Are You Alright

Funke Adeyemi’s birthday party was not a party.

It was a gathering, she had said firmly when Damilare suggested a venue. A small gathering, family and close friends, food and music and nothing that required anyone to make a speech. She said this every year. Every year the gathering expanded by seven or eight people and someone made a speech anyway and Funke pretended to be surprised by all of it.

The house in Gbagada was warm and loud by seven o’clock. There were relatives Nneka had not met yet, cousins and family friends and a woman called Auntie Bisi who seemed to know everything about everyone and made it her business to establish this within the first ten minutes of meeting you.

Nneka moved through it carefully.

She knew how to do this. Smile at the right volume. Remember names. Ask questions that made people feel interesting. She had been doing this version of herself since she was old enough to understand that rooms like this were assessments dressed as celebrations.

Damilare was across the room with his father and two uncles, laughing at something, comfortable in the way that men are comfortable in spaces that were built around them. He caught her eye once and raised his glass slightly. She raised hers back.

We are good at this, she thought. We are very good at performing us.

She excused herself from Auntie Bisi’s orbit at half past eight and went looking for somewhere to breathe. The sitting room had become too full, the corridor too loud. She found the balcony through a door at the end of the hallway, a narrow space with two plastic chairs and a view of the street below and the cool night air that Lagos occasionally remembered to produce.

She stood at the railing and let her face do nothing for a moment.

“Are you alright?”

She turned.

Tobi was in the doorway, a bottle of water in his hand, not quite inside and not quite outside. He had not said are you having fun or why are you alone or any of the things people said when they found you escaping a party. He had said are you alright, which was different, which was the specific question that landed somewhere behind her sternum.

“I needed air,” she said.

He nodded and came to stand at the railing a few feet from her. He did not make it strange. He looked out at the street the same way she had been looking at it.

Below them a generator rumbled to life somewhere on the road. A car with one working headlight moved slowly past. Someone was frying something nearby and the smell of it drifted up, palm oil and onions, the specific smell of a Lagos evening.

“Your mother is remarkable,” Nneka said after a while.

“She is,” Tobi said. “She has been throwing herself a party she calls a gathering for fifteen years and every year she acts like the whole thing surprised her.”

Nneka smiled. “She looked genuinely moved by the speech.”

“She rehearsed looking moved. She knew Uncle Kunle would speak. He speaks at everything.” He said it without malice, just the comfortable honesty of someone describing people he knew completely.

Nneka looked at her glass. “Is it always this… full? The family.”

“Always,” he said. “You get used to it. Or you find balconies.”

She laughed. A real one, surprised out of her, and she felt it in her chest the way you feel things when you have been holding yourself together for several hours.

Tobi looked at her when she laughed. Not for long. Just a moment, the way you look at something when it catches you off guard.

Stop, she told herself, though she could not have said exactly what she was telling herself to stop.

“How is the Ajah project?” she asked. She did not know why she remembered that.

Something shifted in his expression. Small, almost invisible. “You remembered that.”

“You mentioned it at the venue.”

“I did,” he said. He was quiet for a moment. “It’s coming. The client keeps changing the brief but the bones are good.”

“That must be frustrating. When the bones are good and someone keeps changing what goes around them.”

He turned to look at her then, fully, and there was something in his expression she did not have a name for and did not try to name.

“Yes,” he said. “That is exactly what it is.”

From inside the house someone called Tobi’s name, loud and demanding, one of the uncles by the sound of it.

He straightened. Looked once more at the street below. “I should go back in.”

“Yes.”

He moved toward the door, then stopped without turning around. “You don’t have to perform in there, you know. They already like you.”

Then he went inside.

Nneka stood at the railing for another five minutes. The generator below kept running. The night air kept coming. She held the railing with both hands and thought about what he had said and thought about what she had almost said in response and was grateful, deeply grateful, that she had said nothing.

She went back inside and found Damilare and stood beside him and was warm and present and everything the evening required.

She did it well.

She always did it well.

To be continued…