The Girl Who Saw Lions Page 17

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked casually. My heart was doing a pumpity-pump excited dance. Little sister, little sister, my blood sang in my ears. Little sister, little sister.

  ‘Her name is Abela Mbisi,’ said Molly. ‘I’ve just been telling your mum about her. I’ve been sent her details from the adoption services in London. She’s been through a terrible time, this little girl.’

  She passed the photograph across to Mum.

  ‘It’s so important to find the right home for her, as soon as possible. She needs so much love and a secure home. And of course, the first people I thought about were you two. She fits your initial application absolutely, and no one else in my area has made a similar request. I just wondered if you would like to come and meet her.’

  I hardly dared look at Mum.

  ‘There is one problem, that I have to tell you now,’ Molly went on. ‘Her parents both died of Aids.’

  I gasped. What about Abela? Could she have it too?

  As if she was reading my thoughts, Molly said, ‘I don’t know, at the moment, whether the little girl has been tested for HIV.’

  The silence went on for ever. I knew a lot about Aids from television programmes and school. I knew that it was a terrible problem, particularly in parts of Africa.

  ‘And if she has it?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Aids is not always the killer disease it used to be. These days, especially in the West, treatment is very effective.’

  If Mum were to adopt Abela and she got ill, it would be really, really hard for her. But Mum would be thinking something else as well, I knew. To give a chance of happiness to someone in this situation is a rare gift. I’d heard Mum say that so often. Putting money in a charity box is easy, she says. Taking a bundle of cast-off clothes to Oxfam costs you nothing at all. But this was something that would affect our lives, for ever. And I willed her to say yes. Your mother has so much love to give, Nana had said. Well, so have I. We can do it. We can do it together, Mum. I went and stood behind her, touching her just lightly on the shoulder. It’s what she does to me sometimes, when I need a bit of support.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mum at last. ‘I’ll come and meet her.’

  25

  Abela

  ABELA SPENT HOURS writing in her book, slowly and painfully, struggling to write in English as much as in Swahili, struggling to bring her memories to the surface. When she wasn’t writing there was a voice in her head, framing the words that she would later struggle to put on the page. She felt she was talking aloud to someone when she was writing, someone who understood her and wanted to be her friend.

  ‘Want any help?’ Carmel asked her one day. She worried that Abela was spending so much time up in her room on her own.

  ‘I write my life story,’ Abela said shyly.

  ‘Your life story! All nine years of it!’ Carmel smiled. ‘Good job no one asked me to write mine. Sixty years, I’ve got to tell about, and every one like a rainbow! You want some help?’

  ‘I can’t remember everything,’ Abela admitted.

  ‘Show me some of the things you brought with you. Show me your pretty kangas! I bet they’ve got stories to tell!’

  Abela ran upstairs and brought her two kangas down and spread them on the table. ‘They’ve got words printed on them,’ Carmel said. ‘Can you tell me what they mean?’

  ‘This one mean “You will remember me”,’ said Abela shyly. ‘And this one mean “Be my friend”.’

  ‘Oh, I’d like one that says, “Come and do my housework!”’ Carmel laughed. ‘Where can I buy it? Marks & Spencer’s?’

  Abela giggled. ‘We have a big market, where they sell them. They sell everything there. All kinds of fruit, chickens, beans… And cloths like this. Some is bright cotton like this. And some is not heavy, like the Asian ladies wear.’

  ‘Oh, don’t I love markets! Tell me what it was like, Abela. Did your mum sell things there?’

  Abela nodded. She closed her eyes and swayed on the balls of her feet as she described the shady, covered stalls of the main market and the open square where she and her mother and the poorest women used to sit. She told about the little mounds of oranges and bananas, red beans, chilli peppers, the live chickens, the thieving dogs and cats. She flicked her eyes open dramatically and told Carmel about the mad mzee with her curved, deadly panga, chasing the children and the teacher round the stalls. Carmel shrieked with laughter.

  ‘No wonder you can run like a gazelle. Poor old woman though. Some old people just lose their minds, you know. Sometimes life gets so bad for them, they don’t know what they’re doing any more. I used to go to the library every week for an old lady on the corner who couldn’t even walk that far. And one day, I brought her a book she’d already had, and do you know what she said? She was going to boil my head in the stewpot! I never ran so fast in my life!’

