The Girl Who Saw Lions Page 2

  ‘I am! I am!’ Rosa shouted, leaning back and pretending to batter him with her fists. ‘Put me down, you monster!’

  ‘Calm down,’ Nana said. ‘You’re a young lady now, Rosa.’ She opened up her carrier bag and brought out a present wrapped, as always, in Christmas paper. Nana never saw the point of buying special birthday paper, at any time of the year. Rosa looked at her mum excitedly. Was it, could it be, the present she had dreamed of? She tore open the paper, opened the box, and screamed with joy. It was. It was a pair of ice skates.

  *

  I love skating, more than anything else in the world. Mum and I are learning together. We go to the skating rink every Saturday morning, and we are in the same class. We’re just about as good as each other. I can go backwards, I can spin, I can do cross-overs. I love the music, which makes me want to dance and sing, and the sounds of the skates freeshing on the ice. I love the excitement I feel when I try a new move, and try and try again because it’s too hard at first, and then find out I can do it. Most of all, I love it because it’s something my mum and I do together.

  It was my idea. I was off school with a sore throat last winter and Mum let me sit by the fire with the tartan blanket round my shoulders, and watch daytime TV. It was the European Games, and I watched a girl of about fourteen doing figure skating. She looked so quick and graceful and neat, like a little bird, and I thought, I want to do that.

  ‘What d’you think, Mum?’ I asked her. ‘I really, really want to learn to skate. D’you think I could?’

  And Mum put her arms round me. ‘If you really want to do it, you can,’ she said. ‘And do you know, Rosa, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, too. We could have lessons together, if you don’t mind me falling over every five minutes and making a fool of myself.’

  So we started having lessons, and to our surprise Mum turned out to be quite good at it, and so did I. We wouldn’t miss our Saturday skating lesson for anything. Since we started ice-skating we’ve got into the habit of having to do particular things each time we go, a set of traditions like a sort of good luck charm. The first is that we always travel to Ice Sheffield on the supertram. The car won’t do, because Mum doesn’t believe in using a car when you can get there by public transport. The bus won’t do, because the roads are so busy it might make us late. And the tram is perfect, because it glides so smoothly and quietly you could believe it was on skates and saying, ‘Look at me! I can do it too!’

  The best part of the journey is when we climb out of Sheffield centre, away from Pond’s Forge and the big swimming pool with its see-through flume tunnels. Then the tram is soaring uphill, gliding us away from the city, and we’re looking down on the shining canal and the smart hotel complex far below us. We’re sky-skating. Mum and I smack our hands together and say, ‘Yes! We’re off!’

  When we arrive at the Arena stop, I race Mum up the track to Ice Sheffield – I always beat her and have to wait at the door. Then she has to wait for me while I get my hire boots – I always sniff inside them to make sure they’re not too sweaty from the last wearer, and then she has to lace them up for me because I can never get them quite tight enough; I’m too impatient. She has her own boots because her feet have stopped growing. She bought them on eBay, and they look about a hundred years old. Even the blades are a bit rusty, but she says that gives them character. She can lace them up in seconds while I’m hopping about. Then she takes off her purple skate guards and we hobble towards the ice. Just before we step on, she squeezes my hand.

  ‘Don’t…’ she says.

  ‘Break…’ I say.

  ‘Anything!’ we both say, and then we’re off, skating as fast as we can round the rink, and we lose each other because we’re in a tide of people, all swaying and gliding, drifting, dancing. It’s like the river swim at Pond’s Forge; you just have to go with the current, leaning into the bends like a cyclist, round and round, swift and sure, a swarm of coloured fish. I know some of the people who come to coaching every Saturday, and we shout to each other as we pass. Mum’s friend Pat swoops up to us and they swing along side by side, gossiping about growing beans or treating poorly cats or playing fiddle. Pat’s son Jamie is my age. He skates faster than anyone, head down, knees bent, lapping us all. His little brother Toby does his best to keep up, and his cheeks glow like red roses with the effort. And then there’s Paige, who skates like a ballet dancer, her arms willowy and her back straight and her head proud and high. Her hair is tied back in a pink band, and she wears a short pink skirt that flounces out when she turns; her skates have matching pink heels. I try to copy Paige, lifting my arms away from my sides like wings, but she looks like a swan floating across the water, and I look like a waddling duck, I just know it. I never even take my coat and hat and gloves off because it’s too cold.

