“Hello. Shola Ajayi speaking.”
“It’s Anna,” I said.
“Oh, hello. You must be very excited. Congratulations.”
“I can’t believe it. How much?”
“Well, they started at three-ninety but I pushed them up to four hundred. It’s ten thousand below our asking price, but remember, I said this property sits around the four hundred thousand mark because it hasn’t been modernized.”
Four hundred thousand pounds.
“So what do I do need to do now?”
“Nothing. I’ll draw up the paperwork and when everything’s ready, I’ll ask you to come in and sign.”
“What’s the couple like?”
“Lovely. Young. They got married two years ago.”
“Children?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Well, I thought I should call you straight away with the good news. I’ll get started on the paperwork and I’ll see you in about a month.”
“Can I still go to the flat?”
“Of course. It’s yours until we sign the papers. All right. Bye for now.”
I’ve met Shola only once. She was dressed immaculately—overdressed, it seemed—for a high-street estate agent. Her weave was long and expensive, human hair, the tips flipped with a tong. She was British Nigerian, more British than Nigerian, I thought, until she picked up a call from her father.
“Sorry, I’ll have to take this. It’s my dad and he’s in hospital.”
When she put the phone to her ear, she stopped speaking English. Her voice was deeper in the other language. She was more animated. She covered her mouth to laugh.
“What language was that?” I asked when she dropped the call.
“Yoruba. That’s my tribe in Nigeria. Again, sorry about that. As I was saying—”
My mother’s flat was in a low-rise council block in Islington and it was a stand-alone unit, unattached to a housing estate. These features slightly increased its value. On the walk from the station, I passed a bakery, two estate agents, an independent coffee shop, a gym, a massage therapist’s with white pebbles and green succulents in the display window, all of which had opened in the last five years.
I had always thought she rented the flat from the council until the executor read out her will. “Left to my beloved daughter, Anna.” She was a sales manager in a department store, watching other women step in and out of clothes, rehearsing for their lives in her dressing room. I was impatient with the size of her life, disdainful of it. And yet, somehow, she had amassed the money for a down payment. My mother, with no financial education and no university degree, had worked out how to own property in London. The paperwork showed she applied successfully for a mortgage in 1984 and completed her payments in October 2009.
I let myself into the building. Almost no one was left from the old days. The Sharmas moved to Willesden, to a house with a garden. Mrs. Levstein died. The Okoyes went back to Nigeria. The changes were gradual. At first, there were clashes between the old and new. Skirmishes were waged on the cork noticeboard: PLEASE KEEP THE NOISE DOWN AFTER 10PM. THE COOKING OF CERTAIN FOODS CAUSES THE BLOCK TO STINK. And then only the new tribe remained, with their parsley and olive oil. The old were all gone.
I unlocked the door of flat 7 and walked into the hallway. I was twelve again, letting myself in after school. I put my bag down. I took off my shoes from habit. We had a beige carpet. My mother was very careful of it. On the right was her double room. Her taste ran to clutter: framed family photographs on the walls, porcelain figures on the window ledge, too many cushions on her bed. My room was plain in comparison. I had a single bed, a double wardrobe, and a shelf of worn books that she bought secondhand. Adrian Mole came of age at the same time as me. It was all bare now, cleared out after she died.
Our rooms were on one side of the hallway, the toilet and bathroom were on the other. We could hear each other’s pee striking the water. Sometimes at night, I would knock on the adjoining wall and she would knock back. We would pretend we were signaling in Morse code.
“Did you ever wish I was white?” I asked her when I was an adult.
“What do you mean? Of course not.”
“But you always said, ‘You’re just the same as me, Anna.’”
“I didn’t mean it that way. It was just when you came home and some kids had been mean about your hair being a bit different from theirs.”
“A lot different. You can see that, can’t you. It’s very different. There’s nothing wrong with it being different.”