The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  I had my bath in the pink-tiled bathroom next to the kitchen. My grandmother ran the water hot and deep, and scrubbed me with Lifebuoy. I had never had a bath tub before. In Koidu we had showers, without even hot water – although in truth the sun on the tank meant the water was always tepid. At the caravan site there was only the shower block. Gran moved between the two rooms keeping an eye on me and laying the tea table at the same time. Left alone for a few minutes I would try to swim up and down in the water.

  At six sharp my grandfather came home from the travel agency for tea. There were slices of bread and margarine and hot, sweet tea in yellow Melaware cups, home-made Scotch broth with bloated grains of barley, mince and boiled potatoes or poached haddock followed by glasses of butterscotch Angel Delight. My grandmother did all the cooking, apart from my grandfather's morning porridge; he insisted on making that himself, putting the oats on to soak at night before he went to bed.

  Around tea time my mother's car pulled up outside. Once her teaching assignments were over for the day she came to collect me and joined us at the table. We ate, more or less, in silence. My grandfather did not approve of talk at the meal table. My grandmother stepped back and forth between the sink under the window and the table, clearing dishes.

  ‘What'll you take, Am, brown bread or white bread?’ Every day the same question. Every day the same answer.

  ‘I'll have white bread please, Gran.’

  In my book of poems, alongside the tale of Shock-headed Peter and the tailor with the enormous scissors who snipped off the thumbs of children who sucked them, was a ballad about three wicked boys who teased a blackamoor. On the opposite page was a sketch of a savage, a little golliwog figure with a faint look of bemusement etched upon his not-quite-human features. The boys were sketched in quite a sophisticated manner, but the little black boy was like a child's drawing: a perfectly circular head, big round eyes and a striped outfit. In punishment for their cruelty a magician took the white boys and dipped them into a giant pot of ink, turning them all into blackamoors themselves.

  My grandmother liked to call me ‘her little savage’, but I didn't want to be like the little inky man in my book. I refused to eat brown bread. I would not eat my boiled egg if the shell was brown. I wanted nothing but white meat, carved from the breast of the chicken. ‘Brown bread makes you brown and white bread makes you white,’ I recited my own mantra. Did I come up with it myself?

  My grandmother took a slice of Mothers Pride from the wrapper, spread it with margarine and cut it into pieces for me.

  When we were through eating, my grandfather went back to his chair in the sitting room to finish reading the Express. Gran washed the plates while my mother dried, and as soon as the kitchen was set back to rights the two of us drove home in the dark, across the bridge to our caravan site.

  16

  Spring in my grandfather's garden brought rows of daffodils shuddering in the breeze like a brass band marching to a silent tune. We had been in Scotland for nearly a year. As the evenings lengthened he spent hours in his garden, where he grew rhubarb, raspberries, blackcurrants and vegetables. Late in the summer he collected the fruit and spent a whole day in the kitchen, behind closed doors like a scientist surrounded by bubbling pans and glass jars.

  My grandfather had tiny, birdy blue eyes and long dry fingers with which he pinched my cheeks. He dressed in the colours of the hills: tweed jackets flecked with tiny yellow threads like the gorse-covered slopes and sharp creased trousers the same shade as the grey-green heather. When we came to visit he would kiss me sloppily on the lips and never noticed me wipe my mouth with the back of my hand afterwards. At tea he let me share his kippers, carefully stripping a portion of dozens of feathery bones to put on my plate.

  Grandad was the first person to tell me I was a changeling. Afterwards I asked my mother what he meant.

  ‘A changeling? That's what the faeries leave behind in the crib when they steal human babies and take them back to their secret world.’ She told me about faeries – how they lived in caves in the hills, deep in the forests and glens, and very few people ever saw them. At night faeries came to the homes of overburdened housewives. They cleaned the entire house from top to bottom in exchange for a glass of milk left out for them the night before. When the woman came down the next morning the pots were gleaming and the little people were gone, no trace of them left behind.

