then smiled. ‘But everybody calls me Lee.’
* * *
The belief in other minds – the realisation that other people have their own vibrant mental lives and are not merely projections of our own – seems to emerge between the ages of four and eight. This is also around the time we learn to read and begin to ask some version of the question: where does my name come from? It’s as if, for the first time, we realise that the moment we’re born, we all fall into a pre-existing net of words. Like characters in a story, we are named. No longer safe in our petty internal worlds, we’re shoved suddenly to the outside. We look back at ourselves and wonder: who is that?
As a boy, Lionel Banda had always known where his older sister’s name came from. Carol was Carol because their grandmother, a misty figure who lived far away in the mysterious Land of Ing, was Carolyn. As for his own name, Lee had always been a practical boy who thought in equations like: ‘I’m Lee because I’m Lee.’ Then one day, when he was seven years old, he had an accident at the supper table. His ntoshi missed his mouth and he spilled relish down his stripey sweater and his sister said his full name.
‘Lie-NULL!’ Carol shouted, imitating their mother’s scolding tone.
Ba Grace, their mother’s aide, leaned over and cleaned him up with a serviette. As they resumed their quiet munchery, Lee wondered something about himself.
‘Why did you name me Lionel?’ he mumbled through his mouthful of nshima and cabbage. There was a pause.
‘It is a velly good name,’ said Ba Grace. ‘Strong. Like a lion.’
Daddy drank deeply from his glass of Scotch and laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. It shot out, rat-a-tat-tat, and Lee was surprised to realise that it was aimed at his own stripey sweater. Was he not strong? Lee wiped off the oil smeared around his lips. Is that what Daddy meant? The worst part of his father’s cruelty was its inconsistency. Lee never knew when he was going to receive a cold look or a light smack or – and this hurt the most – a sneering insult.
‘Lion is my favourite animal!’ He grinned now, trying to laugh it off.
‘We know that,’ said Carol. ‘And mine is kalulu. And he tricks lion, HAHAHA.’
‘Not all the time! He tricks njovhu sometimes!’ Lee argued bitterly.
He was too young to understand that his older sister was rescuing him. Carol often instigated ‘argy-bargies’, as Mummy called them, as a distraction from the darker rifts between their parents. Brother and sister debated the beastly tales until Ba Grace shushed them both.
After supper, still fretful, Lee picked a different fight with his sister, this time over a toy.
‘It’s mine, Daddy bought it for me!’ Lee cried, trying to wrench the action figure from his sister’s bigger, stronger hands. They were sitting on the floor of their shared bedroom.
‘It’s. My. Turn!’ Carol groaned between gritted teeth. She was eleven, far too old to play with this kind of toy but still committed to the righteous ethos of Bags I. She tugged at He-Man’s bulging legs as Lee tugged at his big-jawed head. The talking figurine slipped and fell with a clatter, then began its mechanical self-affirmation:
‘I…have…THE POWER! I…have…THE POWER!’
‘The battery’s gonna die!’ Lee yelled, grabbing He-Man by the sword and switching off his power. Lee glared at his sister, his vision sparkling with tears of protest, but Carol had frozen. She raised her index finger, her neck straining like a hare as she listened. Shouts were coming in muffled spurts through the wall that separated their bedroom from their parents’. Carol scrambled across her unmade bed to hear better. Lee joined her in the tousled sheets and pressed his ear to the wall, too.
The shouting had a pattern. Daddy would go first, his voice rising one indignant step higher with each word. Mummy would reply with a clipped sentence, calm and resolute. It was almost like he was calling out, ‘I…have…THE POWER!’ and she was responding with that conclusive reply: ‘He-Man.’ After a few minutes of this fight, during which Lee thought he heard his full name uttered more than once, there was a silence.
All of a sudden, Carol jumped on him and started pummelling. Lee fought back eagerly. Their cries as they punched and grappled were so loud that he didn’t hear the door open or the stern voice asking what was going on. He