JOLA...CHAPTER ONE - by Khadijah Mohammed

The LaunchGrace stood in the wings of the studio, peeping through a gap in the curtain. They were arriving one by one, then in clusters, and every one of them held her book. They flipped through the pages, pointed at lines, leaned in to whisper to each other. Somebody laughed out loud at something on the page, and Grace felt it in her chest like a hand pressing down. She had done this over and over. Two books, dozens of readings, hundreds of signatures. But tonight the nervousness was different. It sat low in her stomach and would not move. "You okay, Grace?" Bari had appeared at her shoulder, her voice soft. "Umm... yeah!" Grace said, a little too brightly. "I'm just tired. That's all." Bari brushed her palm gently across Grace's cheek. "You can do this. Don't forget that." Grace said nothing. She smiled instead, small and quick, and let it do the talking. She was twenty-nine. In October she would turn thirty, and she had already done what most people her age were still only dreaming of: she had a name in the literary world. At twenty she published her first book, The Ugly Pebbles. Then came her second, The Wife, and by then the whole country seemed to know her. Secondary schools put her books on reading lists. Producers turned them into films. The awards came, a couple at a time. She was sensational. And then, at the very peak, the accident. Six months in a coma. A year of learning to be herself again. Now she was back, with her third book, Jola, and she was the reason the entire studio was packed. "Don't worry, baby girl," Bari said, pressing her hands against Grace's. "You've got this." Grace opened her mouth to say wait, but Bari had already slipped out through the curtain and into the light. The rowdy room fell quiet the moment Bari appeared. "Ladies, and gentlemen who came with their ladies," she began, and the audience laughed warmly, "thank you all for coming to welcome Grace and her third book, Jola. Getting here has not been easy. For Grace to be received by you like this is, truly, an honour." She spread her arms. "Please, help me welcome Grace to the stage!" The applause started in one corner, then caught like fire. People rose from their seats. Someone whistled. Behind the curtain, Grace could hear every bit of it. Her feet, though, had decided not to listen. They stayed rooted to the floor while the clapping swelled and swelled, until it seemed to be coming from inside her own ribs. The curtain twitched. Bari's hand reached back through the gap, warm and sure, and closed around hers. "Come on, Grace," she whispered. "They're waiting for you." She tugged, gently but without room for argument, and Grace stumbled out of the dark and into the glare of the stage lights. The applause hit her like weather. Faces turned up toward her, hundreds of them, glowing and expectant and kind. Someone near the front was already wiping their eyes. Grace smiled, and it came out almost awkward, as though she had forgotten how smiles were meant to be arranged. "Umm... thank you all," she said. Her voice sounded small in the big room. "I can see that many of you already have a copy of Jola. Thank you, Bari, for that warm introduction. I won't waste any more of your time. Shall we read?" A chair was waiting for her at the centre of the stage. She sat, set the book on the table, and opened it to where it had all begun. Chapter one. CHAPTER ONELagos, MainlandAlina Nursery and Primary School It was a cloudy morning, the kind of Lagos grey that made the whole sky look like a lid pressed down over the city. The children stood in neat lines on the assembly ground, from Primary One all the way to Primary Six, small bodies in blue and white. Alina was a big school, an elite one. Its main building rose at the far end of the compound like something lifted out of an old British photograph: red brick darkened by decades of rain, tall arched windows, white-painted frames, and a clock tower whose hands had never once agreed with anybody's wristwatch. Frangipani trees lined the driveway, dropping their pale petals onto the tarred ground. Parents' cars were never allowed past the gate, so the morning always began with a long, polite river of drivers and mothers in wrappers waving their children inside. The uniform was blue and white: blue pinafores and white socks for the girls, blue shorts and white shirts for the boys, every collar starched flat. Sunshine stood in the Primary Four line, her song of praise clutched in both hands. Around her, the teachers stood behind their classes as they did every morning, and every morning they murmured and gossiped behind their folders, passing news along the rows like sweets. This morning they said nothing. The silence behind the children was so complete that Sunshine could feel it on the back of her neck. All that echoed across the compound were the children's voices. All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small... Debbie led them, as she always did, her voice thin and clear above the others. They sang the first verse. Then the second. As Debbie drew breath for the third, a voice cut across the ground. "Stop, my dear. Stop there." The song died in a ragged scatter. Every head turned. The proprietress had stepped onto the platform at the front. She was an elderly woman, tall even with age, with long silver hair that fell past her shoulders in a single heavy plait. Her skin was light, almost golden in the grey morning, and her face, even now, was astonishingly beautiful. She had the kind of bones that age could not take anything from. Sunshine had always wondered what sort of beauty she must have been when she was young. Today there was no beauty in her face at all, only something very tired. She stood without her usual walking stick, both hands folded in front of her, and looked out over the sea of blue and white. For a long moment she did not speak. "Children," she said at last, and her voice was very gentle. It was the voice she used when a child fell and scraped a knee. "Come closer. All of you. Come, come." They shuffled forward until the lines dissolved into a crowd. Even the smallest ones from Primary One pressed up near the platform, staring. "I have something to tell you," the proprietress said, "and I want you to listen to me the way you listen to your mothers, because this is how I am speaking to you now. As a mother." A bird called somewhere above the clock tower. No one moved. "Last night, a little before midnight," she said, and her voice caught, only slightly, "our Jola went to be with the Lord." Nobody understood at first. Sunshine saw faces turn to each other, puzzled, waiting for the end of the sentence. "She is gone, my children. Jola is dead." The word fell across the assembly ground and nobody picked it up. Then, very quietly, from the back of Primary Two, a child began to cry. And Sunshine, who was nine years old and standing in the grey light with the unfinished hymn still ringing in her ears, felt the ground beneath her tilt, just a little, as though the whole school had slid sideways and would never be set straight again.

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