The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  The night porter, who was a dark-haired young man wearing a grey morning coat, had been unexpectedly kind. He returned with a bottle of Milk of Magnesia, put us to bed between the fresh sheets, wiped the slime off the carpet and turned off the light with a stern warning not to move until the morning.

  Now, as we entered the lobby of the hotel I saw the same porter behind the reception desk. He smiled and winked, then turned back to the couple in front of the desk. Both the man and the woman had pale, mauve hair and I gazed at it in wonder. Our stepmother had a sheaf of messages in her hand and was slowly turning them one at a time. As I waited next to her, I looked at the couple’s silvery clouds of hair and I remembered my question. I decided to try it one last time.

  ‘Auntie Yabome?’ I began. She carried on reading. Louder this time: ‘Auntie Yabome?’ Still no answer. I felt a twitch of impatience, and the third time I positively boomed: ‘Auntie Yabome!’ Satisfied now because I knew I had her attention, I paused.

  But instead of answering me she gripped me by the upper arm – I could feel her fingers digging into my flesh – and swung me round to the other side of the desk, away from the waiting people where, below the level of the desk, out of sight, she slapped me suddenly and sharply across the back of my legs. ‘I told you to call me Mummy. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

  ‘Yes, what?’ she demanded, her face close to mine.

  ‘Yes, Mummy,’ I whispered. ‘Yes, Mummy,’

  Nothing made any sense. I thought my stepmother was asking us to call her Mummy – I hadn’t realised she wasn’t giving us the choice. Even so, my mistake had seemed so simple and I failed to see how it could really matter so much. I walked across the lobby: my face was hot and my calves were beginning to smart, I could feel the itch in my nostrils that meant I was about to cry. Through the descending blur I saw my friendly porter looking at me. For a moment he caught my eye, and then just as quickly he looked away.

  After two days we moved into a service flat in Earls Court. Mrs Cobally, a fifty-year-old woman with unlikely honey-blonde hair, was the concierge at Grenbeck Court and for some reason, from the very first day when we stopped in at the office, she took a shine to our family and brought us all under her wing. In the evenings she left her husband in front of the television in their overheated apartment and slipped over to our flat bearing a bottle of Babycham or sherry. She would give the bottle a shake in front of Mum – ‘How’s about a little of this, then?’ – and wiggle past her into the sitting room.

  We were now very careful to call our stepmother Mummy or Mum in front of anyone we didn’t know, including Mrs Cobally. Mrs Cobally had given me a long, curious look when I once reverted to ‘Auntie Yabome’. Thank goodness Mum hadn’t heard. I didn’t make the same mistake again. We dared not risk anybody discovering that Mum was not our real mother; we feared the attention of the authorities or anyone else who might begin to ask questions. While they sat together Mrs Cobally talked and puffed cigarettes, blowing the smoke through her nose like a dragon, topping up her glass all the time, while Mum took tiny sips from hers.

  Our flat was on the ground floor at the back of the building. Below us was a paved expanse, unadorned by flower beds or potted plants, overlooking the tracks of the District Line. Twice every minute, day and night, the trains rumbled past. There was only one bedroom and we all shared it. At night I lay awake in the not-quite-dark of the city night, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the tracks.

  Earls Court struck me as a wonderful stately name. The first time we walked down to Earls Court Station to catch a train I imagined an old-fashioned steam engine with gleaming red flanks, puffing smoke like Mrs Cobally. I talked about our train ride all the way along the grimy pavement, spotted with blotches of ancient chewing gum and glistening stars of saliva; past Bestways late-night supermarket; past the uncollected sacks of black plastic; past the furtive, fumbling men who stepped out of neon-lit doorways; past the meths drinkers lying around the entrance to the tube station. My stepmother suggested the trains weren’t really like that any more, but I ignored her. I didn’t want anyone spoiling my fun. When the dull, sleek tube train arrived it bore no resemblance to the train of my fantasy, but I leapt through the sliding doors, determined that I was going to have my adventure whatever. I was disappointed, but I wasn’t going to admit it to myself or anyone. The train was red – that at least fitted with the fantasy.

