by Paula Leyden
“It’s done, that’s all. And you two were supposed to be waiting here in case Nokokulu woke up.”
“She’s still asleep. Can’t you hear?” Madillo said.
She was right – the snores were rumbling again.
Not for long though.
“Ha!” came Nokokulu’s voice from her tent. “Ha! You talking about me, Chiti and your two twin friends? What are you up to?”
It was as if, even though she had been fast asleep, she had heard every word we’d said.
“We’re going to climb the tree, Nokokulu,” Fred said quickly.
“And the lightning?” she said.
At that moment, the large black cloud moved across the sun, blocking it out almost completely.
FRED
The Purple-striped Burrowing Praying Mantis
I had almost forgotten about the lightning. Almost. I know Bul-Boo doesn’t believe that Nokokulu has magical powers but it was not a coincidence that just as she said the word, the cloud blocked out the sun. I sometimes think my great-granny likes scaring me. She said to Dad once that it’s good for children to be scared now and again, otherwise they’ll think there’s nothing to be scared of.
There is no danger whatsoever of me growing up imagining that there is nothing in this world to be afraid of.
Last Sunday Nokokulu brought a wooden coffin-shaped box into the kitchen and put it on the table. She told me and Joseph that inside it was a very small dead ancestor and that if we dared open it we would be cursed for infinity. I stared at the small coffin (it was only big enough to hold a cat) and knew that I wouldn’t ever touch it. I didn’t even want my breath to touch the outside of it in case it thought I was approaching with the thought of opening it.
Joseph is different from me. He doesn’t talk much and he doesn’t really believe in things he can’t see.
Nokokulu looked at him. She knows what he’s like. “And if you open it, Joseph Mu wi wi Mwamba, it won’t only be you who is cursed, it will be your older brother as well.” She then left the room.
Dad once described her as “wily”. She was being very wily then, because even if I had to knock Joseph to the ground and make him unconscious, I wouldn’t let him near the box.
His middle name is not Mu wi wi by the way. That means “mosquito”. And the letter in it, n, is a letter only found in Bemba. You pronounce it ng. I like it. And he is a bit like a mosquito when he decides to be annoying.
We never found out what was in the box, but Dad said it was most likely chocolates.
“Nokokulu,” I said, “if a storm comes we all have to stay in the car away from the tree.”
I tried hard to keep my voice deep. At the moment it is in the process of breaking, and breaking is the right word for it. I never really know what it’s going to do. I like the sound of my new voice. I just wish it would stop running away and leaving this awful noise in its place.
“Chiti, stop speaking in a girl’s voice,” she said. “You want me to make the storm go away? I can do it, just like that – hocus pocus, psika psoka.”
She made her hands into little claw-like shapes in front of her and started muttering magic words. Well, they sounded like magic words – they weren’t in any of the languages I know. Some days I wish I had been born into a family that was witch- and ancestor-free. An instant family with parents who were never born but who just appeared one day, fully trained to be nice fair parents and that was it.
“Yes, yes, please, Nokokulu, make it go away!” a voice said behind me.
I didn’t even need to turn around to see that it was Madillo speaking. Identical twins they may be but I know how different they are. Not in a million years would Bul-Boo ask Nokokulu to make a spell. If Nokokulu lived with them instead of with me I just know Madillo would make her do spells all day long.
I regret ever telling Madillo that Nokokulu is a powerful witch. I think what sealed it was when I told her about when she magicked a man into growing horns on his head that just grew and grew until he could no longer stand up with the pure weight of them.
All the witch things I know about my great-granny are what she has told me. It’s not that I don’t believe she’s a witch; it’s just that sometimes I wonder. Maybe it’s because of Bul-Boo. I think I’m going to ask Nokokulu to prove it to me one day.
Except not today.
Nokokulu looked at Madillo. “For you, Mad Girl, I will chase the storm away. But I want my boy to ask me as well.”
I took a deep breath. “Please, Nokokulu, make the storm go away with one of your spells,” I said very quietly, wishing that Bul-Boo wasn’t there listening.
And just like that, away it went. I can’t prove it was Nokokulu, but five minutes after she’d muttered something and done a funny little dance, the clouds cleared and the sun shone.
“Coincidence,” Bul-Boo whispered to me. “Pure coincidence.”
It might have been, but even Bul-Boo sounded like she was trying to persuade herself.
“Now can we go and climb the Sleeping Cow tree?” Madillo asked. “That was brilliant, Nokokulu, a perfect spell.”
“I know it was brilliant. That’s what I do, brilliant things.”
Nokokulu always answers a compliment about herself with another one – about herself!
I wished I could tell her about my feeling of doom, perhaps then she’d make it go away like the clouds. But I didn’t feel like hearing her laugh at me. I decided just to keep it to myself and hope that we would escape from there without anything bad happening.
If I was Hindu, according to what Sister Leonisa taught us I would believe that if I did good things in life then good things would happen to me, but if I did bad things then bad things would happen, and in my next life I might come back as a crab or a tick. Or something worse. I don’t think I agree. I mean, bad things happen all the time to people who are good. Say if you look at the soccer team who crashed into the Atlantic. What had they done apart from being the best ever soccer players? Or Aunt Kiki? Most of all Aunt Kiki. She never did anything bad to anybody and then she got sick and disappeared. How could anyone say she deserved that?