  Our coaches call us into our groups and for the next forty minutes we have to work hard, going backwards and forwards across the rink, swirling, making lemon shapes with our feet, scissoring, turning, weaving, going down on one knee and gliding up again. It’s really difficult. I don’t have time to look at anyone then, I just so much want to get it right. I’m only aware of one thing, and that’s my ice shadow. She goes everywhere with me, turns with me, glides under my skates and comes round the other side. I know I shouldn’t watch her because my eyes are supposed to be looking straight ahead, but it’s like having a sister, a twin, my black self with me all the time.

  When the coaching finishes the music comes on, and we’re all grace and speed, all swans now, every one of us, floating free as air because we don’t have to concentrate any more. We’re all that little bit better than we were forty minutes ago. Paige floats towards me and away, backwards, and round, and away. I can hear Jamie stamping his skates on the ice, trying something new, scraping the pick, which is the little serrated bit at the tip of the blade, then he dashes past me, turns his head to grin at me, and tumbles over. He’s up in the same movement, and his clothes sparkle with ice dust. Scrape, scrape, go Toby’s blades; I can hear his sharp breaths, desperate to keep up. Then Mum’s next to me, holding out her hand, and we glide round together. We both gasp and laugh out loud with the fun of it. Everything seems to fall away from us; all the skaters and the watchers and the coaches, it’s just me and Mum, holding hands and looking at each other and laughing, ready to fly.

  The thing about Mum is – I can’t say this to her, I can’t really say this to anybody, because it sounds a bit silly – but, well, I think she’s my best friend. And that’s why the skating, learning together and having fun together and holding hands and swinging each other round – that’s why it’s my favourite thing.

  When the public come on we hobble off the ice, ducks again, and totter over to one of the tables at the rink side. This is another tradition. Mum has some coffee from her flask and I have a muesli bar, and we sit for a bit and watch the skaters. It’s exciting watching the rush and swirl of all the coloured swans with their black shadows. There’s a patch of sunlight coming through one of the high windows, and it makes a window shape on the ice. When people skate through it they turn briefly golden. Paige pauses in the centre of it and lifts her arms high, like a golden bird.

  ‘We’ve passed to level nine today,’ Mum told me one day, just before my birthday. ‘We’ve got to decide what to do when we finish that. Figure skating or ice hockey.’

  ‘Do we have to choose?’ I asked her.

  ‘If we still want coaching, we do.’

  ‘Figure skating.’

  ‘That’s fine.’ Mum poured herself another coffee. ‘I’m thinking of doing ice hockey with Jamie.’

  I stared at her. I couldn’t believe it. This is what we do together; this is our special thing.

  An Asian family stumbled past, one by one, just the other side of the barrier. They were all clinging onto the bar with both hands, frowning with concentration. One of the boys dared to lift his hand away and disappeared completely, his feet slithering away in all directions.

 
I sniggered.

  ‘That was us, twelve months ago,’ Mum reminded me. ‘We’ve done it, Rosa! We can skate! It just shows, if you really want to do something, if you really work at it, you can do it. Never forget that, will you?’ She screwed the lid back on her flask. ‘Back to the ice? Fifteen more minutes, then we’ll have to catch the tram.’

  I heard her, but I didn’t move. I was watching Jamie, head down, charging round the rink as if all the bears in the woods were chasing him. Then down he went. Splat!

  And not long after that, Mum told me about the adoption child.

