The Sleeping Baobab Tree

by Paula Leyden

  I stared at the page. Everything was there: the address, the phone numbers, even a picture of the clinic. These two “doctors” must have kept Mum’s patients there, pretending they were able to cure them. Even I know there is no cure for AIDS yet. It doesn’t mean people have to die. There’s no cure for diabetes, either, but there is treatment. AIDS is the same.

  I looked back in my black notebook. I remembered Dad telling me about people like this, people who pretend they can cure you by staring into your eyes or giving you little drops of medicine that has nothing in it, only water. He has a name for people like that. There it was, a few pages back in my own handwriting: Snake oil salesmen and charlatans – Dad’s description of people who sell cures that don’t work.

  As I was reading this I realized that we were pulling into Fred’s driveway. Nokokulu slammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt, making the car skid into his mum’s prize rose bushes. I looked up to see what had happened. There, standing on the driveway waving at us, was Aunt Kiki. She was thinner and paler than the last time we’d seen her, but it was definitely her, and she was smiling.

  Nokokulu stared. Almost as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  Fred turned round to me. “It’s Aunt Kiki,” he whispered. “She’s come back.”

  “I know,” I whispered back. I didn’t know what else to say. It was like something out of a dream.

  Nokokulu reversed the car out of the flower bed and finally spoke, her voice quieter than usual.

  “Chiti, go and say hello to your aunt,” she said.

  He didn’t need a second invitation: he jumped out of the car and ran towards Aunt Kiki. I saw tears in her eyes as she leant down to give him a hug.

  “You two,” Nokokulu said. “Time to go home now.”

  Just then Madillo woke up, as if she’d only been having a quick car sleep. “We’re back already? That was quick,” she said, sitting up.

  “Yes,” said Nokokulu, opening her door. “It was very quick.” She got out of the car and for the first time ever I saw her give someone a hug. She just put her arms around her granddaughter and held onto her tight.

  “It’s Aunt Kiki,” Madillo said, looking at me. “She hasn’t disappeared after all. She’s here, right here in Fred’s garden.”

  I nodded. It was all too strange. Aunt Kiki appearing out of nowhere, Madillo awake and talking. I needed to get home fast.

  BULL - BOO

  Ratbag’s Wrath

  Fred stared at Madillo as we got out of the car.

  “You’re awake,” he said. One of Fred’s special skills is stating the obvious.

  “Of course I’m awake,” Madillo said, laughing. “I’m standing outside the car. You’re awake too!”

  “We’ll see you later, Fred. We’ll be back,” I said, before the conversation disintegrated any further. “Come, Madillo, let’s go.” I was impatient to tell Mum and Dad about my discovery and about Aunt Kiki being back.

  We crawled through the hedge and came in through the back door. Mum and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table. They both turned to look at us when we came in, and for the first time I understood what people mean when they say “the silence was deafening”. Neither of them spoke. They just stared at us. Mum with a reproachful look in her eyes and Dad with his deciding-whether-to-be-angry look. Mum’s was worse.

  Madillo was the first to speak.

  “Hi, we’re back,” she said in a pretending-to-be-chirpy voice.

  They both nodded, then looked at one another. Mum tipped her head towards Dad. “You go first.”

  “OK,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Don’t ever, ever do that again. Never. You want to go somewhere with Fred or with anyone, just ask us. That’s all. It’s not hard. You both know how to speak. We might say yes, we might say no – but ask us. Instead you lied. Not once, but twice. We don’t do that to you. We don’t expect it from you. OK? Anything could have happened and we wouldn’t have known where you were.”

  I felt my face burning. Madillo moved closer to me. Neither of us could even look at Mum and Dad.

  “And,” Mum added, “if it hadn’t been for Nokokulu we still wouldn’t know.”

  “Nokokulu?” we both said, surprised.

  “Yes, we spoke to her when you were still at Ng’ombe Ilede,” Dad explained. “I went next door yesterday evening because Fred’s dad had been fishing and he called me over to give me some tilapia. Naturally I asked where you all were as Mum said she’d spoken to you earlier and you were staying another night. Lie number two. He told me that Fred had gone away with Nokokulu and you had come home yesterday morning.”

