Yellowbone

by Ekow Duker

  ‘You must give me all your belongings,’ the guard said. ‘For safekeeping.’

  Karabo thought it bizarre that she would give anything to this ogre of a woman but she did not protest. She put the mattress and the plastic utensils down and handed over her cell phone and her wallet. She had no idea where they’d taken her suitcase or the violin. But she was too overwrought to worry about that now.

  The other woman stood watching Karabo through cowed eyes. She’d been lucky. She hadn’t had to strip.

  ‘Wait here,’ the guard said to the woman. Then she led Karabo into a large open courtyard with low buildings on either side. Out here, khaki-yellow had given way to faded black and mottled white, like a dilapidated chessboard with human beings for pawns. There was an aged solidity about the surroundings, as if the prison had been here forever and had changed little in all that time. In the distance, a line of hills stood against the horizon, their wooded crests slumbering above the prison walls. Fingers of mud crept up from the base of the buildings but gave up in exhaustion before they’d gone very far. A palm tree with jagged black stumps protruding from its trunk, stood forlornly in one corner. It looked like it was a prisoner too.

  In the near distance was a metal barn-like structure with a wooden cross above it. Karabo guessed that must be the church. She stumbled as the guard steered her towards a single-storey block to her left with two large plastic water tanks crouched solidly in front of it. Her feet squelched in the mud and a dank odour rose up to meet her. It smelled like a place where small animals came to die.

  ‘Don’t waste my time!’ snarled the guard. She unlocked the door and shoved Karabo through the entrance. A shadowy corridor stretched out in front of Karabo, ending in a wall with a barred window. The floor felt rough and uneven beneath her feet yet it glistened with small, irregular pools of water. Then, all of a sudden, a clamour of terrifying cries rang out on all sides. It was as if a stone had been thrown into a flock of sleeping birds and sent them squawking up into the sky.

  ‘Obroni! Obroni!’

  ‘My darling!’

  ‘My daughter! I am here!’

  Hands clawed through the bars, each trying desperately to touch her. The last cry had sounded uncannily like Precious and Karabo spun around half-expecting to see her mother. Instead she saw a dark, gaunt woman in a blue headscarf with her face squashed against the bars and pink gums exposed in a terrifying snarl.

  ‘My daughter!’ she wailed, her eyes bright with pleading. Karabo turned and hurried after the guard. But the woman’s sobbing only grew louder.

  ‘My daughter!’ she cried. ‘My daughter!’ She was in such anguish that the tears ran down Karabo’s face.

  Karabo’s cell was at the end of the long corridor. Gradually, the commotion died down. When the guard unlocked the door, huddled shapes rose slowly to their feet like witches emerging from a swamp. It looked larger than the cell at the airport police station but was much too small for the number of women packed inside. The floor was knit tightly with foam mattresses similar to the one Karabo clutched to her chest. She counted only three beds.

  ‘You are welcome,’ one of the women said. She was lying on the bed furthest from the door and was propped up on one elbow. She looked like she owned the place and Karabo had come to visit. She also had a blue cotton scarf wrapped around her head and it matched the loose dress bunched about her body. A fuzz of grey hair peeked out from under her scarf. Karabo thought she must be very old but there were no wrinkles on her face. Her skin was as smooth as if there was nothing in the world that could ever trouble her.

  Karabo stood in the doorway, not sure if she should enter. Then a brawny looking woman patted the ground next to her and said, ‘Come.’ She sounded like Maria for her voice was heavily tinged with French.

  ‘No, Morocco,’ the old woman said. ‘She will sleep next to me.’

  She beckoned to Karabo with a rapid flutter of her hand. As Karabo stepped gingerly over the women’s bodies, she could not avoid treading on them but they did not seem to mind. They just laughed at her when she stammered her apologies.

  ‘The men’s prison is much worse,’ one of them said. ‘They pack them so tight over there, a man cannot turn in his sleep unless thirty men turn with him at the same time.’

  There was a low murmur of assent. ‘Some of them even sleep standing,’ another woman exclaimed. ‘Here at least they give us mattresses.’

  ‘There is a men’s prison too?’ Karabo asked in a small voice.