  We were on the supertram, on the way to Ice Sheffield for a public session. I shifted round in my seat to watch Sheffield slip away from us as we swooped up from Fitzalan Square, then I lifted my hand up for the hand slap and the ‘Yes! We’re off!’ Mum didn’t respond. She’d forgotten all about our tradition. I had noticed that she was behaving a bit oddly that Saturday morning. It was a bit like our first morning of skating; she seemed tense and nervous, locked inside herself. Looking back, I think she’d been a bit strange all week, making private phone calls from her room and saying she had meetings to go to in town as soon as she left me at school. She seemed to be happy and worried all at the same time; and at last, that Saturday morning, she told me what was going on. She moved across from the seat facing me so she was sitting next to me, and said,

  ‘Rosa, I’ve got something very special to ask you. How would you like to have a sister?’

  I nearly burst with surprise and excitement. ‘Mum! Really? Oh, cool! Are you going to have a baby?’

  She shook her head, smiling. ‘You’re pleased, aren’t you? But no, I’m not having a baby. I’m thinking of adopting a little girl.’

  That was how she broke it to me.

  ‘What do you think? What do you think, Rosa?’

  What was I supposed to think? I said nothing, nothing at all. How could I say anything, there on the tram, or anywhere, how could I tell her how I felt? I didn’t want an adopted sister. I didn’t really want another child in our house at all. A baby was one thing, I could play with it and take it out in the pram. It might even look like me. But an adopted sister? What if I had said to her, ‘I’m thinking of adopting a mother?’ How would she have felt? Inside my head I was screaming. If I opened my mouth, all that would have come out would have been a scream.

  She kept on talking to me but I wouldn’t answer. She kept on and on, pouring words into my ears, words that I didn’t understand and didn’t want to hear and didn’t have any answer to.

  ‘I’ve always wanted a sister for you,’ she said.

  Scream, scream, scream inside my head, like the whistle of a train as it dives into the tunnel.

  ‘I never wanted you to be an only child, Rosa. We’d be a real family,’ she said. ‘What do you think, Rosa?’

  I turned my face away from her and stared at my reflection in the window. Mum couldn’t talk now, there were some kids opposite us talking and laughing noisily. She tried to hold my hand instead. I balled it up into a fist. She stroked the fist. She lifted my balled fist up and kissed it, and in my reflection I saw my eyes glisten with tears.

  When we came out of the tram, the sun was blinding. Mum started chatting about whether we’d be able to do the lemon skating move without falling over today, where we have to bow our legs in and out.

  ‘Now that we’ve passed level nine, you might be ready to have your own pair of skating boots, instead of using hired ones. I was wondering about getting some for your birthday. Shall we go and look at some today? You could try them on, and we can find out how much they’re likely to cost.’

  My own boots! I felt as if I had woken up from a bad dream. I watched her face, but that worried look had gone; she was smiling and chatting and promising me any colour boots I wanted provided I made sure my feet wouldn’t grow one more centimetre from one birthday to the next. At last I trusted myself to look at her again. Maybe she wasn’t going to mention this adoption business again. Maybe she’d forgotten all about it; and so would I. Maybe she’d realised that she had made a terrible mistake. And when we went into the shop at the ice rink and tried on the new boots, and found a pair, a pink pair with red heels, the most beautiful boots in the shop – then, at last, I allowed myself to smile at her again. In fact, I felt as if my cheeks might burst.

  Mum screwed up her face when she saw the price.

  ‘What d’you think?’ I asked anxiously. I couldn’t help clutching the boots to my chest and stroking them, as if they were a pet rabbit.

  ‘I think Nana and Grandpa might chip in,’ Mum smiled, and squeezed my hand. She asked the assistant if we could take the catalogue home with us, so I could look at the picture of them every day until I really owned them.

  And that’s today, my thirteenth birthday, the day of the glittering snow.

  3

  Abela

  DURING THE NIGHT my grandmother Bibi woke me up, shaking my shoulder, hissing in my ear, ‘Abela, Abela, get up now.’

  It was pitch dark. My eyes were sticky with sleep. I rolled away from her and she shook me again, ‘Abela, your mama’s very sick.’

  When there is no light there is no body, only a hissing voice and a hard hand gripping your shoulder. It brings fear; it brings such hopelessness, when there is no light anywhere. I fumbled across the floor to where my mother lay. She was so hot that I could feel her skin burning before I touched her. Hot, and wet, and her breath dry like wind-rattled leaves.

