The Girl Who Saw Lions Page 4

  Abela and her mother threaded their way into the building. The smell of sweat and sickness was overwhelming. At least it was cooler inside than outside; the electric fans had been switched on at the same time as the water. Rows of iron-railed beds lined the walls, and in them lay the dying, and round them clustered their relatives, feeding them, washing them, stroking them, arguing over their heads. A few had grey, greasy nets slung above the bed, splodged with dead mosquitoes. Every now and then an ululating cry went up, ‘Lu-lu-lu-lu-lu-lu-lu.’ It was the cry of grief.

  Those who had chosen to go home to die were carried out in the arms of their relatives. They were as thin and weak as baby birds. The weary nurses walked from bed to bed, doing what they could. They wore immaculate starched headdresses like white crowns on their heads. One of them sang, in a deep, croaky voice, as she trudged around the ward. It was as if it was only the singing that was keeping her going.

  And into this stinking hellhole Abela and her mother walked. If she thought her mother had the strength, Abela would have turned round and taken her home again, walked through the sticky days and the lonely nights with her; anything rather than leave her here. As it was, she knew that all her mother wanted was to lie down and sleep. She watched a nurse throwing a stained sheet off an empty bed, and steered her mother towards it. Her mother sank down gratefully onto the filthy mattress and smiled up at Abela.

  ‘Good girl,’ she whispered, like a sigh of wind. ‘You go home now.’

  ‘No,’ said Abela firmly. ‘I’m staying with you, Mama. I’m going to make you better.’

  Her mother’s eyes glistened. She turned her head away and fell asleep.

  Abela sat on the edge of the bed and watched the bewildering bustle of the ward. So many people. So much noise. She saw a boy of her own age come weaving in and out of the lines of beds with a live hen clutched in his hands. He was trying to catch the attention of one of the white-crowned nurses, but she seemed to ignore him. The hen clucked and squawked in shrill indignation, pecking the boy’s fingers. At last the nurse turned round. Her eyes were nearly shut with weariness. The boy thrust the hen towards her.

  ‘Please can I buy medicine for my father?’ he asked.

  The nurse shook her head. ‘You’d do better to take your kuku outside and cook it. Make a nice tasty stew for your baba instead.’

  ‘Please,’ the boy begged. ‘Mama said we haven’t any money for medicine.’

  ‘I said no.’ The nurse walked on past him. ‘Take your hen away.’

  Abela remembered the money that the woman from the bus had given her. She ran after the nurse and tugged her arm. ‘I’ve got money,’ she said. ‘Some medicine for my mama and some for his baba. Real money.’

  She held out her hand. The coins were hot and wet in her palm, she’d been clutching them so tightly.

  The nurse clicked her tongue impatiently. ‘Money or hens, mangoes or bicycles, they’re no use, child. Nothing is, any more. We haven’t got any medicines left. We ran out of them two weeks ago.’

  Abela stared at her, unbelieving. They had come all this way for help. Surely there was something her mother could be given to ease her? The medicine man in the village would have found something for her, a weed or a herb, a coloured potato, the juice of crushed insects, anything rather than send her away with nothing.

  ‘Can I pay for a doctor to see her?’

  ‘No doctors here,’ the nurse said. ‘They’ve all moved on, or died. Your money is useless, little one, wherever you got it from. You can’t even eat it. The only thing you can buy here is coffins.’ She squatted down, moved at last by pity for the desperate child. ‘Go home. Take your mama home. That’s best. There’s nothing we can do for her.’

  Abela turned away from her, more upset by the hopelessness in the nurse’s eyes than she had been by her earlier harshness. She hoicked up a corner of her kanga to make a pocket, tied the coins into it and tucked it into her waist. She went back to her mother and sat by her, bleak and cold now, the joy of the morning all gone. The woman who was washing her daughter in the next bed called over to her, ‘Medicine truck will be coming tomorrow, that’s what I’ve heard. Why don’t you get your mother some water? They’ll be turning it off soon, and there’ll be no more today.’ She handed Abela a Coca-Cola bottle without a cap.