  ‘Yes,’ another replied. ‘It is not far, just on the other side.’

  She made a hopping motion with her hand to indicate the hordes of men who were imprisoned just beyond the extent of her arm. Karabo unrolled her mattress and patted it into the space they had made for her. She tried to fold back the edges so it wouldn’t intrude on anyone else’s space but it was no use. She sat down on the rectangle of foam that now marked out the borders of her existence and hugged her legs to her chest.

  There was a click and the little light there had been went out. ‘Don’t cry,’ a voice said in the dark for Karabo had begun to weep. ‘It will be okay.’

  But what exactly would be okay? And what was it? And how would it be put right? Her life had careened off a cliff and plunged into the most hellish existence imaginable. In despair, she thought of killing herself like Inspector Thulisane had done. One shot to the head and she’d be delivered from this place. But she didn’t have a gun and the guards she’d seen carried only rubber batons. She could snatch a baton from one of them and club herself to death. But that was just silly. Better still, she could hang herself with a strip of cloth or a piece of electrical wire. They did that in movies, didn’t they? But if she couldn’t even lie down without jostling her neighbour, someone was bound to see her and stop her the moment the noose was around her neck. Karabo fought to hold back her tears. Wherever Inspector Thulisane was right now, it had to be better than this.

  CHAPTER 43

  The women questioned Karabo long into the night. They wanted to know where she’d been caught and what she’d been carrying. They couldn’t believe she’d been arrested because of a fucking violin.

  ‘I tell you, there were drugs inside,’ Morocco declared. This sparked a fierce argument between those who, like Morocco, couldn’t imagine a woman being arrested at the airport when she wasn’t carrying, and those who insisted Karabo was telling the truth. And as Karabo listened to their voices, she tried to picture the women to whom they belonged. They bickered mostly in English with liberal sprinklings of Twi and the odd French word thrown in for Morocco’s benefit.

  It was uncanny how several of the voices swirling around Karabo could have been female facsimiles of Teacher’s own voice. Their English was measured and cultured and they argued with flawless logic. Others had only a rudimentary vocabulary and reverted to forceful interjections in pidgin like ‘You craze!’ or ‘You think sey everybody dey like you?’ In the end it was Auntie Abena, the elderly matriarch, who put a stop to the squabbling.

  ‘Karabo is tired,’ she said. ‘It is her first night and she needs to sleep.’

  The voices sputtered on for a few more minutes before dying away. Each side wanted to have the last word and of course that only fanned the argument into life once again. They’d strayed far away from the original dispute about whether Karabo had hidden drugs in the violin and drifted into an animated debate about high court judges and which ones routinely took bribes. Karabo was wide awake now and, despite Auntie Abena’s instruction, she couldn’t bring herself to sleep.

  Karabo curled up the way she’d seen garden snails do in Mthatha, with her head tucked in and her knees pressed against her chest. But that only brought her feet into the soft belly of the woman lying next to her. The woman grunted but didn’t complain and threw an arm over Karabo’s thighs. The breath snagged in Karabo’s throat. She was about to be pinned down and raped. She lay there weak with fear, hardly daring to move. But nothing happened after several minutes an
d she finally gathered enough courage to lift the woman’s arm off her legs. It was heavy and flopped lifelessly to the floor.

  It was uncomfortably hot in the cell and the air was thick with the murmur of sleeping bodies. It was cooler close to the floor; the concrete tickled Karabo’s nose with its damp, peppery odour. Then out of the semi-darkness, a grey shape detached itself from the floor and lumbered over to the corner. There it squatted and a sound like rain falling on a corrugated-iron roof filled the cell as a jet of urine pummelled the sides of a metal bucket. The woman had barely straightened when a putrid smell of piss and blood and faeces powered through the cell. It made Karabo feel faint. She needed to pee now but the stench and the thought of navigating the obstacle course of sleeping bodies were too much. She writhed on the mattress, clenching and unclenching her fists as she tried desperately not to wet herself. Then she felt a hand press gently against her chest.

  ‘Bra.’

  The woman’s voice was as light as her touch. Bra was one of the few words in Twi Karabo understood. She took Karabo’s hand and led her to the bucket in the corner and knelt by her side as she squatted. Karabo held her breath for as long as she could but when she let it out again, the stench was right there waiting for her. It clambered down her throat and turned her stomach. She would have collapsed if the woman had not held her up.

  Morocco cried all through the night. She whimpered like a wounded animal, mumbling mysterious words in Arabic. Her weeping would have unnerved Karabo if she’d been alone. But no one reproached Morocco or told her to shut up. In time, her muffled, haunting dirge lulled them all to sleep.

  Karabo dreamed of Inspector Thulisane that night. It was a Sunday morning and they were all in the church in Mthatha. Inspector Thulisane came up and handed her the velvet collection pouch as usual. But just as she was about to take it from him, it fell and spilled the notes and coins onto the floor. She went down on her knees and began to count the money and for some reason there were no South African rands, only Ghanaian cedis. It came to four thousand cedis, the exact amount Teacher had been unable to post for her bail.

  Karabo awoke to find all the women huddled around Auntie Abena’s bed. The old woman’s hands were stretched out over them the way Pastor Fola Adebayor did at the church in Mthatha. Karabo scrambled to her feet and joined them. If Auntie Abena was dishing out free blessings, she didn’t want to be left out.

  Auntie Abena’s prayer was an urgent babble of Twi that Karabo couldn’t understand. She opened her eyes to see a rapturous smile lighting up the old woman’s face. It didn’t make any sense. You weren’t supposed to look that happy in prison. And as Auntie Abena prayed, the women kept interrupting her with hearty amens and Morocco’s ‘Amens’ were the loudest of all. They could have been a football team psyching themselves in the dressing room before going out on the field.

  The women slid their mattresses under the beds and Karabo quickly did the same. Those mattresses that couldn’t fit under a bed were stacked against the wall. Then a key scrabbled loudly in the lock and the cell door opened with a clang. Karabo looked up to see the guard who’d brought her to the cell the night before. She fell into the raggedy line as Morocco led them out. She couldn’t help feeling this was the reason Morocco had ended up in prison in the first place. With her loose-limbed gait and self-assured manner, she looked like a woman well accustomed to walking headlong into trouble.

  There were four cubicles in the shower block and only one of them was fitted with a shower rose. The cubicles were built over a rough floor that sloped down to a narrow gutter that ran along the wall. Karabo hung back as the other women undressed and washed themselves. Their empty breasts flopped tiredly from emaciated chests or ballooned out on either side but they didn’t seem to give their nakedness a second thought. Some bellies were wrinkled and knotted with age while others were ravaged with the scars of childbirth. The women chatted as they showered, handing each other small cakes of soap which they rubbed vigorously over coloured strips of nylon netting until they bubbled into a white froth.

  Karabo was bracing herself to enter a vacant cubicle when a heavy-set woman barged into her. She staggered backwards and looked up at the woman, wondering what she had done. To Karabo’s surprise the woman began scolding her like she were a dog. And when it became apparent that Karabo didn’t understand a word she was saying, she berated her in English instead.

  ‘You must learn to respect your elders,’ the woman fumed. She bunched her cloth up under her doughy arms like she was getting ready for a fight. ‘Didn’t they teach you manners in South Africa?’

  By now, everyone knew where Karabo was from but she still had no idea why this woman was so angry with her.

  She wagged a thick finger in Karabo’s face and flicked the tip of her nose. ‘You were watching me. I saw you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ replied Karabo. ‘If I did, I didn’t mean to offend you.’

  She was waiting for the brusque reaction that came when she spoke big English when all of a sudden, the woman let out a hoot of laughter. Her lips curled away from her teeth to reveal a bright set of pink gums.

  ‘What have you done with my husband, eh? They say you were with him at Mile 7.’

  Karabo looked around for help but the woman had manoeuvred her into a corner. Then her voice dropped to an urgent whisper.

  ‘Kweku Amoako. Is he with you?’

  ‘You must be mixing me up with someone else.’

  ‘But it was you!’ the woman cried desperately. ‘Isn’t your name Karabo?’

  Then she began to cackle again, a breathless, barking laugh that came from deep within her chest. A chill ran down Karabo’s back for she realised the woman was insane.

  ‘There must be another Karabo,’ she said. ‘I’ve never met your husband.’

  The idea of another Karabo drew the woman up short. She looked quizzically at Karabo with her forehead furrowed in a frown.

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know this Kweku Amoako of yours.’

  She left the woman muttering to herself and counting her husband’s misdeeds on her fingers. What if they were all insane? The judges, the lawyers, the policemen, the inmates, the entire bloody lot? A few days ago she’d been in London, studying architecture at a prestigious school. Now here she was in a hellish prison in a country she’d longed to visit all her life. It didn’t make any sense. She’d give anything to be back in her room in Russell Square. Or to be lying on Nigel’s bed while he played the violin. Karabo closed her eyes and pinched her cheek. If all this was just a bad dream, maybe pinching herself might wake her up.

  Then she heard the soft voice that had called to her in the night.

  ‘Bra.’

  She opened her eyes and saw the girl, for she was too young to be a woman, who the previous night had helped her relieve herself in the bucket. She had short cropped hair and a dark, almost circular face with the obligatory blue scarf wrapped tightly around her head.

  ‘Mma mpira wo ho,’ she said to Karabo.

  Karabo shook her head in bewilderment. Then the girl smiled and gently pried Karabo’s fingers off her cheek. Karabo spluttered her embarrassment.

  ‘Oh no! It’s not that at all! I wasn’t hurting myself. Really, I wasn’t!’

  The girl tapped an imaginary watch on her wrist. Karabo was the last to shower and she was running out of time. Karabo hurried to the empty cubicle and in her haste she almost slipped and fell. She had no soap to wash herself but the water was refreshing. It fell on her like a thick tangle of warm rope.

  Karabo’s new friend was called Fatima. She spoke a few halting words of English and after much miming, Karabo gathered she was from northern Ghana. They joined the feeding line and shuffled forward to where another inmate was busy ladling porridge out of a blackened, industrial-sized pot. By now Karabo was weak with hunger. She hadn’t eaten anything since they’d brought her to the prison the previous day. She craned her head around the line to see what was on offer but sh
e really shouldn’t have bothered. The porridge, if it really was porridge, had the consistency and colour of dirty water. It could have been scooped from a gutter and put in the pot to boil. Aghast, Karabo turned to Fatima.

  ‘Are we expected to eat that?’

  Fatima pulled a mournful face and raised her index finger.

  ‘One day, one Ghana cedi and eighty pesewas.’

  ‘That’s all we get?’ Karabo asked and Fatima nodded.

  Karabo did a quick calculation in her head. One cedi and eighty pesewas was only five rands. You couldn’t buy a packet of chewing gum for five rands. She stared at Fatima in horror. She was going to starve.

  Fatima pointed at Karabo and then at herself. ‘We will cook,’ she said. ‘You and me.’

  But they were holding up the queue and already Karabo could hear irritated cries of ‘Hey! Obroni!’ welling up behind her. After what passed for breakfast, Fatima took her by the elbow and steered her past the metal shed masquerading as a church and towards the rudimentary classrooms on the opposite side of the courtyard. The women were supposed to improve themselves there by learning crafts like sewing and beadwork but no one seemed to pay much attention. Karabo and Fatima sat in a patch of shade beneath the prison wall that loomed high above them.

  They didn’t speak for several minutes. Karabo pulled out a blade of grass and sucked on the stalk. She hadn’t done that since she was a child. At least it tasted better than the porridge they’d just been given. The men’s prison was supposedly much worse than this. There were seventy women in the female prison and more than three thousand on the men’s side. It was unbearable, one of the inmates had told her, unless of course you had money. And if you had enough money, you wouldn’t be in prison at all.

  ‘The woman in the shower,’ Karabo asked. ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Auntie Jemima.’ Fatima made a stabbing motion with her hand. ‘She kill her husband.’

  Karabo gulped. ‘How? What happened?’

  It was only after a lengthy charade that Karabo was able to piece together the story. Auntie Jemima was a seamstress from Tema, a port city outside Accra. She’d been married to her husband for eleven years and they had three children together. One night when her husband got home from work, he called Auntie Jemima over to the kitchen table where he was sitting. He began to swear at her, calling her filthy names.