  ‘I write now,’ Abela said. Carmel would talk all day if she let her.

  ‘OK, my love. I’ll leave you to it.’

  Another time, on one of the social worker’s visits, Abela showed Judith Carrington the sloppy sandals and told her about Bibi’s friend who had given them to her.

  ‘What’s she like, Abela? Can you see her in your mind?’

  Abela frowned, trying to catch the slippery picture before it disappeared. ‘She fat. She has a bit of tooth missing, here. She cooks good mayai.’

  ‘Mayai, that’s egg, isn’t it? I remember that.’

  Abela chuckled. ‘Mayai yanavyovurugwa.’

  ‘My goodness! You’ve got me there! What’s that?’

  Abela flicked her fingers together rapidly.

  ‘Oh, I know! Scrambled egg!’ They both laughed. ‘You’d better put that in your book, Abela. Can’t have you forgetting a word like that!’

  After she had written it down, giggling again as they tried to imagine how to spell it, Abela let the pencil roll away from her. She sat with her head bowed, clenching and unclenching her fingers.

  ‘Is there something else about her?’ Judith asked.

  Slowly, half-whispering, Abela told her then how Bibi and the same friend had held her down under the flame tree while the medicine woman cut her. She described how she had been looking up at the blinding yellow sun but had been too frightened to close her eyes in case Bibi thought she was dead. She told how she had heard the green monkeys screaming and had wanted to put her own screams among them, but that Bibi’s hand was pressed over her mouth so she couldn’t make any scream at all. She told her about the angel wings beating about her head until everything was dark and peaceful. And afterwards, how Bibi and her friend had taken it in turns to wash her with water scented with healing herbs, and had sung to her in their deep warm red voices.

  The social worker did not write this down. When Abela had finished talking she closed up the book and said, ‘You’ve remembered that very well, Abela. I wonder if you’re angry with Bibi for letting it happen?’

  Abela was silent, clenching her fists until her knuckles were white. She felt her screams rising inside her, then spreading out, dissolving. She nursed her top lip inside her bottom teeth. Then she nodded. Her tears scalded her eyes.

  ‘Well, you know, I don’t think Bibi wanted to hurt you. She did it because she thought it was the right thing to do to girls; the same thing happened to her, and to her mother, and her mother before that. But many people realise now that it is not a good thing to do, and they’re able to stop doing it.’

  ‘When I’m a doctor, I’ll tell them,’ Abela said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Judith smiled. ‘When you’re a doctor, they’ll listen to you. You’ll be a wise woman!’

  ‘I am wise,’ Abela nodded thoughtfully. ‘I think I am ten years old now.’

  ‘Really? When was your birthday?’

  Abela shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But I think I am ten now.’

  ‘Well, that’s quite old. D’you think you’re too old to play Snakes and Ladders with Cathy?’

  ‘I love Snakes and Ladders!’ Abela giggled
. ‘I’ll even play it when I’m as old as Bibi!’

  Judith persuaded Cathy to come down and have a break from her homework. She stumped downstairs, moaning that her brain was hurting, and Carmel produced her battered compendium of games from the cupboard by the fireplace.

  ‘Do I have to?’ Cathy moaned, but she caught Carmel’s look, raised her eyebrows in despair and slid down onto the chair next to Abela. In minutes Abela’s mood had changed; she was bright and quick with laughter, full of the fun of the game. Judith tidied the objects that Abela had brought downstairs to write about, and flicked through the animal book that Abela and Susie had made.

  ‘What a lovely book – but who scribbled in it?’ she asked. ‘Was it you, Abela?’

  ‘It was me,’ said Cathy, blushing to the roots of her hair. ‘Me and Lola.’

  ‘Then you can just rub them out,’ Carmel said. ‘What a mess!’

  She took the book and opened it at the last page. ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  Judith studied the certificate for a moment, and then smiled and nodded. ‘It’s just about the most important piece of paper Abela could have,’ she said. ‘It’s going to save us all a great deal of anguish. Fancy it being here all the time! I’ll look after it for her now.’ She prised up the Sellotape that Susie had used, and put the HIV/Aids certificate carefully in her folder. Then she gave Cathy the book.

