A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars

by Yaba Badoe

  Scarlett gazes perplexed at the weapon in her hand. Then, at last, she drops it.

  The moment the dagger clatters to the ground, the room convulses with light. The gloaming brightens, searing our eyes with the brilliance of a noonday sun. As dusk returns and gradually lightens into day, the moths wither, sparkle, dwindle, disappear. Until there’s nothing left of them or the dagger but patches of black ash on the restaurant floor.

  29

  If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. I shall never understand the reasoning of Old Ones. They tell us they’re outlaws one day, yet by the afternoon of the next, they do something that rocks us even more: the one thing they’ve warned us against time and time again.

  ‘Don’t talk to black-boots! Don’t go anywhere near ’em!’

  They drummed it into me from when I was a toddler able to string words together, but wise enough to admit – despite Priss’s prompting – that I’m a creature that will never fly.

  So, imagine my surprise when, just as I’m beginning to think that Miguel’s definitely a goner, they thunder into the Caleta restaurant with a battalion of black-boots led by Federico Angel de Menendez.

  ‘You again,’ he says and my heart sings, for skulking behind the black-boots, trying to manoeuvre around ’em to get to us, is my circus family: Mama Rose in the lead, Redwood and Lizzie behind her, and beside them, Midget Man, Mimi and Carlos. Families! They may look different on the outside, but once you’ve adopted one, like I’ve done mine, you learn to take the rough with the smooth, the good with the bad. Tears of relief dribble down my cheeks and gratitude overwhelms me. Not only have the Old Ones come for us, they’ve brought help as well.

  First off, while Mama Rose hugs us up and makes sure we’re OK, a team of paramedics take Miguel away. Black-boots help Barrel Man to stand and escort him out for questioning. Then they seal off the restaurant. Say it’s a crime scene and we’re not to touch anything.

  ‘Can’t I wash my hands?’ I ask

  ‘Hold on,’ Menendez replies.

  Can’t say for sure that I’ll be able to. Now the commotion is over, the adrenalin rush firing me up stalls and exhaustion settles in my bones. Weaker than a gnat, I resist the temptation to nestle in Mama Rose’s arms. I’m too old for that now. Nonetheless, sensing my inclination, Mama Rose hugs me up again.

  We’re herded into the dressing room as a team in white overalls arrives and start snapping a whole heap of photographs. They take photographs of the Captain’s body and gold-topped cane, followed by snaps of tipped over tables and chairs. Snaps of food strewn on the floor. Then they focus on the patches of black ash and scoop up samples for testing.

  After that’s done, Menendez decides that it’s high time he talked to us. That’s when Mama Rose freaks out Big Time. Says she won’t allow us to be part of any interrogation that coerces us into giving false statements. Indeed, she makes what’s about to happen sound every bit as menacing as interrogation techniques Redwood once told us about. ‘Torture by another name,’ he called it.

  ‘But, senora,’ Menendez says to Mama Rose. ‘You will be present throughout the interviews, I assure you. You may call a lawyer now if you wish.’

  Mama Rose replies in a voice that puts her way up on a throne with the high and mighty: ‘We alerted you to what was happening here today, officer, because we believed our children’s lives were in danger. Concerned for their safety, we tipped you off. So remember, my children have done nothing wrong. If anything, they’re the victims not the perpetrators here.’

  Menendez hears the clenched fist in Mama Rose’s English and takes in the strength of her generous frame, the fire in those dark pebbled eyes. About to reply, Carlos intervenes. Rubs Menendez’s arm and rattles at him in rapid Spanish. Speaks fast, so fast, I can’t make out what he’s saying. What I do know is there aren’t any bad words in his utterances: no name-calling, no mention of black gypsy scum.

  Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind having a conversation to figure out what happened back there. Wouldn’t say no to a chance to get my head around what I saw. There’s no hope of that happening. Not while Mama Rose is clucking around us like a mother hen with her chicks. From the glances and nods we’ve exchanged since the black-boots turned up – the three of us – Cobra, Cat and me – have agreed, with some eye-balling encouragement from the Old Ones, that when pressed, we’re to shred our story to the bare bones.

  Menendez nods at Carlos, apparently agreeing with him. Then his eyes drift in Scarlett’s direction. She may be wearing a blue evening dress – a dress splashed with blood – but the tangle of red curls about her face is seared in his memory. The girl who almost drowned herself.

