by Paula Leyden
“We each have our own ways,” said Mum, in her giving-up voice.
“And our own ways are not always good. Look at my own precious girl: she thought she was too big to listen. Look what happened to her.”
Nokokulu was going on about my grandmother again. Although it’s funny to think of her as a grandmother when she was only sixteen when she died.
“I understand, Nokokulu.” Mum had not only given up but was now feeling sorry for her. “It’s very sad. You’re right.”
Right, Mum? About what? About a woman who’s been dead for ever or about telling us what to do whether we like it or not?
Sometimes I despair of my mum.
“You have strong hands for the garden, Sarah,” said the witch, changing the subject very successfully. That was as close to a kind word as she was ever going to give my mother.
“Thank you,” said Mum.
“Maybe,” continued Nokokulu, never wanting to finish on a good note in case somebody might start thinking well of her, “maybe when you are older you will get sense and instead of planting useless bushes and flowers you will start growing vegetables.”
BULL - BOO
The Baobab That Fell Over
After Sister had told us the story about Bukoko the Little Tick Child I looked up Ng’ombe Ilede. Sister was right about one thing: it is also called The Place of the Sleeping Cow or The Place of the Cow Who Lies Down, because of a baobab tree that fell over but carried on growing. In some ways it does look like a sleeping cow (no one has decided yet whether this is a normal cow or an elephant cow) but in other ways it looks like a strange human trying to do sit-ups.
I suppose Sister was also right about another thing: it is an ancient burial ground, so the pretend body of Bukoko the Little Tick Child could have been buried there, if she had ever existed. But I still think Sister made that part up for dramatic effect.
While I was looking it up, Madillo came in. Well, she didn’t just come in, she bounced in like a rubber ball.
“Fred just sent you a message,” she said, holding up my phone. Nokokulu is taking him, this Saturday, to Ng’ombe Ilede. Can you believe that? I sometimes wonder if she and Sister Leonisa are in cahoots, or maybe they exist on the same astral plane.”
She showed me the text, oblivious firstly to the fact that the phone is actually mine and she shouldn’t be reading my messages, and secondly to the fact that there is no such thing as an astral plane.
“Coincidence. That’s all. They happen all the time,” I said to her. “And he’s pretty lucky to be going to a place of such significant archaeological interest.” I had just read that on the Wikipedia page and it sounded pretty good. But Madillo didn’t seem too impressed.
“Coincidence? I don’t think so. On exactly the same day that Sister tells us that particular story, and Nokokulu hears us talking about her abducting people, she announces that she wants Fred to come with her on a little drive. To an ancient burial ground! That’s more than a coincidence, that’s creepy. Why would you take your great-grandson on a trip to visit graves? There’s something wrong with that.”
“People visit graves all over the world,” I argued. “It’s an interesting thing to see how old the people were who died, and when they died.” I was trying not to wonder about the coincidence.
Madillo looked at the computer screen. “And, you see: Ng’ombe Ilede. Right there. On the computer. How weird is that?”
“Not one bit weird. I looked it up, as I always do when Sister tells us a new story. Mainly to find out how much of it is true.”
Madillo shook her head. “No. If you add in the fact that Fred had one of his premonitions this morning, this is not looking good, Bul-Boo, not good at all.”
My phone beeped and Madillo looked at the message.
“Fred wants us to come to the hedge to talk about it,” she said. “Let’s go.”
When Madillo is a little bit scared about something she gets excited at the same time. Maybe both those things happen in the same part of the brain. Dad showed me these pictures in New Scientist once where they took scans of the brains of people eating chocolate. When they ate the first bits of chocolate the happiness part of the brain lit up on the scans. Which makes sense. But as they ate more and more, other parts lit up, the parts that were trying to tell them to stop. Which also makes sense. I suppose you can get sick of too much chocolate, although in our house we never get the opportunity to try that theory out.
I must remember to put into my black notebook this fact: The happiness part of Madillo’s brain lights up just a little bit when she’s scared.
BULL - BOO
Roaming Ancestors and Sacrifices
When we got down to the gap in the hedge between our houses Fred was waiting for us.
