Two months later in Freetown, at five o'clock in the morning, my father overslept by a few minutes and was late for his morning shower. Moments later a blast tore through the empty bathroom, gouging a great hole in the exterior wall and sending a jagged crack from floor to ceiling across the adjacent bedroom wall. He went into the bathroom to find the air opaque with smoke; on the other side of the room he could just make out the remains of the air-conditioning unit lying on the floor. When daylight came the police arrived and said there was evidence of foul play. The following day the newspapers reported an attempt on the life of the finance minister.
In public our father made light of it, saying it was nothing more than a faulty unit. The police wanted to fly in a special investigator, but our father wouldn't hear of it. He said it would cost too much in public money, but privately he confided to friends that he doubted the culprit could ever be touched by the law.
Siaka Stevens, who had recently appointed him to act as premier while he was out of the country on official business, joked in Creole: ‘Na dis job I don gi you make dem wan kill you?’ Has the job I've given you made someone want to kill you? Our father took to wearing a gun at his hip, for the first time since he came back from Guinea.
In Scotland the nights were stretching out and the darkness dragged away the few hours of daylight ever earlier. Every morning as soon as I woke up I ran to the window to see what patterns Jack Frost had left for me on the panes of glass. A few weeks later our shoes began to stick to the floor again.
19
Our mother showed us her wedding ring: a yellow, flickering band. Memuna tried it on. It hung loosely on her finger, but she held out her hand like an adult woman checking her manicure. Our mother laughed at her eldest daughter's poise.
When we three were alone, I asked: ‘Isn't Mummy married to Daddy?’
‘Not any more, I don't think,’ Sheka replied. ‘Now she's married to Uncle Win.’
‘What about Daddy, then?’ I asked.
‘I don't know,’ he said. He stood up and walked away.
Our mother was back from Mexico, where rock stars and actresses went to shed their partners, like old skins, before they wed new ones. Our mother married Winston Prattley, a United Nations official who came from New Zealand and was sixteen years her senior. She had met him in Freetown during our holiday; they had sat next to each other at a dinner at the British high commission while my father was abroad and their relationship started shortly afterwards. Winston Prattley followed us back to Aberdeen and proposed to our mother, promising her that with him she would never need to work again. His offer met with satisfaction: from both the romantic and the pragmatic side of our mother's nature.
It was the summer of 1969. Britain was in the middle of a heatwave. The world watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in fuzzy black and white. In Mexico our mother's wedding plans were delayed by twenty-four hours while the public officials took a break from conjoining foreign couples with careworn faces and stayed at home instead to drink tequila with their families. In America anti-war protesters claimed the walk was phoney, staged in a TV studio to divert attention from the killing in Vietnam.
Back in Scotland we three children spent the week in a farmhouse with a lady called Tessa and no television. Instead Tessa, who was a friend of my mother's from college, had a splendid cottage garden, full of strawberries that were just beginning to ripen. We picked all the red ones, swallowing them with illicit pleasure, licking the transparent pink juice from our fingers. Then, unable to resist, we pulled off the ones that were still pale and ate them, too.
Afterwards our mother and Uncle Win collected us from Scotland and he treated us all to a holiday in Yugoslavia. The first night we slept in a castle in Dubrovnik, where the air drifting through the open window was like warm breath flavoured with herbs, scents of wild rosemary, oregano, thyme and bay. I had never been in a country that smelled as sweet as Yugoslavia.
Mornings we spent wandering through the cobbled streets of the old town, where cars were forbidden and old ladies in shiny, black clothes pushed mules along in the aching bright sunlight. A stand sold strawberry and vanilla ice cream, more delicious than any I had ever tasted. Uncle Win treated us all to one almost every day. Afternoons we went for a drive or swam in the sea, where I learned to hold my breath and open my eyes underwater and once watched in wonder as a turquoise sea horse bobbed in front of my nose.
