“Hey,” he said to her, “Sophie wants to meet you, Squeak. And she wants you to come with me to her sister’s birthday celebration.”
“Oh, I love birthdays, Tani. Will there be cake? When is it?”
“Tonight. I came to take you over there.”
“Tonight? Oh no! I can’t go tonight. Mum and I ’re going to do sketches for my celebration cake. An’ Masha’s going to make it. ’Member? I told you. It’ll have special decorating on it. We’ll have it for after the initiation.”
“Yeah. We need to talk about that as well, Squeak.”
“Why?”
“We just do. Let’s finish up and get out of here.”
She was intrigued enough, he saw, that she picked up the pace, and within twenty minutes she had her bit of earned cash from Masha, and they were back in the market. He needed to keep Simi out of sight of their father’s butcher shop and fishmonger stall, as well as Into Africa. So they kept close to the shops abutting Masha’s and the party store beneath it, and they emerged at the market’s far end. There, he bought a small order of chips and a Coke for Simi. He bought only a Coke for himself. These they took farther along Ridley Road to where the market ended and a dusty-leafed beech tree provided shade. There was no bench, just the tree itself. They leaned against its trunk.
His sister politely offered him a chip, which Tani took. He chewed it thoughtfully and watched her do the same. He opened both of the Cokes and handed her one of them.
He said, “It’s dead important that you go to Sophie’s, Squeak. The Franklins? Like I said, they want you to come.”
“But Mummy and I—”
“Squeak, listen.” He drank down some Coke as if it were something that could bolster his courage. “There i’n’t any initiation. There never was. Mum means something totally different, but she’s calling it an initiation because she thinks you’ll go for it if you don’t know what’s really meant to happen.”
Simi was chewing slowly, and she turned to look at him, round-eyed. She said, “Mummy said . . .”
“Yeah. I know. But she said it to trick you, so you’d think it was part of being in a tribe. But you’re already Yoruba, Squeak. You’re born Yoruba. There’s not an initiation, and there never was.”
“There is,” she said. “I told you, Tani. I went to the place where I’m gonna get initiated. Mummy took me there. I met a lady, Easter. She said she would give me a jab and that would make me initiated.”
Tani tried to decide what to tell her without destroying the world she shared with their mother. He said, “It’s this, Squeak. Mum doesn’t want you to know it all because she doesn’t want you to be scared. But what they want to do to you is what some of the tribes do to girls in Nigeria. An’ other places ’s well.”
She looked at her dusty feet in her dusty sandals. Then she looked at him. She said, “But what they do is jus’ to initiate them, Tani.”
He shook his head. “It’s not, Squeak.”
“What is it, then?”
Tani looked away from her for a moment. He needed a woman to explain this to her and he realised he should have found one to do it. Sophie would have, but it would have had a bloody sight more power if the explanation came from someone who’d been cut. He looked back at his sister and tried to give her details. “They muck girls up is what they do. They muck girls up between their legs. It’s real bad, Squeak. It happened to Mum and now she wants it to happen to you. Cos it’s like this mad tradition they got some places in Nigeria. And tha’s why you got to come with me to Sophie’s now. Because if I don’t get you out of there, they’re going to muck you up between the legs ’s well. Squeak, you’d know all about this if Mum had let you go to school. Didn’t you ever wonder why you got taught by Mum at home? It’s cos at school they teach about this an’ all sorts of other things. You c’n ask Sophie. She knows all about it. She doesn’t have to worry whether it will happen to her because she’s English. But you and me, we’re Nigerian, and—”
“What about my celebration?” she asked, her voice rising, her eyes growing bright with tears. “Lots of people’re coming, Tani. Even our cousins will come from Peckham. Everyone’s giving me presents and eating cake and—” The first of her tears began to drip down her cheeks. Her lower lip was trembling and Tani felt struck. His stomach was turning into liquid.