  My grandmother often referred to the faeries. ‘Ay, well. The faeries will do it,’ she would say, if the washing up lay in the sink and she was busy with other things. The next morning the washing up would indeed be done. Or if I didn't eat my fish or mince, she'd threaten to let the faeries have my pudding.

  I was a faerie, from a hidden world. I liked that idea, so much so I began to tell people I was a changeling.

  Months later, on my first day at school I stood up and introduced myself to my teacher and my new classmates as a changeling. Inspired by this information the teacher went out of the room and brought back a book of Scottish myths to read to the class. She showed us a picture of the creature found by an unsuspecting mother in her child's cot. We gazed at the illustration. I was as horrified as the rest of the class by what I saw there: a cringing long-snouted beast wrapped in soft baby blankets fixed the woman with a dreadful, vicious look.

  ‘Are you really a changeling?’ asked the boy next to me; he had a pudding-bowl haircut and a mole on his cheek. I didn't answer, I wasn't sure any more. At the end of the day while we were waiting at the bay window for our mothers to come and collect us, the boy with the pudding-bowl hair crept up behind me and pulled up my skirt.

  Faeries were not like fairies. I had heard fairy stories. Faeries cleaned the housewife's house in exchange for milk, but if the unfortunate woman forgot to leave a glass of milk out on her kitchen table or started to take the little people for granted they threw tantrums, dropped newly baked pies, overturned butter churns, terrified the cat and played in the flour bins. Faeries stole farmers’ horses at night and rode them deep into their enchanted kingdoms, returning the animals to their stables before light, so that in the morning the farmer found his horse too exhausted to pull the plough. Faeries cast spells on men and women, luring them to places from which they never returned; if they managed to escape from the faeries’ lair they were rendered deaf and dumb by their experience and could never tell what they knew about the faeries’ world.

  When he suffered toothache our grandfather removed his own teeth with a pair of pliers. He never visited the dentist or the doctor. One weekend Sheka, home from school, showed me how he could wiggle his bottom tooth by poking it with his tongue. After tea our grandfather fetched a piece of string and called Sheka into the sitting room. He tightened the string around the wobbly tooth and then looped it over the handle of the sitting-room door. Under Grandad's instruction Sheka stood still with his mouth open in the middle of the room, frozen in an expression of surprise. Grandad warned Sheka to brace himself, then he stepped forward and gave the door an almighty heave.

  The door banged shut and the tooth flew across the room after it, trailing the string like a kite. We raced forward to pick it up, engaged in a macabre inspection and felt especially rewarded to see a little bit of tattered gum left clinging to it. Sheka was sent to the kitchen to rinse his mouth and have his wound staunched with a wad of damp cotton wool. One by one our baby teeth were dispatched in this way. When my turn came I sat in Grandad's chair afterwards working the tip of my tongue into the soft, metallic-tasting hole in my gum. Gran gave me my tooth, wrapped in a piece of toilet paper. Later that night the fairies switched it for a tiny, warm silver sixpence.

  As I was growing up I was only remotely aware of the rift between my grandfather and my mother. In each other's presence they behaved with reserved indifference. When my mother came to collect us she always kept her visits to Gairn Terrace brief. She had inherited from her father a distaste for discussion of the emotional or personal kind. They both acted as though they were un
accountable to the other, glided over the pain and let their eyes slide past each other's gaze. They used my grandmother as a medium, deflecting conversation through her, and Gran allowed them to: she soaked up the anger, sifted the rage, allowed her soul be choked with the briny silt of past hurt. Anything to keep the peace in the family.

  When my mother had announced she was pregnant my grandfather refused to speak to her or allow her under his roof. She had made her bed and must lie in it, he said. Three years later, a few days after I was born, my mother had contracted appendicitis; our grandfather drove his wife down to Bellshill to the hospital, but would only wait in the car park while she went up to the ward. Until he sent our mother the newspaper while we were in Koidu, they had not exchanged so much as a word.

  Back then our mother had left Aberdeen without regret. She had dreams of the life that awaited her and had never intended to live it out in Aberdeen. Her friends worried she might be disappointed. Now she was back in Aberdeen, with three brown children; her husband had only just been released from jail, six thousand miles away. A truce between my mother and my grandfather had been achieved, but there was a dark space at the centre of their relationship.

