The Girl Who Saw Lions Page 10

  ‘Can I come with you?’ I asked her, but she always refused.

  ‘No. It isn’t safe.’

  ‘I want to go out. Can I go to school?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘When Thomas comes. He said I must keep you at home till he comes. Anyway, you don’t need to go to school,’ she said. ‘I can teach you.’ She switched on the television set, the magic box that somebody in one of the other flats had given her. ‘Watch that. You’ll learn everything you need to know.’

  I don’t think she ever switched it off after that. It chattered and screeched all day, coloured lights like eyes blinking, flash, flash, flash, jangly music, voices, words words words, day and night.

  One day she brought me some clothes that someone had given her, and we spent hours sorting through them, cutting them and sewing them so I had a dress and a skirt that fitted me. In those days she was always happy, and I was happy too. She said I made her life better.

  And she made my life better. Every time she came home to the empty, flashing chattering flat she brought smiles and hugs and the sharp, cold smell of England with her. Her carrier bag was always full of food from the café – bags of lukewarm chips, soggy apple pie. We ate together in front of the television and she told me funny stories about the customers.

  But things changed. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. Thomas was supposed to be ringing her every week and she would go out to the phone box on the corner. She wouldn’t take me with her. I would sit on the windowsill watching her, waiting for her to come back, and when she did she would be looking white and miserable; she would go to her room and shut the door and stay there for hours. She grew tired of me, and there was nothing I could do to please her. I tried everything I could think of to make her smile at me. I cooked all her meals, I cleaned the flat, I washed her clothes, and the more I did, the more she seemed to hate me. Sometimes I thought she couldn’t bear the sight of me. She went out to work more often, sometimes she stayed out all night, and when she came back she was tired and grumpy. She would tell me to leave her alone.

  ‘Why doesn’t he come!’ she shrieked at me once in that red, jagged voice that frightened me. ‘He’s no intention of coming, has he? You’ve tricked me, all of you. What do I want with a kid of your age? I’ve got my own life to lead. Why should I have a kid like you tagging round me?’

  But the worst thing was the fact that she wouldn’t let me go out. In all that time, two or three months or more, I only went outside twice, once to the Housing Department and once when we moved from one flat to another. I used to sit by the window in my room and look outside at the grey streets and the cars and the restless people. I saw children playing, and wished I could be with them. Even when it rained, I wished I could be outside. But in my country the rain is alive. The rain sings with life. Here it is a grey mist that closes up the world.

  One day when she came back from the phone box she was in a different kind of mood. I heard the front door slamming when she came in, I heard her footsteps ringing round the stairwell as she stamped up the concrete stairs. She flung open the door to the flat and glared down at me. I was truly afraid. She grabbed me with both hands and shook my shoulders.

  ‘Still not coming!’ she shouted. ‘What kind of a marriage is this? Eh? You knew all along, you brat!’ She knelt down, hissing in my ear. ‘He wants me to sell you to a rich family so he can buy his way over. What would happen to you then, eh? You can thank your stars he isn’t coming yet, because that’s where you’d be now, Cinderella in the cellar, that’s who you’d be. Heard of Cinderella?’

  I shook my head, numb with fright at this new passion of anger.

  ‘Heard of slaves, then? Think it was all over hundreds of years ago? No way, kiddo. No way.’

  I still had no idea what she was talking about. Being sold to a rich family didn’t sound such a bad idea to me.

  ‘So till he comes and finds somewhere for me, you can be my slave! Why not? Pay for your keep for a change.’

  My eyes were filling up with tears. What more could I do for her? Every day I washed Susie’s clothes and put them away nice and tidy. I cooked her lovely food and washed up the dishes and kept the flat clean and sweet.

  ‘There’s plenty for you to do,’ Susie snapped at me. ‘I’ve got myself another job at the café – they’ve asked me to do a bit of washing for them – tablecloths and tea towels and that. No way, I said. I’m a waitress, me! But you could do that, Bella. And if you don’t do it right, I’ve got a big slap on the end of my arm. Do it right and we’ll be friends. Do it wrong and I’ll sell you on to someone else. And that would be like sending you to Hell. Heard of Hell, have you?’

