her subconscious. Discontentment gripped her again. Had it been as simple as an isolated part such as a limb, eye or ear, she would have understood better. The enormity of the loss crushed and overwhelmed.

CHAPTER 5

Hill View Gardens, a sought-after address in the town of Barring, known to locals as Barring’s Jewel, shouted success. Yet all of Ola’s neighbours wanted to be odd. To be odd was the highest compliment in the area. Like any group, human or otherwise, everything rested on hierarchy, on pecking order, and odd hovered way above all the others. When asked, What’s your address? chests puffed up and eyes sparkled on Ola’s neighbours, such was their pride.

This privilege was assured for fifty or so families. All apart from hers were white. Black living on the white side of the street held privilege and peril in equal measure, with the hatred and envy of these neighbours as polite as the superficial compliments.

New odd neighbours often stopped her and Curtis outside their home.

‘Ooh, are you lost? I’m new here too.’ They would speak with a false ease and a penetrating gaze. Ola soon became aware of their street value.

‘I just wondered if you could get some… you know what I mean…’ they would say while staring at her or Curtis as if to transmit a secret message. ‘We’re having a dinner party. It’s not for me. Some of our friends like a little pot. Helps them relax.’

The assumptions came often and were not limited to neighbourhood or drugs.

‘I always find dark skin so attractive. It must be the climate.’ The men gazed far too long with a misty look in their eyes. Often their hands fluttered in trouser pockets.

She repeated their words to her sister. ‘Can you believe it, Ayo, thinking I would sleep with him. His head na correct.’

The men did not disguise their outrage at her curt replies. Hard noses turned to the sky as they marched off muttering.

Barring, a multicultural community, carried clear boundaries and no one transgressed them except Ola’s family. Odd and black were opposites. Two extremes that were incomprehensible in the eyes of her neighbours but tolerated in the same way that a sick family dog is allowed to dribble and shit on newly washed steps. The unspoken code positioned the inhabitants nearest Cedar Park as white, with increasing blackness as you travelled towards the M25.

Likewise, the very few black even neighbours had something to say about Ola’s oddness.

‘So you’re odd. It’s good to see a successful black person.’

Smiles and nods hung stiff and mechanical. She found the thin sheen covering their venom tiring.

‘One of our own but odd. I see.’

Squinted eyes scanned her natural hair and inexpensive clothing and many grunted while stroking their chins.

The even-numbered neighbours always said Hill View Gardens before mumbling their house number. These even residents found flexibility in their lip movements as they grimaced at the occupants of the adjacent street. Most visible ethnic minority families lived on the A47. This major road didn’t even have a proper name and, like a prisoner with only a number for identification, was known to all locally simply by its A road number. Sutton Street joined the A47 by Loretta’s. This laundrette was filled with big men laughing at Loretta’s jokes and waiting for their ticket number to click in the display above that announced their laundry of overalls, aprons, coats and other work clothes was ready for a repeat episode of weeklong dirt and grime. These men adjusted belts hugging full paunches as Loretta strolled past like a catwalk goddess carrying bulging heavy-duty laundry bags.

‘Smells sweeter than fresh baked pie!’ one man crooned, and like a backing group the other men called out, ‘Sweeter than sweet, mmm-huh,’ and ran pointed tongues over top lips as Loretta lowered bag after bag, exposing more cleavage. The men sucked in fresh baked pies while studying her curved behind. Many of the men didn’t have laundry but generous Loretta gave them a floor show anyway.

Ola liked Loretta because she was funny and always had a tale about recovered objects such as an odd fishnet stocking or pretend lace knickers scented with Old Spice and whisky. Grace Johnson called Loretta a prostitute, and not just behind her back like her more reserved even neighbours.

Other tributaries included Canterbury Road, famous for Mama G’s Pizza, or just plain Mama’s, the local hang out for city folk wanting ghetto. Jerk chicken and callaloo deep-dish – the Friday evening favourite – finished off with mango sorbet and a shot of Mama’s favourite Appleton Estate.

On Morris Street the always-open newsagent Connolly’s sold alcohol and food that hovered towards its sell-by date, and with a whisper, hardcore porn videos from Germany. Though no one admitted to knowing this for sure, it was believed by enough people to eliminate the need for solid proof. Connolly’s was called All-Day for short, on account of the 24 hour opening. Currently the number-one for put-downs by Grace Johnson and her eager-to-listen-and-agree even white church friends, All-Day was synonymous with Lucifer and his downward spiral. All-Day meant sins wrapped in newspapers and brown bags as people snuck into the shop in the early hours for condoms, liquor and top-shelf promises, sharing a joke with Henry, aka Big-Man. Henry Connolly used to run security at Strip Palace Inc. in Brighton but ended up addicted to cocaine and speed when his fortune ran out. He founded Connolly’s, a sobering distraction from non-stop partying and angry loan companies.

Grace Johnson and her friends held a prayer vigil there once a month, varying the days, and when she saw the men dashing out clutching bags, she shook her head. ‘Save them, Father. Save them.’

The reward for being odd was a back-door sighting of Cedar Park with the majestic cedar trees. Staring in awe at the park’s mighty cedar and its oversized offspring was always a joy, if to some only for the increased property value. Ola often shook her head and kissed her teeth at the odd neighbours. ‘Anyone would think the oddities had grown the cedars from seed, cha!’

Summertime always meant fellow odd citizens embracing outdoor eating with friends. The clinking of wine glasses and banter infiltrated Ola’s house from Numbers 25 and 29. Sitting on her garden bench, reading, she often heard her neighbours masticating between their praise of the giant flora. As a result of these insults and transgressions, Ola and her family lived a solitary existence away from awkward platitudes.

The majority of odd residents, like the Daramola-Draytons, walked from their back gates down Cedar Close towards Cedar Park. The even folk like the Johnson family had to cross the road first. Those further down Hill View Gardens, Number 39 onwards, equidistant between Cedar Close and Honey Tree Close, were more fickle and turned either left or right, unsure where their loyalties lay. Honey Tree Close, a speedy walk to the park, had ant hills and lots of earwigs and dark corners hiding biting spiders. Cedar Close was longer but far prettier and more gracious, enveloping its inhabitants in smells, sights, textures and sounds. The neighbours didn’t seem to mind this tease of pace or pleasure.

The A47 people had a more perilous journey, taking their lives in their hands every time they dodged the heavy dual-carriageway traffic, but puffing, shaking and sweating, they went along with the other residents of Barring to seek replenishment and renewal.

Contrary to its name, Hill View Gardens was in fact flat. This level, unchallenging street attracted local children learning to roller skate or cycle. Youngsters used the even side, following complaints from the odd residents about noise and danger. Even the odd children crossed to the even side out of respect for the hallowed pavement on their side of the street.

Regardless of all these issues, residents in Barring saw Cedar Park as the constant force in their town and took great pride in strolling to this centre. The ones who could not walk were held, wheeled or driven there. Residents saw this ritual as coming home to the cedars – the stable, enduring presences that looked down on all inhabitants, irrespective of differences, like supreme goddesses. Unlike the other trees in the park, the cedars were evergreens, thus the residents were immune to the natural cycle of change