“Now do you believe me when I tell you about my premonitions?” he asked me.
I didn’t answer, mainly because I didn’t want to upset him by saying no.
“I don’t want to go with her on my own. We’re leaving on Saturday morning at eight o’clock and she’s planning to go for the whole day,” he said, looking worried. When Fred looks worried you feel really sorry for him. It’s something about the way he wrinkles up his forehead.
“Can’t you tell your mum and dad that?” Madillo asked.
“I did, but Dad said it would be interesting and that it’s always good to know where you come from, even though I don’t come from there.”
“Don’t your dad and Nokokulu come from the Northern Province, when Ng’ombe Ilede is in the Southern?” I said.
“Yes, but try telling Nokokulu that. She just rubs her hands together and tells me that her ancestors roamed all over the country. She says she wants me to become a proper member of this ‘great family’. Whatever that means.”
“A proper member? Does she mean traditionally or what?” Madillo said.
“It could mean anything, but I don’t want to be part of some kind of ceremony,” Fred added with a shudder.
I like the word “shudder”. It sounds like the thing it’s describing.
“Ceremony? Like a sacrifice?” Madillo said, jumping over every possible reasonable explanation straight to the worst one.
“Nokokulu is not about to sacrifice anything,” I said, “least of all her favourite great-grandson. Maybe she just wants to teach Fred some manners. She’s always going on about manners.”
“You’re forgetting the main thing, Bul-Boo,” Madillo said. “You always forget the main thing. She’s a witch. And witches sacrifice things to appease the gods. You name any country in the world and you’ll find human sacrifice. Look at the Germans, and the Tibetans and the Celts and the Aztecs and—”
“Do the Germans sacrifice people?” Fred asked, temporarily distracted from his own fate.
“Well, not so much today, but they did. Don’t you remember Sister Leonisa telling us about the Windeby Boy? He was German and the same age as you, Fred—”
“Fred wasn’t there for the Human Sacrifice lessons,” I interrupted her. “It was when you went with your mum to England, Fred, and missed two weeks of school. The Windeby Boy was one of the ones they found in a bog in Germany.”
“And he had a headband on and long blond hair. Not like yours, Fred,” Madillo added, to try to make up for telling Fred that the boy had been the same age as him.
“Madillo,” I said, before she could continue, “Nokokulu is not going to sacrifice Fred. That’s just ridiculous.” I was glad that Fred had missed those lessons. They had been very gruesome and he’d have felt even worse now if he’d sat through them.
“Well, what if she wants to experiment on him with her curses and spells? What if she decides to change him into a chameleon just because she can?” Madillo said.
“I’ve never seen her change a human into anything,” Fred said, shaking his head. “I know she’s a witch and everything, but she wouldn’t do that.”
At last one of them was seeing just a little sense.
“I don’t know if I
should tell you this,” he continued, his expression changing, “but she was also talking about something she called the Man-Beast, some terrible creature with a bad memory. She was speaking almost as if we’re going there to hunt him down.”
Now I could see his worry turning into real fear.
“She’s mad,” I said. “Man-Beast? There’s no such thing.”
“She thinks he’s the one who took away my granny. She says he appears every forty years and now he’s come to Ng’ombe Ilede.”
“That’s it!” Madillo said, bowing her head in the same way she does to Nokokulu. “It’s him – the Man-Beast. He’s the one taking all Mum’s patients. He’s the one who has Aunt Kiki. I was wrong. It’s not Nokokulu; it’s him. The Man-Beast has returned and is rampaging about the land stealing people. Who knows who’ll be next?” She peered round the hedge as she spoke, as if to make sure he wasn’t standing there listening while he decided which one of us to take.
Way to go, Madillo. Why don’t you make things ten times as bad?
Madillo leant forward and grabbed hold of Fred’s hand. “We won’t abandon you, Fred. We won’t let the Man-Beast claim you as his next victim.”
“Stop it!” I said. “Stop it now! There’s no such thing. Nokokulu is the biggest liar I’ve ever met. She’s just trying to frighten you, Fred. And you, Madillo, think for a minute. Have you ever seen a Man-Beast, whatever on earth that might be?”