  ‘Do your best with it,’ she told her. ‘It’s precious.’

  She paused in the doorway for a moment, watching the girls with their heads bent together over the board game, then went out to her car. Carmel followed her out.

  ‘She’s such a plucky kid!’ Carmel said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever come across a child who’s been through so much, and I probably don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘The main thing is, she’s coming through it. Every time I see her she looks better. You’re doing very well with her, Carmel.’

  ‘I love that child,’ Carmel admitted. ‘Don’t say that about all of them, do I? Glad to see the back of some of them, however hard I’ve tried.’ She shook her head, laughing, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘But this little one… We got off to a bad start, and it was my fault. Never looked after a little girl before. But we’re OK now. The Dad thinks as much of her as I do. Let’s hope nothing else goes wrong in her life. Will someone adopt her?’

  ‘At her age, who can tell? But I have made a contact, I think.’ Judith looked down at her notes. ‘Six more children to visit today, and they’ve all got their own problems. I’d better get a move on!’

  After that, Carmel helped Abela to write in her book every day, while Cathy was doing her homework. It was the quiet time, she said. Time to sit down and rest her feet.

  ‘My toes are like big balloons, just look at them! Go on now, tell me the story of your long life!’ she would say to Abela. ‘What’ve you got to show me today?’

  Abela would run upstairs and sort through her things in the bedside cupboard; sometimes she would choose Mrs Long’s cardigan or the beaded-mirror key-ring, or the book of animals that she and Susie had drawn. It was some time before she chose the Coca-Cola car.

  ‘This my best thing,’ she told Carmel. ‘My baba make me this car.’

  ‘Ah, now you tell me, I can see it’s meant to be a car!’ Carmel tried to make the squashed wheels turn on the tabletop. ‘But I must say it just looks like a battered old tin can. Shall we write about this today?’

  ‘Me write!’ said Abela, putting on a baby voice. She loved this time, this special time of day that was just for her.

  ‘Say it properly.’

  ‘I’ll write it.’ Abela giggled.

  ‘That’s better. Write about your daddy.’

  Abela’s eyes clouded. It was so long now since her father died. His face slid in and out of her memory, like a fish drifting in and out of shadowed water. She couldn’t hold it there. She couldn’t see him.

  ‘Was he like The Dad?’ Carmel prompted. ‘Like a great quiet grizzly grumpy old bear?’ She hooted with laughter.

  Abela shook her head. ‘Baba is a big, strong man,’ she wrote. ‘He is my father. He has walked many miles and he has climbed many hills. But he has not been to England. He has not been to any town. He has not been on a bus.’ She stared into space, trying to see again the man who was her father, trying to smell his warm skin and feel the soft touch of his hands on her face, trying to hear the brown rumble of his singing in church. ‘He has a black cow called Yetu. And one day he sold the cow to a man in another village, and we were all sad. We said goodbye to Yetu and my father walked her away. I ran after them and kept slapping Yetu’s bottom to say goodbye, till Baba turned round and told me to go to school. At school I drew a picture of Yetu on my slate.’

  Carmel read over her shoulder and laughed. ‘Tell me something about your father, not about your cow!’

  ‘He could sing like Yetu,’ Abela told her, giggling. She deepened her voice and mooed like a cow. ‘Lovely big voice. And he made me this car.’

  She held the car in both her hands, remembering how Baba had shaped the wheels by cutting pieces of tin and flattening them with a stick, curling the strips round a little rod. She could hear his slow, thoughtful breathing as he worked, rumbling his Yetu song to make her laugh; she could see again how he had squatted on his haunches to make the car roll on the ground for the very first time. But now the Coca-Cola tin body was squashed and scratched, the wheels were flattened and useless. She put the car down and took up her pencil again.

  ‘In the night we heard a big loud noise outside, and we ran to see what it was,’ she wrote. Her tongue flickered on her lips as she concentrated. ‘It was Yetu! She had walked all the way home from the other village. Now my baba says she can stay with us, and we give the money back to the man who borted her, and we put beans in the ground instead of eating them, so they will grow and we can sell them.’

