Two Suitcases

The flight from Manchester landed at Murtala Muhammed at ten past six in the morning, and the heat hit Kemi Adeleke like a slap.

She stood at the top of the stairs with her hand over her mouth. Lagos was the same. The same warm wet air, the same smell of jet fuel and frying dough, the same roar of a city that never slept and never apologised. She had forgotten the particular sweetness of it, the way her lungs seemed to open.

"Welcome to Nigeria," said the immigration officer, without looking up.

"Thank you."

"First time?"

"No." Her voice cracked. "I used to live here."

She was thirty-one. She wore a navy trench coat, too heavy for the weather, and carried two suitcases: one black, one plaid, both bought in a hurry at Manchester airport the night she heard the news. Inside the black one was her funeral dress, her nursing badge, a bottle of pills she had stopped taking, and a framed photograph of a man with a stethoscope round his neck.

Dr Babajide Adeleke. Her father.

He had died on a Tuesday. A stroke. In his office at the Adeleke Family Clinic in Ibadan, at his desk, with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. His receptionist had found him. He was seventy-one. He had been working until the day he died.

She hadn't spoken to him in three years.

She hadn't meant to stop. It had happened by accretion, one missed call at a time. She'd been busy. She'd been on night shifts. She'd been ashamed of the thing they'd said at their last meeting, the thing that still burned when she remembered it: You abandoned us, he'd shouted, in the hospital car park, the winter she left. You abandoned the clinic. You abandoned your own people for a country that does not even know your name.

She had answered with something worse.

"Madam?" The officer slid her passport back. "Next."

She picked up her bags.

The taxi ride from the airport to Ibadan took three hours. She watched the road through the window: the market stalls and the billboards, the okada men dodging lorries, the stretches of green where the city thinned into bush. A boy ran alongside the car selling oranges. A woman balanced a basin of yams on her head with the grace of a ballet dancer.

The road ran straight, then bent, then dipped. And suddenly, over the crest of the hill, she saw it. The long red-roofed building at the edge of the town, with the white cross on the gable and the sign hand-painted in blue. ADELEKE FAMILY CLINIC. ESTD 1989. WE TREAT EVERYONE.

She asked the driver to stop.

"Madam?"

"Just for a minute."

She stepped out onto the dusty verge. A hot wind lifted her hair. The clinic stood about two hundred yards down the lane, set among mango trees, its paint flaking, its windows dark. There was a line of patients outside it, even at this hour, sitting on benches in the shade, babies on laps, old men leaning on sticks.

She stood there a long time.

"Kemi?"

She turned.

A man was walking toward her down the lane. He was tall, perhaps thirty-three, with broad shoulders and close-cropped hair, in a rumpled white coat over jeans. His face was weathered and kind and tired. He carried a clipboard in one hand. He stopped about ten feet away, and stood very still, looking at her as though she were a mirage.

"Seun," she said.

"I thought it was you."

"I thought you'd be in Abuja."

"I thought you'd be in England."

"I was."

"I know." He swallowed. His eyes were wet. "I'm sorry about your father."

Her throat closed. She nodded. For a moment she could not speak. A dog barked, far off. A child laughed. The heat shimmered on the road.

"You kept it open," she managed.

"I tried."

"Alone?"

"With two nurses and a part-time pharmacist." He gave a rueful half-smile. "He asked me to, the week before. He said, 'If something happens, don't let them close it.'"

"He didn't ask me."

"He didn't think you'd come."

She flinched. It was the truth. It went in like a knife.

"I'm here now," she said.

"Yes." He took a step closer. His face softened. "Kemi. You look so tired."

"I've been up for thirty hours."

"Come on." He took the larger suitcase out of her hand. "Let's get you something to eat."

"I'm all right."

"You're not."

"No," she admitted, and her voice broke. "I'm not."

He didn't touch her. He didn't say anything else. He only stood beside her on the dusty road, holding her suitcase, patient as a tree, while she cried.