  Scarlett, still trembling, is clutching at Cat like a sinking child to a lifebuoy while Cat whispers. Looks as if they’re sharing secrets, but I know better. In much the same way that I murmur to Taj Mahal when he’s skittish, Cat’s soothing Scarlett. Keeping her voice low and steady, she rubs Scarlett’s forearm, her back. Strokes her. Pets her. Urges her to breathe long and deep to ease her shaking.

  ‘Is she one of yours?’ Menendez asks Mama Rose.

  ‘She’s a friend of my daughter’s.’

  ‘I shall have to talk to her and your children before I let them go,’ Menendez replies.

  Easier said than done, I reckon, ’cause the way Scarlett’s behaving right now, I don’t imagine she’ll talk to anyone but Cat for some time. Won’t let Cat out of her sight, in fact. Even so, unless I try to shape it first, the truth will out in the end. Can’t hide the stink of a dead mouse with the best perfume in the world. Better jump in before the black-boot sniffs it: ‘I don’t mind talking to you,’ I say to Menendez.

  Mama Rose rolls her eyes at me: a signal to stop talking and sit tight, to desist from foolishness this instant! Redwood and Bizzie Lizzie glare at me as well. All of ’em do, except for Midget Man, who most probably has an inkling of Scarlett’s china-cup fragility. Touch her clumsily and she’ll shatter. Prod her too much and she’ll break.

  ‘Be careful, Sante,’ Midget Man whispers, before Carlos intervenes once again.

  ‘Why not interview them all together,’ he says. ‘We have a long journey ahead of us.’

  Perhaps he sees what I’m sensing: Scarlett inching ever closer to a precipice of No Return.

  Menendez and his black-boots um and ah at Carlos’s suggestion. Once they’ve agreed, the Old Ones deliberate and Mama Rose finally gives her consent. Then we drag the stools we sat on not so long ago to a chair by a window of the dressing room.

  It’s late afternoon. Sunlight dapples a silver-grey sea. Cormorants, wings outstretched, dry their feathers in the last of the sun’s rays. In the distance a flash of gold whizzes through the sky. Priss, by the look of it.

  Menendez sits, pulls out a notebook and asks the question he’s been mulling over since he arrived: ‘My friends, what transpired in there?’

  Cobra and Cat turn to me, as if they’re so shook up, I’m the only one present who knows her left from her right, her up from her down. And if I don’t, that’s too bad, ’cause they’ve decided – since I put my hand up for it – that I shall do the talking for them. Truth is, there’re more questions than answers scurrying through my head. Questions such as, where’s the ceremonial dagger? What happened to it? Can objects move from one world to another? I twizzle the golden bangle on my wrist and decide, yes, they can. Then I promise myself that once this ordeal is over, I’ll go walkabout to the sea that cradled me. Only this time I’ll ask Cobra to accompany me.

  I think my thoughts and after due consideration reply to Menendez: ‘Mister, I’d love to answer your question but I’d be lying if I said that I knew what happened. It started this way: a man who saw us perform the other day, Isaka, invited us to entertain the Captain and his friends on the trapeze. We were entertaining them when the others came.’

  ‘What others?’

  We’ve agreed to stick to plain facts stripped of any speculation; the reason being,
a simple tale is the easiest to tell, and the easiest to repeat a thousand times over.

  ‘Looked like moths to me. Isn’t that so, Cobra?’

  Cobra nods. Cat would too if she wasn’t busy with Scarlett. Girl’s likely to collapse if she doesn’t calm down quickly.

  ‘Moths?’ Menendez asks.

  ‘Yes, moths! Moths as big as my fist, that’s how big they were. As soon as everyone saw them, they ran out of there faster than bats through the gates of hell.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I can’t say, mister. It was wild in there with people running everywhere. And those moths.’

  ‘Did you see what happened to the Captain?’

  ‘No, sir!’ I reply. ‘But I reckon the moths did that.’

  ‘And the same moths stabbed his son?’

  I pause. It’s never a good idea to rattle off a lie quickly. Best to prepare the ground before laying a falsehood down. ‘I didn’t see a thing, mister. I was up on the trapeze, like I said. We all were.’

  Cobra and Cat nod, while Scarlett’s uncontrolled shaking escalates to heartwrenching sobbing.