  ‘Will I go to the café, then?’ I asked. That wouldn’t be too bad. I would smell the fresh air, I would run, run and feel free.

  Susie put her face close to mine. I could smell the sharp, nasty tang of her cigarettes on her breath, and I tried to back away, but she gripped me by the shoulders. Her fingers were like the talons of big birds, like the vultures.

  ‘Come to the café?’ she laughed, but it wasn’t the white-moon laugh that she used to have. ‘You’ve got to be joking. You’re not moving from this place till Thomas gets here and sells you on, so you can forget that. You stay here, right here, or you’ll go to a much worse place. And don’t go peering out of that window either. You’ve no time for that. Soon as I get the stuff from work, you can get busy. And you can start now.’ She marched me into her room and pulled out a pile of dirty underclothes from under her bed. ‘Here you are. Get working on that lot.’

  Abela could never judge Susie’s moods after that. Sometimes she was bewitchingly happy. She would put a CD on and swirl round the flat in her creamy silky nightclothes, a cigarette in one hand with a blush of lipstick on the stub. She would grab Abela by the other hand and make her dance with her, round and round, heads flung back, till they were both laughing and dizzy. Sometimes she would scoop Abela up in her arms and shower her with kisses, and tell her that Uncle Thomas was coming soon, very soon, and she wouldn’t let him sell her, she loved Abela too much. They would all live as one happy family.

  And at other times she was deep in a black mood, sultry and dark as a cloud of thunder. She wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t eat the food Abela cooked for her, would sit in front of the television in a deep blue fog of cigarette smoke. At these times Abela would creep quietly about her work, washing the pieces of laundry that Susie brought from the café, hanging them over the radiators to dry, ironing them smooth and crisp, till her back ached and her arms hurt and she longed to lie down and sleep. Maybe life is all like this in England, she thought. Maybe this is what all the children have to do. But then from time to time she would hear the high voices of children running to school or playing in the street outside. Only when Susie was out would she dare to steal a glimpse of them from the window.

  We never had visitors, ever. Susie had no friends. When I was with my mother and father I was outside all day, helping my father with the animals, helping my mother with the maize, playing with my cousins. Outside was where we lived. There were no walls to the church or the schoolhouse; we only went into the house to sleep. People drifted from one hut to another, ‘Hodi, hodi,’ they would call, picking their feet over the chickens, and they would come and sit round the cooking pots and talk and talk. Oh, Bibi!

  Then one day there was a knock at the door of the flat. We both thought immediately that it must be Thomas. I was in my room, ironing aprons with the door open, so I could watch the flickering television screen. I saw Susie patting her hair into place before she ran to the door and pulled it open. But it wasn’t Thomas, of course it wasn’t. A lady in a very wet blue coat and hair like white feathers showed Susie her identity card and said she was from social services. Susie tried to close the door in her face, but the lady stepped forward and said she needed to see me, and Susie came into my room and pulled me out, slamming my door behind me. She dug her fingers into my arm, just like Uncle Tho
mas used to do.

  ‘Keep your mouth shut!’ she warned me, hissing in my ear like a fat snake.

  The woman sat down and smiled at me. Wet drips trickled down her coat onto the floor. She asked me how old I was, but I was too frightened to tell her.

  ‘She’s not very big. You’re about seven, I would think.’

  I knew that was wrong but I daren’t say anything.

  ‘We’re concerned because you haven’t registered your daughter for school here yet,’ the woman said to Susie.

  School! I heard the word and nursed it like a present. How I wanted to go to school!

  Susie sat down slowly at the table. I could see that her hand was shaking. She had a red flush across her neck.

  ‘She doesn’t speak English well enough.’

  The woman frowned. ‘Why doesn’t she speak English? Don’t you talk to her in English?’

  ‘She’s spent all her life in Tanzania. She’s been living with her father and her grandmother. Now she’s come home.’ Susie looked at me and smiled, a smile that was as cold as the window feels when the rain is beating against the other side, and the smile said, Keep quiet. And I did keep quiet.

