True Murder

by Yaba Badoe

  We had been living, just the two of us, in a bare London bed-sit. We’d run away from Ghana to Lewisham. For a month we had survived on next to nothing because my mother wasn’t well enough to hold down a job. I stopped going to school in order to look after her. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t calm her. I couldn’t distract her from faces she said she saw in the mirror.

  She talked to them constantly. She said they were multiplying. And as their numbers grew, the faces stepped out of the mirror into the room and Mama became incomprehensible, cursing them as they followed her back and forth, pacing the floor. She wouldn’t stop walking, and occasionally I fell asleep while she walked.

  One morning, I awoke to find her in a deep sleep. When I tried to rouse her, her eyes wouldn’t open. Her hands were cold. I rubbed them. I stroked her unkempt hair. I covered her with a blanket. I caressed her cheek, until, after what seemed a long time, her eyes opened at last. They registered fear.

  Seeing that familiar look in Beth’s eyes, I remembered my helplessness in the face of my mother’s suffering, and my tears of relief turned into something else. I couldn’t stop crying.

  ‘She’s going to be all right,’ Joshua assured me, bewildered.

  I jammed a hand in my mouth to stem my tears, biting hard until it bled.

  4

  WHENEVER I THOUGHT of home, I would see our house in Accra and imagine myself playing barefoot on the veranda, chasing lizards. I would smell the aroma of my mother’s cooking. Then, forgetting my shame at undressing with strangers, who marvelled at the paleness of my palms and fingered the stubborn resilience of my hair, forgetting the chilblains on my fingers and toes, I would luxuriate in the warmth of home.

  Our house on Kuku Hill was decorated with ferns and bougainvillaea. My mother loved plants, so the garden as well as the house was her domain. It was full of fruit trees: guava, avocado, lime, and to the left, equidistant between the compound walls, was a mango tree that Mama had planted on the day she discovered she was pregnant with me. It had grown from the seed of a mango she had eaten that day, so she called it Ajuba’s tree.

  My parents met as students in London when my father was becoming a lawyer. My mother was training to be a nurse at Lewisham General Hospital. They are both Akan, so even though my father is Nzema and my mother a Fanti, they have more similarities than differences. Nevertheless, my father told me when I was old enough to hear his account of their marriage, that had he known what he later discovered about my mother’s ‘people’, as he calls them, he would never have married her. According to him, a taint of madness runs through her family. It touched Mama’s younger brother first; a boy who by all accounts was a brilliant scholar; and then it touched my mother.

  Aunt Lila, Mama’s eldest sister, tells a different story. I’m inclined to believe her version because it coincides with what I remember. She says it would have been better for both my parents if they’d never married; they brought out the worst in each other.

  ‘As for your uncle, our younger brother,’ Aunt Lila said when I met her for the first time as an adult, ‘he should have known better than to summon up a Mami-Water. The foolish boy wanted help in passing his exams. As if he wasn’t clever enough already, he called up a sea goddess near the lagoon where we lived. The next thing we know, Kweku has lost his wits. Believe me, Ajuba, there was nothing the doctors could do to make him sane again. He should have known better than to mess with juju.’

  Aunt Lila resembles Mama. Their voices are the same and they have that laugh: a laugh which makes you want to join in. But my aunt is altogether bigger and broader than Mama ever was. Lila has had seven children.

  I met my aunt through a cousin who was at school with one of her children. I was in my early twenties by then and living alone in London; after what happened, Pa severed contact with my mother’s family completely. We met at my instigation at Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge. I had heard she was passing through London and, thinking it prudent to meet on neutral ground where few, if any, Ghanaians would be present, I invited her for tea. We recognised each other instantly. She was wearing a glorious orange and maroon boubou with matching headdress, a black cashmere shawl slung over her shoulders, and dark glasses. She might have been an African diva taking London by storm.

  I took to Aunt Lila immediately; despite our long separation, she was reassuringly familiar. She kept touching my arm when she spoke, and whenever she wanted me to pay particular attention to something she was saying, she would hold my fingers with her hands, looking me straight in the eye.

