by Yaba Badoe
‘Are you thinking of your mother?’ she asked.
I was always thinking of Mama, always perusing the image that I had locked away in my heart. Polly possessed a key to a reality that I sensed but wasn’t yet able to understand. She held a clue to an aspect of my self I had misplaced and didn’t want anyone else to find: a part of me steeped in my parents and their violent dislocation from each other.
One afternoon, when Pa hadn’t been back to Kuku Hill for a month and a half, Aunt Lila came to visit with her two younger brothers, a family delegation sent to look after my mother’s interests.
‘We had to clarify the situation,’ Aunt Lila told me over tea at the Basil Street Hotel. ‘We had to let Grace know what was happening. You see, your father was no longer in the country by then. He’d found himself some lucrative job in Rome and he wanted a divorce. Can you believe it, Ajuba? He left the country without telling your mother. Grace thought we were lying at first, stirring up trouble, meddling in her affairs. But eventually she accepted what we said. He’d left her. However, she refused to contest the divorce. No matter what we said, she was adamant. She wasn’t going to contest it, because she thought if she did, Michael wouldn’t have her back!’
‘I couldn’t believe my ears,’ Aunt Lila continued. ‘So I told her the rumours I’d heard in town. The gossip put about by Michael’s girlfriends. They were saying that Grace was unbalanced, and that your father had said that when he was settled abroad, he was going to get custody of you. That made her sit up. It drove your mother wild.’
The next day, Mama told me that she’d had a dream in which a colony of ravenous fruit bats attacked the mango tree in the garden. Their teeth glinting in the moonlight, they had devoured the tree’s ripening fruit. It was an omen, Mama said, of what would happen if she left me in Ghana: for the bats had attacked my tree, Ajuba’s tree. She must remove me from harm’s way, far from Ghanaian eyes.
The dream galvanised her into action. Suitcases were brought out of wardrobes, clothes were washed and packed. She wrote letters to friends in London; she wrote to her old hospital. In the flurry of activity she seemed her old self. Mama said I was going to see snow. And if I was lucky I might see the Queen of England. Yet behind everything, behind the excitement and activity, the distribution of gifts and Tawiah’s solemn vow of secrecy, I sensed Pa’s presence casting a shadow over Kuku Hill.
For instance, Mama would be sorting out her jewellery, humming to herself, when all of a sudden her face would cloud over and she’d touch me as if to steady herself.
‘If your father should take you away,’ she warned, ‘don’t believe everything he tells you, Ajuba. I know your father. He’ll try to poison your mind against me. If he does, turn your back on him. And remember, I shall love you wherever you are.’
‘But I’ll always be with you, Mama. I’ll always look after you.’
She sighed and then she kissed me.
Within two weeks of Aunt Lila’s visit, my mother had taken me to London. Her plan was to gain employment as a nurse and to find me a school. Together we were going to start life afresh. We would be happy again. Unfortunately, her plans didn’t work out. Four months later she had fallen into that deep sleep and been rushed to hospital, Pa had found me, and I was on my way to boarding school in Devon.
On the train, he tried to reassure me that it was for my own good; he tried to convince me that a British public-school education was the best in the world. I had a golden future ahead, he said. A girl of my intelligence could achieve anything she wanted.
‘I want to be with Mama,’ I mumbled.
He pretended not to hear me. We were on the journey from Waterloo to Axminster, sitting opposite one another at window seats. I was watching the high-rise buildings of London recede, when Pa said in a low, urgent voice that I’d never heard him use before: ‘What your mother did was quite unforgivable. But you’ve got to forgive her. She wasn’t herself, Ajuba.’
I nodded. I knew what he said was true. Mama hadn’t been well for a long time.
‘You must try to think kindly of her,’ Pa went on. ‘I know it will be difficult but you must accept what’s happened. Anyway, it’s all behind us now. She can’t hurt us. We won’t see her again.’
What Mama had foretold was coming true. At the time I was too frightened of the suffering on Pa’s face, the tears he wiped from his eyes, to probe any deeper. But at the thought that I might never see my mother again a tremor of fear tingled through my body, and when I closed my eyes Mama surfaced behind my eyelids as vividly as the last time I had seen her. She was begging me not to believe my father’s lies. The further we travelled from London, my life with Mama ebbing away, the more I tried to persuade myself that if Pa really had my best interest in mind he would come to realise that I needed Mama almost as much as she needed me. Of course I’d see her again. And until I did, nothing Pa said or did would stop me loving her.
This is what I told myself on the journey to Devon. Once we’d arrived and Major Derby had picked us up, driving us deep into the countryside to the school in its acres of forest; after Mrs Derby had shown us around the classrooms and dormitories and Pa was getting ready to say goodbye: only then did I realise that it was Pa’s hand that I didn’t want to let go of now. Forcing myself to be very small and still, so that when he walked away I would remain intact, I heard a desolate voice posing a question my mother had often asked: ‘When am I going to see you again?’
‘Very soon,’ Pa replied.
Like my mother before me, I could tell from the relief in his eyes as he kissed me goodbye that he was lying.
So notwithstanding her concern for me that night, her hands warming my fingers in hers, I was incapable of expressing my feelings to Mrs Derby. I was mistrustful of discussing my parents with anyone. I simply wanted to be with my mother again, home in Ghana. ‘There’s nothing I want to talk about,’ I told Mrs Derby eventually. ‘I just want to go to sleep.’ Escaping the headmistress’s piercing gaze, her eyes magnified by steel-rimmed spectacles, I turned my face to the wall. ‘You can go away now.’
