by Paula Leyden
I sighed. Neither of them were going to be any use.
“Well…” I said, trying to think clearly.
“Well what?” Nokokulu’s voice shouted, right next to my ear.
I jumped up.
There she was, on her hands and knees, like a ninja. She had somehow crept from her seat, round the car and sneaked up on us.
Madillo burst into loud noisy tears and stayed crouched down behind me. Fred looked stricken.
There was nothing we could say that would make this any better at all.
Nokokulu stood up.
“Where do these useless, useless, bad, wicked, stupid, smelly little children come from to torment me?” she shouted to the sky. “And YOU,” she said as she turned to Fred and grabbed his ear. “Bad, bad boy. Very bad. As bad as a rotten pumpkin. As bad as a snake with no brain. Why?” she wailed, letting his ear go and falling to the ground in a little angry heap of chitenges, “why am I cursed in this way?”
Not one of us said a word.
She sat up and dusted herself off.
“And the doctors?” she said very quietly to me and Madillo. “The doctors know you are here?”
I shook my head.
A small grin appeared on her face. A small evil grin.
“Oh. Not good. Not good at all. Big, big trouble coming your way, mpundu. Big, big trouble.”
As if we didn’t know that already.
Madillo’s sobs were subsiding but she remained hidden behind me
Fred was just looking at the ground muttering to himself under his breath.
Nokokulu heard him too.
“And now I have a great-grandson who talks to himself. No good will come of this I tell you. No good at all. There was a man in my village who always talked to himself and he quickly forgot how to talk to other people. No woman would marry him. Who wants a man who says nothing to anybody? Nobody, I tell you. So what did he do? He ran away from the village and they say he is living among the animals, because he has learnt how to talk to them. You want to become like that man, Chiti? You think one of these twins will marry a man who talks to himself?”
I felt so sorry for Fred. He looked like he’d rather be anywhere than here. I am very pleased that my relatives don’t get cross with us in front of our friends. It’s a horrible embarrassing thing.
Nokokulu stood up.
“Well, now you’re here you’ll just have to stay while I do my business. On my own,” she added, looking at Fred. “The Man-Beast would smell a lying boy from miles away. So. No silly singing or shouting. You do what I say, when I say it. No arguments. No laughing.”
She didn’t need to add that one in. I wasn’t sure any of us would ever laugh again.
“I have work to do tonight. You three will stay in the tent while I do my work.”
“Tonight?” I ventured. “We’re staying here tonight?”
Her grin reappeared.
“I’m staying here tonight. You want to go home, you can go. I don’t think it was me who invited you here!”
Maybe Fred hadn’t been exaggerating after all. Everything he had ever said about her was probably true. Imagine her being quite happy to let us walk off on our own in the middle of the bush!
“Not going?” she asked, watching as neither me nor Madillo went anywhere. “Fine. We will all stay here tonight then. I have two tents – one for Chiti, one for me – and I have food. You can stay with Chiti in his tent and try and get some sleep in between all the talking he does to himself.”
With that, she turned and got back into the driver’s seat, shouting as she went, “Get in the car now. We have only one mile more then we will be at The Place of the Cow Who Lies Down.” She started up the engine and all three of us ran and jumped into the car.
Everything had gone wrong. Absolutely everything. Now we were stuck here for the night, when Mum and Dad were expecting us back. When we didn’t arrive they’d phone Fred’s parents, who would tell them we had gone home early that morning. Then they’d contact the police and a huge search party would be sent out. They’d probably think we’d been abducted by the same person who had killed Sonkwe and Thandiwe.
That’s the problem with making something up. It grows. One small lie leads to another and another till there’s nothing left for you to do but lie full time. Imagine being condemned to a life like that? You’d wake up in the morning and have to try to remember all the lies you’d told the day before just to make sure you didn’t make any mistakes.
Terrible.
BULL - BOO
Storm Clouds Gathering
The car was completely silent as we travelled the last mile to the huge sideways baobab tree. Madillo sat and drew a tent with three miserable faces looking out of it and giant black clouds above it. Fred just stared straight ahead. I checked my phone and saw that I actually had three bars of signal on it. I considered phoning Dad or Mum. They’d be mad, there was no question about that, but it couldn’t possibly be worse than the night we were facing, camping with an angry Nokokulu who was here to search for some unknown two-legged half man, half beast creature. She had gone back to the top of my list of suspects. I was now considering writing her full name in. In pen.
But if I phoned Dad and he came to fetch us it would mean us leaving Fred here on his own with her. We couldn’t do that. We couldn’t let him down like that.
Nokokulu braked hard and the car skidded on the dirt road. “Wait here,” she said to us. “I will be back. Don’t talk.”
We all just looked at one another. Right now there was no way we were going to disobey her.
I looked down at my phone again. Still a few bars. I decided to put off phoning and go online and resume my search instead.
“That’s really strange,” I whispered, forgetting the instruction.
“What?” asked Fred.
“Well, I’ve been searching for something here, in Zambia, and a US site keeps coming up.”
“If there aren’t many instances of the thing you’re searching for in Zambia,” said Fred, who liked an excuse to show how much he knew about the Web, “then sites located elsewhere will come up.”
