The Girl Who Saw Lions Read online

  ‘Money,’ the boy said again. ‘For my father. To make him better.’

  Now she understood him. She lifted up the corner of her kanga and untied the knot she had made in it, very slowly, because her fingers were stiff and numb and seemed not to belong to her at all, and then she handed the boy the coins that the white woman had given her. Without a word the boy turned and ran away, back to the van, back to the voices of the earth, the voices of hope.

  Abela stumbled on towards the sun. When it was directly over her head she found some shade and slept a little, and then walked on with the sun behind her. Sometimes people came out of the trees towards her, slipping past her and out of her life as silently as they had come; ghost people, the people of dreams, the silent ones. She thought she saw her mother holding out her arms and smiling to her, but when she ran to her it was the light of the low sun on the blue smoke from someone’s fire. An old man was roasting corn, and held out a cob for her to take. She ate it greedily. His wife hobbled out of her hut and tcjkked in her cheek at the sight of Abela’s swollen feet.

  ‘Stay the night here,’ she told her. ‘It’s dangerous to walk now. You can curl up by the fire, nothing will harm you.’

  But Abela couldn’t stay. She didn’t want anyone looking at her, or touching her, or asking her questions that she was afraid to answer. While the old woman was sprinkling the flames of her little fire with drops of water, Abela slipped away from her.

  The sun had gone completely now. Fireflies danced like bright blue flames, then darted away. The sky was brilliant with clusters of stars, and the moon blazed in its own white brightness. Abela walked quickly, listening in her head to her mother’s pretty blue voice. Then suddenly the song stopped, and Abela froze. There came another sound, and Abela knew that it was not inside her head but was part of the living darkness around her. The sound was stealthy and smooth, feet padding on crinkled stalks, strong bodies pushing canes aside, swift now, and purposeful.

  That was the night she saw the lions.

  I knew what they were before I even saw them. I didn’t know whether to run away or to stay still. I wanted to lie down and wait. My bones were so tired that I just wanted to sink down onto the ground and sleep. I no longer knew where I was walking to or from, or why. I just wanted to sleep. Then the moon glided out from behind a tree and I saw the lions, and they saw me. There was one male and two lionesses. They were as still as statues, and they looked as if they were made of gold. Their eyes gleamed in the moonlight. Please, please, holy God who comes with the priest to our church, don’t let them kill me. Please. You have already taken my mother and my father. Please let me live. These were the words that were beating in my head like drums, so fast that they weren’t words at all, so loud that they drowned my heartbeats and the tremble of my breath. And my mother’s voice was singing through them, Be strong, my Abela, be strong. I felt her standing by my side. I felt my father standing behind me, with his hands on my shoulders. I was as still as they were, as silent, as watchful.

  And at last the lions left me. They turned their heads and padded away, shimmering black and gold through the trees.

  I was alone again. The huge silence of the night wrapped itself around me. The massive stars gleamed down on me like eyes. Thank you, I whispered. I let my voice trail out of me, and there was no answering roar. I was quite safe. I began to walk again, quickly this time, and then when I reached the road I began to run. I had thought I wanted to die, but when I saw the lions, I knew I wanted to live.

  By the end of the next day Abela was back in her grandmother’s house. There was no need to tell Bibi what had happened. The old woman held out her arms to her and rocked her, and they wept together. She gave her some soup and then wrapped her up in her arms again and they slept together on the mattress. It was a whole day before Abela woke up again. She lay listening to the village sounds outside the hut: children laughing, hens clucking, the steady chip, chip, chip of someone chopping wood. Everything was right again. Nothing was right.

  She ran outside. Her grandmother was bent double, chipping a log to make kindling for the cooking fire. She was too weak to swing the axe like Mama used to do. Chip, chip, chip went the axe, sending little white splinters like sparks into the air. When she saw Abela she straightened up slowly, easing her back with one bony hand, wiping away the sweat from her brow with the other.

  ‘Bibi, where is she?’ Abela asked, though, of course, she knew. Her sister’s little sleeping mat had gone. They had lost Nyota, their little star.

