‘That’s why you always run crying to Mummy when I sit on your head?’
‘It’s a tactic. You should learn some one day.’
‘Said the pupil to the master.’
‘Said the birch tree to the stump.’
I noted that Lucinda’s house had turrets, and a long gravelly path to its entrance, that her parents talked of wings instead of rooms, that her mother said ‘ooofully’, instead of ‘awfully’, and fed her dogs smoked salmon and roast chicken from the same plates and weighted silver cutlery that we ate with.
The wings were cold and smelt of wet dogs, even though large fires burnt in every one. Rugs and books were strewn all over the deep sofas and surfaces, and the walls were painted dark rich colours, blood-red, yolk-yellow and olive-green.
We sat in the sofas and on the floor of the children’s drawing room and watched a film starring a horse that was bred for racing. In the last race the jockey drove the horse so hard that its hoof came half off, and yet it still ran and won.
Lucinda’s father, wide-bellied in tapestried slippers and an assured deep shout in his voice, switched on the lights.
Everyone in the room was crying, except for me.
That night, we all crowded onto the bed in Lucinda’s room, even though we had been assigned rooms in the various wings. I watched how Josephine knelt on the bed, brushing and braiding Lucinda’s hair.
‘I notice you talk to Anna a lot,’ Lucinda said to me.
I said nothing.
‘I feel really sorry for her,’ she said. ‘That hurts!’ She elbowed Josephine and yanked her hair away, then turned back to me. ‘She’s always inviting herself to our parties, and turns up to things even though no one told her to come. She almost invited herself to this. And have you noticed that she says really stupid things? Like “toilet” instead of “loo”, and she calls a sofa a settee…’
Josephine laughed.
I looked at her, wishing Lucinda would elbow her again.
Josephine looked up at me and took one of my braids between her fingers and pinched it. ‘Hey, how come your hair’s always different every few weeks? It’s much longer suddenly.’
‘We have this special ointment in Ghana,’ I said slowly. ‘It makes our hair grow really long, really fast. It once went from here –’ I put my hand by my chin ‘– to here –’ I touched my right shoulder ‘– in a week.’
‘Really?’ Their voices were high in amazement. ‘Wow.’
Kojo was right. It was possible to change stories and still be believed.
I went through all the motions of talking, eating, laughing, sleeping, and, while waiting, perfected the mantle of their ways. I learnt to stand in the woods at the back of the school while Charlotte, who was repeating our form for the third time and was tallest, smoked; and while Juliet, who was already beginning to grow breasts, talked of boys. I learnt to sit on the floor of the 7-Eleven shop on Sunday mornings, skiving church with Sarah, who was pretty, clever, good at sports, and whose parents lived in London. I learnt the choreography of slipping food from my plate into paper napkins under the table, of being excused, of flushing it down the loo. In class, I still could not find my way into the mannered indirect world of Jane Austen, of all that tea-drinking and people not saying what they meant. I missed the clear direct words of Rilke and Goethe. Even the floweriness of Balzac and Zola in French class did not compensate, and all the teachers seemed intent on deadening the things you hated, as well as those you loved, except Mrs Lilley, with her long chestnut hair that she held back with thin Alice bands in blue velvet or brown tortoiseshell, her line-straight skirts, cowl-neck blouses and matching high-necked jumpers. She did not metaphorically pat us on the head or shake hers patronisingly when we spoke, but nodded seriously and sometimes smiled a little at the edges of her mouth. We read excerpts of the Bible-sized tome by Simon Schama on the French Revolution as homework. In his pages, it was as if each turn, each power struggle, were playing out in the room, and I was anxious for each day to pass, so I could come alive through his words at night, learning the secret passion at the back of each player’s heart. I saw how the past could come alive and be relived through words. When I presented, the other girls complained at my high marks even though I had not learnt a single date. For all their ‘top minds’, only few of them could see we just had to make sense of the story, learn a few facts to throw in for good measure. It would not work for everything, but it was not in everything I had to succeed.
Still the story I told was not good enough for what we were planning. I had to learn to create images with words. During art class, I looked through the shelves for books titled ‘revolution’ and opened one.
Camilla Gray was twenty-one when she began her pioneering research on Russian art, it said. She published the book five years later and died tragically at the age of thirty-five…
I took the book to my table, turned to the last page.
For the first time since the Middle Ages, the artist and his art were embodied in the make-up of the common life, art was given a working job…
I looked for a picture of her. There was none, though it said she had been a ballerina before she had written the book. I looked at an image of huge crowds in a square… A Re-enactment of the Storming of the Winter Palace.
‘What are you doing?’ Miss Pettisome, our art teacher, wore uniforms of black scarves layered with primary-coloured coats, like shapeless dressing gowns, their sleeves much too wide and hollow.
I closed the book. ‘Just looking.’
‘You should be getting on with your project. Not looking.’
The art block was filling with copies of Monet’s Water Lilies, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Rodin’s Kiss.
