Named

One

Mandy, Mandi, Mandeee

If I'm gonna tell a real story, I'm gonna start with my name.

-Kendrick Lamar

Norfolk, December 2014

I wake up with a jolt.

The downstairs phone is ringing. Who the hell is calling the landline on a Sunday morning? No one calls the landline any more except for crank callers, salespeople, and my mother before she discovered the joys of texting, emojis and WhatsApp.

'Shall I get it?' my husband, Mike, asks, yawning.

'I'll go,' I say.

I fling off the duvet, grab a jumper and run downstairs.

'Hello,' I say, picking up the receiver before it slides into a recorded message. 'Hello?'

'Camilla?' the person on the other end of the phone says, in an uncertain way, like he almost doesn't believe it. 'This is Teju,' he continues, but it's difficult to understand what he is saying over the clank-clank of crockery and the opening and shutting of cupboards in the background.

'I'm sorry. What was your name?' I ask, tasting last night's vegetable curry on my breath.

He laughs, apologises for the noise and says his wife can never make coffee quietly.

'I'm Teju. I'm your cousin, and we are proper cousins,' he chuckles. 'We are not first cousins removed or anything like that. My dad is your father's older brother.'

It's my turn to laugh. My family consists of my mother, brother, sister and me - that's it. There are no cousins.

'I'm calling on behalf of him,' he says.

'Who?'

'Your dad.'

The word 'dad' hangs in the air as though it's drying out in the breeze. What is a dad? How can he call someone I haven't seen or heard from in nearly four decades a dad?

'Are you still there?' he asks.

I don't reply. Instead, I focus on the beads of condensation trickling down the kitchen window, the perfect distraction from the shock and the wibbly-wobbly sensation in my legs.

'I said I'm calling on behalf of your dad. He-'

'Is this some kind of joke?'

'No,' he replies. 'Your dad asked me to find you. I realise it's a lot to take in after such a long time.'

I expel air through my nostrils. That's about all I can muster. I try to say something and my throat seizes up. I can't get my words out. I struggle to breathe, which is ridiculous - I teach yoga, for God's sake; I'm supposed to be good at this breathing lark.

I figure the best thing to do is let him talk. Then, glancing down, I notice in my haste to reach the phone I put my jumper on back to front. I'm barefoot. The kitchen floor is bloody freezing, and part of me wants to scream, 'I'm not interested,' or, more accurately, 'Leave me alone,' and slam down the phone.

But I don't hang up. I remain silent.

I listen to this man who claims to be my cousin witter on about my 'dad', and it takes every ounce of inner resolve not to mention some of my so-called 'dad's' nicknames. He is not my dad. He is The Nigerian. But how can I yell out 'The Nigerian?' This Teju person has a Nigerian accent, and I'm not a child. I am a grown woman in my 40s with a mortgage and responsibilities.

'I haven't called your brother yet. I thought I'd start with the youngest first,' he says good-naturedly. 'Then I'll contact your sister Adunni and your brother Abdul.'

'It's Dunni,' I say, correcting him. 'She prefers Dunni.'

'Ah - I see.'

'Why now?' I ask, leaning against the kitchen counter. 'Why did he ask you to find us now after all these years? Is he unwell or something?'

Teju says that other than a mild stroke a few years ago, he's in robust health.

'None of us is getting any younger.' He pauses. 'I think your dad wants to make up for lost time.'

'Is that so?' I reply sarcastically.

As a tactic to get rid of this stranger, I ask for his email and number. But he mishears. He says my dad would be pleased to know I'd agreed to call him.

'Oh - but your dad's hearing isn't great,' he says helpfully. 'You'll need to speak up-'

'No,' I say, raising my voice. 'I want your contact details, not his.'

I pick up yesterday's newspaper, scramble around the top drawer for a pen and scribble down the digits.

When I finish, there is a heavy silence.

'It's been good talking to you, Camilla,' he says. 'I hope we can speak again soon.'

Annoyingly, my overly polite gene raises its head. I mumble, 'Well, thanks for calling,' and I immediately regret it.

'Wait a minute. Can you clear something up? I'm a bit confused,' he says in an apologetic tone. 'Your dad called you-'

'Please stop calling him my dad!' I bark.

'Sorry,' he says. 'Uncle Rimi calls you Amanda, and when I last saw him he said you were known as Mandy, but he told me I should search for Camilla. Would you prefer I called you Amanda? I called you Camilla just now, didn't I, or do you like Mandy?'

'Yes - no,' I stutter.

'So when will you call back?' he asks.

I cradle the receiver against my ear and don't reply.

'When do you think you'll call back?' he asks again.

'Soon,' I lie, and I hang up.

*

What would you say if I asked you to guess the first recorded written name in history? Perhaps you'd reel off a series of names from the past - names like Thor, Eve or Andromeda - all perfectly acceptable guesses.

But to answer this question, let me take you back to the summer of 2020. It was a grim time. Lockdowns in the UK were just a few months old as the world dealt with the collective horrors of Covid. But in July, in the midst of the prevailing horrors, a large and remarkably fine pictorial clay tablet was sold at an auction in London. Known as the Kushim clay tablet, it was one of 77 pictographic tablets found in what is now southern Iraq. The tablet, etched with dots, brackets and drawings, appeared to depict business deals for multiple shipments of barley.

It read:

29,086 measures barley 37 months Kushim.

In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the cultural writer and historian Yuval Noah Harari refers to this clay tablet. He believes the most probable reading of this sentence should be: 'A total of 29,086 measures of barley were received over the course of 37 months. Signed, Kushim.' This means that the tablet sold at auction in Iraq was one of the earliest references to naming, so, if Kushim was indeed a person, he may be the first individual in history whose name is known to us.

And, five millennia later, just like Kushim, I too was named.

My name was Mandy.

Here I am, aged ten, on a Sunday afternoon in 1980, sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor in the back room of our terraced house in Luton, a multicultural town some 30 miles northwest of London.

In those days, life on a Sunday revolved around preparing for school on Monday. There were baths. After bathing, the 'kink' in my hair was pressed with a hot comb until it was as straight as a ruler. But not yet. It was a few minutes after two, and so far I'd spent the afternoon watching an MGM musical, and boy, did it brighten life up. Sundays back then were the day of closure. And that's no exaggeration. It felt like nowhere was open.

My brother, Abdul, five years older than me, was out, and Dunni, my sister, four years older, was upstairs 'doing her homework'. Except, in reality, she wasn't doing her homework. We shared a bedroom and, when I left her, she was lying on her bed, her hands behind her head, staring at the poster of Mel Gibson on her side of the bedroom wall.

Carmen, my mother, sat behind me, and I knew by the acrid smell wafting from the sofa that she was painting her nails. Remember that name - Carmen. It's important to this story.

By then, we no longer lived among the tight-knit community of the Marsh Farm council estate, built in the 1960s as part of the town's post-war expansion. Our new home was on Bradley Road, which meant if I wanted to see my best friend Jess it was a 15-minute cycle ride away. Still, we had moved up in the world. Our new bay-windowed terrace house had a galley kitchen, a too-hot-in-summer, too-cold-in-winter conservatory, a 'posh' front room reserved for guests and a back room/dining room for eating and watching television. Television was limited to three channels and was a massive part of family life, and the back room, like the rest of the house, was immaculate. Today, we'd call Carmen an early 80s devotee of the yet-to-be-born Marie Kondo approach to cleaning and clutter control. But money was tight. My mother worked hard to furnish our home in a cost-effective...