The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  ‘Chicka pocka, lollipopa, om, pom, push!’

  Susan’s father was a wealthy businessman; they lived in a large house in Sussex with a swimming pool. He had given his permission for Susan’s entire class to spend the day and she told us her father even planned to hire a projector and screen so we could all watch a film in the evening. After weeks cooped up at boarding school we were feverish with anticipation.

  Monday morning, a fortnight before the party, Susan arrived at school with the invitations. She said she would give them out after lunch, and all through the morning the pile of envelopes sat at the front of her desk. I was sitting close enough to see the names in beautiful italic script, handwritten on the front of each envelope. I had never, ever received an invitation like that.

  At lunch time we walked down to the main building and went to change out of our coats. At the beginning of each term the matron allocated the coat pegs in alphabetical order, and on the first day of term we swapped the name tags around to suit ourselves. Susan and I had pegs next to each other, even though our surnames began with completely different letters. We were busy preparing ourselves for lunch when Susan caught my arm, letting the others go ahead.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. I was keen to get to the table. My stomach was rumbling.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Susan, looking me straight in the eye, ‘but you can’t come to the party.’

  I stared at her. I thought I had misunderstood or misheard, but Susan’s perfectly serious expression filled me with cold dread. ‘But why not? Who else isn’t going? Aren’t you having a party any more?’

  ‘It’s my dad. He says you can’t come.’

  ‘Your dad says I can’t come?’

  ‘My dad doesn’t like black people. He told me he won’t have anybody black in his house. Sorry. Really.’

  There were no other black kids in our class. Marius Georgiades, who was a Cypriot, was olive-skinned but unquestionably white. What Susan was saying, I realised, was that everyone was going to her birthday party except me. What took me aback was her utterly matter-of- fact tone.

  ‘Have you told him – that I’m your friend, I mean, your best friend.’ She nodded. ‘Well, speak to him again. It’s not fair. He doesn’t even know me.’ I was desperate to go to the party. I couldn’t believe I was going to miss it and nor could I compute the explanation I had been given. I couldn’t go to the party because I was black. There seemed to me to be as much sense in it as asking someone the way to Brighton and being told that apples are green.

  Susan handed round the invitations later the same day. I stood by and watched. In the excitement no one seemed to notice I hadn’t been given one. After the weekend, when Susan came back to school I ran up to her: ‘Did you ask him?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her father hadn’t changed his mind.

  ‘I don’t understand – why not?’

  ‘Dad says the reason is because once when I was a baby he left me outside in my pram in the garden and three big, black men came with broken bottles and smashed them over me. I was cut all over. I had to go to the hospital, he said, to have stitches. Of course I can’t remember anything about it because I was just a baby, but he was there. So that’s why, that’s why he doesn’t like black people. I mean, you can see that . . . can’t you? If your baby was attacked.’

  I didn’t know what to say. There were a million things I could have said, but I didn’t know where to begin. I nodded in silence.

  After breakfast on Saturday all the children who were going to the party were called out of the dining room. As some of my friends passed me they whispered: ‘Aren’t you coming?’ No, I mouthed and shrugged. There were quizzical looks as they hurried off. I spent the afternoon lying on my bed in the dorm, reading my book alone. After supper the girls and boys arrived back, high on sugar and sun, carrying paper bags full of Liquorice Allsorts, aniseed balls and coloured pencils; they were chattering like birds.

  In my dorm the two girls who had been to the party smiled at me with sorry eyes: ‘You didn’t miss much really. It was just a party.’

  ‘Yes, not even that good, actually,’ said the other girl.

  I knew that wasn’t the point. I didn’t know who they were trying to make feel better, themselves or me.

  When Susan came back to school two days later she brought one of the goodie bags for me, and a piece of birthday cake wrapped in a blue paper napkin. I put it on the chair next to my bed, where I hung my clothes. And I left it there.

  The Rastafarian kept walking as the taunts flew around us. We were quite alone – it was a one-way street between the busy Earls Court Road and Warwick Road, where few people passed, but now the silence was replaced by mocking laughter and the trumpeting horn.