“But there are a lot of instances of this in Zambia.”
“Then you can be sure that the US site makes some reference to Zambia,” said Fred with authority. “It might not be on the front page, it could be a link or a meta tag, but most likely there’s text on that site that says something about Zambia. You should look through every page.”
My phone signal was failing as the Ratsberg and Wrath site started to show itself on my little screen. I couldn’t see anything obviously linked to Zambia at first, then as I was about to exit I saw a funny link right at the bottom of the splash page: HOPE IN AFRICA! I clicked the link, but then the signal went altogether. I asked the others to check their phones. Madillo’s of course was out of charge. Fred had no signal either.
Nokokulu arrived at my window and banged on it. “Open up, mpundu!” she shouted. “I don’t know why you think these silly phone things will work in this place where powerful spirits rule the air and the earth? This tree,” she said pointing to the baobab, “this tree doesn’t want to hear any city noises here. You understand?”
She shook her head sorrowfully. “No sense, no sense in the brains of children in this century. Now, out, out all of you. You,” she said, pointing at me, “take the tents out of the boot and put them up. The biggest one is mine and I want it near the tree. And you, Chiti, when the tents are fixed, you get my suitcase out of the car and put it into my tent.”
I’m not sure why Madillo escaped any work, but she did. It was probably because she had still not uttered a single word so Nokokulu had forgotten she was even there.
I wasn’t about to ask questions, anyway. I just got the tents out of the boot and started to put them up. Fred looked like he wanted to help, but because he hadn’t been instructed to he just stood to one side watching. He was right – we didn’t need any more trouble from Nokokulu.
Ma
dillo sat down near where I was working until Nokokulu shouted at her, “Hey, small twin, you know if you sit in the dirt too long you’ll get worms in your bum? Mad Girl, if the worms find a way in, they’ll crawl up to your brain and make you even madder.”
I think Nokokulu is missing that switch in her head which stops parents, grandparents and especially great-grandparents from being rude to other people’s children. She just doesn’t have it.
Last time she called Madillo “Mad Girl”, Fred asked her not to and she said that our mum and dad shouldn’t have given her a name which starts with “mad”. Sometimes she shortens my name to Boo and thinks it’s really funny to shout it out as if she’s giving me a fright.
Madillo just got up without saying anything and went and stood next to Fred. As they were standing there watching me a dark cloud appeared, as if from nowhere. The sky had been bright and sunny all morning, but now the cloud blocked all that out. It was definitely a thundercloud and I saw Fred looking at it and thinking the same thing. He’s not fond of thunderstorms. He has a theory that he is going to be killed by a bolt of lightning – and that’s not so far-fetched because a lot of people do die each year in Zambia from being struck by lightning. One of the reasons Fred stopped playing soccer was because he read that story about a soccer team in Congo where all eleven players were killed by lightning. He said no one from the other team was killed. After reading that nothing would persuade him to go back to playing.
Fred’s father decided it would be a good idea for Fred to conquer his fear of lightning by doing a project on it. This was probably the worst idea he’d ever had. Fred called his project “Lightning Can Strike Twice, In Fact it Can Strike Seven Times”, and it was about a man in America called Roy Sullivan who was struck by lightning seven times and each time he survived. He then apparently got so tired of all this that he shot himself. The worst part of the story (apart from the fact that he shot himself) is that one of the times he was struck he was travelling in his car, which is supposed to be a really safe place to be during a thunderstorm. The results of Fred’s project were: (a) he got more scared of lightning and (b) Sister Leonisa decided to tell us some lightning stories of her own.
One of these took place in a church in a small town in Italy where lightning struck the steeple of a church. The trouble was that in the basement of the church there were a hundred barrels of gunpowder. These were ignited by the lightning strike and a huge explosion destroyed everyone in the town.
After telling us this Sister asked, “So, what’s the moral of that story?”
Because there’s always a moral with Sister Leonisa.
“Don’t store gunpowder in the basement?” Madillo said, which seemed logical.
Sister shook her head sadly. “Anyone else?”
“Don’t build steeples?” Fred tried.
“No, Fred, that’s silly,” Sister said. “Nowhere is safe. That’s the moral, girls and boys. Nowhere, not even a church. Especially not a church.”
We all went silent then, as that was just confusing. Firstly, it wasn’t a moral. Secondly, why was she, a nun, warning us against going to church?
She suddenly looked a bit confused herself, as if she’d forgotten why she was telling us this.
Anyway.
I finished putting up the tents and Fred ran to the car to get Nokokulu’s suitcase. He carried it easily because it was so light.
Madillo, who had now found her voice, whispered to me, “She probably brought it with her so she could put Fred’s dead body in it to bring back. Now we’ve foiled her evil plan.”
I didn’t answer. Why did she keep putting words like “dead body” and “murder” in the same sentence as “Fred”?
“You go and have a rest in your tent now,” Nokokulu told us. “I will call you when I need you. And remember, no noise. You must not wake up the ancestors.”
