“Thank you for helping Mummy, Uncle, but I don’t think I’ll be having any chicken.” He had his mother’s playful manner.
“Look at this boy,” Ojiugo said. “Your uncle is a better cook than I am.”
Nna rolled his eyes. “Okay, Mummy, if you say so. Can I watch TV? Just for ten minutes?”
“Okay, ten minutes.”
It was the half-hour break after their homework and before their French tutor arrived, and Ojiugo was making jam sandwiches, carefully cutting off the crusts. Nna turned on the television, to a music performance by a man wearing many large shiny chains around his neck.
“Mummy, I’ve been thinking about this,” Nna said. “I want to be a rapper.”
“You can’t be a rapper, Nna.”
“But I want to, Mummy.”
“You are not going to be a rapper, sweetheart. We did not come to London for you to become a rapper.” She turned to Obinze, stifling laughter. “You see this boy?”
Nne came into the kitchen, a Capri-Sun in hand. “Mummy? May I have one please?”
“Yes, Nne,” she said, and, turning to Obinze, repeated her daughter’s words in an exaggerated British accent. “Mummy, may I have one please? You see how she sounds so posh? Ha! My daughter will go places. That is why all our money is going to Brentwood School.” Ojiugo gave Nne a loud kiss on her forehead and Obinze realized, watching her idly straighten a stray braid on Nne’s head, that Ojiugo was a wholly contented person. Another kiss on Nne’s forehead. “How are you feeling, Oyinneya?” she asked.
“Fine, Mummy.”
“Tomorrow, remember not to read only the line they ask you to read. Go further, okay?”
“Okay, Mummy.” Nne had the solemn demeanor of a child determined to please the adults in her life.
“You know her violin exam is tomorrow, and she struggles with sight reading,” Ojiugo said, as though Obinze could possibly have forgotten, as though it were possible to forget when Ojiugo had been talking about it for so long. The past weekend, he had gone with Ojiugo and the children to a birthday party in an echo-filled rented hall, Indian and Nigerian children running around, while Ojiugo whispered to him about some of the children, who was clever at math but could not spell, who was Nne’s biggest rival. She knew the recent test scores of all the clever children. When she could not remember what an Indian child, Nne’s close friend, had scored on a recent test, she called Nne to ask her.
“Ahn-ahn, Ojiugo, let her play,” Obinze said.
Now, Ojiugo planted a third loud kiss on Nne’s forehead. “My precious. We still have to get a dress for the party.”
“Yes, Mummy. Something red, no, burgundy.”
“Her friend is having a party, this Russian girl, they became friends because they have the same violin tutor. The first time I met the girl’s mother, I think she was wearing something illegal, like the fur of an extinct animal, and she was trying to pretend that she did not have a Russian accent, being more British than the British!”
“She’s nice, Mummy,” Nne said.
“I didn’t say she wasn’t nice, my precious,” Ojiugo said.
Nna had increased the television volume.
“Turn that down, Nna,” Ojiugo said.
“Mummy!”
“Turn down the volume right now!”
“But I can’t hear anything, Mummy!”
He didn’t turn down the volume and she didn’t say anything else to him; instead she turned to Obinze to continue talking.
“Speaking of accents,” Obinze said. “Would Nna get away with that if he didn’t have a foreign accent?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know last Saturday when Chika and Bose brought their children, I was just thinking that Nigerians here really forgive so much from their children because they have foreign accents. The rules are different.”