"You were in here all this time?" Sarah Harrison asked, her lips pursed.
Jess sat up, trying to gauge the situation. She was getting good at
this.
"Yeah," she said hesitantly.
"Then why didn't you answer?"
"Sorry, Mummy."
Her mother waited, and Jessamy's brow wrinkled as she scanned her face,
perplexed. An explanation was somehow still required.
"I was thinking about something," she said, after another moment.
Her mum leaned on the cupboard door, trying to peer into the cupboard,
trying, Jess realised, to see her face.
"Didn't you play out with the others today?" she asked.
"Yeah," Jessamy lied. She had just caught sight of the clock. It was
nearly six now, and she had hidden herself in the landing cupboard after
lunch.
She saw her mum's shoulders relax and wondered why she got so anxious
about things like this. She'd heard her say lots of times, in lowered
tones, that maybe it wasn't right for Jessamy to play by herself so
much, that it wasn't right that she seemed to have nothing to say for
herself. In Nigeria, her mother had said, children were always getting
themselves into mischief, and surely that was better than sitting inside
reading and staring into space all day. But her father, who was English
and insisted that things were different here, said it was more or less
normal behaviour and that she'd grow out of it. Jess didn't know who was
right; she certainly didn't feel as if she was about to run off and get
herself into mischief, and she wasn't sure whether she should hope to or
not.
Her mother held out a hand and grasping it, Jess reluctantly left her
towel pillows and stepped out on to the landing. They stood there for a
second, looking at each other, then her mother crouched and took
Jessamy's face in her hands, examining her. Jess held still, tried to
assume an expression that would satisfy whatever her mother was looking
for, although she could not know what this was.
Then her mum said quietly. "I didn't hear the back door all day."
Jessamy started a little.
"What?"
Her mum let go of her, shook her head, laughed. Then she said, "How
would you like for us to go to Nigeria?"
Jess, still distracted, found herself asking, "Who?"
Sarah laughed.
"Us! You, me and Daddy!"
Jess felt stupid.
"Ohhhhh," she said. "In an aeroplane?"
Her mum, who was convinced that this was the thing to bring Jessamy out
of herself, smiled.
"Yes! In an aeroplane! Would you like that?"
Jess began to feel excited. To Nigeria! In an aeroplane! She tried to
imagine Nigeria, but couldn't. Hot. It would be hot.
"Yeah," she said, and smiled.
But if she had known the trouble it would cause, she would have shouted
"No!" at the top of her voice and run back into the cupboard. Because it
all STARTED in Nigeria, where it was hot, and, although she didn't
realise this until much later, the way she felt might have been only a
phase, and she might have got better if only (oh, if only if only if
ONLY, Mummy) she hadn't gone.
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
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