  “So we called Nokokulu,” Mum said.

  At that we both looked up.

  “What?” I said.

  “We called her, on her mobile. She told us that you were both with them and she would bring you all back this morning. Although we didn’t expect you this early.”

  Nokokulu on a mobile phone was hard to imagine. And why hadn’t we heard it ring?

  “Why didn’t you phone me?” I asked.

  “Bul-Boo,” Mum said, “your phone was off. And if I were you I wouldn’t be asking questions at all right now. I’d be looking down at my feet and saying sorry and promising to never, ever do anything like this again.”

  Mum in indignant mode is not good; I’m sure she could see we were sorry. Madillo looked as if all she wanted to do was curl up in a ball on the floor and howl.

  But then Mum decided to change the subject.

  “Bul-Boo, sweetheart,” she said, “I’ve got something to tell you. You remember when you asked me about Ratbag the other day? You must have had some kind of sixth sense.”

  Madillo looked even more crestfallen. She’s always the one trying for a sixth sense. I don’t even want one.

  “Not a sixth sense, Mum,” I said. “Scientific research.”

  “Whatever it was, you have no idea how important that one little question was. Ratsberg and his partner, both of whom call themselves scientists, have their own theories about AIDS. Well, one theory. They say it doesn’t exist. People think all sorts of funny things about this illness and mostly that’s OK. But not this. This can lead to murder. Years ago, in South Africa, these two men misinformed the government about this illness. They persuaded certain people they were right, that there was no such thing as HIV or AIDS. Then the government misinformed the people, and as a result no one got proper medicine when they were ill. The disease spread like wildfire. But that’s all in the past. South Africa has a new president and things have changed. Instead” – she looked at me and Madillo – “they moved to Zambia. These hyenas in their white coats came here to spread their lies and make money promising people health. But you, Bul-Boo, with that one question, helped us to stop that.”

  I wanted to tell her I already knew that, but Mum was determined not to let me get a word in edgeways.

  “So,” she continued, “I looked them up, and I found the place and went there yesterday. You don’t need to know the details, but let me tell you that I found Fred’s Aunt Kiki and seven other people there. All of them my patients. They had gone downhill very badly, and had all become very thin. Ratbag had them staying there, pumping them full of vitamins, hypnotizing them, getting them to do exercise. And he had them off all their prescribed medicines. He had their heads filled with the idea that he was going to cure them.”

  “Mum, I also looked it up…” I interrupted.

  She waved her hands to let me know that she hadn’t finished speaking. When she has something to say it’s hard to stop her.

  “Can you believe that he had made them all sign ‘legal’ documents threatening to take them off the wonderful holistic cure programme if they came to tell me or their families where they were? I tore up the contracts in front of him. Professor Ratbag,” she said with vehemence, “Professor Nothing. He’s a murderer, plain and simple.”

  It was hard to take all of this in. It was as I’d thought, sort of, but so much worse. All I co
uld do was nod. I was just relieved that her patients were now safe. Aunt Kiki was back and things were going to be all right.

  Madillo turned and whispered in my ear, “And it was you who started it, Bul-Boo.” Which was true, but it was nice to hear it from her.

  “As of yesterday they’re all back on medication,” Mum said. “All but two,” she corrected herself quietly, looking down at her own shoes for a moment.

  Like us, Mum couldn’t bear to think about Sonkwe and Thandiwe being dead.

  “Will they make it? Will Aunt Kiki?” I asked her.

  “They will,” Mum said. “I know they will.”

  Mum never says things she doesn’t believe, so that was a relief.

  Mum turned towards Dad. “We were just discussing it, your dad and I. I thought we were going to have to take legal action to get the clinic closed, but Dad has spoken to his cousin Sipho. You remember Sipho, girls? The Minister of Transport?”

  We nodded.