  Just when I was wondering how it would all end for us the hounded man did something that made me stand quite still. He turned round to face the car, threw his arms behind him as though he were baring his chest and lifted up his chin. He was showing them his face, the very features the louts demanded to see. His face was gaunt and hollow-cheeked; he had a thin beard and protruding teeth with wide gaps. It was an ugly face, but a nice ugly face. He bellowed: ‘Leave me alone. Leave me a-lone! Why can’t you people just let . . . me . . . be?’ Then he closed up again, turned to the wall and covered his face with his hands.

  The car sped away, engine roaring in triumph. I wanted to say something to the man. I wanted to run up to him and say something kind. But I didn’t know how. He still hadn’t seen me and he didn’t look back now. He just carried on walking, still hunched up; the loping stride had vanished. I sensed that if he knew that I, a small girl, had been a witness to his humiliation it would only be made worse, so I went on home, holding my oily bag of crushed samosas.

  31

  I used to walk down a road, any road, and say to myself: If I can just hold my breath until I get to the end of this street Daddy will be released from prison. Or, if I was crossing a bridge and a train went underneath, I wished my father would be freed. Sometimes I’d stand there until train after train had gone by, eyes closed, amassing wishes. Three times over three years, as I cut the first slice of cake, I used my special birthday wish so that I could have him back. I wished on the full moon and the new moon, and then any moon at all. At Christmas, if I found the silver sixpence Mum hid in the pudding, I wished for my father’s freedom. I wished for nothing else.

  As time went on I increased my challenges: to reach the end of the road with my eyes closed without bumping into anyone or anything; to leap every other paving stone, dancing between them, promising myself that if I could make it ten yards, or twelve, or fifteen, I would somehow, miraculously, earn his freedom. Gradually I upped the ante: I’d work my bike up to speed then aim the front wheel at a pothole or a speed bump. If I don’t fall off, if I can stay in the saddle, then they’ll let him out of prison. Alone in the flat one afternoon I stood in the galley kitchen passing my hand as slowly as I dared across the ice-blue flame of the gas ring, once, twice, thrice, until the smell, like burnt bacon rinds, rose from the scorched ends of my fingernails.

  I was walking down Philbeach Gardens when I swung out and stepped onto the zebra crossing without looking and without waiting. A taxi coming fast round the curve of the road braked forcefully; the driver leaned out of his cab and swore at me, shaking his head in exasperation. I kept my face turned away and walked on. When I reached the other side I exhaled: I felt as though I had passed a test or scored bonus points in some unknown contest.

  There’s a good reason exile was once used as a punishment. It is life apart, life on hold, life in waiting. You may begin full of strength and hope, or just ignorance, but it is time, nothing more than the unending passage of time that wears down your resilience, like the drip of a tap that carves a groove in the granite below. Exile is a war of attrition on the soul, it’s a slow punishment, and it works.

  A malaise seeped into our life at home, tainting our relationships with each other. My brother, my sister and I became incapable
of being in a room together without a remark, or a look, or a gesture provoking a fight. Mum was out at work during the week, and while she was gone we turned on each other, honing young tongues on the bitter new pleasures of sarcasm and ridicule, turning the holidays into one long, exhausting trench war. Even the letters from our father telling us to take care of each other, telling my brother especially to look after his sisters, couldn’t break the cycle of mutual destruction. Sometimes I think it had the opposite effect, making us all the more angry and resentful. Incapable of spending time together in the way we used to, our trio fractured: Memuna and Sheka, the two older ones, preferred each other’s company while I spent much of my time alone.

  My memories of those years, and the ones that followed, are mainly of being by myself, of feeling excluded by my immaturity. I was the only one who hadn’t outgrown the Raleigh Chopper we were given our first Christmas in London, and I spent hours circling the streets or else parked outside W. H. Smith, where I whiled away afternoons at a time coveting shiny pencil cases and Caran d’Ache colours.