Miss Pettisome had told us to find an artist to copy. ‘That’s right. Find an artist who inspires you, and copy their work, forge, plagiarise, steal. If you would like to add your own little twist, by all means do.’ She said that the philosopher Plato regarded art as just a poor copy of the object world, which was already only a shadow of the real. ‘Mimesis, he called it. Poppycock, I say.’ She looped her arms theatrically in the air when she spoke. ‘Copy away as much as you want and don’t be afraid that you’re stepping away from “the real”, whatever that means. Copying gives you mastery of form.’
‘Do we have the Plato book here?’ I asked, as she stood over me.
‘You’re too young to read Plato, my dear.’
‘Can I go to the library? Everyone’s already doing everyone else.’
‘Don’t you have enough to distract you with here? … I suppose so.’
I got up, Camilla Gray in hand.
‘Uh-uh-uh … where do you think you’re going with that?’
‘Can I? I’ll bring it back.’
I rushed out before she could say no, through the grounds, past the girls in short skirts playing hockey, and into the library. I sat by the window and reopened the book.
A Re-enactment of the Storming of the Winter Palace.
They had recruited thousands to restage the storming and decorated the square with giant sculptures.
I turned the page. There was a structure, lopsided, but upright, made of iron poles reaching up and up, spiralling round and around: Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International.
It was like the festivals that Kojo had told me about in which they acted out events from the past to recreate order.
It was what we had to do. Recreate what had happened; not just on the pages, but in life too.
‘What are you doing in here, weirdo?’ It was Josephine, with Lucinda and Charlotte.
‘I’m looking for something.’ I put my hand over the book.
Lucinda picked it up. ‘The Russian Experiment in Art.’ She threw the book back onto the table. ‘Come on. It’s lunchtime.’
‘I can’t. I have to do this. We have to … in our spare time—’
‘You know where to find us if you get bored.’
‘Yeah, I’m bored already…’ I shrugged, w
atching them leave, though it was their world, which from the outside looked so expensively wrought, and which was really ridden with holes, that I was bored of.
I got up, scoured the library for Plato’s Republic and looked for the section of which Miss Pettisome had spoken.
The sun was the light of truth, it said, and the everyday shadows on the walls of the cave in which we were trapped, and to which the sun gave form, were what we thought of as truth.
The philosopher kings could climb out and see and pass on to the others, who were either too dense or lazy or afraid to climb out, their wisdom and clarity.
The philosopher kings, who had gold in their souls, just like my grandfather, Kojo and me.
Miss Pettisome had told us that, in Plato’s Republic, artists would be banned, because they made copies of objects that in themselves were copies of the real.
But, for Camilla’s artists, naturalistic trees and landscapes were reduced to three or four colours, and then to lines, as if to remove all that was superfluous to life, to retain only what was necessary and true.
It was like our stories, which only passed on what was essential.
Kojo had told me they collapsed time, that in them the past and the future were pulled into the present so that it did not matter what age or date something was; they all collapsed into one which contained them all.
He told me that the way they told stories here, with one thing after the other, and one date following on from the next, was all wrong.
It was not really how it worked, they had got it all confused, but we knew better.
I made a sketch of Tatlin’s Monument, then looked out of the window.
The girls in their hockey skirts came into focus, running and hitting at the ball.
What if we did it? What if we really did manage to climb out and there was nothing there except the climb?
The girls began to stream in; lunch break was almost over.
I walked along the aisles, opened books, traced the flatness of the pages with my palms, inhaled the familiarity of bound paper.
I picked up a book on Van Gogh, his thick, tortured, almost chaotic strokes applied layer over layer, in a way that was still strangely serene.
I traced the swirls and curves of his suns with my fingers, and closed the book.
This would do.
13
I waited outside after school for my mother’s car, though I knew it would arrive long after everyone else’s.
I looked at the brick-red wall of the school building keeping out the world, and wondered how it would be if I climbed it and closed the distance.
I thought of Kojo and of all the secrets he was discovering in the notebook that he was keeping from me, of how I could now tell him what we must do.
When my mother’s yellow Golf pulled up, there were two heads in the car instead of one.
It was Kojo.
I went towards the car, but I did not open the door.
My mother was shouting.
Kojo was shouting too.
But not in their usual shouting for shouting sake’s way.
‘I didn’t do it!’ That was Kojo. ‘I said I didn’t do it.’
I got in and closed the door; their noise was forming layers in my head.
‘He said he didn’t do it,’ I yelled. ‘Didn’t you hear him?’
My mother’s fury turned on me. ‘You think because you have big schooling now that you are better than me, heh? Now I am a foolish woman? Now I am stupid? Who pays for that school of yours, heh?’
I had tears in my stomach and in my throat.
My mother’s voice was so loud now that people driving past looked out of their cars at us, even though the windows were shut. She shouted all the way home, and kept shouting even when Kojo and I went up to my room.
I sat on the floor and told him about Simon Schama and Plato and Camilla Gray, of how we would be able to change the past, because the future was so clear to us; of how our words and those in the notebook would make the past come alive again, and thus change the present.
