Other Names, Other Places by Ola Mustapha

Author:Ola Mustapha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairlight Books
Published: 2023-07-12T08:47:38+00:00

Prison break

In case you were wondering, it was That Man’s weariness that allowed me to plant the idea of me moving to Japan to teach English right after I graduated.

‘Booming economy,’ I’d said in my brightest voice when I went down to London from university to deliver my sales pitch. ‘Good money in Japan’… ‘chance to learn another language while I teach’… My stomach churned as I waited for the obligatory explosion.

But he’d just mumbled, ‘Okay, my love,’ head hanging down as we picked at his chicken tagine. ‘But only for a year, and then you must come home, to your family… You’ve been away too long already. I’ve lost your mother and sister – I can’t lose you as well.’

Nearly three years had passed since Mama’s prison break, but Sherine’s was still recent and raw. All these abandonments had left him heavier, slower, less nimble in the boxing ring. At least my official reason for running away absolved him of any blame.

‘You crack me up,’ said Mariana as we sat in the Burger King in Turnpike Lane the next day, my appetite restored now that the ordeal of telling him was over. ‘Why stop at Japan? Why not go to New Zealand, to really make your point?’

‘Shut up, bitch,’ I’d said, cracking up too. ‘You know I can’t go back and live with him after college – I’d end up slitting my wrists. And I can’t be arsed to go through what Sherine did. This is the easiest way.’

Sherine’s efforts to do things the normal way, like an English person, had ended in tears. She’d left home in a minicab at 2am, raking her nail down That Man’s face when he’d tried to stop her. None of this surprised Mariana. She came from a milieu that understood why it was easier to concoct a burning desire to share the spoils of Japan’s ‘booming economy’ than it was to simply tell your parents you were leaving home. Her own escape eventually came via the standard template for our ‘set’: marriage to a guy she’d been seeing on the sly for two years before she finally sprang him – ta-da! – onto her ostensibly unsuspecting parents. He was Greek-Cypriot too, so what could they say? Everyone knew the drill.

‘Yeah yeah,’ she said. ‘I know. But you can’t put it off forever. You can run away from your problems, but they’ll still be waiting for you when you get back.’

I knew she was right. I knew it was only a holiday away from reality. But it was a holiday I was determined to drag out for as long as possible.

My need to run away to another hemisphere couldn’t be pinned entirely on my family. London itself had to take its share of the blame. The feelings and associations it induced in me… the sadness that enveloped me each time my train or coach pulled into its shabby suburbs on my trips back from university. I thought those feelings belonged to me, Pavlovian echoes of my childhood.

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