  It started with the dog walk down the rutted lanes of Tengbe Farkai. I had an image of a world, one gleaned from pre-war readers and my own Janet & John books, full of clean, eternally smiling children and it seemed a better place to be. I was already nostalgic and I had barely begun to live my life yet. I was not unhappy really, but somewhere inside me I knew my childhood wasn’t measuring up. I didn’t make up an imaginary friend to comfort myself; I made up an imaginary world. I yearned for a past I had never even experienced. In November of 1970 I did not want to be alone and stranded in a dirty city while our father was in prison. I longed to live in a different world, a world just like the one inhabited by the boys and girls behind the covers of my books.

  In my book of collected verse there was a poem entitled ‘The Lamplighter’ about the man whose job it was to walk the London streets every night lighting the gas lamps. As night fell I sat waiting by the main door of Grenbeck Court for him to come, just as the little boy in the poem had done. I knew about electricity and I could see the streetlights all had bulbs, but that was the strangest thing: I just carried on pretending to myself that the lamplighter was on his way, until the lights began to flicker and then glow orange and my stepmother came to fetch me into the flat for supper. When she asked me what I was doing, I opened A Child’s Garden of Verse and showed her the illustration of the lamplighter with his ladder and Victorian hob-nail boots, lighting lamps in a London street just like Trebovir Road.

  Mum told us she had engaged a tutor to teach us maths and English so we didn’t fall behind with our lessons. Miss Bird did not let me down; she was exactly as she should have been. Her hair, the colour of silver and tea, was caught in a wispy bun at the back of her head and she wore good quality – if somewhat elderly – cashmere in shades of green and brown. Miss Bird looked like an old-fashioned governess, who could have leapt from the pages of one of my old-fashioned books. She never raised her voice above a melodious whisper and she asked my opinion of the stories and poems we read. With Miss Bird we spent far more of our time reading poetry than tackling sums and that winter she gave me the keys to my escape, places to hide with a host of new friends: Scheherazade, Huckleberry Finn, Asian and the inhabitants of Narnia, Guinevere and Lancelot, Don Quixote, Anne of Green Gables and Beowulf. I looked forward to our time together; I was pleased not to be in the crowded classrooms of Bertha Conton any longer.

  Back in Sierra Leone Stephen Olver, George Burne and Murietta Olu Williams caught each other’s eye at public occasions and exchanged a sly three-way wink. The driver who had taken us to the airport, on the other hand, had fled for his life. When he arrived back in Freetown without us, when Stevens and his henchmen realised we had escaped from under their noses, they issued an order for the man’s arrest. He jumped right back into the car and drove out of town and didn’t stop driving until he arrived in Monrovia, where he sold the car and lived for a while off the proceeds.

  Most of the wave of support for the UDP had come from the western area; the Creoles, many of whom opposed Stevens’s anti-democratic behaviour; and the north, which followed our father and the Taqi brothers. In an effort to try to limit the damage to the APC in those areas Stevens had appointed another northerner to the finance post. Sembu Forna might have been our father’s namesake, but our father had little respect for him. In the event he lasted only a few months before Stevens gave the job to one of his foremost allies, Christian Kamara Taylor. S. I. Koroma was given Mohammed Bash Taqi’s post as minister of development. The government was now in the hands of the extremists. Nancy Ste
ele, head of the APC women’s forum and one of Siaka Stevens’s mistresses, advocated putting the leaders of the UDP against a wall and shooting them. The elections, due to be held in November, were postponed until February the following year.

  Stevens condemned the UDP as a ‘rebel group’ funded by the CIA and he denied all our father’s allegations. The state newspaper the Daily Mail printed a front-page story saying arms worth one hundred thousand leones were found at our house. The detentions were given two inches of coverage on the back page. In the House of Representatives the MPs voted to back the state of emergency and Stevens gave himself new powers of arrest and detention. Immediately afterwards there was a purge of Temnes in the army and six privates were accused of supporting the UDP and plotting to overthrow the government.

  In November the courts dismissed the application for habeas corpus by the leaders of the UDP. The gutlessness of the judiciary caused many hearts to sink, but the few remaining members of the opposition SLPP stood up, one by one, in the House of Representatives to condemn Stevens for the illegal arrests of our father and the other men, and for spuriously declaring a state of emergency just to ban the new party.