  ‘Your parents returned home,’ she said, ‘with all sorts of new-fangled ideas about family life. I remember Grace telling me that for a modern marriage to succeed, a husband and wife must unite in everything and concentrate on their children. Husband. Wife. Children. That’s all. They came home worshipping the nuclear family. With that sort of attitude in Ghana, Ajuba, they might as well have worshipped the nuclear bomb! Of course it exploded in their faces. By the time Grace was having trouble with her pregnancies she’d forgotten how to confide in us. Her own sisters! Either that or she refused to. So when she became ill, my dear, your father took his pleasure elsewhere.’

  Yet there were happy times on Kuku Hill. Christmas parties on the veranda, my father serving drinks to family and friends, everyone going home with one of Mama’s cakes. And Mama laughing, always laughing: teasing Pa with smiles until he would take her hand, telling the world he was the luckiest man alive. And there was Aunt Rose, trailing behind Aunt Lila and her children, bearing gifts.

  After I was born, both my parents wanted more children. Mama would have planted an orchard of mango trees if she’d had her way, but unfortunately she kept miscarrying. She would be happy for what seemed like a long time, then suddenly she’d be silent, and the house would fall silent with her. The maid would carry her meals upstairs on a tray, Pa would eat alone, and I was told to keep out of their room so that Mama could rest. I walked the house on tiptoe, frightened that if I made a noise, I would never hear her laughter again.

  When my mother gave birth to a stillborn child, the son my father wanted so badly, he was as distraught as she was. He explained that the brother I’d been looking forward to was in heaven, and my mother was ill. ‘Will Mama die too?’ I asked. He held me tightly. When I pulled away, demanding an answer, he had tears in his eyes. No, she wasn’t going to die, he said, but we must be very patient because it was going to take a while for Mama to be well enough to leave hospital and get back to her old self. In the meantime, I was to be good because my Aunt Rose was coming to look after me.

  An unmarried woman with a reputation for flightiness, Aunt Rose was a dressmaker by profession. According to Aunt Lila, Rose got into one scrape after another, always getting herself talked about for the same reason: men. She had a way with men that was uncanny. Whether it was the Wash Man, the Garden Boy, the House Boy, or my father for that matter, she’d have them eating out of her hand within half an hour. Her eyes sparkled in their company, and if she liked someone especially, she became dreamy-eyed, doe-eyed.

  My father relaxed visibly in her company, and the house, which had long been quiet, became noisy with the clamour of her friends. I loved Aunt Rose because she was never silent. She had the radio on all the time: either the radio or the record player. She taught me how to dance the Highlife, a hand on my stomach, eyes closed, hips swaying. The more I managed to make them sway, the louder she’d clap her hands. With Rose in the house, I never walked on tiptoe.

  When Mama came back from hospital, the first thing she did was to turn off the radio. Taking the hint, my aunt tried to behave in a more subdued manner, and, sheltering behind her, I followed her example.

  For a while Mama watched me. She watched my father with Rose and then all of us together. Then she began to woo me back, gently, carefully. She fed me fruit from her garden, a guava one day, a pawpaw the next. Cutting the pawpaw in half, she would scoop out its glutinous black seeds, and f
eed them to her chickens. To rid them of worms, she told me. Mama reclaimed me with fruit and stories her grandmother had taught her. By the time the mango tree was in season, I was hers again completely. It was then she struck.

  It was Saturday morning and Aunt Rose was preparing to go to market. We were eating a late breakfast on the veranda when my aunt approached my mother for money. Taking a wad of notes from her handbag, Mama slapped it on the table. She looked Rose up and down. She looked at my father, then at me.

  ‘This is my family,’ Mama announced. ‘No one will take it away from me. Certainly not you, Rose. Look at you! What sort of woman do you think you are, trying to steal my husband, my child?’

  My aunt protested. My father protested, saying this wasn’t the way to thank Rose for her kindness. Rose started crying. My mother was mistaken, she said; she loved me as an aunt, she respected my father as an in-law, nothing more. But Mama would have none of it.

  ‘Can’t you see what she’s doing?’ she shouted at Pa. Pointing an accusing finger at Aunt Rose, she said, ‘This woman here, this sister of mine, has had more men than a Krobo prostitute in Abidjan. Do you expect me to believe she left you alone, Michael?’ Mama shook her head. ‘How can you expect me to believe that?’