  In Guinea our father was still in the bush preparing for armed insurgence. Letters continued to arrive and money for our school fees. All the while my mother thought he was back in Koidu running the clinic. In the meantime their relationship was apparently on hold. My mother carried on with her degree and her own interests. She had a large circle of friends; her life was reasonably well organised and she seemed happy.

  At Easter my brother and sister came home for the holidays. Behind our caravan, gypsies arrived and camped in the outlying fields. And in the long grass pitched battles were fought between the kids of the poor whites and the swarthy gypsy children. No one questioned but that we would fight on the side of the home team against the travellers. Stones and insults flew across the divide as Sheka, Memuna and I fought side by side. In a lull between exchanges of fire we whispered and waited, lying hidden from our enemies under cover of the grass. The seconds ticked past. Perhaps the gypsies had retreated. Sheka put his head up above the tall stalks and caught a flying rock in the centre of his forehead. Blood spurted from his wound. We retired from the field.

  On 17 April in Daru, a border outpost a long way from Freetown, a group of young soldiers arrested their senior officers, locked them up and took control of the radio. The rebellion spread to Freetown, to the barracks at Murraytown, Wilberforce and Juba, where men broke into the stores and stole arms and ammunition. By evening the privates had locked the entire officer corps in Pademba Road, including Juxon Smith and Police Commissioner William Leigh, both badly beaten and lying on the floor, alone in their cells. The leaders of the Privates’ Revolt, as it came to be known, celebrated and told the press that they had mutinied over pay and conditions, accusing their officers of driving around in smart new cars while the men received nothing. They called themselves the ACRM, the Anti Corruption Revolutionary Movement.

  Our father left Guinea for Freetown as Siaka Stevens's envoy. The takeover had pre-empted the APC's plans and the leadership needed to act fast. He had covered no more than twenty-five miles when he met Mohammed Bash Taqi on his way from Freetown to Conakary: he was in the company of two of the soldiers of the ACRM. The privates in charge of the army had insisted that Colonel John Bangura be asked back from Guinea to lead the movement, with Colonel Genda as his deputy. For the APC it was a good sign.

  Later the same night in Freetown our father and Colonel Bangura met the youthful ACRM leaders, alongside a man called Lami Sidique; he had been secretary-general of the NRC's civilian committee. Our father had first met him aboard the Aureol when we were all on our way home for the first time. Sidique was an experienced civil servant, a decent man, and he led the negotiations in tandem with the new acting governor-general, Banja Tejan Sie. The young privates, who had absolutely no agenda beyond exacting their revenge on their officers and commandeering expensive cars, had at least the sense to realise they were in over their heads. They agreed with the proposal to a return to civilian rule. In the last year, though, the political landscape of the country had shifted. Albert Margai was no longer leader of the SLPP. The party was now headed by Salia Jusu Sherriff, who had been minister of health during my father's brief stay at Connaught Hospital. No one was certain exactly what model of civilian leadership there should be. After countless late-night discussions all the successful candidates from the previous year's elections were called to State House to decide.

  Nine days after the Privates’ Revolt Siaka Stevens was named prime minister of Sierra Leone for the second time. Everyone waited for the announcement of the next most senior post, that of minister of finance.

  Two days later, on 28 April, Mohamed Sorie Forna, our father, was sworn in as minister of finance. He had been with the party only a year and few people had ever heard of him outside the tightest political circles. The rumour mill crackled with whispers. He was described as brilliant, ambitious, ruthless. There was astonishment at his age – thirty-two – followed by a surge of indignation among those party stalwarts who had been bypassed. The opposition had hoped Stevens would give the portfolio to their leader, as a gesture of unity. The Creoles for the most part pretended to be above it all. The new minister retired to his new, empty house, with just two months to produce his first budget.

  I would have given a lot to be at Gairn Terrace when the cable arrived bringing the news; to know what passed through my grandfather's mind. Here was the black man whom he had snubbed, husband to his daughter despite my grandfather's best efforts, father to the dark-skinned grandchildren who ran in and out of his home, now a cabinet minister. It should have been his worst nightmare, but perhaps it made no difference. Would he, could he now forgive his daughter for defying him? Would it have occurred to him to do so?

