The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  There was no more chocolate milk in triangular cartons. The milk-processing factory was closed; the company had gone bust, leaving the government with outstanding loans. Along the beach at Lumley, in the curve of the bay where I spent days of that holiday rolling in the surf, the Cape Sierra Hotel stood on the tip of the peninsula. The modern building was equipped with a swimming pool, luxury reception rooms and an outside dance floor, but the bedrooms were unoccupied half the year.

  Our father called the Cape Sierra Hotel a folly, ‘mocking us all from Aberdeen Point’. He said so in his speech to the House of Representatives. The next day's newspapers wore his words across their front pages like a bandanna, alongside a picture of him sweeping into the house, confident and smiling. His first priority was to end the cycle of borrowing and bankruptcy. There were to be no tax rises. Ending diamond smuggling was the next priority, and in exchange for the assured security of their mines the diamond companies would pay an extra tax, a hypothecated tax to be used purely for development projects. It was a cautious budget, but an optimistic one. It reassured genuine international investors and won the confidence of local people.

  Our father had a brilliant mind, combined with unshakable self-belief. He had set about mastering his new job in a matter of months. Brian Quinn, the IMF's representative, who used to teach at an American university, lent him Samuelson's Principles of Economics. Our father spent his days at the ministry and his evenings with his team of advisers, cramming his head with information just as he had during late nights in the front room of my parents’ tenement flat when he was a medical student. For a man of his ability it wasn't an impossible job: ours was a tiny country with a rudimentary economy. And besides, what alternative was there? This was government in the newborn states of Africa. Lines of graduates, trained specialists: these did not exist. Africa had to make do with what she had. In many countries it proved disastrous, but it could also be exhilarating. Within the struggle there were moments like these when suddenly everything seemed possible.

  At home, though, the ephemeral hopefulness that follows a reunion had already drifted away. By 1968 our parents’ marriage was a bowl patterned by a thousand hairline fractures; it was not to survive the holiday.

  They had been apart for more than a year. They had both had other relationships. My mother arrived from Aberdeen to find a pair of hair combs and a jar of skin-lightener in the bedroom.

  Over those hot, wet months, while mildew grew on our new suitcases in the cupboard, we watched as our parents acted out the inevitable dénouement of their marriage. Their war was conducted with the weapons of silence and withdrawal. There was not even the comfort of an angry confrontation, no vivid scenes to focus our floundering emotions or anchor the insecurity in something solid.

  One morning we all had breakfast together. Our father took his coffee heavily sugared, and he asked my mother to pass the sugar bowl. She carried on, blandly eating her breakfast as though she hadn't heard. He repeated himself in a clear, even voice. We all looked up – everyone, that is, except my mother, who had suddenly turned stone deaf. Her eyes were fixed somewhere on the centre of the tablecloth, as though she were examining a stain. I slipped out of my seat and with one foot on the floor I stretched out towards the sugar bowl. It was just out of reach. My fingers fumbled on the rim as I tried to drag it closer. The bowl toppled and fell. Crystals scattered on the white tablecloth. Now look, my mother exhaled in exasperation. I climbed back into my seat as she began to scoop the sugar up; then she replaced the bowl – exactly where it had been before, next to her elbow.

  Our mother was the first person in her family to marry a foreigner. Our father was the first person in his to marry for love. When the passion leached out of their union and left a colourless husk, he offered her something else. An African marriage, my mother pronounced with scorn, where the men and women do their own thing. She could not accept such a compromise, for she was a European woman who deserved nothing less than to be loved and cherished.

  Our mother always denied what others talked about openly: that she was pregnant when she married my father. Times changed and women married or lived alone, kept their maiden names, worked at their own careers, had babies out of wedlock – still our mother clung to her position, which became less tenable as the years mounted. I always thought she was protecting her reputation, in an old-fashioned sort of way. But in time I began to see her motivations might be different: she wanted people, us especially, to see her marriage as an act of daring, precipitated by true love. It should have been a brave, compelling love, the love of myths. And yet the prosaic truth hinted at a different reality. It had been an inauspicious union, sadly flawed at its inception.

  That holiday our mother spent her days with friends, old and new. Somehow in that fractured atmosphere she blossomed nevertheless. She loved the sun and soon her skin flushed pink and gold, streaks of nacre shone in her hair. When she was around our father her mouth hardened into a straight line and she stared into the corner of the room, but when she was with her friends she seemed radiant.

  Our father focused on his official engagements. He flew to Israel with his economic adviser to persuade the Israeli government to buy back the oil refinery they had built. It was overpriced and, since Sierra Leone had no oil to speak of, useless. He rose early and spent long hours at the ministry. In the evenings he played tennis at the Hill Station Club and often we joined him, fetching the balls that rolled into the corner of the courts, or pitched over into the hedges on the other side of the fence. Weekends we all went to the beach as a family, to Cape Club, where we spent our afternoons playing on an old wreck. The boat was washed up on the sand, beached so that it was beyond rescue and would never sail again. But for that one holiday it was still a boat and we played in the cabin, spinning the wheel this way and that. Gradually, the gentle waves tore into the hull, pulling it apart until eventually, years later, I could only find a snag of rusty metal in the sand.