  *

  I don’t know why God did this to me. He has taken nearly everything that belongs to me, and I am so afraid because I don’t know where it will stop. Perhaps my grandmother will be the next, but she says no, she is too old to die of this sickness, she will die of something else.

  ‘And me?’ I hardly dared ask such a question. Fright was fluttering in my throat like a butterfly.

  Grandmother Bibi shook her head. ‘Your mama and baba were not ill when you were born, they were healthy and strong. But by the time they were waiting for Nyota to be born, they were already very sick themselves. So the baby had no chance.’

  ‘No chance?’

  ‘No. That baby had no chance to live.’

  I stared into the pile of chippings that my grandmother had made. I have heard of a baby who was born with no sight. I have even heard of a baby born with no arms. But I have never heard of a baby born with no chance. And this was a new thing for me to think about; to live or to die, to be sick or to be healthy, was it all a matter of chance? Could this be true?

  8

  Rosa

  OK. I WASN’T quite a hundred per cent truthful about the skating. It wasn’t easy at all. The first day we went to the ice rink, when I was so excited that I could hardly breathe, Mum made me sit for a bit watching the other skaters. They drifted like colourful butterflies across the ice, just flitting here and there, no effort at all. They looked wonderful. I imagined myself with them, gliding and spinning, weaving forwards and backwards with my arms outstretched like graceful wings, just like them. I picked out a girl in a pink skirt with matching boots, a Swan Lake girl, and I thought, That’s me!

  ‘Ready?’ Mum asked me at last.

  ‘READY!’ I giggled. I couldn’t wait.

  So we hobbled across the rubber floor and stepped out onto the ice, and immediately my legs shot away from me and I thumped down on my bottom. The ice was hard and cold, and it really hurt. What was worse, I couldn’t get up again. My skates slid away from me whenever I tried. I had to scrabble over onto my hands and knees and Mum hoisted me up into a standing position; then my feet splayed away from me again and I clung onto her for dear life. She was laughing, but I was close to crying with surprise and shock and hurt. Mum planted my hands on the rail that ran round the rink, and that’s how I spent the next half hour, totally glued to it, daring myself to move my feet more than an inch at a time. Even then, every now and again my feet betrayed me and shot away in any direction, and down I went. I banged my bottom, my knees, my chin.

  Mum seemed to get the hang of it straight away, but she stayed near me, coaxing me round. When I’d managed to crawl right back to the starting point again I’d had enough. My hands were aching from clinging onto the rail, my jaw ached from gritting my teeth, my head ached from concentrating so hard. I stumbled out onto the mat at last. Mum went round the rink on her own then, very slowly, her hand just dithering above the rail in case she lost her balance and had to grab for it, but she did it, smiling with triumph, and then she came tottering over to where I was sitting. She brought out her flask of coffee and the muesli bar that I’d chosen so joyfully and hopefully on my way to Ice Sheffield that morning.

  I shook my head when she pushed the muesli bar towards me. My throat was clenched tight, and my eyes were stinging with hot tears. I’m not coming again. Never, never, never.

  ‘What hurts most, your pride or your bottom?’ Mum asked.

  I giggled in spite of myself,
in spite of the tears that were washing freely down my cheeks.

  ‘That’s my brave Rosa. Sunshine and showers,’ Mum said.

  I turned away. Through my tears I watched the blurred pink Swan Lake girl. I wondered if she had ever, ever in her life, fallen over on the ice.

  Mum followed my gaze. ‘One day, you’ll skate like that,’ she told me. ‘If you want to, that is. But you have to want to, very, very much.’

  I swallowed hard, and bit the muesli bar. It was sweet and comforting.

  Mum screwed the lid back on the coffee flask. ‘We could go straight home,’ she said, ‘Or we could go round just once more. I could hold one of your hands, and you could hold the bar with the other, and I bet you’ll be able to let go of the bar before we get back to the start again.’

  And that’s exactly what we did. It was wonderful!

