Agnes stops and turns around to face me in the dark, so suddenly that I almost walk straight into her. I feel the akara sinking into my stomach.
‘I keep having nightmares, Agnes. Where the men come back again.’
‘Why didn’t you talk to me about it before, Anita?’
‘I – I didn’t know what to say.’
I am seeing myself as I was when I last remember it happening. Alone in a room at my mother’s house in London. Behind a closed door. Footsteps. A man’s laughter. A door opening. My knickers being pulled down. More laughter. Feeling like my skin is being peeled off from the inside. Later, walking with my legs very far apart, like a cowboy in a Western.
‘I’m really sorry, Anita,’ Agnes says. She grabs my hand and we keep walking.
An insect lands on my wrist and starts inching up my arm. I slap it away.
‘Anita, listen to me,’ she says. ‘All you need to do is just forget about what happened to you, OK? Put it out of your mind. Don’t ever think about it again after tonight. OK?’
Agnes and I walk through the darkness towards our grandmother’s house, holding hands and saying nothing. I whisper ‘thank you’ but I’m unsure what I’m thanking her for.
It turns out that my revelation wasn’t news to Agnes; she’d witnessed what she’d called an ‘incident’ between me and one of my mother’s male friends, years ago. I was a few weeks away from turning four. I don’t remember Agnes being there. All I remember about this particular man is him being fat. That he kept perspiring and that he must have been rich because he handed me pocket money afterwards: a twenty-pound note that smelled brand new. Agnes had tried, without success, to protect me.
I uncover this information as an adult, when I gain access to my childhood Social Services records. I find that my then social worker had written and filed away a short report about what happened:
5.6.1975
Mrs Taylor had requested a visit especially as a result of information that Agnes had given her. Agnes is Anita’s half-sister and when they were last at home [with their mother] on a weekend together, Agnes was concerned about incidents that occurred with Anita and a man that visited her mother.
Mrs Taylor then said that Anita had complained of vulval soreness and irritation and that when her own daughter, Mrs Travis, had bathed Anita, she had put some cream on that area and thought that Anita was different in some way.
I explained to Mrs Taylor that it was very doubtful if a doctor would be prepared to examine such a small child internally, but I suggested that she might take Anita to her GP for some treatment for the soreness and if the occasion arose, she could then tell him what she suspected.
I suggested to Mrs Taylor that she should endeavour to let Agnes feel that she could talk to her freely about anything for the child had obviously been very bothered by it, to mention it to Mrs Taylor on her return.
I sit in dirt that’s as bright as the skin of a clementine. Ants, fat and glossy like black beads, crawl all over my legs and I don’t even care. At home, in Fernmere, I see creepy crawly things and I run screaming at the sight of a single ant, the tiniest spider. Here, I am me and an ant is an ant and ‘Hideous Africa’ is not in the slightest bit hideous.
‘What are you doing all by yourself, Precious-No?’ says Aunty Nneka. The bones in her knees creak as she crouches down beside me. ‘I’m going to tell you a story,’ she says.
The best-ever stories are told in Africa, and Aunty Nneka is the best-ever storyteller. She speaks of something called an mbari house where the village’s craftsmen congregate to carve sculptures in an orgy of artistry that they offer up to native African gods. Once the gods have feasted their eyes on all the art, the craftsmen destroy it all – and go on to rebuild it again when the gods need soothing next time.
African gods? I just can’t believe it. I’ve heard of Greek gods. I’ve seen pictures in my illustrated children’s Bible of the English god who I thought was everyone’s god: a white man in a white robe with a long white beard.
‘Are the gods coloured, Aunty? Is their skin brown like ours?’
‘Gods don’t have skins,’ says Aunty Nneka.
We sit in silence.
‘I can feel your mind whirring,’ Aunty Nneka says, finally. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘How come I don’t live with my real family all the time, Aunty?’
‘It’s just the way things are. Right now.’
‘But there must be a reason.’
‘Everything is everything.’
This new phrase crawls into my head and my mind goes round and round trying to understand it.
