“Kofi?”
“Yes. Your father. I will be leaving in two hours. Will you join me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Where is it?”
“Gbadolite.”
“Is that far?”
“It depends how you travel.”
“How would we be traveling?” I asked.
“By plane. Fastest way to get to Gbadolite. Nine hours by road otherwise.”
“You have a plane?”
“Bamana has a plane. Come now, make a decision.”
This was why I was here. To spend time with Kofi. “I’ll come,” I said.
“Excellent. Sule will pick you up at seven thirty. Goodbye.”
The airstrip was twenty minutes outside Segu. Kofi was waiting on the tarmac beside a plane with a pointed snout and a tail that branched off into two metal fins. The tips of the wings curved upwards. The twin engines were humming.
“Welcome, Anna.” He grasped my shoulders and pressed his cheek to mine.
Inside was spacious. Even Kofi could stand upright. On one side was a row of armchairs. On the other was a single leather sofa. An air hostess in a red-and-blue uniform welcomed us with a platter of cut fruit. The air was misted with lavender.
“Good morning, Sir Kofi.” She bobbed a curtsy.
“Good morning.” She curtsied to me, too.
No one knew where I was. No one needed to know, except Rose, and even then, she depended on me for nothing. My decisions were mine. Reckless or not, only I would bear the consequences. My British passport was zipped into a side compartment in my bag. It was my talisman. In the Name of Her Majesty, allow the bearer to pass freely.
“Would you like something to drink, madam?” The air hostess’s lipstick matched her skirt.
“Yes, please. Some water.”
Sule took the armchair at the back of the plane, while I sat behind the pilot’s closed door. Kofi lay on the sofa. If I looked back, I could see the soles of his feet. I was curious about him, as scientists are curious about new species they discover. I wanted to observe him in detail, to take notes on my findings. Once I had buckled my seat belt, the plane sped down the runway and rose into the sky. It was a cloudy day and the city was obscured.
I’d bought a magazine from the hotel shop. The woman on the front was larger and darker than your average European cover girl. She was not a model or, if she was, she was modeling to a standard I had never seen. Her pose was sassy, obvious almost, with the hand on the hip and the bold stare. I couldn’t tell her age, but she was older than Rose when she went for her first casting.
At fifteen a modeling agent had spotted her outside a McDonald’s, a hunter drawn to prey. She was almost as tall as Robert by then, with an erect, striding gait from lacrosse and netball. She wanted to do it. I was skeptical of a profession that depended solely on looks but Robert didn’t see the harm. Professional head shots were arranged, with her hair ironed flat and her eyes surly for the camera.
I went with her on castings and waited outside with other mothers of minors. She got to the final round for a big fashion house and came out of the casting in tears. One of the girls, a pale English rose who would eventually be booked and feature in Vogue three months later, had pointed out the muscles in Rose’s calves. “Her legs are nigger big,” she said. Rose quit modeling after that. Then a year later she quit food.
Were Robert and I to blame? All the advice we received said no. It was the culture and its harsh focus on female bodies, not parents who dieted or didn’t diet, not mothers who were strict or lax with food.
“But we let her go on that casting,” I said to Robert on one night of tearful recrimination. He replied that there were other girls in her year who had never been on a casting, yet they had also stopped eating. It was scant consolation.
The plane juddered and swung to the left. My glass rattled in its cup holder.
“Don’t be afraid. The winds are strong this time of year,” Kofi said.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“The flight is short. We’ll be landing soon.”
Our descent was rapid, and I felt the pressure in my ears. When we broke through the clouds, Kofi pointed out Gbadolite. It was cut out of the forest in the shape of a key. There were buildings scattered along the long central road. The plane circled twice before we landed.
“Welcome to Gbadolite,” the air hostess said over the PA system.
Kofi and I sat in a golf cart. He was driving. There were no cars in Gbadolite, or if there were, they were tucked away in an underground garage. Ours was not the only golf cart. There were families, couples, even some solo travelers who had come to see the theme park that Kofi had built in the middle of the forest. They could choose from museums, a television studio, a cinema, a zoo, a water park, and a cable car ride. We were driving to the zoo.