One afternoon we rented a motor boat. My mother stood at the end with a fishing rod in her hands wearing a crochet bikini. The nylon line winged through the water after the boat. In a while it snagged, loosened and pulled taut again. She gave a small ‘ooh’ of excitement and began to reel her catch in slowly while we all crowded at the end of the boat. Everyone, including the boat's driver, who switched off the engine and threw his cigarette into the water, waited to see what she had caught. The whining pitch of the reel slowed; the water bubbled and the surface split. I saw vivid shades of purple, blue and green, like an oil spill, shimmering strands that trailed off into the wake of the drifting boat. There was silence.
‘Medusa,’ the driver pronounced. ‘Jellyfish. Very dangerous.’ He drew his hand across his throat. I thought he meant we were going to kill it and I wondered how. My mother held onto the rod while we drove the boat out to sea, far away from the shore and the swimmers, and there the boatman cut the line.
On the way back to the beach my mother explained that the Portuguese man-of-war was the most dangerous jellyfish in the sea: its tentacles grew to seventy foot and the sting from them could kill a man. Why was it all different colours? Had anyone ever been stung? Why was it Portuguese? We mouthed questions at her, while Uncle Win gazed at his new wife with pride and slowly stroked the copious hairs of his black, walrus moustache.
Our mother's new husband was based in Nigeria; when they met he had been in Freetown on a visit to oversee the local office. From Yugoslavia we went back to Scotland, where my mother packed up the caravan for the last time and sold her yellow Mini. She was leaving Aberdeen for the second time, and once again she said few goodbyes. We flew to Lagos and the four of us moved into Uncle Win's spacious home in a neighbourhood colonised by embassy workers and oil company staff. Far away from the seething, sweating swarm of Lagos, the white-painted wooden house was surrounded by a beautifully tended garden with lawns like green felt and borders full of flowers. There were uniformed staff: a cook, a gardener, a driver and a house boy. Inside the house were rugs, polished wooden floors, even a separate dining room and a wide staircase leading to the upper floors.
Even though the house seemed to be so big, there wasn't room enough for all of us. So while my mother moved into the master bedroom, the three of us shared a room on the other side of the landing. It contained only two beds, and so a sofa was brought up the stairs and put at the foot of the other two beds. That was where I slept.
A few days after we arrived my mother called us to her. We gathered around her in the sitting room. She had something important to talk to us about, she said. ‘Uncle Win is your father now. So what do you think you would like to call him? You can carry on calling him Uncle Win, or just Win if you like. But if you want to, it might be nice if you called him Daddy.’ She looked at each of us in turn.
I thought for a moment. I liked Uncle Win, I remembered the ice creams. And the thought of calling someone ‘Daddy’ felt good.
‘Sheka?’
‘I'm going to call him Win, Mummy.’ I was surprised at my brother's choice. I thought he was brave to call an adult by his first name, bare and unadorned. To my ear it sounded impertinent without some sort prefix or another. Like going into a church without a hat. I could never do that.
‘That's fine. What about you, Memuna?’
My sister plumped for ‘Uncle Win’. It was my turn, the youngest.
‘Am?’
I said I would call him Daddy. My mother was pleased. She smiled her special smile for me, a sudden brilliant flash, and hugged me, pressing my n
ose against her soft breast. ‘Good girl!’ she said, rolling her ‘r's in the way she did: ‘Good gurrl!’
I tried, I really did. But it didn't stick. I would forget, and when I remembered I couldn't quite form my lips round the word and push it out. Instead I dropped my voice and whispered, tagging it onto the rest of the words at the end of a sentence – ‘Daddy?’ The word hung suspended in the air as if I might open my mouth and let it slip back into the warmth. No one else seemed to notice. Not even Uncle Win, who didn't react one way or the other to whatever he was called. So I stopped. I went right back to calling him Uncle Win, which probably was no more appropriate than calling him Daddy, but it would do.
Can-can in combat boots. Past our house the soldiers strode, ten abreast across the width of the avenue, legs flung high as chorus girls, blank eyed as paid performers: young men who had sold their bodies for an infantryman's wage. They wore fatigues and heavy black boots drawn tightly at the ankle with laces woven in and out of dozens of eyelets. I, who had recently learned to tie my laces, found them compelling.
