The Sleeping Baobab Tree

by Paula Leyden

  “Fred, you have to come in now,” Joseph called from the back door.

  Madillo always used to think that Fred’s little brother, Joseph, was a hermaphrodite. But she doesn’t any more; she told me the other day that she only thought that because she believed that a hermaphrodite was the same as an amoeba, where one cell splits into two. She couldn’t believe he was Fred’s brother because they are so different, so she thought he had created himself. I did explain to her that if that was the case there would be two identical Josephs and at any moment they might split into more, then there would be hundreds of them before your very eyes. I explained how it’s called binary fission, but she said that didn’t sound as nice as hermaphrodite. Imagine if science was about what sounded nice!

  When Fred didn’t answer, Joseph ran up to the hedge. “Mum says you have to come and wash the dishes because you’re better now, and the next-door twins have to go home.”

  He didn’t look at us when he said this. He never does. Maybe he’s scared of us.

  “OK,” Fred said, resigned. “So I’ll see you in the morning on the way to school and I’ll tell Mum you’re coming to stay over tomorrow night?”

  “OK,” I said.

  “We didn’t even discuss what will happen when Nokokulu discovers us,” Madillo said after Fred had gone. “That’s going to be terrible.”

  “Let’s talk about that tomorrow,” I said.“And anyway, what can she do to us?”

  I paused as the question left my lips. “On second thoughts, don’t answer that.”

  The last thing I wanted was a list of the ways a witch can kill her victims. It would be a very long one.

  BULL - BOO

  Science, Witches and Disappearing Patients

  When Mum and Dad arrive back from work in the afternoons it isn’t always the best time to ask them anything, but today we had no option. Anyway it wasn’t asking them a big thing, we often go to sleep over at Fred’s.

  They get really tired at work, Mum especially. Dad seems to be able to put things out of his mind but Mum can’t. I could see Mum had been crying when she came in this evening. I hate seeing that. If Madillo ever sees her crying she thinks it’s because they’re going to get divorced – but it’s not. It’s always work things. Mum told me once that if she’d known how much sadness there was going to be in medicine she might have become a beautician. At least then all her customers would have been happy when they left her. But I know she doesn’t think that all the time. Anyway she’s a bit clumsy so she’d smudge the faces of her customers if she was a beautician and they wouldn’t be too happy about that.

  When she’s been crying it’s most often about children whose parents have died.

  There are a million AIDS orphans in our country. One million. I don’t really like the way they are called AIDS orphans. You never hear about cancer orphans or heart-attack orphans or even malaria orphans. It makes them sound as though they are more than just orphans, as if that’s not bad enough on its own. Dad says it’s because people need to know how terrible this disease is. But how could anyone not know that?

  It’s seeing those children that upsets Mum the most – when little babies are brought into the clinic by their older brothers and sisters who have to grow up very fast and become mini parents. I heard her speaking to Dad about it once, when I was supposed to be asleep. I suppose a lot of what I learn about Mum and Dad is when I’m supposed to be asleep. This time it was a pretty serious thing.

  She said she wanted to adopt another child.

  Another child? Just like that. As if we’re not enough for her. As if we don’t need to be asked.

  Dad said that it would make no difference as there are millions of children all over the world who need a home, and we couldn’t adopt all of them. I didn’t listen to any more because once I’d got over the shock of it, all I could hear were the words “another child”. So, were we the first adopted children? It’s not that I’d have minded if we were, because then we’d have two family histories. (I like family histories, I’ve traced ours back to my great-great-great-grandmother.) But I wished they’d told us. Luckily I knew I was related to Madillo at least.

  The next day, I asked Mum and she just laughed and put a mirror in front of me and said, “Who do you look like?”

  I gave her the obvious answer: Madillo. But I don’t think that was what she was looking for.

  “Yes, Bul-Boo, we all know that. But both of you look like half me and half Dad, so you can’t be adopted. Although we have been thinking about adopting a child. How would you feel about that?”

  Mum often asks us how we’d feel about something but normally it’s after she’s already decided that’s what she’s going to do. She’s what Dad calls a benign dictator. She rules us with a smile on her face and mostly makes the right decisions.

  “We’d feel OK, I think. I’ll ask Madillo. Maybe adopt someone the same age as Joseph so he has a friend? How does Dad feel about it?”

  It’s always a bit harder for her to be the benign dictator with Dad. She has to use more persuasion on him.

  “He’ll be fine,” she said, “but we haven’t decided.” Translated that meant Dad was not too sure about the whole thing.

  I’d like to have an extra brother or sister, I think. Or both, especially if I knew that their parents had died and they were alone in this world. When I told Madillo about it she got a glazed look on her face and said, “That means we’d be their saviours.” Which was a bit extreme.

  But that was quite a long time ago and we’ve heard nothing since then, so I suppose Mum’s still trying to persuade Dad.

  Anyway, I knew the reason for her tears today, and it had nothing to do with orphans.

