"Broken Glass, Broken Portuguese"

The staff got there first.

Four seconds, maybe five. A steward came up the stairs at a walk that was not a walk, with a dustpan and a folded cloth, because that house had a procedure for everything, and stopped two metres short of us and did not come closer, because it had no procedure for this.

Luísa turned around and went down the corridor.

I want to be accurate about the order of things, since the order is the only part I still have any authority over. She turned first. Ana went after her. I went after Ana. Behind the three of us, the twelve stems and the two bowls of two glasses lay across the tile in champagne, and the steward stood over them holding his cloth, waiting for somebody to release him.

Nobody released him for a long time.

⁂

The corridor upstairs has the serious art in it. Frames with lights over them, a long runner, and, halfway down, the one painting in that house that does not match the house---too much colour for the corridor, brushwork still arguing with itself, two quick letters in the corner.

Luísa got as far as that painting.

"Lu---"

The name did not survive the corridor. Luísa turned around and put her open hand flat on her sister's collarbone and pushed her, once, without any violence in it at all, the same measured amount of force she used on a car door, and Ana went back into the wall under her own painting and stayed there.

"Get away from me."

English.

That was the whole of it. That was everything my girlfriend said out loud in that house that night, four words, to her sister, and none to me, and then she walked to her room and the door shut and the key locked.

I have never heard that key before or since. It was stiff. Nobody in that family had ever needed it.

⁂

They came up the stairs then, all of them, because a crash in Ikoyi carries.

Iago first, still holding his glass, saying---o que foi, o que foi---and then he saw the tile, and his sister against the wall, and me standing in the middle of the corridor with nothing in my hands, and he stopped so hard Diogo walked into the back of him.

Diogo did the math in about two seconds. He has always been the quicker one; his brother is only louder.

Then the rain arrived. It came onto the glass doors behind us all at once, the way it does when the stillness has been building since afternoon, and inside thirty seconds the whole house was under it, and everything anybody said for the rest of that night had to be said over the sound of a roof taking a beating.

I tried to go down the corridor.

Diogo put his hand flat on my chest without looking at me, the way you put a hand on a door you are not opening, and I stopped, and that was the last time that night I made a decision about where my body went.

"Diogo." My voice came out fine. Everything in me was doing the necessary things---my lungs, my knees. My hands hung there with no opinion at all.

He was not listening to me. He had turned to his sister.

⁂

They fought in Portuguese, so they fought at full speed, which was how I learned that they had been holding it back at every dinner I had ever eaten in that house.

I understood all of it. I stood in that corridor and understood every word, in a language I learned at night off a phone so I could hear what people said about me when they thought they were alone, and it worked exactly as designed. It worked beautifully. I have never been better informed in my life.

"Do you know what she gave up?" Diogo said. Not shouting. His voice went thin at the top instead. "Say it. Say what she gave up."

Ana said nothing, so he said it.

"She was nineteen. She had the studio, she had Renata, she had all of it, and Papa's business came here and somebody had to hold the family, so she came, and she has been holding it since. Eight years. She has never once been late for anything, for eight years." He pointed at his brother without turning his head. "Us. The visas. The contracts. His passport, twice."

"Diogo," Iago said.

"And you." He turned all the way around to face her. "Art school. Every camera. Every trip. You have never signed anything in your life. She paid for the whole of you, and this is what she gets back---in her parent's house, in front of her mother, on the night of her brothers' record."

Ana came off the wall. She looked at her brother the whole way.

"I know what she gave up," she said, in English, and her voice was completely level, and I would have given anything at all for it to have been shaking. "I was the thing she gave it up for."

Diogo's face did something then that he will not remember doing.

"Then you owed her," he said.

"And there it is," Iago said.

The rain went up a level. Nobody moved.

"Listen to yourself, Dio. Owed. Owed her." Iago set his glass down on the runner, on the floor, in a house where you do not put glass on the floor. "Everybody in this family is a debtor. That is all we are. Papa is owed for the business, Mamãe is owed for the leaving, Lu is owed for the eight years, and we are owed for being the boys---and this is why nobody in this house can say I love you without an invoice attached."

"She fucked our sister's man."

"Yes." Iago's hands went out. "And she is not paying it off. That is not a debt. It is a sister. You do not get to repossess her, bro."

"Don't."

"I am not defending it. I am telling you what we are."