  Much of that holiday is lost to me now, although curiously I recollect with great clarity events leading up to it as well as those that took place shortly afterwards. Perhaps the atmosphere at home discouraged me from forming memories. I have seen the photographs: me at the beach, hand in hand with Big Aminatta, my hair a mass of dense ringlets, crystals of salt sparkling like precious stones on my darkened skin. In another shot I am leaning over the balcony overlooking the garden at Minister's Quarters, my feet on the lowest rung, laughing wildly at who knows what, and that wild hair again, blowing across my face. They are happy images, there's no doubt. Yet they exist in a vacuum with barely a corresponding memory alongside.

  18

  Milik was the steward in the house on Spur Loop and he was there when we arrived. He doesn't appear in any of the photographs, nor was Milik his real name.

  In the mornings he laid the table and served breakfast. The milk, mixed from powder and water the day before, was kept chilled in the fridge. The cold masked the chalky flavour, made it seem almost like real milk. In the mornings, after I poured my Rice Krispies into the bowl, Milik would ask: ‘Milik?’

  ‘Milk,’ one or other of the three of us corrected. ‘Milk. It's milk. Say “milk”.’ We pressed our lips together – ‘mmm’ – and to enunciate the final syllable we stuck our tongues out to touch our upper teeth in an exaggerated manner: ‘Mmm-ilk. Mmm-ilk.’

  ‘Mi-lik,’ he repeated carefully. ‘Milik.’ No matter how he tried, or how much we teased him, he couldn't form the word without slipping in the extra vowel. In time we gave up, but we called him Milik between ourselves and sometimes as a nickname. He took our teasing as it was meant, as a sign of our affection. Gradually we stopped using his real name altogether and now I can't even remember what it was.

  During the days Milik worked in the kitchen, carrying out his chores alongside our two cooks, Amara and Amadu. He sorted the laundry and washed it by hand in a big zinc basin under the tap at the back of the house; at other times he sat on the step by the back door and pl
ucked chickens with Big Aminatta. Above them the vultures circled and landed, one by one, until there was a queue on the roof's edge waiting for the scraps. In the evening, just before the official Mercedes appeared in the drive, Milik changed into a clean white shirt and as soon as our father called he carried through a glass and a bottle of cold beer on a tray. The rest of the time he sat on a stool in the corner of the kitchen, polishing our father's shoes, rubbing with tight circles over the same spot until the shoes shone like a stag beetle's back.

  I loved Milik. He was never impatient with me, the way Big Aminatta and even Amadu and Amara could be. We three children spent most of our time in the kitchen and out the back, climbing the mango tree that crowded over the kitchen door, collecting the taut, green fruits and eating them sprinkled with salt. He warned us we would get stomach ache. ‘Why?’ I asked – the question I asked after every adult statement.

  Milik simply shrugged: ‘There are things you know, but you don't understand,’ he replied, and there was nothing I could say.

  Sometimes Milik would oblige my continued presence with a story. Some were the tales of Mr Spider. In America, where the fables were carried by enslaved Africans two centuries before, the foolish character whose deeds and misdemeanours are driven by greed and self-interest became known as Br'er Rabbit. In Ghana he is Ananse, the Spider. Other stories, the ones I really preferred, were the rambling accounts without an obvious meaning that featured devils or bush spirits and their encounters with men.

  ‘There was a man with a lump on his back,’ started Milik one day. He was sitting on the kitchen step with a chicken, its throat freshly slit, in his hands.

  ‘A hump?’ I checked.

  ‘Yes, a hump. There was a man with a hump on his back.’

  I interrupted a second time, just to revise my correction: ‘A hunchback.’

  ‘Yes.’ Milik, like most people I knew in Sierra Leone, didn't take umbrage when you corrected his English. He plunged the chicken into scalding water and went smoothly on: ‘Everyone in the village knew the hunchback because of his hump. One day this man was walking back from the fields when he stepped off the path to piss and while he was standing there some devils saw him and they said to each other: “If a thing is on a thing, let us take it off. Or if it is not on, let us put it back on!”

  ‘They led the man into the middle of their dancing ring under the hump tree, where humps were hanging. They danced around him and sang their song:

  ‘“Round and round,

  If you meet a person in the dance, they will beat you,

  Round and round,

  Let us hang it there, they will beat you.’”

  ‘What does that mean? Who will beat you?’ I asked.

  ‘It's the devils’ own song. It doesn't mean anything.’

  ‘It must mean something.’ Although I enjoyed Milik's stories, I'd become used to the sort of tales, like ‘Snow White’ or ‘Cinderella’, in which every detail has its place and purpose, driving listener and storyteller to an inevitable, moral conclusion. It didn't occur to me that something of the song might have got lost in the translation.

  ‘It's just a song these devils sang among themselves. Listen. You don't worry about it. They said: “If a thing is on a thing, let us take it off. If it is not on, let us put it on.” And whoop, they lifted off his hump and hung it on the hump tree. The man went back to the village, where the people were amazed to see him with a straight back.’

