My Life As A Chameleon

First chapter excerpt of My Life As A Chameleon, by Diana Anyakwo, the story of a young Nigerian girl growing up in Nigeria and Great Britain in the 1980s.

“This often gut-wrenching tale delves with honesty and insight into biracial and bicultural identity, mental health struggles, racism, and other topics that will resonate widely.”—Kirkus, “Small Press Gems”

Manchester, 1990

My childhood was relatively happy up until The Incident – the first time I understood my father was not well. The Incident is the dividing mark in my life: Before and After.

Before, things were simpler. Not perfect – looking back, I was aware that there was something going on beneath the surface of our happy family life, but it was kept behind closed doors, didn’t have a name, and either I didn’t see it or didn’t want to.

It’s coming up to the five-year memorial next month and we are all going back to Nigeria. It’s making me think about things, my life, my family, what we could have been, what we lost.

Lagos, 1982

We live in Ikoyi, a pleasant neighborhood in Lagos. Our house is a bungalow with five bedrooms and huge gardens. There’s me, my parents, and my older siblings, Sophie, Luke and Maggie.

I’ve always been the odd one out, probably because of the large age difference between us. I’m eight years old. Sophie is twenty-one, Luke is seventeen, and Maggie is fifteen. My mother likes to call me her miracle baby. She named me Lily because I reminded her of a canna lily, her favorite flower. I guess it’s nice, but it marked me as different from the start.

Maggie is the prettiest. She’s like a princess with her soft hair curled into perfect little ringlets. It’s so annoying. I don’t understand how she has that and I have the frizz that stands up on my head like a sweeping brush. It doesn’t seem fair.

The priest comes to visit my mum every week. I think they are friends because they are both Irish and miss their home. Mum gets out the best China teacups and they talk about rolling green fields and the smell of cow dung. Once when Father Burke was at our house, Maggie walked past and he looked up at her in a strange way and said, “That Maggie, she’s a looker. You better be careful. She’ll attract the boys like bees to honey and land herself in a whole lot of trouble.” He wagged his finger at my mum as he said this, and I could tell Mum was angry because her face went red as she spoke in a low flat voice.

“Watch the way you talk about my daughter.”

My oldest sister Sophie is also very pretty but in a different way from Maggie. Sophie wears her frizzy hair in a big Afro and she has this cool style, all large gold hoop earrings, flared jeans, and platform shoes.

Sophie’s always irritated and ignores me most of the time. Sometimes I do things just to annoy her, so she has no choice but to pay attention to me. When her friends from university come over, they love to talk to me. They say I am cute and look at me as though they would like to take me home. It drives Sophie mad. I think it makes her like me even less.

My brother Luke is the nicest. When I had the measles, the rash went up right inside me. It hurt so much for me to pee that I cried every time. Mum had to work so Luke stayed home from school to look after me. He read me my favorite stories and brought me all my meals in bed. He even made a chocolate cake. He’s talented like that – he can do anything. He’s always playing with a Rubik’ Cube. I love to listen to him solve it over and over again, the soothing sound of crick-crick-crick as he twists the square.

Luke loves animals. He has a huge fish tank which he keeps in the lounge. It’s like watching TV. There are so many different types of fish in there. I like the angelfish best. Their skin is white and shiny and they float around in pairs. If I trace my finger along the smooth glass, the fish will follow, back and forth.

Whenever we are all home and in the same room, the atmosphere gets tense. It’s like my siblings know something bad is about to happen and won’t tell me what it is. I just know it has to do with my father.

In those moments, the one thing that can make them all relax is remembering their childhood together, before I was born, when they lived in the big house in the railway com- pound and Dad was a hospital supervisor and they went on lots of holidays abroad.

Mum says, “Do you remember when we had tea in the Dorchester?” and my siblings nod and close their eyes as though they are back there. Then someone says, “What about all those trips to Switzerland? Do you remember that creepy hotel in Vevey?” Everyone laughs and adds their own memories.

Once, I asked Luke what it was like in the railway com- pound. He smiled, showing me all his teeth, and said it was a magical place built on the old Botanical Gardens with plants and forests all around. Our house was the biggest, right next to the swamp.

“There were mammy waters living in there,” he said. “What are they?”

“They’re mermaids. They sit on the banks of the swamp at night among the reeds and sing.”

I listen to these stories and find it hard to imagine so much harmony in my family. It’s as though they are describing different people.