  Abela was glad to have something to do. She ran out to the tap in the yard and waited in the queue, and at last her turn came. The bottle was only half full when the trickle of water stopped. She saw the boy who had been talking to the nurse standing listlessly, still clutching the hen. The bird squirmed in his hand, tapping his fingers with its beak.

  ‘The medicine truck is coming tomorrow,’ she told him. ‘It’ll be all right then.’

  He looked at her blankly.

  When her mother woke up, Abela tried to feed her with bits of broken biscuit and crushed banana, but she hardly ate anything.

  ‘You,’ she gestured to Abela. ‘You have it.’

  ‘No, Mama. You eat it.’

  ‘You need it to keep strong,’ her mother said. She closed her eyes and turned her face away. ‘Be strong, my Abela.’

  When night fell, sudden and full, some of the people outside the hospital lit their little paraffin lamps and built fires out of sticks, balanced their cooking pots on three stones over the flames, and heated up chicken bones and beans or whatever bits of food they had brought with them. Some rolled themselves up by their fires to sleep. Others swarmed into the ward and stretched out on the floor between the beds. Abela climbed into bed with her mother, wrapped her arms round her, and slept deeply from utter weariness.

  6

  Rosa

  OUTSIDE, THE WIND was hurting itself against the house as if it was a person, alive and angry. I could hear its voice. I could see how its breath shuddered the trees and tore the last dead leaves away. It was winter now, all right.

  I was at my nana’s house, sitting on the windowsill in the room that’s my own bedroom there when Mum’s away. This time Mum had been on a special one-day course about fostering and adoption, and because it was in London she spent the night with a friend. She was due back at tea time. I watched her arriving, but I didn’t go down to her. After a bit I heard her going out again.

  My nana is just the best person in the world, next to Mum. She has to be two grandmothers in one, as I don’t know my dad’s parents. She’s always busy. She does voluntary work for a charity called Shelter, who care for the homeless, she has an allotment where she grows just about every misshapen vegetable you can think of, and she runs some kind of online self-help service. She’s always going to meetings and phoning people up and bashing things out on her laptop, but when Mum and I go round she just puts all that business away somewhere else and makes a fuss of us. She would never, ever, let us come to the house without offering us a meal. She called me downstairs to the kitchen soon after Mum went out.

  ‘Come and give me a hand, Rosa.’

  I went down the stairs slowly. I was feeling hurt and resentful. ‘Where’s Mum gone?’ I asked.

  ‘I just wanted a bit of shopping, so she’s nipped up the road for it,’ Nana said. She put her head to one side. ‘You didn’t think she’d gone home without you, did you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘How would I know what she’s doing?’

  ‘Don’t snap, crocodile,’ Mum would have said, but Nana just smiled.

  ‘Well, she could have taken you with her, but I pleaded with her to let you stay behind because I needed an expert cook around. Fancy making a lemon cake with me? I’ve got some eggs that need using up.’

  She got out all the ingredients, and while she was melting butter and sugar in a pan I grated the lemon without shredding my fingernails. I tipped it into the melted butter, and Nana said, ‘What do you think of this idea of your mother’s? Are you pleased?’

  I looked up at her. Nana is the only person that I can say just anything to, anything in the world. But my throat was clogged as if it was full
of flour. My eyes were smarting. I tried to wipe them, pressing them with the back of my wrist.

  ‘You crying, Rosa?’

  ‘It’s just the lemon juice.’ But I was crying. I was crying inside.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ said Nana. ‘I think you’re the most beautiful child I know, and so does Grandpa, and so does your mum. Oh yes she does. And I don’t think any child in the world is more loved than you are.’

  Now my eyes were bubbling, but I didn’t let the tears run. I looked at Nana instead and smiled.

  ‘Look at you, sunshine and showers, that’s my Rosa.’ She lifted the pan onto the table. ‘Oh Lord, we haven’t beaten the eggs yet. Do you want to do one? Watch me.’

  She took one of the eggs out of its box and tapped it smartly on the edge of a bowl, then dropped in the golden yolk in its slimy mucus. I did the same, holding my breath in case the shell went in too. Two yolks, side by side. I stared down at them.

