only, silk shirt with the iron. Or swap the sugar for salt when I baked cinnamon buns yesterday.”
Scarlet opened her mouth to protest again, then closed it. What could she say? She had done those things. For, although she hadn’t turned on the tap, brandished the iron, or touched the sugar tin, Scarlet knew that she was still responsible. How, or why, she couldn’t explain, but strange things happened around her. And, after seven years of such things, Scarlet had come to accept that this was the case.
“I’m sorry . . .” She fingered the daisy’s petals. It upset her mother more when Scarlet claimed not to know how these things happened. It was better simply to confess and take the consequences. “I, um . . .” She pulled at her hair, slowly twisting it into a bun at the nape of her neck. “I was playing with a magnifying glass . . . Miss Dixon told us about burning things with—”
Her mother tut-tutted, shaking her head. “What on earth are they teaching in schools nowadays? It’s hardly appropriate education for six-year-olds. I don’t—”
“Seven, Mum,” Scarlet mumbled. “I’m seven.”
“Of course you are. But I don’t think that makes it any better, do you?”
Scarlet shook her head in turn, surprised again that her mother had accepted an illogical lie in place of an improbable truth. Here they were, sitting in the garden without a magnifying glass in sight, yet Ruby Thorne believed this explanation. And she’d believed far greater lies before.
Yet, despite her rational mother, Scarlet was a child who prayed for tornadoes to take her to Oz, who upturned many a wardrobe seeking Narnia and spoiled several lawns digging holes to Wonderland. Ruby believed in none of these things and didn’t like her daughter believing in them either. So Scarlet had learned to keep quiet about her adventures and, indeed, about everything else.
Ruby stood, brushing from her skirt any insect or blade of grass impertinent enough to cling to the cotton. “Let’s go. Your grandma might need a hand with the afternoon tea rush,” she said. “All those little old ladies clamouring for their teacakes . . .”
“What’s ‘clamouring’?” Scarlet asked, pushing herself up from the ground. But her mother was already striding across the lawn, halfway to the house. With a reluctant glance back at the charred daisy, Scarlet ran after her.
Liyana
“I’ve got something special to show you.”
Liyana looked up to see her mummy sitting on the sofa. On her lap she held a small carved wooden box, painted white. Liyana could tell, from the way Isisa clutched it, that this was a precious box.
“What?” Liyana abandoned her sketchbook—her incomplete scribblings of white trees shedding white leaves—on the coffee table. Her mummy pulled Liyana onto her lap.
“I’ll show you,” she said. “But you mustn’t tell anyone.”
Liyana considered this. “Not even Dagã?”
“Auntie,” her mother corrected. “And no. Especially not Auntie Nya.”
Liyana nodded. She didn’t ask Isisa why. She never asked why. She didn’t ask why they’d left Ghana one night and come to London and never left. She didn’t ask about her father—not his name, his whereabouts, or if he was alive or dead.
Upright and still, Liyana waited on her mother’s lap. She sensed a secret on her mother’s lips. And since Isisa Chiweshe kept a lot of secrets but seldom, if ever, revealed any, this was quite a coup. Excitement twitched Liyana’s fingertips.
“I’ve been wanting to show you these for a long time, vinye,” her mother said. “But I had to wait until you were old enough.”
Liyana looked up. “But I’m only seven.”
“Perhaps.”
Liyana frowned.
“Well, yes, I suppose that’s true,” Isisa conceded, “if you’re measuring in years. But you’re already far more advanced than most—remember that.”
Liyana didn’t know what to say to this, so she said nothing.
“Let’s sit on the floor.” Setting Liyana aside, Isisa slid from the deep sofa, slipped off her snakeskin shoes, and tucked herself under the coffee table. Liyana shuffled after her.
“Are we playing a game, Dadá?” Liyana asked as her mother opened the box and, as if she were lifting a newborn babe from its cot, removed a pack of cards.
“Not quite,” Isisa said. She held the cards between her palms for several moments, then began to shuffle. Mumbling an inaudible secret beneath her breath, Isisa slowly drew three cards from the pack and placed them facedown on the coffee table, alongside Liyana’s drawing. “And stop calling me that. In England, I’m ‘mummy.’ Remember.”
“Is it snap?” Liyana said hopefully. Her mummy rarely allowed games, unless