  ‘And they grew right up to the sky! Fee fie fo fum!’ laughed Carmel. ‘B.o.u.g.h.t., honey. Hang on.’

  She went outside to speak to her husband, who was easing caterpillars off his cabbages. After a bit he came into the kitchen carrying the toolbox from the shed. While Abela was writing he took up her car and began to prise the flattened wheels from the bodywork, coiling them round to make them roll again. Carmel sent Cathy to the local shop to buy a tin of Coke, then poured it out for them to share, grinning at them because fizzy drinks were usually forbidden. The girls hiccupped as it went down too fast. The Dad fixed the wheels onto the new Coke tin, testing it from time to time on the tabletop by rolling it carefully backwards and forwards. During all this time he never spoke a word, just whistled very slightly between his teeth like a sissing snake, but when he had finished he handed the car to Abela and said, ‘This isn’t as good as the way your daddy made it. I’m all thumbs these days.’

  And at that moment Carmel snapped her camera and there was Abela, clutching her new car and smiling with joy.

  The next time Miss Carrington visited, Abela was writing about the red cardigan and the yellow echoey schoolhouse in Tanzania. In her daydreams insects buzzed and hummed around her head, a laughing jackass shrieked in the trees outside, children chanted their tables as Mrs Long wrote them out on the board. ‘Mrs Long has curly black hair,’ Abela wrote. ‘Mrs Long is so kind.’

  ‘Would you like to write a letter to your teacher?’ Judith asked her. ‘I’m sure we can find a way of getting it to her. She’d love to know how you are, Abela.’

  ‘Can I?’ Abela’s eyes were wide with surprise.

  Carmel brought her a piece of writing paper and Abela stared at it for a long time, as if she expected words to appear on it by magic.

  ‘Dear Mrs Long,’ Carmel prompted her.

  Abela licked her lips carefully and wrote, ‘Dear Missus Long.’ Then she looked up. ‘What else will I write?’ she whispered.

  ‘Anything,’ Judith said. ‘What would you say to her if you met her in the street now?’

 
; ‘Hello, Teacha. How are you?’ Abela said shyly. She began to write, ‘I am very well. I am very happy. I have a friend called Jasmine and a friend called Carmel and a friend called Cathy and The Dad who mend my car is my friend and I have a friend called Judith and she is my’ – she paused – ‘soshal werker. I see her in Africa. Abela.’

  Judith read the letter and smiled. ‘Do you know, Abela, this will make Mrs Long very, very happy. I’ll find out where to send it and I’ll post it today. Now, I’ve got something important to tell you.’

  ‘Uh oh! Cup of tea time!’ Carmel sang. She went over to the sink and closed her eyes tight. This was the moment she longed for and dreaded with every child who came into her care.

  ‘You know we’ve talked in the past about one day, when you’ll move on to live with a new family, the family you’ll stay with for the rest of your life?’ Judith asked.

  Abela nodded solemnly. She could see Carmel, standing by the sink with her back to her. It was as if a chasm was opening up between them, dark and deep and frightening. Miss Carrington’s voice was coming to her from far away, from the other side of her world, the other side of her life.

  ‘Well, we’ve found someone who might be just right. Tomorrow a lady is coming to see you. She’s looking for a little girl just like you to adopt, and she’d like to meet you.’

  Carmel turned round, smiling encouragement at her. ‘That’s lovely, honey. Someone who can give you a nice home for your life. You’re ready for a nice family all of your own.’

  ‘No promises on either side,’ Judith told her. ‘Just meet her and see if you like her. I won’t let you go anywhere if you’re not happy with the idea. But I’d like you to meet her.’

  ‘But I don’t want.’ Abela stared down at her letter to Mrs Long. She remembered her teacher’s words, Be happy, Abela. She had wondered then if she could ever be happy again, and since then she had often wondered whether there was anyone in the world she could trust. But now she was beginning to be happy again, and she could trust Miss Carrington and Carmel. If they thought it was a good thing to meet this lady, then she must do it.