  One afternoon during the holidays the flat was cold and shadowy, the heating was off, but the spring sun wasn’t quite strong enough to warm the air and a wan light filtered through the streaked window panes. Memuna and Sheka were out together and I was alone in the flat with Mum. Somewhere in the house we had a key we used to let ourselves into the small park opposite, where at one time we had all belonged to the playgroup (now I was the only one who still went); we had been on trips to the adventure playground, and London Zoo, and on Saturdays we went to the kids’ cinema club. The heavy iron key to the park was not in its usual place in the kitchen, so I went through to look for my stepmother. I needed her permission to go to the park, in any case.

  Mum was lying in the bedroom, on her side, facing away from the door. She was wearing trousers and a sweater, her slippers were kicked off and lay facing each other on the carpet, the curtains were wide open. I couldn’t tell if she was having a nap, though usually she got under the covers.

  ‘Mum?’ I whispered. There was no answer. I turned and began to withdraw, quietly as I could.

  Just as I was closing the door I heard her: ‘Am? Is that you? What is it?’ Mum’s voice was muffled.

  I crept forward a little and began to apologise. A few steps in, I paused. There was something wrong with Mum: her face looked smudged, and her eyes were shining. ‘Mum, what’s the matter?’ I had never seen her cry before; I couldn’t remember ever seeing an adult cry at all. I asked her again and as I did so the pitch of my voice began to rise. I stood by her, hands by my sides, not knowing what to do.

  In the years we had been in London I had begun to think Mum was beautiful. In my eyes she looked just like Diana Ross, with her Afro hair, hooped earrings and high platform shoes. I used to sit on her bed and watch her when she was getting dressed to go somewhere. ‘Mummy, can I have that when you die?’ I asked the question about everything I liked. My favourite piece was an apricot velvet trouser suit she wore on special occasions. Memuna did the same – we raced each other around the room pointing at things. Mum, can I have that? A pretty silver bangle. Mum, can I have that? A bottle of scent. Mum, can I have that? When I was younger I used to make her handbags from scraps of cloth, sewn together with running stitch around three sides, with a handle of plaited wool. I genuinely didn’t understand why she never seemed to use them.

  ‘Don’t worry, Am,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing. It’s just a headache, that’s all.’

  ‘Shall I get the aspirin?’ I offered.

  ‘I’ve taken some already. Perhaps a cup of tea, Am. I’ll take a cup of tea.’

  I went to the kitchen and lit the gas ring. A minute later the kettle began to rattle and huff, working up enough breath for a whistle. I found a cup and saucer and reached for a bag from the box of PG Tips. I carried the tea through carefully and slowly set it next to the bed. I looked at Mum: her face was still wet.

  ‘Now what’s that for?’ she said. I didn’t answer – I thought Mum was about to be gruff with me for crying, but she didn’t say anything more. I curled up next to her on the bed and put my arms around her.

  The doctor said what Mum needed was a holiday, but Mum loathed flying and so in July of 1973 we used up all her savings and set sail on the SS France, the second largest ocean liner in the world, bound for New York. The crossing took five days: for me five mornings, afternoons and evenings of untrammelled independence. On the first morning, after a night of mild rolling, Mum couldn’t rise from her bunk, and she pretty well stayed there for the entire journey, attended by a kind and solicitous deck steward. Memuna and Sheka went down with seasickness too, and briefly I was left to myself entirely.

  The ship was a world which I could roam unchallenged, with no one to tell me what to do. I swam up and down the salt-water pool; ate four-course meals served by a uniformed waiter under the swaying chandeliers of the dining room; went to the cinema and sat entirely alone among the rows of seats; and lay on the deck and watched the clouds, like Dr Seuss creatures, crossing the sky to America. In New York we stayed just two days before we boarded the Greyhound bus for Boston to stay with John Karefa Smart, who was now teaching at Harvard, and his family.

  America was a glass of hot chocolate: six inches of steaming, creamy chocolate, eight inches of vanilla-flavoured whipped cream, sprinkled with hundreds and thousands, crowned by a glorious, artificially gleaming cherry. America was Rosalie May, eldest daughter of Uncle John, a beautiful former fashion model, hopelessly extrovert and extravagant, who delighted in spoiling me, thought her name was dull and told me she would change it to mine. America was horror comics, which I read by the score until I became too terrified to sleep; it was bread that tasted of sugar; it was an endless succession of visits to Sears Roebuck, where Mum kitted us out in a year’s worth of new clothes. America did not disappoint, and after five weeks we returned home the way we had come. This time round Mum managed to acquire some sea legs, and even joined us for the end-of-voyage gala dinner the night before we docked at Portsmouth. We posed together at our table, with happy smiles, and we sent the souvenir photograph home to our father.