‘Is that a riddle? What does that mean, Aunty?’
‘It means that everything in this minute is exactly as it is meant to be.’
I begin to count. One-plus-two-plus-three. All the way up to sixty.
‘It’s a new minute now, Aunty. Is everything still everything?’
‘Everything is as it’s meant to be in every minute.’
On Christmas Eve, I begin seeing things that other people say are not real.
The day starts as normally as a Christmas Eve spent in Africa can: I wake up covered in sweat and fresh mosquito bites. When I climb out of my grandmother’s bed, it is so early that night hasn’t quite given way to morning and the sky outside is still dark and bluish-purple, like a bruise. I trot through the small house and slip noiselessly into the steaming-hot kitchen where I stand in a corner, watching Patty do her chores.
Patty has a rhythm going. She leans over the table holding a big rusty knife and begins chopping up something I can’t quite see and every few minutes she stops, cocks her head to one side, looks out of the window and leans forward and starts chopping again. Finally, she turns around and screams.
‘Anita! You scared me-oh! I didn’t hear you come in!’
As soon as Patty sees me, she starts spooning bright orange palm oil into a big brown frying pan. She grabs two ripe plantains and yanks their skins off. She slits the yellow flesh into thin slices with her knife, sprinkles the slices with salt and flings them into the frying pan.
Patty fries plantain pretty much every time she catches sight of me. Now that she’s found African food that I will actually eat, she seems pleased, or relieved.
‘Eat,’ she says, putting a plate piled high with sweet, crisp plantain on the table in front of me.
As I munch plantain, Agnes strides into the kitchen, carrying what looks like a gigantic knobbly bar of soap. She drops this bar of soap – which is about three feet long – onto the kitchen table and it lands with a gentle thud on top of the plantain skins and chopped onions.
‘I made this myself,’ Agnes says.
‘Wow!’ I say. ‘How did you make it?’
‘Palm oil; lye,’ she says, cutting off chunks of soap and placing them into a large basket. ‘I’m going to try to sell it at the market today and make naira to buy Christmas presents with. Want to come and help me sell it?’
‘Will you give me my own bar of soap if I help you?’
‘I’ve got something better for you. Aunty Edna already gave me some traditional soap she said I should give to you; it will help your eczema. Wait, yeah?’
Agnes disappears into the back of the house, comes back and drops a brownish black squidgy lump with white specks in it into my hand.
‘I don’t know how to make the traditional soap yet. It’s made with cocoa leaves and paw-paw and all that,’ Agnes says, cramming a slice of plantain into her mouth. ‘Go and wash and get dressed. We need to get to the market early.’
We arrive at the market, and as we stroll through it, I feel suffocated by the smell of raw animal flesh mingled with decaying fish that fills the breeze-less morning air. I’ve been to the market in Chichester before, where local gypsies hawk dodgy kitchen appliances, knock-off perfume and bruised-looking fruit and veg. But nothing has prepared me for the explosion of colour and noise and the stomach-churning stench of this market in Chukaro.
Searching for a spot in the shade where we can sell our soap, Agnes and I pass rickety tables laid out with sinister-looking things to eat. There are dried bats that look like dusty black leather gloves and whole fishes that are so old they feel like cardboard when I poke at them.
Standing on a table, at the centre of a circle of ladies who are screaming, ‘How much? Give me, give me!’ is a goat. The goat’s skin has been torn off and blood drips from its raw pink flesh. The goat’s head lies next to it on the table, crawling with fat, brightly coloured flies. Agnes stops to examine the goat’s head and tells me about the delicious soup our grandmother could make with it. I shiver.
Basket of soap in hand, Agnes weaves her way through the crowd with her nose in the air, looking so snooty that I bet people think she could buy up the entire market if she felt like it. Maybe Agnes really could buy the whole market; she’s got a purse stuffed full of pound notes, after all. People in Africa go crazy for pound notes. When I was introduced to my great-aunt Edna, the first – and only – thing she said to me was, ‘Did you bring me British pounds-oh? Did you bring me US dollars, I beg?’
