The Girl Who Saw Lions Page 6

  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 take 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 rush of excitement I feel when I try a new move, and try and try again because it’s too hard at first, testing out which way to tilt my foot, inside edge, outside edge, and then find out I can do it. Most of all, I love it because it’s something my mum and I do together.

  Once I’d started I just couldn’t stop, it was pouring out of me, a river of words. At first everything came out in the wrong order, just as I remembered it. But now, I’ve reached the day where Molly gave me the striped book. I think I want to keep on writing in it. I’m trying to write the exact truth. And this is my true thought for today. I’m going to ask Mum why she wants another daughter.

  9

  Abela

  A MONTH PASSED, and Abela slept a lot, cried a lot, dragged herself to school when she could. She kept thinking she could hear Mama singing, or the little whimpering cry that Nyota used to make when she was waking up, or her father’s deep rolling laughter. But the little house was empty of sound, except for Bibi’s low voice persuading her to eat, drink, get up, give her some help. It never occurred to Abela that her grandmother was as steeped in grief as she was for the three losses to her family. Bibi just kept going, and tried to keep the world moving for Abela.

  One day when she came home from school, she found her grandmother making little maize cakes, special occasion cakes, on the griddle over the charcoal stove.

  ‘I have had a message to say that your uncle is coming home!’ Bibi’s eyes were dancing with smiles. ‘Yes, your Uncle Thomas has come home from Europe, and he has a surprise for you.’

  ‘I don’t know Uncle Thomas,’ Abela said.

  ‘Well, you do, but you were only four or five when he went away to Europe. He fell in love with a rich tourist who gave him the money to go to her country, and I thought he would never come home again.’ She said the word mzungu, which meant tourist, with a mixture of pride and contempt. She did not like them. When they climbed off the bus to stretch their legs they stared and took photographs, they wandered round the village and peered in the huts as if they owned the place. Abela thought about the lady tourist with the hair like flames that she had met on the way to the hospital, and said nothing about it.

  ‘Why has he come home from Europe?’ she asked. To her, Europe was one big place, one massive world where many white people lived. Everybody who lived in Europe was rich. Why would Uncle Thomas want to come home again?

  Bibi shrugged. She flipped the maize cakes over on the skillet. ‘I know why, but I don’t understand. He sent someone to tell me he was living in Dar es Salaam for a bit, and so I sent a message back on the bus to tell him about your mother. She was his sister. He needs to know that she has died. He needs to help us now. He has been trying to get the right papers to go back to England, something to do with that. He wasn’t allowed to stay any longer.’ She paused. ‘They threw him out, his friend said,’ she announced dramatically, as if that made him a hero.

  Abela stared into the charcoal fire, frowning. She dimly remembered her uncle now. He was a bully, she remembered. He used to shout a lot at her mother, and sometimes he hit her. He used to tease Abela and chase her into the monkey woods until she cried, and then he would make his voice squawk like a hen with laughter. She used to be afraid of him.

  ‘Well, he’s coming home. I’ve had a message to say he will be on the bus tonight. All the way from Dar es Salaam! He’ll be tired, he’ll be hungry, he’ll be dirty. Don’t expect much from him tonight. He’s bringing someone with him. And he has a surprise for you.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘There, now you want to see him, don’t you? He’s a good boy. He doesn’t forget his old mother and his little niece.’

  When the cakes were made, Bibi shook out the bedroll ready for Uncle Thomas to sleep on. She and Abela would sleep together on Mama’s bedroll, she said. Plenty of room. And the guest would sleep on Abela’s bedroll. Bibi was like a girl again, excited and laughing at the thought of seeing her son after five years, and her excitement affected Abela. She magicked what the surprise might be in her head. Maybe he had brought her some pencils from Europe.

  When the time came to meet the bus they strolled together through the compound and up past the schoolhouse to the road, Bibi shouting out to her friends that Thomas was coming home. The fireflies blazed a blue trail for them. Food stalls were being set up on trellis tables along the roadside to greet the bus passengers, paraffin lamps lit, music playing from someone’s portable radio. Even though this happened every time the bus passed by the village, it felt as if everyone had turned out that night to meet Uncle Thomas.