  It was about a month after her first visit before Molly came again. Mum had been to a couple of meetings with her in between and told me what happened there. I pretended to listen, but I was humming quietly in the back of my mind while she spoke, drowning out her words with the words of a song we’d been learning for the Christmas concert at school. In the concert, I sang a solo verse, and I was shaking so much that Ellen next to me had to hold the music. I daydreamed about that, and about the fact that Nana said it had made her cry to hear me singing, and that took me to the end of Mum’s explanations and left me smiling sweetly and blankly at her when she finished.

  A few days after the start of the new term, Mum asked me if I’d like to help her to make some apricot slices. ‘Why?’ I asked suspiciously. They were my speciality. I only made them for special visitors.

  ‘Molly’s coming round after school,’ she said. ‘She wants to talk to you again.’

  Aha. ‘I’ve got homework to do,’ I said. ‘I can’t waste my time cooking. Have you soaked the apricots?’

  ‘Of course.’ Mum lifted the lid of the pan, and the sweet sharp smell rose up to greet me. I nearly gave in.

  ‘You need to boil off a bit of that liquid,’ I said. Then I swung away and made as much noise as I could going upstairs. I threw my school bag on my bed and the French dictionary slid out onto the floor with a satisfying thud.

  ‘And I’m not tidying up my bedroom,’ I shouted. ‘It’s good enough as it is.’

  I took out my favourite shoes, the red sequin ones that Aunty Lisa had given me for Christmas, and which I’m supposed to save for parties. I never go to parties, not since my best friend Zeena left, abandoning me to the likes of Sophie Maxwell and her party Mafia. No one who Sophie didn’t like got invited to any parties. But who cares? I still had the shoes, and they are just about the most beautiful shoes I have ever seen. I turned off my bedroom light so only the light from the landing came into my room, making the shoes sparkle and glow like points of fire. I clipped my heels together like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, but nothing happened, nothing to whisk me away till Molly’s visit was over. Nothing ever does happen, in real life. If something awful is going on in your life you just have to stay put and get on with it.

  I could smell the juicy apricots simmering in the pan downstairs; I could hear Mum thudding the rolling pin onto the pastry. She really hates making pastry, and the pastry knows it. She usually buys frozen or asks me to do it, saying I’ve got lovely cool hands and hers are too hot and sweaty for pastry making. I hoped she would remember the cinnamon.

  The threatened visit lurked at the back of my brain all day at school, and it happened just as Mum said it would; there was no escape. When I arrived home, tipped out of the Maxwell smelly dog-transporter, Molly was there in her disappointingly rather scuffed-looking gorgeous shoes, sipping tea and chewing tough apricot slices. Mum had forgotten the cinnamon, and when I glared at her she took the plate to the pantry and shook a drum of mixed spice powder over the slices. It made us all cough.

  I wore my sequin shoes again, and they were much admired by Molly. She told me about a pair of patent leather shoes she had been given when she was my age, and how she would shine them with the sleeve of her cardigan till she could see her face in them. She asked me about skating, and whether I’d learned any new moves since she last saw me. Fool that I was, and a born show-off, I demonstrated the knee bend, sliding about in my sparklers across the kitchen floor, which made her laugh and cough again.

  And then, just when she had crossed the enemy line and had become a friend, she said, ‘If we do find a sister for you, would you like to teach her to skate?’

  I stopped immediately, in mid-flight, one knee bent and the other leg stretched behind me, perfectly balanced and frozen solid now as if the kitchen was full of ice, as if I was carved out of ice, as if she and Mum were two ice maidens.

  From somewhere deep inside the heart of a glacier, Molly said, ‘Rosa, you’re not really happy about the idea of adopting, are you?’

  I was too stiff and cold with ice to say anything.

  ‘We need to have a proper talk about this. I’m trying to imagine how I would have felt if it had been me, if my mum had wanted to introduce another girl into the family when I was your age. Is it because Mum would like it to be a girl of around your age? Would you be happier if we were talking about a little boy, a brother for you?’

  ‘I hate boys,’ came my stiff, frozen robot voice.

  ‘Or a baby.’

  ‘Babies stink of poo,’ I said.