  Prejudice, though, doesn't depend on logic. It distorts images; it is like viewing a pebble through the waters of a stream. And like water it slips through your fingers: there is nothing to grasp hold of, wrestle with. It can always find another opening. It leaks into everything and in the end, if it drains away, it leaves everything damp. Still the same, but slightly stained, with a tide mark around the edges.

  I was too young to ask those questions and my mother would not. I didn't see my grandfather or my grandmother again until I was twelve and by then I was coming to terms with something altogether more momentous. Much later, I came round to asking Grandad, but although he spoke to me of many things he would not speak to me of that.

  17

  We returned to a new house and a city I could barely remember. I was only a year and a half old when we left Freetown for Koidu. The only reminders of our lives up-country were Big Aminatta, who was even bigger now, and Jim, the Old English sheepdog. Poor Jim. Twelve months of neglect had exacted their toll upon him. I caught sight of him wandering the grounds a day after we arrived, confused and listless, looking like he had a bad case of mange. It was only when I saw Jim I remembered that he had once been our dog. A memory bubbled up, but never quite surfaced. Gazing at Jim, my dog, who looked at once familiar and strange, produced a swimming sensation, of lives leaking one into the other. As for Jim, he didn't remember me at all.

  The ministerial residence in Wilberforce was grand, certainly by African standards. In contrast to the pitched roofs and layered rooms of the colonial homes, the concrete house was built in the shape of a letter P, flat planes at one end, curved walls and balconies at the other. It was painted bright white, except for under the eaves and the pillars supporting the roof over the veranda, which had been daubed with turquoise.

  At the front a sloping garden overlooked a view of the hills and the sea. At the back, the direction from which the house was approached, there was an expanse of empty land bordered by a row of concrete cabins that served as the boys’ quarters and several piles of gravel. The gravel had probably been there since independence; it gave the whole
place an unfinished look, as though the money for the job had run out or the last occupants had left in a hurry. Given the sorry state of our government, either, or both, were entirely possible.

  The rains were just beginning. The city looked burned out and exhausted, as if it needed a grand soaking to reach the depths of the earth, bring back the greenery and live again. The brief night-time showers did little more than leave streaks on the cars, on the painted facades of houses and down window panes. A year had passed and the populace had endured a lot; the jubilation had ebbed away a long time ago. People were becoming too accustomed to the lingering sourness of disappointment.

  At the end of June our father presented his budget speech to parliament. He wore traditional robes: pure white with curls of gold embroidery cascading down the front and at the cuffs and hem, and a matching round cap. He had worked on his presentation round the clock.

  In the Margai era the government misspent so flagrantly that suppliers refused their worthless IOUs and began to demand cash on delivery. Juxon Smith, with his customary zeal, had investigated the wealth of ministers and where he found evidence of corruption he forced the miscreant to repay the money. People relished the sight of big men cut down to size, but little cash was actually recouped. Juxon Smith raised taxes and went begging to the International Monetary Fund for the second time. We were nine million leones in debt.

  New countries like ours were easy prey for western lenders, who persuaded leaders to finance new projects on credit. In the five years following independence, factories, roads and hotels flourished, springing up across the landscape. They were popular, too, yielding jobs and manufactured goods; they made people feel that our country was developing – never mind that they were bought at an inflated price or that repayments swelled each year, leaving every man, woman and child bound and the country in hock for years. Ministers, contractors and suppliers were satisfied. They built new houses and bought gleaming, growling cars with their cut of the deal. But greedy hands had strangled the golden goose. When the cars broke down there were no parts or trained mechanics to fix them. Houses begun were never finished. They turned into ruined building sites, bristling with steel girders, lacking outside walls so that rooms were exposed to view, like a doll's house. Homeless people moved into them, living their lives in front of an audience like actors on a stage, with velvet drapes of moss hanging down and hordes of brown and black African magpies screaming in the wings.