  ‘Your mum’s got so much love to give,’ said Nana. ‘She’s always thinking about people who have nothing – no money, no home, no one to love them. She’s been brought up to care about others, and so have you. Always looking for ways to help them. Here, Rosa.’ She handed me the egg whisk. ‘Mix ’em up.’

  I turned the handle. The two golden yolks bobbed about like fish in a pond.

  ‘Faster now!’ Nana said.

  The yolks broke and poured golden lights into each other. I whisked them faster and faster, and they both disappeared into a creamy yellow sea. I tipped it all into the mix, and Nana stirred in the flour and then poured the whole lot into the cake tin.

  ‘What I love about cake,’ she said, ‘is that you put all these separate ingredients in and when they’re cooked, you can’t taste any of them, just cake. If the mix is right. Just delicious cake.’ She put the tin in the oven and eased it shut with her knee. ‘She’s got a lot of love to spare, your mum. She’s got to put it somewhere.’

  Grandpa put his head round the kitchen door and said if the chief chef was free he could do with someone to play a duet with, as he’d only got two hands. He teaches me to play the piano, a bit at a time, whenever I go round there. He says I’ll soon be able to play better than he does, though he says that’s not much to boast about. When we’re playing duets I concentrate so hard that I forget to breathe sometimes. Grandpa’s glasses slide to the end of his nose and I can tell he’s twitching his face to try to keep them on, because the rule is, whatever happens, even if you lose your place in the music, to KEEP ON PLAYING. ‘Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’ Grandpa shouts, when I’ve got myself into such a mess that every note is wrong. His fingers gallop across the keys and I’m rolling about on the piano stool trying to remember to breathe, with laughter tears running down my cheeks. But we do it, we get to the end together, and bang down the last chord in triumph.

  Silence. But the ghost of the music hums and throbs round the furniture all on its own.

  And that day, in that buzzing silence, I heard Nana say, ‘I don’t think Rosa’s very happy about this business, you know.’

  I wondered whether she was talking to Grandpa, but if she was, he didn’t hear her. He was twitching through the pages of the duet book looking for something else to play. Maybe Mum had come back in without us hearing her, but she wasn’t answering either. I was beginning to think I’d imagined it, when Nana said, ‘I think you need to talk to her properly.’

  Then Mum. ‘I will, I just need to be absolutely sure about it myself. It’s a big thing.’

  ‘Well, don’t leave it too long. She needs to be sure, too. I’ll tell you something – your dad thinks you must be out of your mind, doing this to her.’

  Crash! went Grandpa’s hands on the keys. ‘“Jolly Miller”,’ he shouted. ‘We haven’t done this one for ages. Come on! Keep up!’

  Mum’s hobby is aromatherapy massage. It’s just the most wonderful experience, the way her hands press firmly and steadily over your back or whatever part of you hurts, and she strokes the lovely bright-smelling oils into your skin. I feel as if I’ve been sleeping in a field of flowers when she does it to me. And I love the names of the oils – citronella, with its lemony smell that helps you to sleep; cassia, as warm and spicy as Christmas pudding; ylang ylang, which means flower of flowers. And Mum’s favourite is vetiver, which means the oil of tranquillity. Mum loves to try and make people feel better. She treats people who are in pain with back problems or headaches or who just can’t relax. Nana always seems to have backache, and when we come Mum always gives her a session, stretching her neck and pressing her spine, soothing her perhaps with a little rosemary and lavender in sweet almond oil. She’ll lecture her for curling up on the settee when she’s reading.

  ‘You’ve got terrible posture, Mum,’ she says to her. ‘No wonder you’re always in pain.’

  I could hear them in the bedroom, while I was arranging salad on the plates; Nana mumbling contentedly under Mum’s magic stroking, and then I heard Nana say, ‘I won’t go on about it, but are you sure you’re doing the right thing, Jen? I’d hate Rosa to feel she was being rejected.’

  I didn’t hear Mum’s reply, but Nana was absolutely right. That was just how I did feel. Rejected.