In Nigeria the war in Biafra was reaching its terrible zenith. Two years earlier the Christian Igbo people, who lived east of the delta of the Niger river, declared their independence from the rest of the state, threatening to spark the break-up the Nigerian Federation. Many African states supported General Gowon's military government in Lagos and Britain supplied him with military hardware. Tanzania and the Ivory Coast recognised Biafra's claims and France shipped arms to the secessionists.
The military might of the government in Lagos dealt the Igbos a series of swift and successful blows, but the Biafrans clung on for two years, refusing to surrender their dreams of a homeland. The war had disrupted food production and gradually the stores ran out. General Ojukwu, the Biafran leader, refused to allow aid supplies into Biafra if they had been shipped through federal Nigeria. The war officially ended after the New Year. Ojukwu fled to the Ivory Coast. By then more than one million Igbo people had slowly starved to death.
In Lagos we were far from the fighting, yet the signs of war were there. The secret police dumped bodies in the sea which sometimes washed back up onto the beaches or floated into the harbour, arms bound at the elbow, the marks left by their final torture still evident upon the bloated bodies. My stepfather was a keen sailor and a member of the Lagos Yacht Club, a popular meeting place for ex-patriates. On the weekends the sailors raced each other round orange buoys in the harbour and drank Heineken on the terraces. During those competitions yachtsmen sometimes sailed past the nameless victims of tribal persecution with whom the police had finished.
Our mother told me how, hanging out on the trapeze of Uncle Win's Flying Dutchman, she had hit a corpse. One minute she was skidding over the waves like a flying fish, the next she felt a bump. The corpse and she came back to back, like two people on a dance floor, just for a fraction of a second – and then the motion of the boat swept her away.
At first we watched the soldiers march past from the upstairs balcony. One day we crept down and crawled through the hedge and stood in the street. The next day we moved closer. And the day after that. We edged in until, at some point, our passive curiosity transmogrified into a game of chicken with the stamping feet of the soldiers. We crouched in the street until we could feel the first vibrations thudding through us. At that moment my stomach tightened. Then I saw the dust swirling at the end of the road. The soldiers were on their way. We held our positions right in the path of the approaching juggernaut. Our bodies were coiled tight as cobras. At the final moment, just when I thought I was about to feel the heel of a boot on my back, we hurled ourselves out of the way and scrambled through the hedge back into the safety of the house.
Our mother stitched brown and white checked dresses for my sister and me, and bought brown shorts and a white shirt for Sheka. We stood for our fittings on the landing at the top of the stairs, where my mother kept her desk, papers and her sewing machine.
Every Sunday we lined up in the same place, dressed only in our knickers, one behind the other. Sheka, Memuna, then me. Our mother checked us front and back for small red pimples and when she saw one she put a dab of Vaseline petroleum jelly on it from the family-sized pot on her knee. A few minutes later a pinprick of white appeared and when my mother squeezed a creamy, fat maggot, no more than a few millimetres long, slid out. We called them tumbu boils. The insects laid their eggs in the fibres of clothes as they dried on the washing line and even though the servants ironed every piece carefully, right down to the last sock, sometimes eggs survived the hot iron and hatched in our skin. The glutinous Vaseline cut off the oxygen, forcing the larva out for air. Afterwards our mother gave us our pocket money, a thrupenny bit, with a picture of the queen on it, just like we used to get in Scotland.
In September we started at Corona School, and on the first day it was evident to me our dresses were all wrong. They were the same colour as the other girls’ dresses, granted. But while everyone else wore a broad gingham check, our checks were narrow. Not only were we new, with no friends, but our dresses were different. The other pupils glanced at us from the safety of rings of their friends. We lined up on the playing fields next to the long row of classrooms; no one spoke to us, so we in turn pretended to ignore them.
The pupils at Corona were a mixed group; the mass of black faces was speckled with white ones. Most of the boys and girls were Nigerian, but the school's good reputation made it the first choice among the overseas business community.