  ‘This interview has to stop,’ Redwood says. ‘The poor girl is in no fit state to be here. She’s traumatised.’

  Menendez turns to Scarlett, and with his voice low and confiding, asks: ‘Did you see anything, senorita?’

  Wracked by weeping, unable to answer, Scarlett simply quivers while every single one of us, except the black-boots, silently will her to reply: ‘No.’

  ‘Please, Scarlett. Please,’ I plead mutely. ‘Go on. Do it. Say it.’

  She shakes her head. Which is just as well, ’cause from the throb and thrust of her, I don’t think she remembers what she did. Won’t most probably for a long time. And when she does remember, she’ll have to decide how much was down to her and what was due to the others: the spirits of the dead. She may never fully know.

  When her sobbing eases, Cat retrieves a phone from a pouch on her lap: ‘This may help you understand what’s been going on,’ she says. ‘I got it from one of the Captain’s men. That barrel of a man that your men led away just now. Took it from him when he was laid low.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Menendez. He doesn’t look at the contents of Barrel Man’s phone, just pushes it aside.

  It’s then, and only then, when he’s rustling through the possibilities in his mind, that I’m tempted to tell him more. Like an itch on my tongue, I’m minded to tell him about the others. Tell him there’s a whole heap of them out there without a home for the night. Tell about the Captain’s party and what I saw with my own two eyes. I bite my tongue to keep the words inside, ’cause with Carlos’s friends on the case, and the pictures in Barrel Man’s phone, the truth will come out eventually. I keep my tongue tied, and sure enough Menendez stops probing.

  He says to Carlos: ‘Hombre, you may take them home now. If I need to speak to them again, I’ll get in touch with these witnesses through you. Understood?’

  Carlos smiles. He knows as well as I do that the Captain’s got a better chance of resurrecting from the dead than we have of sticking around to answer more questions from black-boots.

  *

  Next morning I return to the Caleta beach with Priss and Cobra. Priss flies away to hunt for food while Cobra stays beside me.

  In my left hand is Mamadou’s flute, in my right, a small boat. Cobra helped me make it after supper at Carlos’s last night. A meandering meal peppered with queries from the Old Ones. They wanted proper responses to the questions posed earlier by Menendez, and a good deal more besides. Such as: why hadn’t we told them of our plans to entertain at the Captain’s party? Did we appreciate how worried they’d been when they woke up and discovered us gone?

  Mama Rose wiped tears from her eyes. ‘It’s a basic courtesy,’ she said. ‘Always keep us informed.’

  Mimi moaned. Then Bizzie Lizzie said: ‘Don’t ever do that again, Sante-girl, you hear?

  ‘Yeah,’ Redwood said. ‘We expected better from you, son. Don’t ever hightail it out of here without letting us know, understood?’

  I nodded. Cobra did too. No chance of Cat complying, ’cause she was already up in the pigeonnier helping Scarlett clean up.

  The Old Ones exchanged nods and glances and then chose that moment, of all the moments in the world – when we were exhausted, battered and bruised – to unload a barrelful of botheration on us. What really happened in the restaurant? How did the Captain die? What part, if any, did Scarlett play in Miguel’s stabbing? Moths? What on earth was I talking about when I mentioned moths? Families! When you want them out of your hair, they stick to you meaner than an infestation of nits.

  Between us, Cobra and I told ’em what we could. I did most of the talking as usual, but when I think about it, it’s only right that I should. Told ’em about the unquiet dead, their day of reckoning, and the forces unleashed at the Captain’s celebration. And no, I had no idea of the whereabouts of Grey Eyes and Isaka. They disappeared with everyone else in the commotion, so how was I supposed to know where they were?

  Once the Old Ones had finished probing and were digesting what I’d said, I mentioned what I was thinking of doing next day.

  ‘Makes sense,’ Midget Man replied, caressing his beard. Tends his beard as carefully as a rose bush he does – as tenderly as Mimi brushes her hair at the end of every evening. ‘Saying goodbye is never easy, Sante,’ he added. ‘And it doesn’t necessarily mean those ghosts won’t want to talk to you again. Still, it’s worth a try.’

  Mimi, running an ivory comb through peppered grey locks, agreed. They all did. Even Mama Rose who, at first, was reluctant to let me return to Cádiz. But I did. She couldn’t stop me.