She seemed to have forgotten that all the bodies that were buried here had been dug up many years ago. If we wanted to wake them we’d have to go and make a noise outside the Livingstone Museum. But none of us was going to point that out to her. We were all relieved, I think, to be able to escape into the tent, where we could talk without her listening in. We needed to decide what to do.
When we got into the tent, before either Madillo or I could say anything Fred blurted out, “She’s evil. She planned all along that we’d stay here. My own great-grandmother, lying to me.” He sat down on one of the rolled-up sleeping bags. “And those disappearances, Aunt Kiki and the others, I bet she’s behind them. She’s so … mean sometimes. And rude.”
“It’s not her,” I said.
The others looked at me. Neither of them were in the mood right then to hear someone defending Nokokulu.
“I’m not saying she’s not evil or anything,” I explained, “just that she’s no longer the prime suspect in the abductions.”
There I was, talking about the disappearances as abductions, like Madillo.
“So who is, if it’s not her?” asked Fred, looking a little relieved. I think in a funny way he does love Nokokulu. It’s just that sometimes she makes herself unlovable. Like today.
“The primary suspects have just been reinstated,” I said, getting a little carried away with myself. “I just know.”
“You just know?” Madillo said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not going to go into the details now,” I said. “But trust me. We will have a peaceful day and night here. Knowing Nokokulu, she’s probably brought really good food with her. If her temper improves, she might even share it with us. And when we get home tomorrow I will prove to you that somebody else is to blame for the disappearances, which means we’ll be able to find Aunt Kiki and the others.”
I was quite wrong about the peaceful night part.
BULL - BOO
Life’s Sorrows
Madillo and Fred both looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, which was understandable really as I wasn’t exactly giving them much to go on. Just that I had a strong hunch that was growing by the minute. The hunch was based on evidence; I just didn’t want to talk to them about it till I really knew.
“Your phone had a bar of signal over by the car,” said Madillo. “Maybe we ought to phone home and tell them the truth, then they’ll come and fetch us.”
This wasn’t like Madillo. She likes adventure better than anyone I know. Certainly more than I do. Nowhere spooks her. But something here was spooking her badly.
Before I could respond we suddenly heard a strange sound from the other tent. Fred looked at me and Madillo, who shrugged. I crept out of our tent towards the noise. The others followed. First we heard the snores. Then they stopped abruptly and Nokokulu started talking. Very fast.
“She’s in a trance,” whispered Madillo. “She’s casting a spell.”
“Or maybe she’s just talking in her sleep,” I said.
Nokokulu’s voice grew softer. She was speaking in Bemba.
“When you took my flower away from me I should have come after you. Now you are taking the next one. This time I am here. If it’s me you want, I am here. If you will spare my Kiki, you can have me without a fight. My powers are passing to my boy. You will not be able to touch him. He is beyond your reach. He is here to witness. He has come to take Kiki home.”
We were all quiet. Fred had tears in his eyes. I looked down at my shoes. Suddenly Nokokulu had gone back to being a very sad old lady. Who knew how many sorrows a person could pick up in a hundred years. My mum was much younger than Nokokulu and she already had sorrows. Why had I never thought of it like that before? The reason Fred’s great-granny was bent down and crotchety was because of the load of life’s sorrows she was carrying.
Of course that still didn’t make her a very nice old lady. All of us knew enough about Nokokulu not to expect her to come out of the tent transformed into someone gentle and kind. But she was definitely not our serial killer.
“We must stay the night now,” said Fred quietly. “I do
n’t want our parents coming here to take us all back before Nokokulu has had a chance to do whatever it is she thinks she must do. I owe her that much after betraying her in my head, thinking the worst of her.”
This was a longer, more serious speech than I’d ever heard from Fred. It made me feel sort of proud of him.
“I agree with Fred,” I said, dismissing the pleading look from Madillo. “But we still have the problem that Mum and Dad are expecting us home tonight. We’ll have to tell them we’re staying over at Fred’s again.”
“What about us?” Madillo asked. “We’re not beyond the reach of the Man-Beast. Chiti may be protected but we’re not. That’s why she didn’t want us to come.”
It was strange to hear her call Fred “Chiti”. Neither Fred nor I commented. She had a strange look about her.
“Don’t think like that,” I said firmly. “She’s just confused by her regrets. By tomorrow she will have met her dreaded Man-Beast in her sleep and sorted things out with him. Then we can all go home and sort out the real demons.”
“But why does she think he’s taken Aunt Kiki? She was living in Lusaka. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I agreed. “She’s just upset and it’s made her muddled.”
“My phone battery is flat,” interrupted Madillo, “and if I make the call I don’t think I’ll be able to stop myself from asking Mum to come and collect us straight away.”
Which was her way of saying that I had to be the one who phoned. As usual.
Mum sounded tired when she picked up the phone. She had been called out to the clinic during the night and was still half asleep so she didn’t ask any questions – which was lucky, because I’m sure if she’d been properly awake she would have known from the sound of my voice that something was not quite right.
I had gone to stand by the car to make the call and when I came back to the tents I saw that Fred and Madillo had wandered off to look at the strange lying down baobab tree.
“Hey!” I shouted, running over to them.
“How did it go?” Madillo asked.