  “Well, he’s going to fast-track their expulsion from the country. No one wants them here. They’ll be sent packing with their shiny white teeth and bags of tricks.”

  “The police have already been in contact with Ratsberg advising him of this,” Dad added, “and my bet would be that he and Dr Wrath are in the airport as we speak, demanding seats on the next flight out of here.”

  Mum turned back to us. “So. That’s that. Sorry, Bul-Boo, you were saying you’d also looked it up?”

  “I did. I found their website.”

  She grinned. “I was going to say I’d leave it to you next time but hopefully there never will be a next time.” She got up and came to give us both a big hug. “I’m still cross though,” she whispered. “No more lies, right?”

  We both nodded, which was a little difficult as she was holding us so tightly.

  “And,” Dad added, “given that you were being driven by Nokokulu I’m mightily relieved you’re back in one piece.” He laughed. “All the way from here to Ng’ombe Ilede – that’s a lot of driving for one tiny witch.”

  I decided that now would not be a good time to tell them about crashing into the gates at Munda Wanga gardens and just hoped Madillo felt the same. I looked sideways at her. She was smiling to herself.

  “You called her a witch, Dad!” she said suddenly.

  He winked at her. “A slip of the tongue.”

  That seemed like a good time to leave, while they were both in such a good mood.

  “We’ll go over to Fred’s to tell him what’s happened,” I said to them.

  “Aunt Kiki has probably told them already,” Mum said. “But go across. You can take this to Nokokulu to thank her for bringing you back safely.” She handed me a beautiful orange and green chitenge cloth. “She can add it to her collection.”

  Given the choice I might have avoided talking to Nokokulu, but this gave us no option. I suspect that was Mum’s plan.

  FRED

  The Sleep of Forgetting

  No one seemed to want to explain anything to me. As if I was just a boy with no brains in my head. And on top of that I had hardly got through the door when Dad started bellowing at me about the twins and their parents, and about me giving Nokokulu a headache. If I gave her a headache, I don’t know why she didn’t just cast a spell and make it go away again. Surely that would be a pretty simple spell.

  After he’d finished telling me off he sent me into the kitchen to join Aunt Kiki and Nokokulu, who were eating breakfast. I didn’t feel like eating, mainly because Nokokulu was sitting there with the whole pot of meat in front of her and a giant pile of nshima next to it. Great lumps of it were disappearing into her mouth one after the other. I don’t know how they all fitted into her small body. Dad walked past the door and when he looked in he roared with laughter. “It’s like watching a snake swallowing rats, isn’t it, boy?” Then he went off without waiting for my reply.

  At that moment Bul-Boo and Madillo arrived.

  “Ha!” Nokokulu said, in between mouthfuls. “Mpundu! Come, come inside. You told your parents where you were?”

  They just stood there nodding.

  “Or did they tell you where you were?” she said, grinning in that way she does when she thinks she’s being especially clever.

  They nodded again, staring at her as she went back to devouring her food.

  Nokokulu paused in her eating for a moment and looked at Aunt Kiki, who was sitting on the couch, exhausted. “Kiki, my child, do you see these three children in front of me, looking at me like they never saw a hungry person eating before?”

  Aunt Kiki said, “Yes, Granny,” and gave me a wink.

  “Have you ever seen the like before? Answer me that. Three people standing there looking like sheep awaiting slaughter.”

  Aunt Kiki just laughed.

  Nokokulu wiped her fingers and looked at all of us. At Aunt Kiki sitting on the couch, the twins standing in the doorway looking as though they were getting ready to run, and at me sitting right opposite her at the table.

  “I’m going to tell you all something,” she said. “I am going to say it to you once and then I never want you to talk to anyone about it again. Especially not to me.”

  I shook my head. “Never, Nokokulu. We’ll never speak of it again.”

  She ignored me and carried on. “I had a child once – Maluba. She was my only daughter. She is still my only child. I know that wherever she is, she still lives in the half-and-half life between now and for ever. She was mother to you, Kiki, and mother to your father, Chiti.”

  The room had suddenly gone very quiet.

