discover the final trump card in this stupid game between her parents: a blank price tag – or was it a receipt? – tied with a thread to her big toe?
* * *
It turned out Isa was already pregnant again, from that delirious night before the Battle of the Price Tags began. This time, it stuck. Seeing this as a sign, she gave herself over to the business of her children. Isa grew fat and recalcitrant over the next four years, a period that Daddiji called The Proliferation and during which she gave birth to three more daughters. In photographs taken around the turn of the twenty-first century, Isa’s smile was hidden between plump cheeks, and no matter how Sibilla coaxed her to look at the camera, her eyes were either off seeking some child crawling or stumbling into potential danger, or gazing down at the one in her arms. She became addicted to the drug of breastfeeding – the smarting relief and the chemical high of locking eyes with her baby. Isa finally had the captive audience she had always sought.
‘Everybody else lives with their children,’ Daddiji grumbled. ‘Must we live for them?’
They did seem outnumbered on Sunday mornings. Gabriella was picking her nose, preferring what she found there to her breakfast. Lilliana was sitting in her high chair in her forest-green onesie, a volcano of giggles and burps, dribbling a lava of scrambled eggs. Naila was scraping hers across her plate, whispering ‘kwacha’ when she pushed them one way, ‘ngweeee’ the other way.
‘You will never know the depth of a mother’s love,’ Isa said indignantly, shifting baby Contessa from one breast to another, dripping milk over her own plate.
‘If you’re such a loving mother, why are the workers in this household bloody legion?’
‘Don’t play with your food!’ As Isa reached forward to scold Naila, her nipple plopped out of Contessa’s mouth, which opened wide with surprise and then umbrage.
‘Why so much shouting-shouting?’ Daddiji shouted.
Contessa started wailing and that set Gabriella off.
‘And where are your precious workers now when we need them?’ Isa yelled back.
‘It’s SUNDAY!’ Daddiji bellowed. ‘I think we can handle one day a week without—’
Naila covered her ears and imagined her sisters’ heads exploding one by one – plop! plop! plop! – like overripe fruit. They were already halfway there, with their big cheeks. The Proliferation had been hardest on Naila. She had been swaddled in the warmth of her parents’ attention for years. It felt as if a blanket once large enough to wrap twice around her was now shared with fitful creatures who tugged and yanked at it all night, leaving parts of her body exposed: her foot or her arm or her back. This was the worst thing about being a sibling: you never knew when you would feel the chill.
* * *
Isa relished her daughters’ obedience but did not enjoy enforcing it. So, after a few years, she created a regimented routine to rein them in – and make them profitable. She named the family business Lovely Luxe Locks Ltd. It turned out that, after all her worries, the girls had indeed inherited their grandmother’s genes but in just the right proportion – their hair grew at twice the normal rate. Sibilla refused to participate in this enterprise, and the workers washed their hands of it, saying that it looked like witchcraft, that it was like inviting a curse to come inside for tea. Management therefore fell to the eldest. Naila was then ten years old.
Every morning, after their breakfast and bath, Naila ushered her sisters through a set procedure – shampoo, rinse, condition, rinse, air-dry, oil and comb.
‘How long until harvest?’ Gabriella would ask.
‘Soon,’ Naila would say, weighing the hair in her palm. ‘You’re almost ripe.’
‘What if it runs out?’
‘It won’t,’ Naila would reassure her sister, smoothing her tresses down her back.
When Naila had finished combing the other two girls as well, four-year-old Contessa especially squirmy, she would line them up by descending height in the corridor outside the master-bedroom door. Naila was at least two feet taller than her sisters, and from her viewpoint, their heads always looked like a shimmering black waterfall.
Mother usually emerged around 8 a.m. She was like a goddess to her girls, with her long skirts, her grey eyes, her red lips. Naila, Gabriella, Lilliana and Contessa would face her as she stalked the corridor before them, hands clasped at the base of her spine. Then she’d pause before each girl in turn and ask: