by Paula Leyden
Contents
BUL - BOO: Bukoko the Little Tick Child
FRED: Doom and Gloom
BULL - BOO: Professor Ratsberg and Dr Wrath
BULL - BOO: The Menshi Curse
FRED: Nokokulu and the Man-Beast
BULL - BOO: The Baobab That Fell Over
BULL - BOO: Roaming Ancestors and Sacrifices
BULL - BOO: Science, Witches and Disappearing Patients
BULL - BOO: Doomed Archaeologists
FRED: Talking to Girls
BULL - BOO: Goldfish Training
FRED: Nokokulu Versus the World
BULL - BOO: The Journey of a Stubborn Old Woman
BULL - BOO: Storm Clouds Gathering
BULL - BOO: Life’s Sorrows
FRED: The Purple-striped Burrowing Praying Mantis
BULL - BOO: On Top of the Baobab Tree
FRED: The Cloud of Doom
FRED: Nocturnal Lettuce
BULL - BOO: Old Hidden Face
BULL - BOO: Fred’s Laughing Hyena
MADILLO: Moon Shadow
FRED: Silent Echoes
FRED: The Call of the Nightjar
BULL - BOO: Shadows Short, Shadows Tall
FRED: An Alive Something
BULL - BOO: Aunt Kiki and the Snake Oil Salesmen
BULL - BOO: Ratbag’s Wrath
FRED: The Sleep of Forgetting
Epilogue
Thanks and acknowledgements
About the Author
This book is for Dad, Mum, Julia,
John and Karen, with love
BUL - BOO
Bukoko the Little Tick Child
In a side pocket of my rucksack I have a small red notebook. It’s where we (i.e. Madillo my twin sister, Fred our neighbour and me, of course) note down what happens at school. Or more specifically what happens in Sister Leonisa’s class. She’s our religion teacher. There are three columns on each page: GOD, STORY, WORK. It’s different from my small black notebook, where I write down the things that I think about. That belongs to just me.
In the GOD column we fill in how often Sister mentions God, and most days we write “zero”. Sister Leonisa says that talking about God all the time can get boring.
In the STORY column we put a tick if she tells us a story and a sad face if she doesn’t. Well, Madillo puts a sad face, I just put an X. I’m not big on sad or smiley faces.
Most of that column is ticked.
The WORK column is the emptiest – if we ever get to do any work in her class she never takes it in anyway, so it doesn’t really count.
I decided that we should start the book because I like keeping records of things. You never know when you might need something as evidence. I’d hate to be called as a witness before a judge and have to look down in an embarrassed kind of way and say, “Sorry, Your Honour, I can’t remember anything.”
Madillo says it’s not strictly necessary, because Sister Leonisa hasn’t committed a crime so we don’t need evidence. “Not yet,” I tell her. “There’s plenty of time.”
As soon as Sister walked into the classroom today I knew we could tick the STORY column, leave the WORK one blank and put a big zero underneath GOD. She said just two words as she stepped through the door: “Zebras down!”
The Zebras are the blinds she made from old sheets. She said we could use them because the rest of the nuns had outgrown them.
As if an adult can outgrow a sheet.
I asked Sister how this was possible and she said, “There are many things you don’t know about nuns, Bul-Boo.” Which is no kind of answer at all. What’s not to know about nuns? That they grow mysteriously in the night and then reshape themselves back to normal size in the morning?
Sister Leonisa never says, “I don’t know.” She hates admitting to not knowing something, so instead she makes up answers.
Madillo (who also likes having an answer for everything) says it must be because the nuns eat so much that they are all getting fat, but one look at Sister Leonisa would tell you that’s not true. She looks just like one of the matchstick drawings she does on the blackboard.
Anyway, the blinds are called Zebras because Sister got us to paint black stripes on them before she hung them up. She said the sun would be hurt if we shut it out completely – that’s why we left the strips of white. She talks about things like the sun as if they have feelings.
In Sister’s world, the sun is a woman. An angry woman if you put up blinds to shut her out. So we have stripy ones which let in half the light and don’t work very well if we are watching a DVD but do work for stories.
So we rolled them down.
Once they were down she started.
“Ng’ombe Ilede … Ng’ombe Ilede,” she said, her voice deep and rumbling. “The Place of the Sleeping Cow. The place of death.”
That’s another category I should have put into the notebook: STORIES THAT HAVE DEATH IN THEM. That column would be ticked all the way down. We never tell Mum and Dad her stories any more, because they say she’s morbid. They may be right but we’re used to her. I think if she told us a story about pink fairies we’d all leave the room.
“Ng’ombe Ilede is a town crawling with ghosts,” Sister said, making crawling movements with her hands. “They sit up in the trees, swim in the warm waters of the Kariba Dam, wait behind old walls. They are everywhere, and they’re watching.”
There is something about the way Sister Leonisa speaks that makes you believe what she’s telling you, even if you don’t want to, and even if you know that nearly all of it is exaggerated.
“One of these ghosts is called Bukoko,” she continued. “Do you know how she got that name?”
We all shook our heads. By now we know that the only person Sister wants an answer from is herself.
“Because that’s what you call a child whose mother drinks too much beer when she’s pregnant. Poor little child, sitting there in her mother’s stomach, drinking gallons of beer, burping away from all the bubbles. When a baby burps in its mother’s stomach the air has nowhere to go, so the poor child gets squashed. This happened to Bukoko and by the time she came out she was tiny, a small beer-pickled baby. Bukoko the Little Tick Child is what they all called her, because her belly was full and round, like a tick after a good drink of cow’s blood.”
Along with death, Sister manages to add the gross factor to every story she tells. I sometimes think that if she wanted to tell a story that wasn’t gross already she’d just add in a string of disgusting words at the end to satisfy herself.
I put my hand up. “I’ve never heard of a baby burping inside its mother’s stomach. I don’t think that’s scientifically proven.”
I saw Madillo scrunching up her face. She hates it when I use the phrase “scientifically proven”, especially in Sister’s class.
“Just because some of us have mothers and fathers who are doctors,” Sister said, “we think we know everything. But we don’t. There are some things that doctors and scientists will never know because they close their minds to them. Now, if I can carry on?
“Poor little Tick grew only one centimetre each year. She grew so slowly that her mother despaired of her. Nothing would work. Every morning after milking the cow her mother would set aside the cream off the top of the milk especially for Bukoko so that she could grow up into a big strong woman.”
Sister rolled her eyes. “Even a man whose eyes had been gouged out by an eagle could have seen that this was never going to happen. But Bukoko was a happy child, her round belly was filled with creamy milk and her little legs were strong. They were able to carry her far and wide, and during the day when her mother wasn’t looking she would run off into the nearby forest to play with the Little People.”<
br />
Surely Sister Leonisa was muddled about this. She’s always adding in bits of other stories. Everyone knows that the Little People are from Ireland, not Zambia. Unless there are some who migrated here. Like the Red Legs in Jamaica. Mum told us once that Oliver Cromwell (who seemed to spend his time either killing people, burning down their houses or turning them into slaves) sent some Irish people to Barbados (yup, as slaves) and their descendants stayed there. They became known as Red Legs because they get burnt by the sun, which the Barbadians don’t. I think that must be true, because Mum doesn’t like the sun, and if by accident she sits in it for too long her legs go red. Anyway, to give Sister the benefit of the doubt, maybe Oliver Cromwell enslaved the Little People from Ireland and sent them all to Zambia. But I’m seriously doubtful.
“Every day Bukoko played happily with her little friends, until one day,” Sister lowered her voice to a ghostly whisper, “one day, the day of her thirteenth birthday, she went into the forest and didn’t come back. All the villagers were helpless, weeping and wailing about the loss of their little tick girl. Weeping and wailing never did anyone any good at all. You remember that, girls and boys,” Sister added. “Especially if it’s fake. Then all it is is a lot of irritating noise.
“Night fell and the darkness crept around the houses in the village. Then the moon rose, bright and full in the sky, and the weepers and wailers went to bed, leaving the poor mother alone outside, calling and calling to her daughter. No sign of Bukoko. But, as midnight struck, the mother heard a little voice she recognized, ‘Mama! Mama!’ It was her child, Bukoko. But where was the voice coming from?”
Sister looked at us and Madillo, as usual, forgot she wasn’t supposed to answer.
“From the forest?” she said.
Sister shook her head. “No, Madillo, how do you think the little tick child could climb a tree on her tiny legs?”
Which was a bit unfair as Madillo hadn’t actually said in a tree in the forest. But Sister didn’t give her a chance to reply.
“The voice came from the sky. The mother looked up and, by the light of the moon, she saw Bukoko sitting cross legged on a small soft cloud.
“‘Come down, my child,’ she squawked. ‘Right this minute. We are looking for you.’
“Bukoko shook her head. ‘No, Mama, I’m not coming down. I like it here. Up here nobody calls me a tick or laughs at me, they all think I’m just a perfect girl. I think this is where I’ll stay for ever.’
“And, just like that, whoosh, she disappeared. Never to be seen again.
“Her mother fell to the ground and writhed around in anguish. ‘Gone, gone for ever, my little girl.’
“As the mother lay there, clouds of dust rising all around her, she started to wonder how she would explain this to the rest of the village. She felt shame creep over her. How could she tell the others that her daughter had left her, of her own free will? That wouldn’t do at all.
“So what do you think she did, girls and boys?”
I spoke up. “She shouldn’t be worrying about how she was going to explain it – she should still be upset. How could she be thinking about anything else apart from her daughter stuck up on a cloud?” I said. “And anyway, nobody could sit on a cloud, because a cloud is just millions and billions of water droplets – it’s like saying she was sitting on a cloud of flour, which is impossible.”
“Well, I never said she was going to win Mother of the Year, did I, Bul-Boo?” Sister replied. “And, as I’ve said to you many times before, you can’t explain everything with science and droplets of water and flour. There are other things in this world that you and I can’t see. Magical things. I tell you now, Mrs Scientifically Proven, anything is possible if you just believe it.”
She then carried on as if I’d said nothing.
“The mother’s clever plan was to pretend that a two-legged hyena had come into the forest and bitten Bukoko’s head off so that all that was left of her was her small dead body. So she hurried home and wrapped some of her daughter’s clothes around a medium-sized rock and placed this rock in a wooden casket on a bed of grass. She then called all the neighbours and told them her sad tale. Through her tears she explained that they could view the body but the head was gone, into the belly of the hyena. The funeral was held and Bukoko the Rock was buried. There she lay, silently, until one day when the Archaeologists came and dug her up.”
Sister said “Archaeologists” as if it was a swear word. In her list of Evil People in the World, archaeologists are right up there near the top.
“So, from the stone in a grave they learnt the whole story?” I asked.
I already knew that trying to debate logically with Sister was futile. But today I couldn’t help it.
“On her deathbed the mother confessed to her wicked lie, Bul-Boo, as people do. Her words were repeated and the story was passed down through many centuries until it arrived here today. Now I am passing it on to you and you can pass it on to your children. One day perhaps they will go on a school trip to Ng’ombe Ilede and see the ghost of little Bukoko wandering around happily near the tree called the Sleeping Cow.”
The bell rang for break time and she clapped her hands. “Now, no more questions. Enough is enough.”
As we were getting up to go I saw Madillo grabbing her skirt pocket. She always forgets to switch off her phone. The problem with that is that even if it’s on silent Sister says she can hear a vibrating phone from a mile away. And she can. Luckily this time she didn’t because there was such a racket going on around her.
Madillo read her message once we were safely out of Sister’s sight. It was from Fred.
“I am having a DOOM day,” it said.
