She agreed to marry him out of respect for keeping one’s word, out of respect for Yoro Ba. Penndo had come to love my father because he was her exact opposite. He was as old as an immutable landscape, she was young like the changing sky. He was immobile as a baobab tree, she was the daughter of the wind. Sometimes opposites fascinate each other because of the differences between them. Penndo had come to love my father, the old man, because he contained all of the wisdom of the earth and of the recurring seasons. My father, the old man, idolized Penndo because she was what he was not: movement, joyous instability, novelty.

We clinked bottles and smiled, but his words stung because the life I’d imagined for myself had slipped through my inattentive fingers. It was not the place that was a backwater, it was me. My spirit had eddied into the shallows of domesticity and beached itself. I had let John down because I had let myself down by immuring my combative originality, which he’d always valued and loved. Yes, my brother’s words stung –look how long I have remembered them- but they were a gift: he would not me forget that I had once known other things and made other plans.

In this world, my mother can weave back together her grandparents’ dreams that unraveled in Turkey. She won’t work in factories like they did. She will write and paint. She will sing the lyrics of her grandparents’ songs to music of her own invention. She will teach her daughters to sing too. She will show them that anything is possible. Perhaps dreams can be passed from mother to child through blood, or through whispering to womb, or through the sheer power of faith that can cross oceans and mountains and estrangements, because my mother’s dreams have always been my dreams: to create beauty from ink and thin air.

In this world, my father can carry his father’s dashed hopes of an academic life across continents. In his late forties, my grandfather got the university degree colonization had denied him. He studied literature. My father got a PhD in his twenties. He dreamed he would return home with his knowledge and use it to help build the Africa the generation before him had fought so long and hard for. As a child, I watched him do this. As an adult, I believe it might have killed him—the heartbreak from all of the suffering he could not end. Yet his dream, like my mother’s, was in me too.

When they were deciding whose place to go back to, he said they could go to his, but she should know he lived with his parents. She was amused again, said “very unusual” and kissed him, lightly holding his face between cool, pale hands. At her flat, which was decorated like an adult’s, with paintings and wooden furniture, he felt like a mortal who’d climbed Mount Olympus and with one outstretched, trembling hand, touched the breast of a god. It became one of his favourite memories, making him smile whenever he thought of it. But it never occurred to him to ask her out again. In later years, he couldn’t understand why. He suspected that this was a chance of happiness blithely overlooked.

If they hadn’t happened to meet in the two months, out of a lifetime, when he was idling, they’d never have got together. It was practically false pretences. She didn’t know why he even wanted it. Just for shags and someone to have around when Roland was busy? That unfair thought brought out its own contradiction: she knew why he wanted this. It was the same reason he was so attentive to what she thought of him. They’d never spoken about it, but every page of his personality was watermarked with the memory of loneliness. That made her feel for him. And he was good. There was no doubt he was good. And maybe, in fact, when you thought about it like a grown-up, that need in him, and that goodness, were forces powerful enough to keep a relationship impregnable for decades. It was like when you were hiring: drive was more important than qualifications. You wanted them hungry. They would become what you needed.