  The bus was five hours late. It didn’t matter. That was quite normal. Bibi chatted to the women at the stalls, sitting on the white plastic chair that one of the stallholders had brought home on a bus from Arusha. She teetered it backwards and forwards on three legs as she leaned round to talk, her hands flitting like bats, and Abela curled up on the ground and slept. The mad mzee prowled round, muttering to herself, her panga tucked under her arm till the Indian chilli-seller prised it away from her, chuckling softly. Abela heard the distant rumble of the bus as if it was inside her dream, and only woke up properly when she felt something tickling her cheek, and a woman’s voice speaking to her. She opened her eyes to see a white woman looking down at her, the light of the lamps flickering across her face and making her long pale yellow hair gleam.

  ‘What a pretty child, Thomas. Is this Bella?’

  Recognising her name among the English words, Abela sat up with a start and struggled to her feet. Bibi was hugging Uncle Thomas, who was dressed in strange trousers and shoes, not blue jeans like the men in the village, not shorts like the tourists.

  ‘Look at these smart clothes!’ Bibi clucked in admiration. ‘You must be a rich man these days!’

  Thomas put his arm round his friend’s waist. She swung her hair and gleamed a smile at him. ‘This is Susie,’ he said. ‘Say hello, Abela. Say it in English.’

  Abela rubbed the palms of her hands together nervously. ‘Morning, Teacha!’ she said.

  ‘Well, it’s not morning, it’s nearly midnight,’ Susie laughed. White, white, thought Abela. Oh, her voice is as white as the moon. I have never heard a lovely moon-white quiet-soft voice like that before. ‘And I’m certainly not a teacher. Not clever enough! Not bossy enough!’ She crouched down to Abela. ‘Do you speak much English, Bella?’

  Abela bit her lip and scratched the ground with her big toe. ‘A little bit,’ she whispered. She glanced shyly up at her grandmother. ‘Teacha say me I best in school.’ Then she burrowed her face into Bibi’s side.

  ‘You’d better be,’ Susie said. ‘Because I don’t speak one word of your language. Oh, yes I do! One word – jambo! That means hello, doesn’t it? I love that word. Jambo! Jambo, everybody!’

  Bibi clicked her tongue in her cheek as if she were calling her cow to the end of her field for milking, and led the way towards the compound. She wanted to feed her guests before they slept, and that thought was far more important to her than talking to the pretty white woman her son had brought home. Abela struggled to stay awake while the bean stew and the maize cakes were prepared. The sky hung like a black tent over them. Susie and Thomas sat outside the hut with little lamps glowing around them to keep away the mosquitoes. Huge moths fluttered round the lamps and Susie flapped her hands at them. Her rings sparkled like stars. When Bibi proudly served out the bowls of food, Susie said she was too tired to eat.

  ‘Can we go and sleep now?’ she asked. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t keep my eyes open, Thomas.’

  Thomas waved his hand towards his mother’s hut. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘In there? I c
an’t sleep in there! Isn’t there a hotel?’

  ‘Not unless you want to walk about fifty miles.’

  Bibi smiled and nodded, understanding nothing except that her guest was too tired to eat.

  Susie peered into the hut, and backed out again. ‘I won’t sleep in there,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s too dark, and it stinks of smoke, and there’s no room.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Thomas snapped.

  ‘Isn’t there a proper house anywhere?’

  ‘Stop whining! If you’re tired, sleep in there. If you’re not, sit here and wait for the lions.’

  Susie yelped and groped her way into the blackness of the mud hut, and Bibi followed her and showed her the bedroll that she was to sleep on. Susie covered herself up with the blanket and went straight to sleep. Abela lay on the roll that used to be Mama’s and looked across at her, at the beautiful pale yellow hair, at the white face like a sleeping moon, just lit by the glow from outside.

  The fire under the cooking pot died down, the hut was in darkness, and still Bibi and Uncle Thomas talked on, sitting just outside the hut in the starlight. He told his mother about the house he had lived in when he was in England, with a room for every person, a kitchen full of things that worked by electricity and a bathroom with running hot water.

  ‘I have heard that the people in Dar and Arusha and Moshi live like that,’ Bibi said, not impressed. ‘All the big towns.’

