Becoming Abigail

Then XVII

She had felt caught in the sheath of men’s plans. From the time her father and Peter had decided that she needed to come to London. There had been the trip to Lagos in the long lean body of a bus. Then the flight in the cigar belly of the plane, and now, hurtling through the bowels of London in the subway, headed for Peter and Mary’s.

She studied the curious map of the London Underground system with interest. It wasn’t much good as a map printed the way it was on thick cardboard tacked to the wall opposite. It was nestled between a poem and an advertisement for Cadbury Creme Eggs. She promised herself she would try that as soon as possible. Turning her attention to the poem, she smiled. To what can our life on earth be likened?/ To a flockof geese,/ alighting on the snow./ Sometimes leaving the trace oftheir passage?/ Su Shi. I should burn that onto my arm, she thought, mentally searching to see if she had any room left.

These were good omens. The two main things she loved, here, at the moment of her arrival.

The map was a mass of lines — reds, blues, yellows, greens, blacks, browns, and even a deep purple. Laid out the way it was, it made her think London spread out in a neatly laid out geometric square. She would find out later that it was an old and untidy sprawl of rivers and canals, beautiful parks, old cobbled streets that still held the echo of horse drawn carriages, tired crumbling walls built by Caesar, and modern plazas of glass and chrome. There was the open pleasure of Covent Garden with its flower shops, vegetable stalls, colorful barrow boy calls, the new market with stall after stall selling trinkets that nobody needed to people who should know better. There were street musicians everywhere filling the hallowed halls of the Underground with their melancholic worship. But that would come later. With Derek. That and his tongue that filled her with a desire so deep it threatened to rip her apart.

For now there was just the clacky-clack of the tracks, the warm rush of air as they hurtled down one of the city’s many arteries, and the swaying that was a lulling to sleep. And the people around, careful to avoid their luggage sitting in the center of the carriage. Eyes never meeting. Reading. Bopping heads to music filtered through headphones. Nodding off to sleep. Packed tightly as they were, she still noticed the small island around everyone. And so many white people. Shades of white. She had never thought of it that way. But it was true. White as translucent as snow, making visible the veins running like green rivers just underneath the skin. Others that were denser, pinker, blood vessels spreading like tentacles of light. Others that seemed unsure whether to be a dirty ivory or a rich cream. And brown ones, tanned deep like the happy flow of a tropical river down a mountainside. She wondered what her mother had made of all these shades.

She studied Peter as he slept. In this moment of vulnerability, nostrils flared in a snore, drooling slightly, he looked like a child. She had been suspicious of him from the beginning. Not just because of what he had done to her when she was twelve, but because there was something about him that didn’t ring true. It was as if he hadn’t learned to occupy his body properly. Or perhaps it was his life that he hadn’t stepped into, occupying instead another one. One that was clearly uncomfortable. It made her uncomfortable that she couldn’t place it. Bad people didn’t bother her. Like good people they were a known quantity. It wasn’t even the loose possibility of these that bothered her. It was the struggle against either side. That was where the danger lay. What was it Abigail used to tell her? A house divided, that’s the dangerous place. She smiled suddenly. Abigail couldn’t have told her anything. Still, she didn’t buy Peter’s story about the other kids he took back having run off with bad company. He had done something to them, she didn’t know what, but she was going to watch him closely, make sure it didn’t happen to her. That was what Abigail would have done. She would have studied Peter’s face too in this moment of openness so as not to be taken in by it.

She turned her attention back to the Underground map, mouthing the words of the stops as if they were a mantra that would reveal all to her. She let the vowels and consonants sink to the bottom of her mouth like the pendulous seed of a mango still holding the sweetness of flesh. She then dropped it down one more level and swished the words around the back of her throat as though gargling. Walthamstow. Mornington Crescent. Angel. Highbury &Islington. Finsbury Park. Tottenham Court Road. Oxford Circus. And on. When the train pulled into the lit-up tiled station bearing the legend Seven Sisters, Peter woke on cue and gathered the luggage. He stepped off without bothering to check if she was with him. Abigail hesitated at the gap between the door and the platform. In the sliver of darkness she saw a rat moving. It was oddly comforting.

“Come on,” Peter said.

“Seven Sisters. Mind the gap,” the station announcement said. “Mind the gap.”