So we’re in my mum’s car. It’s olive green, with the kind of buff finish that makes it seem like it’s sparkling – not sure the make, hatchback though. 

I don’t have many memories of her driving. Actually just a few over this period and then no more, because she stopped not even a year after. Don’t know why.

So we’re in my mum’s car and she’s driving and I’m in the driver’s seat. I’m about seven. Lara George’s new album’s just come out; my favourite song, “I’ll Write a Song About” is blasting in the car from the CD player. I nod and sing along. That day I was escorting you on your errand, Mum, which you would quickly run without me.

I was searching the car as I always did when I was in a space I wasn’t used to: checking every crevice, opening shields and compartments that she probably didn’t know existed. In the glove compartment was a small bag filled with makeup. I pulled out something thin and cylindrical and held it up to the driver. 

“What’s this?” I asked. 

She took her eyes off the road for a second, too much time for a new driver. “That’s mascara.” 

I unscrewed the lid and SLOWLY pulled it out. It was a long tube of thin, black wand and then a fuzzy, sharp-looking brush at the end. This was confusing, not as clear use-wise as the lipstick and blush. 

“What’s it for?” I asked. 

“For your eyebrow. I mean eyelash.”

I unscrewed the cap.

“Don’t use it,” you said. 

I paused. “Why?”

“It’s for adults.”

That made it even more interesting. There was nothing separating me from grownups. I had already mastered crossing the road, and saved my idiot cousin from choking. Most importantly, I had upgraded from the teaspoon toddlers used to eat rice to the metal tablespoon used by Mum and Dad and the other adults. If this black brush was for adults, it was as well for me. 

But you didn’t need to repeat yourself for me to listen, and I screwed it back and put the makeup bag by the cupholder. 

You pulled up to the destination, with a location and appearance I can’t remember, put on the handbrake and got out. The heat was ushered in as soon as you turned off the engine and AC and opened the door – like it had been waiting, like it had been ready to swarm in all along and was waiting for you to leave. 

The air felt heavy, and a sort of anxiety clamped at my throat. I always had this idea that a car was a whole other space of residence and personhood, so this was the equivalent of being home alone, with no real adults, with the emptiness of the back seat as an eery reminder of possible danger. I tried to take my mind off the whole thing, circling back to the concept of extending my eyelashes.

Using my pointed forefinger, I approached my eye horizontally, placing the flesh wand underneath my lashes, then letting the skin run through my lashes. I supposed that was how one used such a thing, glad I’d used my finger a nail scratched against my eyeball. I used a bad word I wasn’t meant to know, clutching my eye for a bit, making sure it didn’t bleed before trying again. This time, I softened the blow of my finger by wetting it, spitting all over the knuckles to lubricate it. I repeated the movement again, brushing my eye, watching my eyelashes clump up and grow thicker in the little car mirror. It was working! I celebrated inwardly as I continued the manoeuvre, smiling. 

The card made a clicking sound from the outside and I saw your figure at the driver’s seat. I watched as you got back into the car, excited to tell you my revelation. You took one look at me before responding.

“You used mascara?” you immediately said. 

I was taken aback, hurt by what I should have read as a compliment on the effectiveness of my creative innovation. I scrambled to defend myself, hating the feeling of being misunderstood.

“No, I didn’t,” I whined.

“Tell the truth,” you muttered, tiredly. 

“I didn’t!” I asserted, my eyes welling up with tears. 

There was no real consequence to saying yes other than your disappointment. But I wouldn’t take an accusation for something I didn’t do. The brush over my invention, over the discovery I’d made with spit and flesh, left me almost too worked up to give further explanation. 

I licked my finger and brought it up to my eye in demonstration. “Look, Mum. I used my finger, look.”

But you’d already put the car in ignition and reversed into the main road, driving on. I knew you weren’t angry, just willing to drop the whole thing and move on. The CD picked up automatically from my favourite song on the album, the jazzy notes falling on deaf ears as I sat in a bowl of feelings I couldn’t process. All I knew was I couldn’t blame anyone for how I was feeling other than myself and my desire for exploration, my wet finger feeling estranged from my body the whole day. 

I sat briskly for the rest of the journey, waiting for an apology I never asked for, which never came. 

I brought this scene up again years after, when the memory popped into my head. You didn’t remember it, but you asked the same question before I reached the end of my story. 

“So did you wear the mascara?” you asked again. 

I felt the rage from my seven-year-old body repossess me, this time tempered by a composure unusual for a teenager. 

“No,” I simply responded, offended that you thought this was some sort of decade-late confession. “I didn’t. That’s the whole point.”

I tried to explain again, and you tried to understand, but I could see it wasn’t really landing. What was the point of this random memory that I’d brought up? The 244 made a sharp right into Ovatltine road, and the green of the petrol station behind your head served as a glaring reminder that this was no longer 2008 Lagos, Nigeria, and I was no longer seven years old. But, again, my mouth kept moving in explanation, which was met with well-meaning half-nods from you.

This memory popped up again this week, but I won’t tell it to you a third time. I’m scared of what doing so would do to me; what anger or sterile indifference would overtake my body from 16 years ago.

I can’t get to the bottom of what it was that irked me about the situation in the first place, which upon reflection was so aggressively nothing. Was I taking offence at the inference that my revolutionary technique couldn’t have achieved the same results as the common mascara manufacturers? Was it the fact you asked twice that day, questioning my character like I ever had a need to lie to you? Was it the fact that the first thing you said had undermined the discovery I’d made, about makeup, about my face and about myself and how my brain worked and its creative solutions? I was never able to convey that part of myself to you in a way we both understood, and that was difficult, I think. 

I didn’t use mascara on myself until I was 14, but that wasn’t because of you. The black and brushy wand proved much harder to use than my finger and spit, and after a few near-blinding attempts, I gave up. I used my own natural mascara all throughout Year Seven to Nine, in the toilet stalls of my all-girls school, at breaktime and lunchtime or before the end of the day, when I taught all my friends the technique before we went on the 401 bus home, eager to impress boys we didn’t even like.

I wish I could’ve brought you along on that journey. The cramped bus was different to the calm stillness of your car: no favourite song playing, no cool compartments to look through or errands to run, but I still would’ve been there. And I would’ve shown you my wet-finger mascara prototype, my original Iron Man figures, and the ideas I had about the different ways we could store bread. I would’ve let you in on the random thoughts of a seven-year-old that are quite nonsensical and eye-poking. You could’ve wet your finger in solidarity and opened the journals of your seven-year-old self to resurrect your own crazy ideas. Or, and this would be most preferable, you could have trusted me enough to believe me as the bus led us down the road into the future of an adolescent girl we could’ve spent together. 

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