I knew straight away why he had sent this to Madillo instead of me. Even though recently Fred has grown taller and deeper-voiced and all that, he still thinks silly things. They never sound silly to Madillo though. She takes all this stuff seriously.
Fred is now convinced that he has gifts. Magical powers inherited from Nokokulu, his great-granny. “Nokokulu” doesn’t actually mean “great-granny”, it means “granny’, but everyone calls her that anyway. I’m not sure why. Even my family does, and she’s not related to us. Anyway, I don’t believe there are such things as magical powers and I certainly don’t believe Fred has them. One of his gifts, he says, is that he can see into the future – but only the bad future. So when he says DOOM we are all supposed to know that he has had one of his tragic prophecies. He never sees good things. In fact he doesn’t see anything in any detail – he gets this big gloom cloud that hangs over his head, and then he knows that sometime in the future something awful is going to befall him. Which is not much of a gift, in my opinion, because we all pretty much know that at some stage in our lives something awful might happen. Well, definitely will happen. All his gift is, as I’ve told him, is that sometimes he imagines the worst, then the worst comes true.
Madillo believes in his gifts and is very jealous of them. She has always wanted magical powers.
His text explained why he wasn’t at school today. When he has these doom-filled predictions he doesn’t even get out of bed in case he falls down the stairs and is left permanently brain-damaged.
I have to say I was feeling pretty doom laden myself. But for different reasons.
FRED
Doom and Gloom
The minute I woke up this morning I knew that everything was going to go wrong. Not just ever-so-slightly wrong but mind-bendingly, end-of-the-world kind of wrong.
How did I know this?
My curse of a gift.
Prediction. Premonition. Foretelling Doom.
To be precise, I can predict when things are going to go wrong. It’s a sixth or seventh or perhaps ninth sense. The only problem is, it is never exact. If it was, I could prevent anything bad ever happening around me. But somehow, when this gift was passed onto me from my wretched great-grandmother, one small bit was left out. The bit that gives the detail.
All I get i
s the general gloom.
Which is why, so far, I have spent quite a lot of my life in a state of peculiar, all-consuming dread. Predicting awfulness, that’s my speciality.
This gift, you see, never forewarns me that everything is going to go absolutely right: that all will be well in the world; that (one of) the girls next door will fall hopelessly in love with me, despite the fact that they only think of me as the boy next door; that my marks in school will miraculously improve or that my parents will transform into normal friendly human beings. No. I’m never forewarned of that. Instead I wake up, as I did this morning, with a large dark cloud hovering over me and a sinking feeling of Unstoppable Wrongness crowding my brain.
I lay there for a while, thinking that I must be mistaken. The sun was shining outside my window, the birds were squawking and the sky was blue. I pulled my sheet up over my eyes and waited. After a very long wait I threw back the sheet with my eyes still closed and jumped out of bed in one movement. When I opened my eyes, there I was with my head in the gloomy cloud. Yup, it was still there. If I was able to stand on my head for longer than a few seconds the cloud would shift position and gather round me on the floor. No escaping this one.
So, here I am. Fred, the boy next door.
There will never be a Fred Junior or Fred II or anything like that. The name Fred started with me and so shall it end. If I have to hear another person telling me all the words Fred rhymes with, I may just whack them. They’ll be the unlucky one among a thousand wisecracking jerks who have felt the need to tell me that Fred rhymes with bed, head and dead.
Hi, I’m Fred.
Oh, poor old Fred, he went to bed and woke up dead with a worm in his head.
It’s beside the point that if he woke up he wasn’t dead anyway.
My second name is Chiti. I won’t even talk about what that rhymes with. But it does mean that I was named after the greatest chief that ever lived in Zambia – Chief Chitimukulu, Chiti the Great. I think that was to make up for my first name. I am one hundred per cent certain there were no great chiefs called Fred. Even the two words together sound stupid. Chief Fred. I can’t imagine people bowing down before a name like that, unless they were trying to hide the fact that they were laughing.