  The tide’s low again today and the sea calm. A mysterious grey haze swirls over the water. One of those shadowy sea-hazes, which makes it impossible to tell from a distance where the shoreline ends and sea begins, but creates a blurring of time and space. Seagulls strut and call on boats beached on the shore as Cobra and I step through the mist to the water’s edge.

  As soon as I’ve done what I’m here to do, our plan is to leave Spain. Travel to France and catch a ferry to England. The next hurdle will be to find out if Scarlett will go back to her parents. I’m not sure if I’d want to if I were her, but you can never tell. As it is, if Cat gets her way, Scarlett will stay.

  They depend on each other, those two. Scarlett may still be splashing in the deep end of crazy, but she’s winkled herself deep into Cat’s heart. Whatever happens between ’em, we’ve decided that Mama Rose’s Family Circus is heading to Wales to meet what’s left of the Williams clan. According to Mama Rose, they live in a big country house close to Brecon. Deer’s Leap, it’s called: an ancient manor house with space enough for all of us, not to mention fields for Taj Mahal and wide-open sky for Priss to roam in. Imagine! We’re to live in a house with a roof over our heads and stay put for three months at least. Even Mama Rose and Redwood think it’s a good idea to hole up for a while. Lie low over winter, so that by the time spring arrives in a froth of green shoots, we’ll have an idea what to do next.

  But first I have to finish this.

  The boat in my hand is made of rectangular pieces of wood, a cork keel and an oilcloth sail. After we’d glued it together, Cobra helped me paint it red, yellow and green. On the hull is a black star in memory of the restless dead here and everywhere, lost souls who drowned in the cold, dark grave of the sea.

  I explain what I intend to do and Cobra stares at me with that puzzled frown he’s been giving me lately: raised eyebrow, greens dark with concern.

  ‘Sante-girl,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but you can’t return a gift that doesn’t exist. There’s nothing there.’ He lifts my arm.

  The bangle slides to my elbow and I feel the delicate throb of its beauty. ‘You can’t see it?’

  Cobra shakes his head.

  ‘It’s here,’ I tell him. ‘As real as your eyes in front of me now.’

 
Shakes his head a second time and I remember. No wonder he was spooked when I first showed him my bangle. No wonder he glances at me when I start playing with it.

  Silence nestles between us while I listen in and begin to appreciate his predicament, mine as well. My special talent, as Mama Rose calls it, goes deeper than delving into the fizz and whirl of people’s feelings. I may have had a knack for it before, but with the help of my bangle, I’ve seen beyond this world and glimpsed mysteries most people, Cobra included, have no indication of.

  ‘Does it bother you’, I ask him, at last, ‘that you can’t see it? Or d’you think that, like Scarlett, I’m a bit psycho?’

  Cobra smiles and touches the wrist on which the bangle lies. ‘I certainly don’t like it when I notice you toying with something you believe in that I can’t register.’

  Pauses ’cause his tongue’s tied. Unties it by caressing the crease of my palm until, suddenly, the love-shine in him beams from his face and licks mine. ‘No, Sante,’ he says. ‘I don’t think you’re crazy. You’re my best girl. I love you. I want you to be safe, that’s all.’

  ‘Then help me, Cobra. Help me do this properly.’

  I sit cross-legged at the water’s edge, close my eyes, and step into the ocean of feeling inside me. The ocean Cobra dredged up with our first kiss. His palm fondling my knee brings tears to my eyes, as every little bit of me – heart, head, body and soul – turns inwards to dwell on parents I never knew.

  I recall the faces of my mother and father as they appeared to me in my dreams: the curve of my mother’s cheek, the gentle slant of her eyes, my father’s strength and laughter. I brood over every single thing that I remember, every glance and every gesture; and sensing the breath of their presence around me, I feel a twinge of anxiety. Once the pit-patter of my pulse steadies, I open my eyes, and say their names out loud:

  ‘Kofi Prempeh and Amma Serwah, I wish I’d got to know you better. That isn’t possible now, and yet true as my blood is red, I shan’t forget what you’ve revealed of yourselves. I’d like to believe that, somehow, wherever I go, you’ll be with me. Don’t know exactly how that’s going to happen. But Cobra here told me not so long ago that you are inside me, same as his parents are in him. Isn’t that so, Cobra?’