Diogo turned away from him and looked at Ana for a while, and then he said, in English, so that it would be for everybody in that corridor, and I understood then that it was for me too:

"You have all been eating from her plate for eight years."

Ana went still. Completely still. She has one stillness she does when she is deciding, and a different one when there is nothing left to decide, and I had only ever seen the first one before that night.

She did not speak again while I was in that house.

⁂

My mother had come up the stairs behind all of them and stopped four feet from the top.

I could not look at her for very long. When I did, she was not looking at me at all. She was looking at the wall, then at the doors, then at the twins, taking in a room full of people fighting in a language that had nothing in it for her, in a house she had entered two hours earlier with kola on her lap.

Then she went past all of us to the tile.

She got down onto her knees in her good wrapper, in the champagne, and began picking up the glass.

"Mama."

"Don't touch it."

The steward came forward and she put her hand up without turning around and he went back to his two metres and stood there with his cloth.

She worked from the outside in, the way you do it, the big pieces into the pan and then her hand flat and going in slow arcs to find what the eye cannot. Stem, stem, base. The bowl of one glass came up whole and she set it upright on the tile beside her knee.

Beatriz went into the linen cupboard at the end of the corridor and came back with two cloths and knelt down opposite my mother without one word, and the two of them cleaned it up together in the rain noise while their children stood over them saying nothing at all.

Neither of those women looked at me. Not once, from the first piece of glass to the last.

I said, "Dona Beatriz."

Her hands went on moving. In four months that woman had never once let go of my hand in under five seconds.

⁂

Chief Obiora Okeke came up last, and the corridor made room for him.

He looked at the door with the bolt across it. He looked at his wife on her knees on the tile. Then he looked at me, and kept looking, and I have been looked at by a lot of men with offices, and none of them ever did it that long.

I opened my mouth.

He raised one finger, about eight inches, and I closed it.

He said something to his sons in Igbo---that nobody would raise their voice again in his house---and they went quiet like schoolboys. Then he turned to the steward.

"Open the gate."

Nobody said my name. Nobody in that corridor said my name from the moment the glasses hit the tile to the moment I got into my car, which is a distinction I did not know a room could make.

My mother stood up off her knees. She did that alone; two people moved to help her and got there late.

"Nne," Obiora said to her, in Igbo, and his voice had a different floor under it. "You are my guest. My driver will take you home. Stay and eat."

"I came with him," my mother said.

That was all. She picked up the dustpan, handed it to the steward, thanked him by name---she had learned it in two hours, of course she had---and walked down the stairs ahead of me.

⁂

The rain took me at the second step.

Nobody came out. The front door stayed open behind us for exactly as long as it took a steward with an umbrella to reach my mother, who declined it, and then it shut.

We crossed the gravel in it. My mother's gele collapsed on one side and she walked the whole way as though it had not. At the cars a second steward came through the rain carrying a cooler bag with both hands, hospitality still running on its own current somewhere in that house, and gave it to my mother, and said, "Madam said."

Madam did not come to the door.

My car was already facing the gate. All four of them were. Every car in that driveway had spent the evening pointed at the exit, in case anybody needed to leave quickly, and on the way in she had called them wise people.

The gate ran back on its rails and Lagos arrived---water, horns, a bus somewhere on Kingsway with its wipers losing---and none of it got into the car, because that gate is very good.

My mother did not say one word from Ikoyi to Lekki.

She sat with the cooler bag on her lap where the kola had been, and the wipers ran, and I have known that woman thirty-three years and I have never heard her be quiet for forty minutes in my life. At the flat she took off her gele in the corridor and held it in both hands and stopped at the door of the spare room without turning around.

"That woman washed her leaves four times," she said, and went in, and closed the door.

⁂

I got to Steve's at half past midnight and he opened the door and took one look and did not say anything, which from him is the loudest thing available.

He put me on the couch. He put a plate down that I did not touch. He took his glasses off his head, put them on the table, and sat in the chair opposite me until about four, and then he slept in it sitting up.

I called her thirty-one times. I know the number because I counted them later, and because counting is the only thing my hands are good for.

Ringing until two. After two, straight to the recorded woman.

At six the fan was still going round and I tried to count the clicks and lost it at nine, and got to eleven the next time, and stopped trying.

At 6:40 Iago sent me one line.

She travelled last night. Don't.

I called her again anyway.

The number you have dialled is switched off. Please try again later.

I tried again later.