  ‘Mama, what’s wrong?’ I whimpered.

  ‘It’s time to take her to the hospital,’ Bibi said.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes, yes, the sooner the better. I can’t do anything more for her.’

  I was still stupid with sleep, shaking with tiredness and fright. The hospital was in the town, more than a day’s walk away for a fit man. I didn’t understand what my grandmother wanted me to do.

  ‘You must go with her, now,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll stay with Nyota.’

  Numb, I wrapped my kanga round myself, and my grandmother put a blanket round my shoulders. Last year my mother and I had walked my father to the hospital, one each side of him, and he leaned on her the whole time. We had trudged and swayed and stopped, trudged and swayed and stopped. The sun had come and gone twice before we had arrived.

  ‘How can I do it on my own?’ I whispered. ‘You must come too.’

  ‘I can’t,’ my grandmother said. ‘I must look after Nyota.’ She had my sister in her arms, wrapped tightly in her kanga. I felt for her cold little baby hand, and knew then that I would never see my sister again.

  ‘Bring her too,’ I urged.

  ‘And we’d walk as slow as elephants. No, take your mother, and go as quickly as you can. Maybe the doctors can save her. I can’t.’

  My mother groaned and sat up on the edge of her bed, and between us Bibi and I lifted her to her feet.

  ‘Can you walk, Mama?’ I whispered.

  ‘Yes, I can walk.’

  My grandmother put into our hands the poles we used for pounding the corn. ‘These will help you,’ she said, ‘and you will be able to protect yourselves with them, too.’

  I remembered once when I was very little, my baba gave me a long stick that would fight off lions. ‘Look big and stern,’ he used to say, ‘and wave your stick at them. Shout your head off! Then see how Simba runs away.’ And he would laugh his honey laugh at the way I drew myself up to my full height and brandished my stick and roared at the pretend lions. It was a game, that day.

  So we set out, with the blanket spread across Mama’s shoulders and mine, even though my mother protested that she was hot. I could feel her skin raging like fire. The earth was cool under our feet. We could see that the sky was nearly white with stars that were as bright as fireflies. Nobody moved in the village, everybody slept, but as soon as we left the cluster of huts I knew that the beasts of the night were prowling, watching and waiting, stalking hungrily. Sometimes a sharp scream splintered the silen
ce, and we knew that some creature had been taken. And the more I listened, the more I heard, creaking and scratching, padding and slithering; a quick yapping here, a flurry of wing beats there.

  Mama leaned heavily on her stick, but after a bit she put her free arm across my shoulders, and I put my arm around her waist, and our moon shadow told us that we were one creature with two heads and six legs. We would have laughed about that, not long ago. We would have roared a two-headed roar that would have frightened a rhinoceros.

  Sometimes Mama hummed a little tune, and sometimes I sang the lovely songs we learnt at school and at church. We were both glad when the light came at last, but the sky was a greasy grey and the air was clammy. It grew hotter and hotter, drumming with insects, and the road in front of us shivered in a haze of heat. Whenever we found shade we sheltered in it. At midday, when the sun was a blazing yellow ball above our heads, we came to a place where little stalls were set up along the roadside. Some boys who were sitting with a pile of Coke bottles filled with water told us that the bus that went all the way from Dar es Salaam to Arusha should be passing by soon, and that maybe it would stop there to give the passengers a break. A little boy was standing next to a huge pile of smooth green coconuts. He hacked away at them by spearing them with a stick that he held on the ground with his toes. He had a knife between his teeth, and when he saw us he sliced the top off one of the coconuts and handed it to me. I gave it to my mother to drink the juice, and then the boy hacked out the wet flesh for me.

  A woman who was cooking little cakes on a pot over a smoky wood fire told her son to give us some orange slices that he was preparing for the passengers.

  ‘She going to hospital?’ the boy asked, pointing his knife towards my mother. I nodded, squeezing the last juice from the orange, chewing the white pulp to a mush before I spat it out.

  ‘You going on the bus?’ his mother called.

  ‘No money,’ I said. ‘We have to walk.’