  Mum sighed, a deep, hopeless sigh, and I suddenly realised that I was the one with power now, not Molly, not Mum. I could make this thing not happen. They were waiting for me to say yes, and all I had to do was to say no. And when I realised that, I felt strong, my ice melted away from me and I went calmly upstairs to my room, put my magic twinkling shoes in their box, and started my maths homework.

  I could hear Mum and Molly talking, their voices rolling and pattering and running together like rainwater. I wasn’t upset any more, I wasn’t angry. I just got on with what I wanted to do. No need to be cute and friendly and too nice to need a sister. After a bit, as I knew she would, Molly came up and knocked on my door. I didn’t answer but she came in anyway and sat on the end of my bed. She tweaked her plait over her shoulder.

  ‘Your mother and I have decided that I won’t come again for a bit.’

  Hmm. I finished my maths problem, closed the book, and clicked my pen so the nib retracted.

  ‘Not unless you want me to,’ Molly went on. ‘Sharing your home with someone, adopting someone into it, is a really big decision, and the whole family really needs to want to do it. You’re not at all sure about this. That’s fine. Some children of your age feel puzzled. They think, why should Mum want another child, when she’s got me?’

  My breath gave a sharp snatch. I stared out of the window. The street was dark. The streetlamp was a hazy orange blur.

  ‘Sometimes they feel jealous,’ Molly went on quietly. ‘They think, doesn’t my mum love me? Aren’t I enough for her?’

  Just under my eyelids the tears were beginning to brim.

  ‘Or they feel angry and upset.’

  She was quiet for ages, and so was I. I could hear next door’s dog padding down the entry, his paws scratching, whining at the gate to be let out.

  ‘Does Mum really want to adopt someone?’ I blurted it out, my eyes still on the blurry orange glow outside the window.

  ‘Well, she does, very much.’

  I swallowed hard. I didn’t feel powerful any more. I felt little and hurt. ‘Then she’d better do it, hadn’t she?’

  ‘No, not at all, not unless you want to. She’s been thinking about this for a long time, but I know it’s a new idea to you. It needs a lot of thinking about.’

  I nodded, biting my lip, swallowing again.

  ‘Some children say they don’t even want to think about it again, and that’s OK, that’s the end of the matter.’

  ‘What would you do, if I said that?’

  ‘I’d go away and I promise I wouldn’t come back to the house again, and Mum wou
ld know that that was the best thing to do.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

  She nodded, satisfied. ‘I’m pleased,’ she said. ‘It would be a shame to dismiss the idea without thinking about it. Talk to your friends about it.’

  I said nothing. Zeena was my only real friend, and she’d gone.

  ‘I’ve brought something that might help you. You don’t have to do this, but it sometimes helps.’

  That was when Molly gave me the book. It was a large hardback book with pink and blue stripes across it. I opened it up. The pages were completely blank, apart from faint grey lines. Molly rummaged in her bag again and gave me a gold plastic pen with ‘zebra’ written on the side.

  ‘It might be a good idea to write all your thoughts down here,’ she said. ‘Just absolutely everything that comes into your head. You know, about your feelings, about your mum, about me if you want. You don’t have to show it to anyone. Or you could show it to me one day, if you want to, and if you want me to come again. Some children write about their hobbies and their friends and their school too, but that’s only when they decide that they want to adopt someone and they want to tell them about their family.’

  ‘Like writing to a pen friend?’

  ‘Mm, yes. That sort of thing.’

  I stroked the book. ‘Can I write about skating, even though we might not adopt anyone?’

  ‘If you want. Gosh, that would be a lovely thing to write about.’ Molly smiled and stood up. ‘You’d enjoy that. But Rosa, only write the truth. OK? It isn’t a storybook. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I agreed.

  Molly came over to where I was sitting and touched my cheek. ‘I hope we meet again,’ she said.

  That night, I started to write in my book. I thought for ages about where to start it, and then I remembered the day Mum told me that she wanted us to adopt a sister. That was the day I had realised that I didn’t know Mum properly, that there was something about her that I didn’t know and that I didn’t understand. But I wasn’t ready to go there yet. Instead, I wrote about skating.