‘Let me buy you a nice cold Fanta,’ says Agnes. ‘Or you can have a Coke if you want.’
‘Can I really, Agnes?’ I say, shocked. I am not allowed Coke at home. Nanny says it turns your blood to poison.
I draw my shoulders back, copying Agnes’s self-possessed walk, and we push past other shoppers and sellers to get to the lady selling cold drinks. A red motorbike whizzes past us, making red dust fly up all around us and narrowly misses Agnes’s left shoulder.
As I turn to watch the motorbike speed off, I notice that I’m being watched by a boy about the same age as me who is trailing dreamily behind a very thin woman with white hair. The boy is wearing a brown shirt that’s hanging off his body revealing a belly button that pokes out a long way, like Pinocchio’s nose. The annoyed-looking woman reaches out her hand to the boy but he’s too busy looking at me to catch up with her.
The man on the motorbike swoops past again, but this time he catches the little boy’s shirt in the motorbike’s handlebars. I watch as the boy is dragged slowly towards the ground where his skull slams against one of the motorbike’s wheels. There is a series of thuds as the basket of vegetables the woman was carrying falls to the ground and then she herself falls to her knees in the orange dust, screaming and screaming. The boy’s head is laid to the side, his cheek resting against the earth. Thick, raspberry-red liquid oozes from the enormous split that runs from the nape of his neck to the crown of his head and onto the earth.
In slow-motion, feeling somehow as though I’m trying to run underwater, I fall onto my trembling knees and cover my temples with the palms of my hands and scream, OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!
Agnes yanks my arm. ‘What on earth is wrong, Anita? Get up!’
‘Don’t you care about that poor boy? I think he’s dead.’
‘What boy? This isn’t funny, Anita; what are you going on about? I think the heat has got to you,’ says Agnes, trying to drag me to my feet. ‘No: I think you are actually going mad. I’m not joking, Anita. There’s a lot of madness in our family.’
‘Don’t touch me!’ I scream.
‘In all seriousness, you have gone mad,’ says Agnes, shaking her head.
I am lying on my grandmother’s bed with a sheet wrapped tightly around me, wondering how going mad will change my life. I feel trapped and uncomfortable: my tightly threaded hairdo won’t let me rest my head against the pillow and whatever position I lie in hurts.
I hear something that sounds like paper rustling and I spring from the pillow, feel my weird antenna hair standing up, and look around me. My grandmother is standing in the shadows in the corner of the bedroom, turning the pages of a thick white Bible. She sees me and walks slowly over to the bed and sits on the edge of it. She lays the Bible in my lap and smiles.
‘I love God very much,’ my grandmother says, in perfect English.
Holding her yellow wrapper up above her knees, she climbs onto the end of the bed and stands there, peering down at me. Her hairy legs are dotted with dark brown scars that were left behind by vicious mosquitoes.
‘Anita, you didn’t know I could speak English did you?’ she says.
In one smooth movement, my grandmother hops from one end of the bed to the other. She lands close to my head, with one bare foot on the pillow and the other foot balancing behind her in the air.
‘I bet you didn’t know I could jump like that, either, did you? I can do anything I want to,’ she says. ‘And no one can stop me.’
My grandmother’s yellow headscarf slides off her head onto the floor, revealing hair which is long and threaded in the same style as mine. She runs a honey-brown hand through her hair and down the side of her face to her neck.
‘Feel how soft my skin still is,’ my grandmother says, pushing her face towards mine. I reach my hand up to touch her skin and find that there’s nothing there but thin air.
‘Put your tongue out,’ someone whispers. ‘Open your mouth!’
‘No!’ I shout. ‘No!’
I feel rage boil inside me. I will not accept any more filthy nastiness into my mouth. I will stand up for myself. I will push away the body behind this whispering voice that’s telling me to open up. If this is madness, I thank the African gods for it because madness has opened my eyes and loosened my tongue.
‘No!’
I struggle to sit up.
‘Anita, do as you’re told. Please.’ It is Mummy Elizabeth’s voice. She places her hand in mine.