  ‘Only the rich ones, Mama. In England, everybody does. Everybody. They all have cars! They have computers, they have mobile phones. Everybody.’

  ‘Tchk! What are these things anyway? Where you going to live, now you’re back here?’

  ‘I’m not staying here. This is no place for a man to live, not when I’ve seen how rich people live. I’m going back to England as soon as I get my papers.’

  ‘What are these papers?’

  ‘Immigration papers. Well, Mama,’ and he lowered his voice, ‘I got into BIG trouble with the officials there because I only went for a holiday and I stayed for five years! They didn’t like that!’ He laughed his squawking-hen laugh. In the hut, Susie murmured softly in her sleep. ‘I didn’t have a work permit, Mama, that’s all. It’s nothing.’

  ‘I talked to the teacher yesterday,’ Bibi said. ‘She told me, it’s bad news that they threw you out. Once you’re out, you’re out, she said. They won’t want you back.’ Her voice was greedy with love; after all, she wanted her son to stay home with her.

  ‘They’ll want me all right. I have a plan.’ He turned round and looked back at the dark sleeping shape of Susie. ‘They won’t want to keep me away from my wife and child.’

  ‘Your wife? You married to this woman?’

  ‘Not yet. Tomorrow, next day.’

  ‘What about that girl from long ago, who took you away with her?’

  ‘Oh, her!’ Thomas grinned at his mother. ‘She was rich, but she was stupid! We didn’t get on.’

  ‘Tchk! So you found another one. Well, she’s prettier than the first. And she’s having your baby?’

  ‘She was, Mama. Then she lost him before he was born. The baby died.’ His voice grew bitter and angry. ‘But I have a plan. I told you. I have a plan, and they won’t stop me going back to England now.’

  In the long silence that followed, Abela drifted off to sleep, and never heard what her Uncle Thomas’s plan might be.

  As soon as she woke up, she remembered that Susie was there. She sat up and looked across to where the pink morning light lit up Susie’s face and hair. She could see the fine golden down on her cheeks, and the flutter of her pale eyelashes. Bibi was stoking the stove to heat up the maize porridge for breakfast, and a sudden gust of smoke drenched the air. Susie woke up, coughing. She blundered outside, gasping and spluttering, breathing in the fresh air.

  ‘How can you live in there, with all that smoke?’ she shouted. ‘I smell like a kipper, Thomas.’

  Thomas stretched and rolled himself over. ‘You get used to it,’ he called back. ‘Don’t make a fuss.’

  But Abela jumped out of her bedroll and ran to the red plastic bucket of water that Bibi had carried from the well the day before, balancing it on her head the way all the women did, never spilling a drop all the long way home. She scooped some out with a coconut shell and carried it over to where Susie sat, still gasping, away from the house.

  Susie shook her head. ‘You’re a good girl,’ she said. ‘But I daren’t drink this water. I’ll get typhoid or something. I’ve got some in a bottle somewhere in my bag.’

  ‘It very good water,’ Abela said, understanding a little. She sipped some and offered the shell bowl again. ‘Mm, good for Susie. Mimi ninapenda. Very nice.’

  Uncle Thomas strolled over to them, his shirt loose over his strange trousers. He was carrying a plastic bottle of water and a bowl of maize porridge. He squatted down beside them. ‘What do you think of Abela? Is she good enough? Smile, Abela. Smile for Susie.’

  Abela bit her lip, wishing he would go away and leave her with Susie.

  ‘She’s just lost her mother, poor kid. Why should she smile?’ Susie said. ‘She’s lovely. Anyway, what do you mean, good enough? Good enough for what?’

  Thomas didn’t answer. He told Abela to fetch some porridge for herself and Susie, and laughed at the face Susie pulled when she tasted it.

  ‘How old are you, Abela?’ he asked suddenly, in English.

  ‘I think I nine year old,’ Abela answered proudly.

  ‘She’s little for her age,’ he commented. He dug his fingers into Abela’s shoulders, turning her round and sizing her up as if she were a calf he might be buying from the market. He cupped her face in his hands. ‘Skinny as a rat. Open your mouth,’ he ordered. ‘Baby teeth, still.’

