Other Names, Other Places
By Ola Mustapha
I remember the kitchen but not the aeroplane. As if Mama teleported us from Tunis to Finsbury Park. We materialised in a kitchen on the top floor of a dark house, where a strange man greeted us. He had a moustache. He looked like a magician. He said, in a voice that made the air vibrate, ‘Welcome, my darlings.’
‘Who’s that man?’ I whispered to Mama, trying to hide behind her. Laughing, she said, ‘It’s Baba, of course – don’t be so silly, say hello to him properly.’
Whether or not because of the strangeness of this meeting, we never learned to call him ‘Baba’ or anything else. To us he was always just ‘That Man’ or ‘him’.
‘I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you!’ he said, gathering me and Sherine into his arms, pressing his face into our hair. He smelt of perfume – Aramis 900, I learned later – and orange peel. The orange smell was familiar: it meant illness, a cough or a cold, anxious voices saying, ‘Eat, ya Susu, eat,’ fingers forcing squirty fruit through clenched teeth. The Aramis 900 was a foreign language I didn’t speak yet.
I’m told it was February 1979. Sherine was seven, I was three. Sherine and Nesrine; our parents called her Nunu and me Susu back then. Waiting for something to happen, we sat at the kitchen table, me nodding off, hypnotised by the chessboard pattern on the red and blue lino floor, Sherine upright and patient. ‘What an incredibly poised little girl,’ someone said about her once. ‘What does “poised” mean?’ I asked you, then went running off to Mama in a huff: ‘It’s not fair – why does everyone think Sherine’s so great? It’s only because she’s older than me.’
Under the dingy light, Mama and the orange man stood by the cooker raising their voices, pointing at a frying pan.
Years later, Sherine told me Mama had tried to fry frozen beef burgers in vanilla ice cream, thinking it was butter.
‘So typical of him,’ I said. ‘Lazy fucker. Why was she the one making dinner that night? Couldn’t he be arsed to do it just that one time?’
‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘And he wonders why she left him.’
Excerpt from “Other Names, Other Places” copyright © 2023 by Ola Mustapha. Published by Fairlight Books.
About the book: Growing up in London with Tunisian parents, wayward Nessie finds herself caught between cultures. Her parents don’t want her becoming too English, while at school she doesn’t feel ‘white enough’ or ‘African enough’ to fit in with any group. She even has multiple names: Nesrine officially, Susu to her family, Nessie to everyone else.And then there’s Mrs Brown: a charismatic woman who befriends her parents and soon becomes the glue holding their dysfunctional family together. Yet after a catastrophic betrayal, Mrs Brown abruptly disappears from their lives.
Years later, Nessie seeks independence but struggles to escape a pattern of self-sabotage. As unsolved family mysteries resurface, she begins to wonder what it will take to find self-acceptance and a real sense of home.
***
Ola Mustapha was born in London and spent part of her childhood living in Egypt, before returning to England. She studied economics and Japanese at university and then moved to Japan, where she taught English for several years. She now lives in London and works as an editor. Her short fiction has been published in literary journals including Aesthetica, Storgy and Bandit Fiction. Other Names, Other Places is her debut novel.
You can read our interview with Ola Mustapha here