I couldn’t think of anything that I’d done in my life that would mean I deserved whatever disaster was about to befall us if my prediction of doom was correct. Mind you, Sister may have been wrong about what Hinduism teaches, as she’s wrong about most things. Dad says that Hinduism is at least a peaceful religion, because it doesn’t spend its life telling everyone else that they should be Hindus.
“Run, run, then. Climb the tree. But I don’t know what you think you’re going to find. There’s nothing to see, only a fallen-down tree and a silly monument,” Nokokulu said.
We all looked at her. She can be very confusing.
“What about the dead ancestors?” I asked.
“What d’you think, boy, that they’ll be walking around here?”
She laughed. Loudly. Which was not necessary – we were right next to her.
“No,” I said. “I know where the things they dug up from here are, the bones and the jewels and everything. They’re in Livingstone, in the museum. I saw them there.”
“So, you know everything then. Why are you asking me questions?”
“Well, because you said there’s nothing to see,” I said, my brain hurting from the way the conversation was going round in circles.
“Nothing to see with our eyes, yes, but we don’t see everything with our eyes, do we, boy? We can see things with our brains and our hearts. But if you run around like crazy things you’ll see nothing. So, go and climb the tree, but no running, shouting or singing and maybe you’ll see something.”
The three of us started walking, very quietly, towards the tree, before she said something else.
As we walked the sky darkened again. The cloud was back.
“That was a powerful spell,” Bul-Boo said, laughing.
“Well, you can get temporary spells,” Madillo replied, “and the cloud is not as dark as it was. I think
the storm has been averted.”
I didn’t say anything as the doom had returned, heavier than ever, and taken over my legs and made them so bendy that I started to feel a bit like a rubber man. Madillo told me once about a character in one of the anime things she watches who eats gum-gum fruit and turns into a rubber man. He’s called Monkey-something, and after he’s stretched he snaps back into shape just like a rubber band. That was me as I waited to be struck dead.
I was not sure I could make it all the way to the tree and started trying to think of other things that might make my legs return to normal. I stared at the ground and thought about the time we were in Kafue National Park and an elephant chased us because she had her calf with her. She came so close to the car her trunk hit the back window.
It seemed to be working. I was starting to feel less wobbly. I looked up and realized I was completely alone at the foot of the tree. Bul-Boo and Madillo had disappeared.
At that moment Rubber Man disappeared altogether and in his place stood Ice Man. Frozen. I couldn’t even turn my head to see whether Nokokulu had also gone. I felt as if it was just me, the tree and the wicked souls of Nokokulu’s long-lost ancestors.
Suddenly I heard a noise – a rough scraping against the bark above me.
“Fred, why are you just standing there? Come up!”
Bul-Boo. The voice of my dreams in the middle of a waking nightmare.
I looked up slowly, careful not to snap my frozen neck.
There they were. Sitting in a bend of the tree, grinning down at me.
“I’m standing here because I’m enjoying the view,” I said in my most casual voice.
“Of the ground?” asked Bul-Boo.
“Yes. There happens to be what looks like a rare praying mantis here. It’s got purple stripes on its body.”
Silence. For a few satisfying moments.
“Are you sure?” Bul-Boo again, her voice incredulous.
“I’m the one looking at it, aren’t I?” I said.
I was on a roll here. Ice Man and Rubber Man had left the building.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I’m coming down to look.”
Oh dear. The end of the roll.
“I don’t think you’ll see it. It’s started burrowing into a hole. I don’t want to stop it, because it would be terrified and might have a heart attack.”
Why didn’t I just say it had flown away? Because that’s what praying mantises do. They fly. They don’t burrow.
“Burrowing?” said Bul-Boo, looking not at me but at Madillo.
“It’s a new species,” Madillo explained. “Fred has made a major scientific discovery. He’ll be hailed the world over for discovering the Purple-striped Burrowing Praying Mantis.”
“Well?” Bul-Boo said, after a pause. “Are you coming up?”
I nodded. Not trusting my voice, which seemed to be busy betraying me.
“It’s great up here. You can see everything,” she told me.
“Except praying mantises,” added Madillo.
She never lets anything go.
BULL - BOO
On Top of the Baobab Tree
You’d never be able to climb a baobab if it hadn’t fallen over. Well, I wouldn’t anyway. The bark feels so smooth and the wrinkles are facing upwards, so you can’t put your feet onto anything. On this one the wrinkles were sideways and there were lots of knots. I saw someone once who put little pegs into a baobab so they could climb up it, but you wouldn’t need them for this one.
I love being at the top of a tree. And being at the top of a sideways baobab is the same as being at the top of a normal tree. From where we were we could see for ever – the Kariba Dam in the distance and the Zambezi and Lusitu rivers.
Fred came up after his excuse about watching the praying mantis. I didn’t tease him about it. He knows I know he made it up, so there would be no point.