  She pulled away from him, her eyes stinging, and he laughed and tweaked her nose playfully.

  ‘Are you going to school today?’ he asked.

  Abela nodded. She didn’t want to. She wanted to stay and look at Susie all day.

  ‘Take Susie with you, show her round. She’d like to meet your teacher. She can talk some new English words to you kids. And afterwards, take her to the market.’ He fished in his pockets and tossed some coins on the ground. ‘Buy your grandmother some decent cakes, and a kuku, a nice fat chicken. And get yourself a nice new kanga to wear at my wedding. You too, Susie.’ He added in English. ‘I want you to wear a kanga tomorrow.’

  ‘It’ll make me look too pale. They’re all such bright colours, Thomas,’ Susie reminded him, pretending to pout. She stood up, stretching, combing her hair back with her fingers. ‘God, I could do with a hair wash. I must look like a tramp.’

  ‘You look beautiful. Doesn’t she, Abela?’ Thomas poked Abela.

  ‘You very nice,’ Abela said shyly. She covered her face with her hands and giggled.

  ‘Thank you. OK, I’d like to see your school, Bella. Will you show me?’

  She stood up and held out her hand, and Abela took it in her own. The eyes of all the village were on her as she walked hand in hand with the beautiful white stranger to the schoolhouse, and she kept her lips bunched, just a little, in imitation of the pretty pout that Susie had made.

  As soon as they were out of sight, Thomas called his mother over. ‘Has the kid been to the clinic recently? Have they tested her for HIV?’

  ‘She’s clear,’ Bibi said. ‘We’re both clear, thanks be to Jesus Christ our Lord.’

  ‘She’s had all the tests? You’re quite sure? She’s had injections? You got the papers to show me?’ he demanded.

  ‘They gave me something. How do I know what it says?’ His mother went into the hut, lifted up the bedroll that Thomas had been sleeping on, and brought out a document. He scrutinised it carefully and then folded it and put it in his back pocket.

  ‘How do you think you’re going back to that place, England? Tell me about this plan of yours,’ his mother said.

  Thomas laughed. He took some coins from his pocket and juggled them up a
nd down in the palm of his hand. ‘In a few days, Susie has to return to England. She’s already bought her ticket, so she has to go then. But when she goes back, she’ll be married to me.’ He tiptoed a dance around his mother, a stately Western dance, jingling the coins like bells and making her smile. ‘I get the documents tomorrow. Then I just have to apply to join my wife. That’s what my plan is.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What documents? All documents, papers, this and that, passports, I don’t understand any of it.’ The old woman flapped her hand in front of her face as if she were flapping flies away. ‘And how can you get married tomorrow? Tomorrow is not the priest’s day for coming here.’

  ‘Priest!’ Thomas laughed. ‘I don’t need a priest!’ He drew a wad of bank notes out of his pocket. ‘This is all I need. American dollars. More valuable than English sterling. I can buy anything I want with these, if I give them to the right people. I can buy a marriage certificate. I can buy a paper to say we have a child.’

  ‘Your child was never born. You told me.’

  ‘No problem. I can buy a certificate to say I have a daughter. A birth certificate. The English government won’t keep me away from my wife and child. I can buy a passport for her.’

  ‘For her? For whom?’ His mother sat down suddenly on the little stool she used for shredding coconut. She knew, of course she knew, whom he was talking about, but her quaking heart would not allow her to say so.

  ‘For Abela Mbisi.’ He bent down to her, smiling, and whispered the words in her ear.

  ‘My Abela?’

  ‘Your Abela! My dead sister’s orphan child, in need of a mother and father. What kind of a life will she have here? How long can you look after her? When I have these papers, it will say that Abela is my daughter, Susie’s daughter. It will say she is seven years old. That will sound better – Susie’s only twenty-five. So, Abela goes home to England with her mother at the end of the week. And I will apply for immigration papers because I have a wife and child in England. It’s so simple. You have a clever son, Mother.’ He went down on his knees and put his arms round her. ‘You want this for me, don’t you? You want it for Abela. A better life, away from all this poverty and disease? When I’m back in England I can get a job. I know how to earn good money, very, very good money. And everything I earn I’ll send to you. Half.’