  ‘We have been told that you go out to work,’ the woman said. ‘Is this true?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Susie said. Her voice was shaking. ‘Just a bit, now and then.’

  ‘And do you take your daughter with you?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  The woman asked me some questions, and I was too frightened to hear what she said, never mind to answer her. But my head was spinning.

  ‘She must come to school,’ the woman said. ‘It’s against the law to keep a child away from school, you must know that. She’ll soon learn English there.’

  I wanted to shout then that I could speak English, that Mrs Long said I was the best pupil she had ever taught and that I was clever enough to be a doctor one day: that I wanted, wanted, wanted to go to school. But I stared at the little puddle on the floor and kept quiet.

  As soon as the woman went, I asked Susie why I couldn’t go to school.

  ‘Because you can’t!’ she snapped. Can’t hung in the air like a piece of old rag in the wind. ‘Not till Thomas comes. I’ve told you! I can’t register you anywhere. We need more papers! Birth certificate, things like that! Why doesn’t he send them? Why the hell doesn’t he come? Oh, he’s got me in such a mess. It’s not your fault. It’s him. I don’t want to be mixed up in his game.’ She ran her fingers through her hair, and I realised then how limp and ragged it looked these days, not at all golden and glowing like it used to be. Her face was thin and she had dark caves round her eyes. For a moment she softened; for a moment she put her arms round me and held me tight. ‘I don’t know what to do!’ she said, in a wailing voice like a little girl, but when I lifted my arms up round her waist to comfort her, she pushed me away.

  ‘Why did you have to come!’ she hissed. ‘Everything’s gone wrong! I don’t want you here!’

  I longed for home. I spent hours in my little room, gazing out of the window at the forbidden street outside. I longed to be running barefoot from my grandmother’s house to my school, or playing in the sand with my friends, or singing in the church with the birds swooping in and out and right through because they thought it belonged to them. Bibi, Bibi, I used to whisper, so my breath made a little cloud on the glass. And sometimes in the night I would hear Susie whisper, ‘Thomas, Thomas.’ I knew then that we were whispering about the same thing. I would never see Bibi again, I knew that now. And Susie knew that she would never see Thomas.

  The lady came back, several times, but Susie didn’t answer the door. She called through the door to us, and Susie kept her fingers pressed into my arm, so they hurt. Her long talon nails cut little circles into my flesh. When the woman went, silence swirled round the flat like a cold mist.

  ‘Perhaps I should go to school,’ I said at last.

  ‘Oh go then, go!’ she snapped. ‘Go to Timbuktu, for all I care!’

  But she didn’t take me to school, and I had no idea where to go. So, one day, I decided to just find it. I could go to school and still do my work at night, I decided. Susie wouldn’t mind, when she saw how hard I would work and how happy I would be. I would find the school, no matter where it was. After all, at home I could walk for hours, days, to find a place I had never been to before. I took my chance on the morning she stayed in bed instead of going out to work. She said she had a headache, and didn’t want to eat the breakfast I made for her. There was the key, on the table next to her bed. There was my freedom. I put her cup of tea down and slid my fingers round the key.

  ‘Go away,’ she groaned. ‘Just leave me alone.’

  My time had come to be strong. I decided not to wear the clothes that Susie had made for me, but to wear the clothes from home, so I would feel proud and brave. I put on my favourite kanga that was as blue as the sky of Africa, and Mrs Long’s cardigan, and the shoes that Bibi’s friend had given to me. I let myself out of the flat with the key, and I tiptoed down the echoey concrete stairs. My heart throbbed like a drum in my chest. But I couldn’t open the door downstairs, the key didn’t fit the lock. I pushed and pulled the handle, but nothing happened. I wanted to scream with frustration. I couldn’t bear the thought of going back upstairs again, now that I had set my heart on going to school. I sat on the floor, pounding my fists against the door, and at last the woman from the downstairs flat opened her door and glared at me. Her belly was big and round.

  ‘What’s all this noise about?’ she asked.