“What’s Nokokulu doing?” I asked. We had a good view of her and she was walking around peering at things on the ground.
Fred shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s lost something.”
“She’s a witch,” Madillo said. “Witches don’t lose things.”
“Nokokulu’s not a witch,” I argued. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation again. There’s no such thing as witches. It’s just pure and undiluted rubbish.”
“There’s no such thing as pure rubbish. Rubbish can’t be pure – that’s contradictory,” Fred pointed out.
“Depends,” I said, not wanting to admit that he was right.
“Depends on nothing,” he said indignantly. “Rubbish can’t be pure.”
I looked away and muttered, “Maybe you’re right.”
Fred and Madillo didn’t say anything. It is rare, I know, for me to admit I’m wrong. That’s mainly because I look things up before I say anything, so usually I’m right. But not this time. I must remember to put that in my black notebook: I was wrong today and I admitted it.
“At least this tent zips all the way up, not like the old one we used when we went to Kundalila Falls,” I said to change the subject.
“That was terrible,” Madillo agreed. “I kept thinking a crocodile was going to come in through the gap at the front. At least with this one we’re safe from anything.”
“Plus we don’t have to share it with Nokokulu, which is the best part,” Fred said. “That would be pretty scary … and loud. Do you know, she says she has never slept in the same room as another human being and she never will?”
“And you believe her?” Madillo said.
“Well … when she was a baby I suppose she had to be in the room with her mother, but she says that from the moment she was born they knew she was special so they gave her her own room.”
“She must have shared a room at some point because she gave birth to your granny, who then gave birth to your dad and Aunt Kiki!” Madillo reminded him.
Kiki. Just the name brought it all back. I looked at Fred. He’s funny about things that really upset him. He tries very hard not to talk about them. He could talk all day and all night about things like predictions of doom, but when it’s something real like Aunt Kiki he just clams up. I saw him wince when Madillo said her name but then he just carried on as normal.
“I know, I know,” he said. “But I’ve never met my granny. I don’t even know if she existed. Maybe Nokokulu is one of those kind of adopted relatives. You know, the ones who come from nowhere.”
Madillo looked at me and then at Fred. “You mean like the Adopt a Zebra thing at Munda Wanga? We did that. Dad says we own one of the ears.”
Madillo and Fred could fill volumes of notebooks with the ridiculous conversations they have.
“I wonder if the story about Bukoko is true,” I said. “It’s funny that we’ve come here just after Sister told us about her.”
“We could probably see her grave from here if it was true,” Madillo said. “You see over there where those lines of stones are? I think that must have been the graveyard.”
Fred and I turned to see what she was pointing at, and there were very neat lines of stones down below in the grass. We had a good view from our high vantage point.
“But we wouldn’t find her actual grave, because surely it was dug up along with all the other graves?” I said. “And when they just found a stone in it they probably didn’t keep the grave marked.”
“Let’s take a photo of the stones anyway, to show Sister Leonisa,” Madillo suggested. “The actual graveyard where Bukoko might have been buried.”
Sometimes Madillo has really good ideas.
“Do you know,” said Fred, as we were starting to climb down the tree. “Because Bukoko was probably a Tonga, her spirit will be here even if her grave isn’t.”
“What do you mean?” asked Madillo.
Fred grinned. He loves it when he is the only one of us to know something.
“Well, a muzimu is a spirit that is left behind when someone dies. And that spirit is then inherited b
y someone else in the clan. It’s a different way of making sure that people live for ever and are never forgotten. So it doesn’t matter how many years ago Bukoko died, her spirit will have been inherited, and then when that person died, their spirit will also have been inherited.”
Both of us stared at him.
“So,” Madillo said slowly, “her spirit could be inside someone who lives in Pambazana, for example, just down the road?”
“Exactly,” Fred said.
“And how do you know this, Fred?” I asked him.
“Dad told me about it when I was asking him about reincarnation and Hinduism. He said that although this is different, it’s the same idea.”
“That means that when I die my muzimu will live for ever,” Madillo said excitedly, “until there are no more people left on this earth. It’s a brilliant idea.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to think about it as I find it hard to believe in spirits, but I have to admit that the thought of a little part of me travelling through time is quite nice.
“The downside is that you have no choice in the matter,” Fred said. “Your muzimu could end up being inherited by anyone. And then you’re trapped inside them, being them.”
We carried on climbing down the tree, probably all thinking of the person we would least like to end up inside. Then we went over to the stones and spent a long time taking photographs of them. We even moved some of them around to make them look like a little child’s grave, which, if I think about it, was a bit morbid. We must have caught that from Sister Leonisa.
By now we had almost forgotten that Nokokulu was somewhere near by and that both Madillo and Fred were feeling doom laden.
Nokokulu reminded us. With a loud blast of her car horn.
“When I grow up I want to be like Nokokulu,” Madillo said. “I’ll wear whatever I want, and shout if I feel like it, do spells all over the place and be rude to other people’s children.”
“And drive all over the road?” I asked.
“That too. Did you see how everyone stays out of her way?” Fred said.
“No, Fred,” I said. “If you remember we were trapped in the boot.”