  Then in December Sarif Easmon was released from prison, the first of the detainees to be freed. He was unwell and released on health grounds, but it was a glimmer of good news all the same. It was rumoured in Freetown that all the detainees would be freed by Christmas.

  In London we adjusted gradually to our new lives. We learned to help with the housework: in the mornings we pushed the carpet sweeper around the room and sprayed Mr Sheen on the coffee table; we laid the table for meals and afterwards we helped to wash and dry the dishes. Most of the chores fell to Memuna and me because we were girls. This was not a form of logic I had encountered before. I’d spent my entire life so far wishing I was a boy and now I was confronting the realisation that the advantages went further than wearing shorts to slide down the banister. After a few days the novelty of housework waned and I preferred to watch television. I had never had a TV set before and I was transfixed by everything from Basil Brush to Hawaii Five-O, but most of all I liked the advertisements: the super-hero toilet cleaner, the talking chimps, especially the housewife who was arrested for failing to use Paxo stuffing – ‘I promise I won’t do it again,’ she begged as the police led her away. This was my introduction to the consumer culture. At first I viewed the adverts as jokes or sketches in between the main programmes; it took me a while to realise they were supposed to be selling something. When I made the connection I suddenly became aware of how many things we needed, really needed: a mini carpet sweeper for the stairs, a cube to turn the water in the toilet blue, air freshener that smelled of spring flowers. Every day I made a new list and at the supermarket I begged Mum to buy them all.

  In a short while my neglect of my share of the chores had me out searching for a switch again. Memuna was in trouble, too. Mum said she was responsible for me because she was the eldest sister. Memuna was cross about the unfairness of it all. I felt cross and guilty. We wandered up and down the road, listlessly at first and then with growing urgency, looking for a tree or a bush from which to cut a switch. In the end we went back to face our stepmother, each holding an inch of yellow privet. Mum thought we were trying to be funny. She marched outside to get a switch herself, but once in the street she made the same discovery: there were simply no trees, no green at all, in Trebovir Road.

  On the last day of schoolwork before the Christmas break Miss Bird gave me a present. It was a tiny Wedgwood dish, with a sprig of wild flowers painted in the centre. In return I gave her a set of lace-edged handkerchiefs.

  We woke up on Christmas morning to stuffed stockings and a massive tree, adorned with innumerable shining globes, threatening to overwhelm the tiny apartment. There were times when our stepmother was as kind as she knew how to be. I had never seen so many presents and for the first hour we lost ourselves in an orgy of opening. Among the pile of gifts was one marked: ‘To Am, Love Daddy’. It was a teddy bear. I knew really that Mum had bought it and wrapped it herself, but I pretended for both our sakes that I believed it had really come from him. I played dumb and hugged the teddy bear, because dumb made me feel better. Mum had bought an Instamatic camera and we posed for pictures by the tree – to post to our father so he wouldn’t feel like he had missed Christmas with us altogether.

  Unbelievably, it snowed that Christmas: pathetic, spongy soft flakes like polystyrene that fell out of a bruised sky to form a film over the yard. I ran out into it, yelling with phoney pleasure, and scraped up just enough to shape into a dirty mound into which I stuck two pebbles and a line of flinty stones giving the impression of a row of broken teeth. I acted as though it were the first time I had seen snow, partly to keep up the illusion, partly because I was genuinely confused about the exact circumstances under which I had last seen snow. That feeling again, of lives colliding, like flash frames from a long-ago dream that suddenly appear in your mind. Scotland and Nigeria, my life less than a year ago, were receding into a mass of blurred images.

  When I had had enough and climbed the stairs to go back inside I passed Mrs Cobally’s door, which was always slightly ajar.

  ‘Come in here, pet,’ she beckoned. The room was stifling hot and made breathing difficult. Mrs Cobally was smiling, wearing fluffy, high-heeled mules below black trousers and roll-neck sweater. There was a hole at the toe of her tights. She pressed a present into my hand. ‘Happy Christmas, my darling. Fetch your mum – tell her to come round here and have a drink with us.’ She gave me her powdery cheek to kiss. As I reached up I caught a whiff of the sweet diesel fumes of her breath.