  7

  Abela

  I STAYED WITH Mama in that hospital all that week, but no medicine truck came, no doctors. Mama grew so weak that she couldn’t do anything for herself. There were no sheets for her bed. I used some of my money to buy two cotton kangas from the family of a woman who had died, and used them in turn. Every day when the water came on, I would roll Mama over and pull away the one she was lying on, and spread the other one out as carefully as I could, with no lumps and creases to hurt her. Then I followed the other women and girls to the taps and scrubbed the soiled kanga as best as I could, but they never came clean again. I spread it out in the sun to dry, ready for the next day. Then I took some water in the Coke bottle and washed my mother down with it, and last of all, gave her some to drink.

  Sometimes people gave me bits of food from their pots. Somebody gave me a coconut and pierced it for me, and I trickled the sweet milk into Mama’s mouth. I could see that she loved it. I sat on somebody’s grating stool and shredded the coconut meat, and the owner of the stool boiled it with her sweet potatoes and filled my coconut shell with it for our meal. They were like a village, those people outside the hospital, and the boy with the hen and all the other children who were on their own wandered from group to group, grateful for any scraps that people gave them. An old man with a beard like a cloud of froth called me over every day to give me a handful of his cooked maize. I got to know their names, and it was like another life, and I would be living there for ever.

  But after the first week, Mama stopped eating or drinking. She could only stare at me, and her eyes were so fevered and burning that I wanted to close them for her so I couldn’t see her pain. The only thing she said to me after that first week was this:

  ‘Be strong. Be a strong girl, my Abela.’

  I couldn’t sleep in her bed any longer. She burned like a fire. I slept on the floor at the side of it, and when I didn’t sleep, I listened to the sighing and groaning, the weeping round the ward, and I was no longer afraid of any of the noises. They were only the sounds of sick people. ‘One day, I’ll learn how to make people better,’ I said out loud. ‘And I’ll come back and make you all well again.’

  I went out next day as usual when the water came on. The pattern of the day was like a song, and I knew the words off by heart. Change kanga, wash it, fill bottle, wash Mama, find food. But when I came back, the singing nurse was standing by Mama’s bed. She was still singing, her own low, deep song like a flowing river, but the white wings of her headdress hid her face from me. When she heard me coming she turned towards me and her eyes told me everything. I was filled with a cold, terrible, terrified dread. And my song came from me, from deep inside, and there is no stopping it when the grief is on us; it’s the sound we make when someone has given u
p their soul at last; the song of death.

  For three days Abela lay under her mother’s bed, refusing to move. The nurses gave up trying to make her go away; they were too busy. After a time they stopped noticing her. When at last she crawled out she saw that there was a stranger in Mama’s bed now, someone who looked like Mama but wasn’t her, someone with arms like sticks and eyes as bright as burning coals. Abela went outside slowly, shielding her eyes against the blinding light of the sun. This hospital that had been like a whole world to her for weeks on end was an alien place now. She didn’t belong here any more. She had to go home. The water was running again, and she filled up her plastic bottle at the tap, knowing dimly that she would need it on her journey. She must walk towards the morning sun, she knew that too. She knew nothing else. She was numb and cold and deeply afraid. She set off along the road towards the blinding orange sun, then stood aside as a van trundled towards her. There was a shout behind her and she saw people running to meet the van, yelling, cheering, banging on the sides, holding out their hands.

  ‘Wait, wait, please wait!’ Abela saw a boy break away from the crowd round the van and come running towards her, waving his arms in the air. It was the chicken boy. She waited, staring blankly at his excitement.

  ‘Come back!’ he shouted, as he drew near her. ‘It’s the medicine van! The medicines have come!’

  Medicine. She frowned, searching deep inside herself to find the meaning of the word, or the significance of the boy’s excitement. He had reached her now, and he stood in front of her, gasping for breath, his hand stretched out towards her.

  ‘Medicine,’ he said again. ‘You can buy medicine to make your mother better.’

  Tears blocked her eyes, just standing on the rim, refusing to flow. The boy was no more than a dark blur now, the shouts of the people clustered round the van made no sense to her. They were not like people noises. They were sounds from the air and the earth; the wind and the rain and the trees. The boy’s voice came to her again out of the mysterious swirl of sound, and the words he made dropped like stones at her feet. She frowned at the dusty soil.