Madillo looked a little deflated but it wasn’t enough to stop her.
“Just because you haven’t seen something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” she said. “And, if you remember, Bukoko’s mother said Bukoko was killed by a two-legged hyena in exactly the same place.”
Fred nodded. “True,” he said. “Very true. And that explains how my granny disappeared.”
Suddenly everyone believed Sister Leonisa’s story because it suited their argument, even Fred, in spite of the fact that he hadn’t been there to hear it!
“You’re both forgetting the main point,” I said. “This is real life. Aunt Kiki and seven other people, who all go to Mum’s clinic, have disappeared. They can’t have been eaten by a monster otherwise the two who have already died would have had bite marks on them. And, if you remember, Bukoko’s mother made up the story about the two-legged hyena because she was embarrassed. And” – it had to be said – “we have yet to eliminate your great-granny from our enquiries, Fred.”
I didn’t mention that she was only on the list in pencil and as an initial. I just wanted to get their attention.
“Yes, of course,” said Madillo, pleased I was even considering Nokokulu as a suspect.
Fred was silent. He looked down at the ground, which is what he does when he doesn’t want to answer a question. I’ve never understood that, as if the ground will somehow save him.
“Two died?” he said finally, in a small voice. “I didn’t know that. I saw Aunt Kiki a few weeks ago. They would have told me if something had happened to her.”
I was almost as bad as Madillo, blurting out hurtful things without thinking.
“Sorry, Fred, I forgot we hadn’t told you everything. We don’t have a lot of facts, but I overheard Mum telling Dad that your Aunt Kiki and seven others who used to come to the clinic have all disappeared. Perhaps,” I said, “Nokokulu hasn’t been told yet. Maybe she didn’t hear the news?”
“Oh, she heard. Definitely. 20/20, you know,” said Fred.
“That’s it then,” said Madillo. “She probably has them all locked away somewhere. She’s probably sacrificing them to the ancestors one by one in order to get her daughter back, the one she’s always talking about.”
“Including her granddaughter Kiki?” I said, trying to sound rational. “Come on now. What do you think, Fred?”
“I don’t know,” said Fred. “I asked her about Aunt Kiki. I asked when she was coming to visit.”
Fred is a master of letting information out in dribs and drabs.
“And?” I said, trying not to sound impatient.
“She shouted at me and then stomped out of the room. She didn’t answer my question, she just looked really, really angry.”
I looked at Madillo. She raised her eyebrows. “What did I tell you?” was all she said.
“Do you want us to come with you to Ng’ombe Ilede?” I asked Fred, a part of me hoping that he’d say no.
“Yes,” he said gratefully. “Yes, yes, yes.”
My hope faded as quickly as it had arrived. But he said, “Nokokulu specifically said you can’t come.”
“Both of us?” Madillo asked.
Fred nodded.
I carried on regardless. “We’ll have to persuade Mum and Dad – they’ve warned us never to get into the car with her. Nothing to do with her being a murderous witch: Dad says she’s just not to be trusted on the road.”
Nokokulu has this bright yellow car that looks about as old as she is. Fred says it’s lucky it’s bright yellow because at least other drivers can see her coming and get off the road fast. She has a pile of cushions on the driver’s seat so she can see over the steering wheel, and on the dashboard she has a stuffed rat. A real one – she says it’s to make sure thieves don’t steal the car. Its mouth is wide open so you can see all of its small pointy teeth. Fred says she stuffed it herself after cursing it to death. He’s just relieved it isn’t a hamster.
Fred looked as if he was deciding whether to defend her or not. She is his great-grandmother, after all, and you are kind of obliged to defend your family, even when you don’t always feel like it – and even if they could very well be a homicidal maniac.
“Well, Dad says she’s not that bad,” he said at last. “She just drives very slowly. And she’s never had an accident, apart from that one man on his bicycle who got in her way. He was all right afterwards, just a few bruises. His bicycle was a bit mangled but Dad bought him a new one. And that was before she got the cushions, so she couldn’t see the road properly – or cyclists.”