  Aunt Lila says that Mama had a point. Rose was renowned for her affairs. But even Rose had her limits. ‘Your father was not her sort at all. He’s what I call an Englishman, Ajuba: stiff, aloof, rather formal. You know your father. Anyway, for all her faults, Rose wouldn’t have done it. We were family. Your mother was ill.’

  Under a torrent of abuse, Aunt Rose packed her bags and left within the hour, my father looking on helplessly. He tried to calm my mother, assuring her that nothing had happened between them, that Rose was innocent of her accusations; in fact she had been a godsend, a treasure. The more he defended her, the more convinced Mama was of their guilt.

  Her suspicions didn’t end with Aunt Rose. Before long, Pa’s relatives gave up visiting us altogether. His friends, male and female, stopped dropping in at the house, and even Aunt Lila, the closest of Mama’s siblings, was made unwelcome at Kuku Hill.

  ‘Somehow, your mother got it into her head that we were all witches. All of us. Even me,’ Aunt Lila told me when we met in London. ‘Can you believe it, Ajuba? She thought we were feasting on her foetuses, that’s how ill she was. Now, if she had said it was your father’s people who were after her, I could have taken her seriously. Everyone knows what Nzema people are like: they mess around with witchcraft all the time. But when Grace accused me too, then I knew she was ill. What your father went through, Ajuba, I can’t begin to tell you.’

  I don’t need anyone to tell me that part of my history, for I remember it clearly. It was after my little sister had died, a few hours after birth, a tiny, sickly child. It was the time when my parents talked to each other through me, a time of tears and tension, when a word out of place could shatter the brittle silence of the house. To keep the peace I was obliged to pass messages from one parent to the other.

  My father must have realised that his marriage wasn’t going to survive. He was biding his time, waiting for the right moment to leave. But there’s never a good time to leave a grief-stricken wife. So, instead of abandoning us, Pa did the next best thing: he avoided my mother as much as possible, staying away for days on end. Dismissing her accusations of infidelity, he claimed she was imagining things; he was staying overnight with relatives. Since Mama wouldn’t let them visit us, he was spending time with them for a change. Of course there wasn’t another woman! Mama was being neurotic, overwrought. He made the situation worse by lying; he added to my mother’s insecurity by avoiding her. He left her to me. And for that I can never forgive him.

  Aunt Lila believes that if my little sister had lived, my parents might have stayed together. She’s wrong. She didn’t taste the slow poison of Pa’s contempt for my mother. And Aunt Lila doesn’t know what I know; she doesn’t know about the mirrors.

  Whenever there was a thunderstorm on Kuku Hill, the maid would rush around the house, covering every mirror with cloth. Mama used to laugh, teasing her. ‘Tell me, Tawiah,’ she asked, ‘have you ever seen lightning strike a mirror?’

  The answer would be no. But that wasn’t the point, Tawiah insisted. It was said in her village that the reflection of lightning in a mirror could kill you. What was even more terrifying were the ghosts in mirrors. Lightning could reveal them. Her people believed that during a thunderstorm, if you looked carefully, hovering behind your reflection you’d see the faces of your enemies.

  One afternoon, soon after my sister had died, the sound of thunder woke me from a nap. I heard the first fat drops of rain hitting the roof. Tawiah was running from room to room, covering mirrors, shutting windows, protecting the house from elements physical and spiritual. The rain fell in torrents, lashing against walls, spilling down guttering.

  At the first flash of lightning I ran to my parents’ room. Pa had been away for several days and Mama was morose, yet because thunderstorms frightened me, I ran to the shelter of her arms. When I opened the door she didn’t see me at first. She was staring at the mirror.

  ‘Mama?’

  She looked in my direction, a dazed expression clouding her face. ‘Oh, it’s you, Ajuba. Come here, darling. Come see what I see.’

  I approached hesitantly, taking hold of her outstretched hand.

  ‘Look,’ she said, turning her face to the mirror. ‘Can you see your father’s whores? Look at them all. His sisters, my sisters, the women he calls his girlfriends. Look how they hate me, Ajuba!’

  I could only see Mama’s reflection and beside it, lower down, my own. ‘There’s no one there, Mama. Only you and me.’