Kojo shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
‘You have to tell me what happened, Kojo. If you don’t tell me, I can’t help.’
‘Someone wrote “Sergeant fucks Jane” all over the Junior Common Room wall,’ he said.
Jane, the pretty school nurse.
Sergeant thought it was Kojo. In the middle of the night, he had got him out of bed, told him to get dressed quick smart.
It was still dark outside and some of the other boys in the dorm had looked out from their striped pyjamas and scratchy blankets.
Kojo’s shoes creaked on the wooden floorboards, and they were the only sound as Sergeant stood in the lit doorway, arms folded.
Sergeant was holding in his cheeks the same way he did on those days he told Kojo what to do and Kojo didn’t.
Roll down your sleeves.
It’s hot where I come from, sir.
Spit out your gum.
I can’t, it’s like sacred tradition in my country, sir.
Sergeant dragged him down to the running fields, pulling him by his woollen hair, and Kojo said he knew Sergeant could not bear to touch it, because of the face he made, and he hoped the dirt in his hair and the Dax wax was slipping off onto his fingers.
It was raining, the soft unyielding rain it rained in England, not the forceful kind from home that announced its coming with flashes and sky rumbles, and he was already slipping in his regulation shoes.
The stiff first discomfort of his cricket whites and rugby stripes was nothing compared to the sodden sagginess of long navy corduroys, shirt and jumper sticking to him in the rain.
Sergeant stood and looked at him and shouted as if he were on a Combined Cadet Force drill. ‘Say it…’ he said. ‘Say it…’
But he could not, Kojo said, first of all because he did not know what Sergeant wanted him to say, and secondly because he wouldn’t.
They stood like that forever, Sergeant and he, both getting wet, and then Sergeant blew the whistle, the one that hung around his neck like a dog tag, even when he was in his speckled green tweed on Sundays.
Kojo knew he wanted him to run, so he ran, slipping in the mud.
Sergeant blew the whistle again, and Kojo skidded out onto the grass as he stopped and ran back. When he reached Sergeant, the whistle blew again.
He was hardly running because he was slipping so much, so he bent to take off his shoes, and Sergeant blew his whistle hard and quick again and again.
His shoes were off. He ran. Back and forth, back and forth, and still Sergeant was blowing his whistle.
It was almost like he was moonwalking.
Sergeant was shouting now. ‘Run, you bloody wog. Run.’
And Kojo knew he was not allowed to say that, the ‘bloody’ or the ‘wog’, but he was not one to point it out.
Sergeant was running beside him now and he was blowing the whistle in his face and he turned back and ran, back again, ran, back, ran, back again.
Sergeant did not know that every night Kojo beat his head against his pillow, that at home Mum used to hold his head down and blow shhs into his ear, that at school the boys had laughed at him, until he showed them what was what, that then they stopped. That he kept beating his head. So he knew about endurance. He knew how to keep going.
‘You won’t break me with your whistling and your insults,’ he was saying to an invisible Sergeant, and his face was more closed than I had ever seen it.
Sergeant. Fucking Sergeant. Fucking Jane. It was raining like a rhythm through his head. He wished he had written it, because it was so good, and he smiled as he thought that.
Sergeant saw, through the rain pouring down, and through his sweat. ‘Down on your hands and feet,’ he shouted.
Kojo stopped. He felt like passing out.
‘Down on your hands and feet. Now.’
He did not know where he found the strength, but he thought of prostrating himself as a child
in front of his father in Kaba.
Of lying face down in the imported gravel at the palace, waiting until he was given permission to get up.
He thought of his sisters.
Of coming out of the bathroom and ripping off his towel and doing a dance and wiggling it at them.
Of them chasing after him and catching him and holding him down.
All three of them holding him down and laughing at him as he struggled to get free.
He was still on his hands and feet, but the sound of his sisters’ laughter was deep in his ears, and the sight of his father’s callused feet and snakeskin sandals was in the back of his eyes.
He felt something come up and he had to lie down or he had to get up.
His hands were slipping and something was struggling in his chest.
He wanted to get up, but Sergeant pressed his great walloping foot on his back.
Sergeant pressed his face into the mud and, right there and then, something in him broke.
Something broke and he was crying and he was hitting Sergeant, punching him with the strength he had left, and he didn’t know if he was crying because Sergeant had won or because of the thing that was broken.
14
After Kojo had gone to bed, my mother came into my room. ‘Maya, I have to tell you a secret,’ she said, amnesiac as always of her mood earlier.
The last time she had told me one, it was of her affair with the Ghanaian ambassador in London, whom she had known since she was young and who she insisted had stayed unmarried so he could marry her. I did not want to know any more secrets.
She began to tell me anyway. After her father died, she said, the other wives divided his treasures so they could gain education and come back to lead.
There was a turn in the fortunes of the family, of the kingdom, as if her father’s passing undid not just the balance of the kingdom, but of the whole country.
‘I know this already,’ I said.
But she went on.
When Nkrumah came into power, he gave scholarships to the young and promising to go abroad, so they could gain education, come back to lead.
The God Child Page 7