“Well,” Madillo said, “I still don’t think Mum and Dad will let us go, and if Nokokulu doesn’t want us … we’ll just have to sneak into the car.”
“How?” I asked. “How does anyone sneak past Nokokulu? Or Mum for that matter?” I excluded Dad because we all know how to sneak past him.
“We’ll tell them we’re going for a sleepover at Fred’s and then just before you leave we’ll get into the boot,” Madillo said, as if she’d done this a hundred times before. “And we’ll be back in the afternoon anyway, so they won’t even know we’ve left.”
“I suppose technically we’ll be telling the truth,” I said, “because we will be staying at your house for the night. We just won’t tell them the other bit. And we will be back in the afternoon, won’t we, Fred?”
“We should be,” said Fred. “Ng’ombe Ilede is only about two hours’ drive away, just past Siavonga.”
“We’ll have to tell your mum and dad that we’ll be going back home before you leave,” I said quietly. “Otherwise they’ll wonder where we are. Will they be up to help you get ready in the morning?”
Fred shook his head mournfully. He does mournful better than anyone I know. Sometimes he imagines that his parents neglect him terribly. Which they don’t.
“OK, so we’ll say goodbye as if we’re going home early in the morning, then we’ll sneak into the car and you’ll have to close the boot before she sees,” Madillo said. “We’ll have to bring a knife or something in case she doesn’t open the boot when you get there. Then we can release ourselves to stop us suffocating or dying of overheating. I’d hate to die of overheating.”
When Madillo plans things she always takes into account every eventuality. I was waiting for the rest of the list. Sure enough…
“We’ll put water bottles into the boot and food supplies – chocolate probably, like the mountaineers. Or is that only so the St Bernards can find them?”
“Chocolate has nothing to do with dogs, Madillo,” I said. “In fact if you feed a
dog chocolate it can die. St Bernards carry brandy to lost mountaineers to warm them up, they don’t sniff out chocolate bars. Plus we can scrap the knife. Nothing could suffocate in Nokokulu’s car – have you seen how many holes there are in the bodywork?”
“Anyway, we should probably also put pillows in the boot so we don’t bump our heads and get concussion,” Madillo said, ignoring me.
At this rate we were setting ourselves up for a few months in the boot of the car.
“Are you sure?” Fred said.
We both looked at him. Sometimes we forget that someone else is there, even when that person is the main subject of the conversation. Mum says it’s because we hear each other more easily than we hear anyone else.
“Are we sure about what?” we said in unison.
“About coming with me?”
I thought for a minute. If we went with him it would mean having to lie about where we were, and I hate doing that to Mum and Dad because they don’t do that to us.
Madillo and Fred were looking at me. Fred for his own reasons, which I don’t always want to think about, and Madillo because she was waiting for me to say, “Yes, we’re sure.”
There are things that are important in life, and one is that you should always look after your friends. Fred is more than our best friend, he is the one person we know almost as well as we know each other. We couldn’t let him go on his own, however many lies we would have to tell.
“Yes. We’re sure. We’ll do it,” I said. “If you promise it’s only a day trip and that when we get there you’ll let us out. We couldn’t let you go by yourself – that’d be awful.”
Fred actually blushed when I said that and then I felt funny. I was waiting for Madillo to say something, but she didn’t. Thank goodness.
But I am starting to think she’s right about Fred having a crush on me.
Sister Leonisa says that the “sickness of love” turns clever people into marshmallows, but that luckily she’s never been affected by it. It would be hard to think of Sister in love. I can’t imagine her looking at someone adoringly. Sister has only a few looks: a glare, a withering look, a pitying stare, an almost-kind look (that’s reserved for Fred the Favourite), a “prove that I’m wrong” look and an “end of conversation, raised eyebrows” look. None of those, apart from the almost-kind one, would go down too well with someone she was supposed to be in love with. And the almost-kind one is a bit strange because she twists her face to get to it, as if the kind muscles are not used to moving. Which I suppose they aren’t.