  ‘Look harder, Ajuba!’

  I didn’t want to see the ghosts in the mirror. I didn’t want to witness the anguish on my mother’s face. ‘There’s nothing there, Mama!’

  Suddenly, my mother smiled. Then holding me close, she said: ‘There’s no need to be frightened. It’s simply a matter of time, Ajuba. Your eyes aren’t open yet, but when they are, you’ll see what I see and you’ll know what I know.’

  ‘Come away from the mirror, Mama,’ I pleaded. ‘Cover it up!’

  I tried to pull her away, but she wouldn’t move. She was mesmerised by the faces she was seeing. Faces of fecund, nubile women. They were mocking her, she said, taunting her. Women who feasted on her babies, intent on stealing her womb, her husband, her child.

  Should I have told someone? Should I have let someone know that before long she was talking to the faces in the mirror without the help of thunderstorms? If my father had been home, perhaps I would have been able to confide in him, but I believed what Mama told me: my eyes hadn’t yet opened. It was simply a matter of time before I saw what she saw and understood. Anyway, Pa was away a week at a time, now. Two weeks. And Mama was waiting for him on the veranda. Watching and waiting.

  I couldn’t sleep the night of Beth’s accident. After Major Derby had carried her back from Bouncy Town and Mrs Derby had shepherded us both into Tavy, a dormitory beyond the Derbys’ bedroom that served as a sickbay, I refused to sleep. I wouldn’t allow myself to in case something happened to Beth.

  Mrs Derby had summoned the school doctor, Archie Whittaker, to make sure that we were all right. A thin, angular man with brusque, confident movements, he prodded Beth’s neck and shoulders, before announcing that she had had a lucky escape. She was suffering from nothing more than a sore neck; and once I’d got over the shock of the accident, I’d be right as rain too. ‘Children are resilient little buggers,’ he said, cuffing me under the chin. ‘You’ll have forgotten what’s happened in a day or two. You wait and see.’

  I wasn’t prepared to wait. I was taking no more chances. Polly had shifted the floorboards on which we walked every day, adjusting the rules of our lives, and Beth and I, tumbling into a yawning cavern underfoot, had entered a world where the certainties of school life no longer existed. A probing anxiety t
hat I’d been trying to evade was encroaching. I didn’t want to travel into my mother’s nether landscape again. I didn’t want to see what she had seen.

  Sensing my anxiety, Mrs Derby, who combined the duties of Matron with Headmistress, spent the rest of the evening by my bed. While her husband interviewed the others involved in Polly’s game, Mrs Derby held my hand.

  She was tall, flat-chested and broad-hipped, her hair a light golden-brown with a tinge of red. Glasses shielded her hazel eyes and her features, accentuated by the severe styling of her short hair, were softened by the colours she wore, reassuring shades of green and brown, merging into chestnut and russet: warm, country colours. She usually smelt of lavender or lily of the valley. That night it was lavender. She dabbed some of her scent on my wrists and neck to calm me down.

  ‘Are we in serious trouble?’ I asked, struggling to inhale deeply. My breathing was rapid and shallow, my voice agitated, my mind wired to painful sensations that I tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress.

  ‘You’re not in any trouble at all, Ajuba. Everything’s going to be fine. There, try to breathe in again.’

  I did as I was told. For a moment my breathing eased, but my lungs, wracked by prolonged sobbing, made me gulp for air as soon as I started talking. ‘I tried to stop her, Mrs Derby, but she wouldn’t listen. We didn’t mean to hurt ourselves, honest we didn’t.’

  ‘I know, sweetie. It was an accident and accidents happen.’

  She fell silent, trying to calm me with the balm of her presence, while I puckered the duvet as I wriggled beneath it, hitting my thighs to stop my legs shaking.

  Folding my hands gently in hers, Mrs Derby said: ‘Ajuba, you know you can talk to me about anything, anything at all.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Even if you think it’s silly, I’m happy to listen.’

  I didn’t know how to transform what was racing through my mind into a language she would understand. I was preoccupied with Polly, my mother and Beth. I didn’t want Beth to enter a deep sleep as my mother had done. I didn’t want to have to wake her up the next morning.