  In September, a few days before I was due back at school, letters arrived from my father. Mine began: ‘My Dear Aminatta, Many thanks for your sweet letters from America and the SS France.’ He told me I looked beautiful in my picture and then spoilt it slightly by enquiring whether I was wearing my arch supports, and if I had been to the orthodontist yet. It was an ordinary letter in every way, and yet it was not. I can’t remember if I noticed it at that time, or whether Mum gave the news to us herself. But when I look at the letter now, bundled among all his other letters to me written while we were in England, it stands starkly alone. The two pale-blue sheets are loosely covered in my father’s familiar handwriting. He wrote using a Biro. It is not what is there, but what is missing that arrests my eye: there is no purple stamp at the top of the page, no censor’s signature, no prisoner number D 6/70, no return address to Pademba Road Prison.

  32

  The humidity outside caused all the windows in the plane to fog over, obscuring what should have been my first sight of home. My smart white trousers were wrinkled and covered in crumbs, and my leather belt cut into my waist. My new blouse had come untucked and was riding up my back and I struggled with hand luggage as we eased our way down the aisle. Outside the temperature was in the mid thirties, and when the doors were opened steaming air, like hot breath, replaced the pressurised cool of the cabin. An English family behind me, arriving in Freetown for the first time, exhaled. Welcome to West Africa.

  Our father and Ibrahim Taqi had been released together. A guard opened the door to their cells, led them to the entrance of Pademba Road and deposited them onto the busy street. They stopped the first taxi they saw. The driver recognised them, which was just as well because neither of them had any money, and he willingly drove them back to Tengbe Farkai. That night they borrowed a record player, sent Santigi o
ut for beers and danced together to Johnny Nash singing, ‘It's gonna be a bright, bright, bright sunshiny day’. They must have felt like kings, free at last. Siaka Stevens had sworn Mohamed Forna would be the last of the detainees to be released and he was, let out just a few days short of what would have been his third anniversary behind bars. Ibrahim Taqi aside, the others who had been part of the UDP had all left prison in the previous months and years.

  In England Mum had written to our schools for permission to let us fly home early, before the end of term. We returned to Philbeach Gardens for the last time, where we spent the whole night emptying drawers, cramming belongings into our suitcases, finding a space for items we didn't want to leave behind. We had gone to bed after midnight and risen in the early hours to dress in our best for the flight home.

  We stepped into the sunlight and down the steps of the aircraft, behind the straggling herd of passengers making their way into the solitary terminal building. On the balcony a small crowd of people waved down at the new arrivals. I scanned the silhouetted figures. I didn't recognise anyone there. I imagined my father would be waiting beyond the immigration desks in the main hall. It would take us another forty minutes, at least, to pass through the anarchy of Lungi's airport bureaucracy. A few yards ahead of me one or two of the plane's passengers stepped around a man standing alone on the tarmac. I glanced at him, and away. And then I looked again. I dropped my bag and let it lie where it fell on the runway. I raced forward with the wind at my heels and I reached him first. First! I was for ever and perversely proud of that fact. Moments later we were all gathered around him, hugging and kissing.

  My father was arrested when I was six years and four months old; now I was nine years and seven months. Yet even though I had not seen even a photograph of him all the time we were in London, for some reason I had never forgotten how the features of his face were composed. Indeed I remembered him well enough to see for myself how changed he was. The starchy prison diet, the lack of exercise had caused him to fill out; he wasn't fat, but he was bulkier. He had taken up a pipe and grown a dense beard, his hairline had receded slightly. Over the four weeks of the holiday I tried to persuade him to shave off his beard, so that he would look more as I remembered him. When eventually he acceded and returned home one evening with a clean chin, I was disappointed by the results. Certainly he looked more as I once knew him, yet somehow indefinably altered.