  This problem of the disappeared patients was one that I knew I could do something about. I wasn’t blowing my own trumpet, as Dad would say, but I was the only person in this house with decent detecting skills. Seeing Mum upset just made me more certain that I had to follow the one slim lead I had to go on. We had no choice. We would have to go on this trip and study every move of Suspect Number 1. The one who shall be known as “N”.

  I couldn’t help rushing my words a little when I told Mum and Dad that we were planning a sleepover at Fred’s on Friday. Even though it was technically the truth, I still felt bad.

  “And Fred’s mum is OK with it?” Mum asked.

  “She’s fine,” I said. “She doesn’t really notice us much.” Which is true.

  Madillo, in the meantime, was just sitting at the kitchen table eating toast covered with something unidentifiable, as if she had nothing to do with any of us. She’s good at that, being the invisible, innocent, toast-eating twin. That way she never has to tell a lie. But I have told her it makes no difference because she is aiding and abetting me, which just makes her a silent guilty party.

  “And the witch?” Mum said.

  I probably forgot to mention that Mum also thinks that Nokokulu is a witch. Mum who is a doctor – who spent years studying science to become a doctor. She thinks our neighbour Fred’s great-granny is a witch. Sort of.

  Dad is on my side in the Witch versus Science debate.

  He didn’t say anything this time, just clutched his head as if he was in agony.

  Mum looked embarrassed, like Madillo does when she’s said something ridiculous. I think sometimes she lets things like that out before thinking about them.

  “I was only joking,” she added quickly.

  She should have just kept quiet and let the whole thing pass with a mere head clutch.

  “No you weren’t,” Dad said. “You actually think that here, on Twin Palms Road in twenty-first century Zambia, we live next door to a witch. Which part of our medical degree was taught under the heading Witches and Other Magical Things? I must have been asleep that day.”

  “I just think there are some things that science can’t explain, that’s all. It’s not a sin,” Mum said, leaving the room. A good way to end an argument, I suppose, leaving the other person with no
one to argue with any more.

  Dad looked at Madillo still munching away. “This is all your fault, you know,” he said, grinning. “My wife, your dear mother, never thought anything like this till the day you came home from Fred’s and announced that we now live next door to a witch. It was the day Nokokulu came to live with them, do you remember?”

  Madillo nodded.

  If Madillo is involved in a less than truthful occasion she just nods or mumbles. I can tell immediately. All she wanted right then was for Dad to leave the room in case he went back to the subject of us going over to Fred’s. She wasn’t even defending her witch theory.

  Dad shook his head. “So what are you going to do at Fred’s?”

  This time she couldn’t keep silent as it was a direct question.

  “Nothing much. Usual stuff,” she replied.

  Dad is very easily satisfied by answers that aren’t answers, so he just said, “Oh,” and left the room. Probably to hunt down Mum so he could carry on the argument.

  Mum always tells him that he should listen to us with more than half an ear, which is an expression I still cannot quite picture. But in this case she was right.

  If it had been Mum asking the question she would have wanted to know what “nothing much” meant and what kind of “usual stuff”. But, luckily for us, not only was she embarrassed by her witch comment, but her mind was also on other things. Sad things.

  BULL - BOO

  Doomed Archaeologists

  On the way to school today we stopped to wait for Fred at his gate and Nokokulu was in the garden. She didn’t say anything, just waved at us with a maniacal grin on her face. I first discovered the word “maniacal” when I was trying to describe Sister Leonisa and Dad suggested it. I suppose it’s not really fair but it does describe Sister better than any other word does.

  Madillo grabbed my arm. “She knows. She knows what we’re planning – you can see it.”

  “She always looks like that,” I said. “How could she possibly know?”

  “She has ways and means,” Madillo said quietly, still holding onto my arm.

  At that point Nokokulu said, “Ha!”

  Just that, nothing more. Madillo may well have been right. Nokokulu’s voice had a triumphant sound to it.

  Fred came running down the driveway, his shoes in one hand and his lunch in the other. He is always late.

  “Sorry, sorry, I’m ready now,” he said as he waved goodbye to Nokokulu with the hand holding the shoes.

  We started walking, and Madillo said, “Fred, I think she knows our plan.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” he said confidently. “If she did she would have said something. She’s no good at keeping her mouth shut, you know that. Do you think she would have stayed silent when she saw you if she knew the plan? Never.”

  “But if she does discover it, then what?”

  Fred paused. “Then I’m doomed. Totally, infinitely, inextricably and horrendously doomed.”

  Fred likes long words. He says they’re his indelible trademark. (See what I mean?) I think that of the three of us he is probably the most dramatic. Nothing is ever just ordinary with Fred – it’s always either the very, very best or the very, very worst.

  “That would be your second doom prophecy day in a row,” Madillo said, with a suitably stricken face.

  “No, that can only happen once the doom of the first one has been fulfilled. That’s how it works. Doom prophecy – doom fulfilment,” Fred said.

  The King and Queen of Exaggeration, that’s who they are.

  As an example. If there was a green mamba in the mango tree in our back garden, I would say, “There’s a green mamba in the garden, we need to find Ifwafwa, the snake man, to take it away.”