Mrs Sami, my teacher, however, looked as if she came from somewhere in the South Seas. She had glossy black hair swept upwards so that it framed her broad forehead and high cheekbones; at the back of her head the hair was pulled into a sizeable chignon. Her son Eddie was in my class and I was put into the seat next to him. It was soon evident that he was eager to become my friend. Eddie had skin the colour of butter, a quick grin and a spiky fringe of the same dead-straight black hair as his mother. I never asked myself why he wanted to be friends, or wondered why the desk next to him was empty. That his mother was our class teacher didn't worry me. At that time I had only two ambitions. The first was to catch up with my brother and sister. The second was to become a boy.
At home I made parachutes for Sindy just like the ones Sheka had for his Action Man, only mine were made of handkerchiefs and string. There was a flat roof above the kitchen where we secretly played and melted our wax crayons under the sun, creating giant palettes of psychedelic colours. From the roof's edge I launched Sindy on her missions into enemy territory. Not once did the chute open and Sindy broke both her legs; they dangled at odd angles beneath her well-endowed torso. Later I took to borrowing my brother's shorts, so much better suited to sliding down banisters than my own little skirts. I wanted to be a boy and being best friends with a boy was a fine start, so I smiled right back at Eddie.
Those first few weeks of school we were always engaged in some project or another. We were told to ask our parents for a black-eyed bean. The next day we put it into a jar with blotting paper and water and over the following days we watched our beans germinate, the shoots race up the glass towards the light. Next we were asked to bring an insect into class. All weekend I laid piles of breadcrumbs on the floor and hovered out of sight with a jam jar, but all I did was encourage lines of ants into the house. On Monday morning I sat ready for school, my empty jar in my hand. As I waited for the driver to arrive I noticed on the white wall in front of me a walking twig. I moved closer. It was a creature of brilliant green: perfect oval head, black eyes, long, slender legs, wings like curled new leaves. At school Mrs Sami said my insect was called a Praying Mantis. She explained how, after mating, the female devoured the male. We stared at her. None of us believed a word of it.
Our mother had dropped her teacher training course when she married our stepfather, but she did not waste all her new skills. Every day after school she gave us additional classes. It was during these extra-curricular hours that I learned to write. I joine
d Sheka and Memuna as they practised their handwriting and while my mother worked with each of them I entertained myself copying out rows of arbitrary letters. One day I lay on my stomach opposite my sister on the floor; her books were fanned out around us. On my blank piece of paper I traced three round, looping letters: C-A-T.
‘Look, Mummy,’ Memuna exclaimed. ‘Am can write. She's written a word. She's written CAT.’
My mother, working at the table with my brother, came over to have a look. ‘Clever girl.’
I warmed to her praise like a tomato in the sun, without being at all certain what I had done. The production of this word had been entirely a fluke, but now here I was being told I could write. I didn't say anything. I smiled at her. I thought: she must know. After that my mother began to include me in the writing classes, where from that day on I wrote and wrote and wrote.
A few years along I learned to ride a bicycle in just the same way. Clutching onto a low wall, pulling myself forward at a painful, wobbling pace, my hand slipped suddenly and the bike spun forward down a small incline. A few seconds passed before I managed to land one of my feet on the ground.
It was Memuna who, for the second time, announced my triumph prematurely. ‘Am's riding the bike. She's riding the bike!’ In a moment the whole family had come out to see me do it. And so I did. I had to. I got on and rode the bicycle up and down for everyone to see.
During break one day Eddie and I were playing on the scorched grass of the school fields, in the shade of a large tree. We were performing rolls, squatting on the grass, tucking our heads in and rolling over. I could do handstands, too. I flipped my legs up over my head and stood, ever so briefly, upside down. In time I noticed I had attracted the attention of a group of the bigger girls, who were watching us from a distance. Encouraged, I executed a few more handstands. From my inverted position I saw a few of the girls smile. They began to walk towards us. I sat down on the grass with Eddie. I was sure they were coming to ask me to teach them to do handstands too, and I pretended not to notice. But inside my head I'd already decided I would agree to show them. After that Eddie and I would be able to spend break with their group, playing skip rope and standing around talking the way they did. I could feel them close behind; I turned expectantly.
The Devil that Danced on the Water Page 17