  ‘I want go school,’ I said. ‘Please open door.’

  ‘Ah! School!’ she grunted. ‘About time too.’

  She unlocked the door, and I stepped into the sharp March morning.

  It was bitterly cold. The sharp wind knifed between the blocks of flats. White flakes drifted on it. Abela thought they were flakes of ash from a fire somewhere, but when they settled on her they melted and gleamed into drops of rain. She looked up at the fluttering sleet and thought the grey sky was breaking into tiny pieces all round her. She had never been so cold in her life, but she began to run, swinging her arms backwards and forwards across her chest, her loose sandals slapping the pavement. She ran to the end of the street where she had watched children walking with their mothers, and down another, and swung into another. From somewhere nearby she could hear the high, excited voices of children playing; the dream sound. She darted over a road, right in the path of a car that screamed to a halt, and she skipped away from it and down another street, and there, at the end, was a yard full of children. She found a gate and ran into the yard, clasping her hands to her mouth in sheer joy, her face so full of smiling that it ached.

  The children were just beginning to file into the school building. Abela followed them in. Some of them turned their heads to stare at her, and exchanged smiling looks at the strange way she was dressed on such a cold morning, but apart from that nobody seemed to take much notice of her. The children made their way to a large hall and sat cross-legged on the floor, and so did she. Now she was noticed. A man wearing a brown woolly jumper leaned forward and tried to catch her attention, but then, another man walked up to the front of the hall and turned to face them all, and the hall went completely silent.

  ‘Good morning, children,’ the new man, the school head teacher, said.

  A chorus of children’s voices rumbled, ‘Good morning, Mister Helliwell. Good morning, everybody.’

  ‘Good mornin’, Teacha!’ Abela called out, and some of the children in the row in front of her turned round to stare. She grinned back at them. The head teacher talked on and on, and Abela gazed round the hall at the bright pictures on the walls, the high windows with their long, colourful curtains, the shiny black piano, the line of teachers sitting on chairs along the side of the room. The man with the brown woolly jumper was staring intently at her again. He was nice, she thought. She smiled at him, and he wiggled one of his fingers at her. She didn’t know it was a sign
al for her to go to him, so she lifted her hand and did the same, then laughed and covered her face, rocking herself backwards and forwards out of sheer happiness.

  There was a sudden scuffling sound, and she realised that the head teacher had stopped talking and all the children were standing and turning to face her.

  ‘Jambo!’ she said.

  The children immediately facing her giggled.

  ‘Turn round!’ one of the girls whispered. ‘Go to class!’

  But the teacher in the woolly jumper had moved forward now. He told his children to go to class and sit quietly and wait for him, then he touched Abela’s arm lightly and led her away from them. He stopped near the head teacher, folded his arms and smiled at Abela. She smiled back.

  ‘Now then. Who are you?’ he asked, too quickly for her to understand.

  She frowned. ‘Mornin’, Teacha,’ she tried.

  ‘OK. I’ll try again. What is your name?’

  ‘Oh. My name is Abela.’

  ‘Bella?’

  ‘I am called Abela Mbisi. How are you?’ Mrs Long had taught her to say that. Far, far away, in another life.

  ‘Hello, Abela,’ he said slowly. ‘My name is Mister Hardy. Come and meet Mister Helliwell.’

  He took her over to where the headmaster was telling a boy off for eating his lunch during assembly.

  ‘I wasn’t!’ protested the boy, wiping cheese crumbs off his sweatshirt.

  ‘This is Abela Mbisi,’ Mister Hardy said. ‘And I’ve never seen her before. Is she one of ours?’

  ‘Bella Mbisi,’ the head teacher repeated. ‘No, I don’t know that name. Come with me, Bella, and we’ll sort you out.’

  ‘Abela, her name is. I’ll see to my class,’ said Mister Hardy.

  Abela’s smile faded. This wasn’t right. She wanted to go with the man in the woolly jumper. She turned to watch him as he made his way down the hall. The boy with the empty lunchbox punched the air and slid away, joyfully forgotten.

  ‘Come on, Bella.’