  Madillo would say, “You will never believe what just happened. The biggest green mamba ever seen in this road, probably in this city, is in the mango tree out the back. No one knows how it came to be here, but it’s very strange that it chose our back garden and our mango tree. We’ll have to see whether we can track down Ifwafwa to help us solve the mystery.”

  And Fred would say, “A cataclysmic event has just taken place. We are all lucky to have survived it. An evil spirit, clothed in the sinuous body of a green mamba, has taken up residence in the twins’ mango tree. If Ifwafwa is still alive we will summon him. If he isn’t, we are all condemned to a miserable and slow death.”

  Yes. I am surrounded by them.

  Madillo looked at Fred. “Well, if she doesn’t know we’ll just have to make sure it carries on that way, won’t we?”

  I was starting to get a small niggle of regret in the back of my mind about this plan. Here we were, about to smuggle ourselves into the boot of an ancient yellow car being driven by an even older, slightly mad person who had, let’s not forget, recently become a kidnapping and murder suspect. Not to mention the rumour of a Man-Beast on the loose.

  Mum and Dad would have no idea at all where we were, and I would be losing a full day in my investigation (which in my black notebook I was now calling An Enquiry into Unusual Disappearances).

  Mum once took us to watch this movie called 127 Hours about a guy who got trapped in a canyon for 127 hours and had to cut his own arm off to escape. The main point of the movie, as far as I could see, was that you should always tell people where you’re going so that if you disappear they know where to look for you. This guy didn’t tell anyone, and every hour that passed while he was helplessly trapped by this rock he regretted it.

  I didn’t want to end up with a movie being made about us called The Mystery of the Disappearing Twins. Imagine if Mum and Dad had to appear on ZTV crying and saying, “They never told us where they were going. All they said was that they were sleeping over at Fred’s house next door. Please bring our daughters back safely.”

  Maybe the newspapers would accuse them of being careless parents, which would be awful. And even more awful would be the fact that we would have just disappeared off the face of the earth, two lying ungrateful children.

  On the plus side, Dad gave us mini smart phones for our last birthday, despite Mum objecting to it, because they have GPS in them and he said it meant we could always be found. I’m not sure if that works when the battery is flat though, and Madillo’s is always flat. I’ll just have to make sure mine is charged.

  We walked into the classroom and Sister’s face twisted itself into the almost-kind look. “Ah, Fred, you’re back. Are you better?”

  He nodded. He’s not that delighted about being Sister’s favourite, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

  On Sister’s desk there was a pile of books and pictures about Egypt. I love it when we do Egypt, but that’s normally in History. Sister had never done it with us in Religious Studies before.

  “Sit down, sit down,” she said. “Wait quietly for the others, then we’ll begin. We’re going back to Ng’ombe Ilede today.”

  I saw Madillo looking sideways at Fred. He went a little pale I think.

  As soon as everyone else was in, Sister started. She wrote A R C H A E O L O G I S T S in big uneven letters on the blackboard, and next to them she drew a skull and crossbones. Like this:

  “So,” she said. “Archaeologists. The scourge of the living and the dead. Men and their shovels, digging up people and things that have no wish whatsoever to be dug up. If I ever hear of one of you becoming an archaeologist I will tell the world that I had nothing to do with it.”

  She stood there looking accusingly at each of us in turn. If any of us did happen to become an archaeologist, I can’t think that the first question we’d be asked would be “Did Sister Leonisa put you up to this?”

  In my mind I was ticking the new column in the little red book: STORIES THAT HAVE DEATH IN THEM.

  “There they are, the thousand-year-old people, sleeping away peacefully in their graves, and what happens? A nosy little man comes knocking on their coffin walls, ‘Let me in, let me in, I want to take you to pieces and inspect your bones.’

  �
�But, what you need to remember is that these nosy archaeologists have the most dangerous job in the world. Why? Because, naturally enough, the thousand-year-old people don’t want to be disturbed, so they breathe their Dead Breath all over the prying men, and one by one they all die in horrible deathly ways. Which serves them right.”

  I do sometimes wonder whether Sister just dresses up as a nun. I don’t think nuns are supposed to say things like “serves them right” when people die. And since when has a death been anything other than deathly?

  “Does every archaeologist in the whole world die like that?” Fred asked. He’s allowed to ask and answer questions to his heart’s content.

  “Yes, Fred, every last miserable one of them. So, for your own good, don’t even think of that as a job,” Sister said.

  “In Egypt,” she continued, “which is the favourite hunting ground of the archaeologists, this has a name: the Curse of the Pharaohs. Anyone looking for scientific proof” – she didn’t even need to look at me – “can find it there. Off they went, a merry band of prying men, and they dug up the tomb of a boy king Tutankhamun. One of them, Howard Carter, walked into the tomb, and the minute he did so his pet canary, who had stayed at home, was killed by a cobra. Instant yellow-bird death.”

  I wondered if she thought the canary deserved it too.

  “That exact minute, boys and girls, that he dared enter the tomb of the famous Tutankhamun. Now,” she picked up one of her pictures, “tell me what you see.”