Gingerly, I poke out my tongue and feel drops of liquid slowly falling onto it. I open my eyes and see my mother hovering over me holding a plastic beaker to my lips. Her face is shining with sweat. I touch my mother’s face and this startles her, making her drip some of the water from the beaker onto my burning throat. She dabs the water away with a corner of the bed sheet.
‘You’re very, very sick,’ my mother says.
‘No, I’m not,’ I say, sitting bolt upright. ‘Agnes told me I might be going mad but I think she was just being spiteful and I think I just had a nightmare, that’s all.’
‘You look terrible. Terrible,’ my mother says. ‘I’m sending for the doctor.’
Within minutes of being sent for, the doctor waddles in: monstrously fat, damp with sweat and carrying a bulging black leather bag.
‘Are you my godfather?’ I ask the doctor. It comes out as ‘goodfather’. ‘My mother said my godfather’s a doctor.’
The doctor laughs, making a whirring noise that sounds like wahwahwah. I cringe and stare up at the wobbling layers of flab beneath his chin.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘You could say that I’m a good friend of your mother’s.’
The doctor’s light brown face has a slimy and raw look to it, making me think of a snail without a shell. In his high, girlish voice he asks me question after question until I start feeling woozy. Unable to look at him any more, I close my eyes.
The doctor’s voice is pleasingly, disarmingly un-scary, like a woman’s. My mother holds my hand. I flush with pleasure. My mother, the brilliant elusive hummingbird, has flitted to my side. Feeling her fingers interlaced so tightly with mine makes me feel that whatever the doctor says is wrong with me, I’m ultimately going to be all right. I squeeze my mother’s hand.
‘Have you been bitten a lot?’ the doctor asks.
‘Bitten by what?’ I murmur in a croaky voice. ‘A tiger?’
He laughs again: wahwahwah.
‘Mosquitoes!’ says the doctor. ‘In a way, we have a lot to thank mosquitoes for. Without them we’d never have got our independence: it’s the mosquitoes that finally drove the white man out of Nigeria. We should have an image of a mosquito in our national flag, don’t you think? How are you feeling? Where does it pain you?’
‘My tummy hurts.’
Using his fat fingers and the palms of his sweaty hands, the doctor presses down on my stomach, the same way
you’d press the top of an apple pie you were about to shove into the oven. I flinch and begin to cry.
Each time he asks, ‘Does it hurt here? Or here?’ I nod. Everything hurts. My brain and even my heart hurts.
The doctor pushes a thermometer into my mouth and I gag and hold my breath. My fingernails dig into my mother’s hands. The doctor takes my hand and presses his thumb into my wrist for a minute or two and opens his black bag.
‘She must take these,’ he says to my mother, dropping a white envelope of pills into her hand. ‘This child almost certainly has malaria.’
Book Two
‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ said Alice.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here.’
Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
The Bowler Hat Collector
‘STILL GETTING CHILLS, darling?’ says Nanny.
‘Yes,’ I lie.
I’ve been off school for weeks, supposedly near-death as a result of the malaria. Nanny has moved me into her bedroom so that she can keep an eye on me during the night. I sleep in the twin divan that was once Gramps’s. Aggy’s back too. She’s back in the box room and has even less to do with us than ever.
‘It was awful for Anita,’ Nanny tells my form teacher on the phone. ‘Thank God we got her home just in the nick of time.’
How is Nanny responsible for getting me home? It’s not as if she paid for my return plane ticket, and I do not believe my real family nearly let me die.
I have been waiting and waiting for a chance to tell somebody my stories from Nigeria. I have wanted to tell Nanny and Aunty Wendy about Chukaro and what I did there and what the people I met there were like. I try to spark up conversations about the family I met in Chukaro, about the ancestors I learned of who now feel like living people to me.
I want to tell Nanny all about the dusty old book called My Africa that my Aunty showed me and about the terrifying photo of my great-grandfather’s body printed inside the book, and about the epitaph beneath the photo: ‘Here lies King Eze Uche, the shrewdest politician I ever knew.’
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