It was Deborah who twigged what Tani’s mum meant. She said, “Have you found a safe house, Mrs. Bankole?”
There was silence for a moment and then the phone apparently changed hands because a woman’s voice said, “This is Dorcas. I’m not able to give you my surname. Monifa and her daughter are with me, and they are both fine. We’re a shelter for abused women. Please don’t ask me to name the shelter or to tell you where it is because I won’t do that.”
“I want to talk to my sister,” Tani said. “I want to know she’s safe.”
“Of course,” was Dorcas’s reply, and after a moment, Tani heard Simi’s voice. “Tani! Tani! I wanted to ring once we got here, but it’s not allowed. Not the first day. Dorcas says it’s better that way.”
“No one’s hurt you?” he asked her.
“No one’s touched you, Simi?” Deborah asked.
“Only Mum,” Simi said. “She had to fix my hair.”
“Oh, I hope I didn’t hurt it too badly,” Deborah said.
“Well . . . no. Your kind of hair’s different to mine is what it is. See, yours is sturdier. Mine’s more—” Someone in the background spoke. Simisola said to that person, “She wants to know did she wreck my hair . . . She didn’t have proper product, you see . . .” And then back into the phone, “Anyways, Mum fixed it but she’s the only one touched me, Tani.”
“Tha’s good, that is,” Tani said.
Another moment as, apparently, the receiver on the other end switched hands again. Monifa said, “I have destroyed the passports: Simisola’s, mine, and your father’s. Yours I left with Sergeant Nkata. You must finish what needs to be done for the protection order, Tani. I still have what remains of the passports. They will go with the protection order.”
“But what’re you . . . Why did you . . . ?” Tani wasn’t sure what he wanted to ask.
Sophie put it for him, and she did it baldly. “Mrs. Bankole, are you leaving Tani’s father? That’s what he wants to know only he doesn’t know how to ask you.”
“We will have a new life when this is sorted, Tani,” his mother said. “It will be the three of us. We will have a life. And you will finish college and attend university.”
“No,” he said. “I need to work now, Mum. I need to have a job. And I will. And, Mum . . . ? I know—”
But his mother interrupted to tell him that Tani was not responsible for her, for Simisola, or for the decision she’d made to leave his father. She was, she said, finished with everything that related to her marriage to Abeo. He had Lark and another family and now they would be the only individuals he was meant to support. As for Monifa herself, she had a job waiting for her at a café in Brixton, where she would cook Nigerian dishes during the day and teach Nigerian cookery at night. She would remain at the women’s shelter until she had the funds for a flat. She would find one among their own people. When she had the flat arranged, they would all be together.
Tani said, “There’s the family money, Mum. He has to give you half of it. You can find a flat now if you have that money. You can find one today.”
“I wish to do this my own way,” she said.
“Mum, no. It is not right that he keeps it.”
“It is right for me. And this . . . everything is different, Tani, which I hope you will one day understand.” She went on to say that she wished an ending to their time of distress could be sooner. She wished it could be now. But it would be soon and when the time arrived, they would be their own small family again.
“Tani is welcome to stay with us, Mrs. Bankole,” Deborah said. “Until you’re ready for him, I mean. I promise not to put even a finger on his hair.”
“Or he can stay with my family,” Sophie said. “My mum and dad know him. It would be perfect. It would be fine.”
“This is for Tani to decide,” Monifa said. “I thank you both.”
At this point, the phone voice was Dorcas’s again. She asked for the details that would tell her who had the protection order, who would file it, and what police station would present it to Simisola’s father. All of that, she reassured Tani, would now happen as quickly as possible. In the meantime, he was to stay away from his father. Could he promise to do that.
“Easy as anything,” Tani said. “I promise.”
CHELSEA
SOUTH-WEST LONDON
“I react to the tone,” Deborah said to her husband. “Honestly, Simon, I know you mean well, but when you speak to me with that certain tone—the way you spoke when the subject was Bolu and her parents—it’s as if you’re attempting to guide my seven-year-old self to some kind of behaviour that you’ve decided I need to adopt. And then I just see red.”