  Milik paused, tearing a handful of feathers off the bird. I hated the smell of wet chicken feathers and scalded skin, but not enough to leave.

  ‘s in that village had a son who was also a hunchback. When he saw the man around the village, he ran to him and asked how he rid himself of his hump.’ Milik paused and leaned closer. ‘Well, what passes between a devil and a man is supposed to be kept secret, but anyway the man told the chief's son.’

  ‘Just because he was the chief's son?’

  ‘Yes, because he was the chief's son and because the man forgot he should have kept the secret. So the chief's son went to the same place and stepped off the path, and the devils saw him, and they put him in the ring and sang their song.’ Milik skipped singing the song again. Probably he didn't want to answer any more questions about it.

  ‘Then they chanted, “If a thing is on a thing, let's take it off. And if it is not on, let us put it on,” and they ran up and snatched the hump off his back and threw it up on the hump tree.

  ‘The chief's son was very, very pleased indeed and he rushed back to the village to show his father how straight he had become. He decided he wanted to thank the devils for their deed. The first man had not done so – he was poor. But the chief's son was rich. He did not know that you shouldn't thank a devil, that they do what they do. If you want to go saying thank you, you will offend them.

  ‘The chief's son bought a fine country cloth and took it to the devils’ place. He called them: “You took a hump off the back of a man who is poor,” he explained, “and he did not give you anything. But my father is rich and so I am bringing you this fine country cloth.”

  ‘The devils listened in silence. They were annoyed, you see. Nobody should thank a devil. So they took the chief's son and put him in the middle of the dancing ring and sang their devils’ song. Then they cried: “If a thing is on a thing, take it off. And if it is not on, let us put it on.” And they grabbed a hump from the hump tree and put it on his chest. Whump! And they told the man that if a devil does something for you, you should go quietly. You shouldn't go back with gifts and say thank you to them. This is not why they do it. They sent him away.’

  I waited. Milik was silent, using his fingernails to extract from the skin of the fowl the tips of a few feathers that had broken off.

  ‘What happened next?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing. It's the end of the story.’

  ‘Well, it's not fair!’ I became indignant. ‘The man who said thank you got punished. What happened to the other man? The one who broke the devils’ secret?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Milik was unperturbed. ‘He went on with his life.’

  ‘But it must mean something.’

  ‘It means when you see someone with a lump on their chest, they bought it with a country cloth.’ Milik laughed. He picked up the bowl of greasy water and threw it out into the yard. Several vultures dropped down, hitting the ground soundlessly, the span of their great wings billowing like parachutes. ‘You wouldn't go back to find a devil. Just like you wouldn't buy a dead chicken,’ he finished and ducked back through the dark mouth of the kitchen door.

  I remembered Milik's story months later in Aberdeen. We returned in October, back to our caravan since the value of the leone against sterling made moving unaffordable. One of the local newspapers even did a story about us: the African minister's wife and children who lived in a caravan. Our mother came back to finish her course; Memuna stopped boarding and joined me at St Margaret's. It was cold and raining, the wind danced and kicked the leaves high up so that they swirled around in front of the bay window as we waited for our parents to collect us.

  Our school days finished with a story from the teacher. We were allowed to bring books to class with stories for her to read, and it occurred to me, as we sat in a circle around her, that the faeries in Scotland were just like the contrary devils in Sierra Leone. So I asked her to tell the story about the man with the hump on his back. She thought I meant The Hunchback of Notre Dame. No, I said, the story with the devil in it. The teacher looked at me frowning and told me to shush. We would not talk about the devil or tell stories about him. She would hear no more about it.

  The next time the butcher's van stopped outside 38 Gairn Terrace to deliver Gran's messages, I looked through the back door and saw headless chickens, lying on their backs, stumpy legs in the air. At the kitchen counter Gran prepared the chicken for high tea, cutting off flaps of skin with a pair of kitchen scissors. I told her she shouldn't buy dead chickens.

  ‘Whatever makes yo
u say that, dearie?’ She looked down at me in surprise. ‘You don't think I'm going to kill it myself, do you?’

  Milik's soft, moulded features rose in my mind and I heard his voice. For a moment I smelled the pungent scents of Africa. I couldn't begin to explain to Gran. There are things you know, but you don't understand.

  We were in our yellow Mini, sliding sideways down a hill at Nigg. My sister and I were in the back seat, my brother and our mother in the front. I saw a red car gliding uphill towards us. Winter had glazed the roads with ice as dark and clear as sugar on a toffee apple. After a slow motion slide the two cars met with a crunch. Nobody was hurt. Two milk bottles on the back seat shattered, bathing our school uniforms, skirts and knickers.

  On bonfire night, on the beach with my mother and her student friends, I gasped and held my breath as a rocket exploded and lit up the black sky. Burning embers fell earthward and landed on my foot. A weal appeared on my red Wellington boot; it bubbled and the bubble burst, a hole appeared and my nylon sock began to melt. When the fire touched my skin I screamed. My mother flew towards me across the hard pebbles, pulled my foot free and plunged it into the freezing sea.