  I walked towards the door of our apartment and examined my present. She hadn’t wrapped it up. It was a blue, plastic deer, with sharp little hooves and hard nubs of horns. I recognised it at once: it was the Babycham deer.

  For years afterwards, whenever we remembered Mrs Cobally and how she liked a drink, and whenever one of the family reminded everyone, because it was funny, that she had given me the Babycham deer for Christmas, I would feel unaccountably annoyed. It wasn’t so much that I was cross with Mrs Cobally; I wasn’t. I even quite liked her. It was just that if I thought about that hideous little blue deer, I would have to admit to myself how wretched her gift made me feel. And if I did that, what else would I have to face about those first few months in London?

  Ten months later, in the back of a drawer I found several packages, each wrapped in familiar paper: shiny blue and covered in silver stars. The parcels were wedged behind the rest of the clutter, the loose cutlery, Sellotape and paper napkins, in the sideboard drawer. The edge of one was slightly torn, giving a hint of the contents inside, though I knew at once exactly what it was: a red can of Old Spice shaving foam. I recognised my own careful block print and the childish kisses on the tag: ‘To Daddy, Lots of Love Aminatta’.

  28

  One day, not long after we first arrived, a visitor came to Grenbeck Court. He was a large man, so tall he had to bend his head to pass comfortably under the lintel of the door. He arrived unannounced yet laden with gifts. I unwrapped my package: a fluffy pink duck with a yellow felt beak. I named it Ducky. The big man invited me to sit on his knee and, over the course of tea, he entertained me with tickles and pinches and even held me upside down by my feet, making me scream in terror and delight. Afterwards I put on his raincoat, which engulfed me like a flood and puddled onto the floor around my feet. He laughed and I showed off all the more. I liked the big man. His name was Tiny Rowland; he told me to call him Uncle Tiny.

  In the previous year the Sierra Leone government had decided to renegotiate the Sierra Leone Selection Trust lease, with a view to nationalising the diamond mines in the near future, just as the governments of Ghana and Zambia had done. They put out the word that they would be looking for a partner in their new venture: SLST was unpopular inside Sierra Leone, regarded by many as a colonial dinosaur whose time was over. The promise of easy fortunes to be mad
e brought a host of the world’s wealthiest men over to our tiny country, scouting for ways to increase the sum of their riches. Among them was the chief of Lonrho, Tiny Rowland.

  Rowland had met Mohamed Forna, the finance minister, on several occasions and signed a modest agreement to scout new mining opportunities in the interior. But Rowland was thought to have his eye on a bigger share of the pie, principally on the concessions owned by SLST and De Beers. Our father had been spoken of as a future contender to Siaka Stevens. Though he might be in prison right now and the UDP a banned organisation, businessmen like Rowland knew the landscape of African politics could shift overnight, as rapidly as the dunes in the desert. Wasn’t ‘no condition is permanent’ our country’s favourite maxim?

  The mining companies shadowed every nuance and change in politics in Sierra Leone and all over Africa. These were the vested interests, although the term wasn’t widely used in those days: they helped shape every political outcome in ways that could not be quantified and were not even understood. There were whispers, rumours that nothing ever changed in countries like Sierra Leone without the mineral concessions first being negotiated. As soon as the family of the man who was being spoken of as a challenger to Siaka Stevens was in trouble, they were there, more than happy to help. The nights in the Angus Hotel, the flat in Grenbeck Court, many of our expenses in London – these were all paid by De Beers. And here was a giant of a man called Tiny demonstrating his famous personal touch in business – swinging a child upside down by her ankles in the name of global capitalism.

  Before long Uncle Tiny and the Lonrho empire would move on, lured by the challenge of greater conquests in the gold mines of Ghana. In the meantime he lent his car to take us to Sussex on Sheka’s first day at school after the New Year. It was a white Mercedes, with a chauffeur: another kind young man in a grey uniform who held Sheka’s head while my brother, overcome by nerves and nausea, threw up in the school car park.