Monifa felt her body shrinking. A woman called back to him, “In here, Jewel,” and then there were footsteps and then there was the detective’s mother with her hands extended towards Monifa as she said to her son, “You have been a time,” and adding to Monifa “Alice Nkata’s who I am. You come this way, madam. It’s Missus Bankole, my boy says. He behaved himself ’cross London, I hope. He drive well coming here? I hope so b’cause there’s times, I tell you, he drives like the devil’s on his tail.”
Monifa saw she’d followed Alice Nkata into a lounge where an old upright piano with yellowing keys shared space with a large African drum, and a three-piece suite with colourful scarves tucked into the chairs, perhaps to hide their age. On the top of the upright piano, a mass of framed photographs stood. A spotless kitchen opened off this room, and a nearby closed door suggested a bedroom, while a short corridor offered other closed doors, presumably to a family bathroom and another bedroom. Monifa said, “I intrude upon you. I am very sorry.”
To which Alice Nkata said warmly, “You come with me, Missus Bankole. I brought up two boys and if I don’t know anything else, what I do know is how to bind up wounds. Jewel here says you got a few.”
A makeshift A and E, Monifa realised, had been set up in the kitchen in advance of her arrival. A worktop held a stack of gauze squares, a tin of Elastoplast, some sorts of unguents in tubes, balls of cotton wool, and a large roll of stretchy ribbed bandaging material. Alice Nkata said to her son, “Jewel, you see to fresh sheets and towels in the bedroom, eh? I couldn’t get out of the café as fast as I liked, so I didn’t get to that.”
“Please,” Monifa said in a low voice. “You must not trouble yourself.”
Alice said, “This isn’t any kind of trouble.” She gestured Monifa to a chair and turned to the worktop to make a selection of items. She said, “Jewel and his brother used to share tha’ room and often enough, Stoney—tha’s his brother, Harold—wouldn’t be in a state fit to sleep in the same room with. That happen, Jewel bedded on the sofa. He got used to it, so you’re not to worry about putting anyone out of a bedroom. C’n you take your dress off, Missus Bankole? It’s a wrapper, is it? You just lower it, then. That way I can see what’s what. Jewel says your ribs’re likely damaged. Do they hurt you?”
Monifa cooperated with the policeman’s mother, although she required Alice Nkata’s help. And then she heard the other woman’s clicking of her tongue and her quiet, “Oh my. Jewel said you didn’t want th’ hospital?”
“I am not that badly hurt.”
“You sure about that? Well, okay. But I’m strapping you up just to be safe.” Having said that, she began to wind the stretchy bandage beneath Monifa’s breasts, round and round and firmly so. “This’ll give you some support when you move,” she said. “You c’n take it off to bathe, but that’s all, mind you. Put it straight back on.”
“I cause you trouble. I’m very sorry.”
“You’re not much trouble compared to my boys. You saw Jewel’s scar, I expect. ’Course you did. No one’s about to miss it. Now that was trouble. An’ what’s happened to our Stoney is trouble on trouble, but tha’s a conversation for another time. Can you cook, Missus Bankole?”
“Cooking is one of the few things I can do, Mrs. . . .” She had already forgotten what the woman’s surname was.
“Nkata, like Jewel’s surname,” was the answer to her unasked question. “But you call me Alice.”
“I am Monifa,” Monifa said.
“Monifa, then. What sort of cooking do you do, Monifa?”
“A little English,” Monifa told her. “But mostly Nigerian.”
“Nigerian?” Alice had opened a bottle of antiseptic and was dousing a ball of cotton wool with it. She called out, “D’you hear that, Jewel? Monifa cooks Nigerian! Your father’s going to be in heaven, that’s what it is.”
Monifa said eagerly, “He is Nigerian?”
“No. But that won’t stop him singing your praises if you can do him anything African. He’s been in London forever but Africa’s where he was born and where he spent his boyhood. Ivory Coast.”
“I would be . . . will be . . . pleased to cook for your husband. And you, of course, and . . .” She lowered her voice. “Do I call him Jewel?”