  “She was named Maluba for the flower. It was because of her that my grandson married this woman from England who only cares about flowers. Everywhere as far as you can look in her garden there are flowers.”

  Nokokulu nodded outside to Mum who was trimming a bougainvillea on the front porch.

  “You, Chiti boy, you are part of this story. You must learn not to be nosy. If you ask me something, I will tell you. Don’t go snooping around in my suitcase like that ever again. You want to know what was inside it? I’ll tell you now,” she said, and a big fat tear rolled down her cheek. “It was my Maluba’s dress. The dress she wore when she was sixteen – a pretty blue dress with small yellow flowers on it. That’s all that was in there. I wanted her with me when I went to seek the Man-Beast.”

  She looked at me. “Because it was he who took my child. Forty years ago, when your Aunt Kiki and her noisy twin brother were only small babies. Forty years ago, he took her. I had to stop him from doing it again. I had to stop him.”

  No one said anything.

  She wiped the tear away from her cheek. “And now he has been stopped. For ever.”

  She shook her head. “You can go in a minute, but before you do, let me tell you, Kiki, while you sit there staring at an old woman trying to get a little morsel of food inside her – let me tell you that these three children aren’t all bad. These girls were loyal to Chiti and they came with him and me to help rescue you. They will always be welcome in my house.”

  “Yes,” said Aunt Kiki, giving me a small smile.

  I didn’t know what to say. It was almost easier to deal with nasty Nokokulu, so I just sat there. I watched as Madillo hesitated for a moment and then went over to Nokokulu and put her arms around her neck saying, “And you, Great-grandmother Witch, you are welcome in my house any day too.”

  Nokokulu coughed loudly then said, “Good child, good child,” before shoving in another mouthful.

  “And this is for you,” Bul-Boo added, handing over the chitenge she’d been holding. “From Mum, to say thank you for bringing us home safely.”

  “Ha!” said Nokokulu, which I suppose could be interpreted as a thank you. “Now, off you go, children. Go and play those silly computer games that shrivel up your brains.” But there was definitely a glimmer of a smile in her eyes as she said it.

  As we all headed off, she called me back, saying to the twins, “You, mpundu, you go ups
tairs. I need to tell Chiti one more thing.”

  When they had gone she beckoned me to her and whispered, “The little one, Mad Girl, she will not remember anything that happened. She has been given the Sleep of Forgetting. I don’t want you telling her anything. You hear me? Nothing.”

  She then shooed me out of the kitchen.

  I ran upstairs to join the twins and when I got into the room I shut the door carefully behind me.

  “What did she want?” Bul-Boo asked.

  “Just to tell me that I’m still her favourite great-grandson,” I said.

  “She could have said that in front of us. Everyone knows that,” Madillo said. “What did she really say?”

  “Exactly that. ‘Fred, you’re my favourite great-grandson.’ ”

  I wondered how long I would have to keep this up.

  “So, she called you Fred?” Bul-Boo asked suspiciously.

  “When she’s in a good mood she does.” OK, time to change the subject now. “But that doesn’t matter anyway. Did you hear what she said about my grandmother, that she was taken by the Man-Beast? As if that wasn’t bad enough, when she thought the Man-Beast was returning, forty years later, she took us with her to find him, endangering our lives and our souls.”

  “Well, we’re all right now,” Madillo said. “So nothing was really endangered, and I liked being there. Plus she brought great food.”

  Bul-Boo and I looked at her. This wasn’t like Madillo at all. Surely she’d want to talk about the Man-Beast.

  “Do you remember anything about what happened when you went to cover up the hyena footprints?” Bul-Boo asked, before I could stop her.

  A grin appeared on Madillo’s face. “The only reason I went to wipe them away was so I could leave the two of you alone for a bit…”

  For that she got a sharp whack across the arm from Bul-Boo.

  I didn’t know where to look.

  “OK, OK, that wasn’t really the reason,” Madillo said, laughing. “I went to wipe the paw prints away and for some reason I felt really, really tired, so I lay down just for a bit and must have fallen asleep.”