She sat stroking my back for half an hour longer until, thinking I’d fallen asleep, Mrs Derby left me.
I stayed awake to hear the Derbys going to bed. I heard the reassuring murmur of their voices behind the closed door as they shared the stories of the day. My parents had often quarrelled at night thinking I wouldn’t hear them, so to hear adults speaking softly to each other, occasionally laughing, eased my spirit. Polly’s name was mentioned several times before they switched off their bedroom light. Beth’s accident had brought my unease with Polly sharply into focus. But to keep out of Polly’s way, I would have had to avoid myself. She was dangerous, she made things happen; yet I was mesmerised by her, a grasscutter dazzled in the glare of headlamps.
When I finally heard Major Derby snoring I got up to check that Beth was breathing. She had been sedated and was fast asleep. I shook her awake. Bleary-eyed, she shifted to the edge of her bed, allowing me to slip in beside her.
‘I thought you’d died,’ I whispered.
‘I’m luckier than a cat with nine lives,’ she purred, half asleep.
‘What if you had died, Beth?’
‘Well, I didn’t, did I?’
‘Beth, what if –’
‘If you don’t go to sleep, Aj, I’m going to shove you out of my bed.’
Unwilling to face the night’s darkness alone, to endure the tremors beneath the floorboards without another body next to mine, I held my tongue. I listened to Beth’s respiration; I felt the rise and fall of her breath, my chest against her back. I started counting each inhalation, every quiver and shudder she made until, realising that her grip on life was as keen as mine, I closed my eyes.
Polly once told us that she had travelled the world even as a foetus.
‘What’s a foetus?’ Maria demanded, her grey eyes bright with curiosity. She ran her fingers through her raven hair in a gesture reminiscent of her mother, who had brought Maria
up to believe that asking questions was a mark of intelligence. I didn’t know what a foetus was either but was wary of exposing my ignorance.
We were in Exe, changing into our own clothes before going down to Seniors for Prep. It had been raining all day and the moisture in the air had seeped into the woollen jumper and the red pair of corduroy trousers I’d pulled on.
Polly sighed, raising an eyebrow: ‘Foetuses are what parents make when they get it on, silly.’
‘You mean making babies?’
‘Sure! Women conceive to make men stick around. That’s why they do it. It’s what makes the world go around.’
‘So that’s why they get divorced when they can’t have babies?’ I queried.
‘Not necessarily,’ Maria replied. ‘The Derbys don’t have children and they’re still together. Not everyone can have babies, Aj, and not everyone wants them. Some people don’t even like babies.’
‘Really?’ The idea that having children was not a prerequisite of life was completely new to me.
Seizing an opportunity to share her insights with us, Beth leapt off her bed into the discussion: ‘Listen, you guys, a foetus is a fertilised egg. Females carry them here in their wombs.’ Beth patted below her stomach. ‘Nowadays you don’t need a man to have a baby. You can get one from a clinic. Or a vet can come to you.’
Living on a farm, though not quite as glamorous as being in the same class as Chelsea Clinton in Washington, DC, did at times have certain advantages. Beth knew more about the mechanics of sex than all of us. Once, when I’d stayed with her, she let me watch one of her mother’s mares being inseminated. The mare didn’t seem to mind much but it did look rather uncomfortable and sticky.
Polly went on to tell us that she was conceived in Rome, born in Paris, learnt how to walk in Madrid, and, before her stay in Washington, she had gone to school in Singapore. She declaimed before the whole dormitory that she was a true citizen of the world, cosmopolitan in every sense, at home wherever she pitched her tent – an expression of her father’s, I imagine.
But although Polly boasted that she had more air miles than the rest of us put together, I was inclined to believe that she found the codes and habits of the English middle classes as bemusing as I did. She might have looked like them but their predilections and enthusiasms – their love of rambling, their obsession with tea at elevenses and teatime, their snacks of flapjacks and marmite on fried bread – puzzled her as much as they did me. The difference between us was that Polly never showed her bewilderment.
A few days after Beth had almost killed herself playing True Murder, I was still dazed by the collision of events: the memory of my mother’s face over Beth’s, the terror in both their eyes. Beth was in high spirits. Her close brush with death gave her a notoriety which, added to her popularity at school, made her irresistible. An American at heart, Polly decided to market her.
During break, she took us down to the bottom lawn, away from the Derbys’ watchful eyes. A crowd of younger children followed. When we were out of sight, under instructions from Polly, Maria marshalled the children into a line. Beth and Polly stood at one end, while at the other end I collected money. It cost ten pence to look at the purple weal around Beth’s neck, and fifteen pence to touch it. ‘She almost died,’ Polly said, urging potential spectators closer. ‘She almost killed herself.’
A close encounter with death, I was learning, was a marketable commodity. We made over £6 that day, and spent it all on sherbet and blackjacks. In the evening I found myself reading True Murder again, like someone unable to resist picking at a scab.
I’ve read somewhere that children are fascinated by death. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. On walks together, I remember Beth used to examine every carcass she found on a track. Whether it was a sheep, a mouse or a bird, she would scrutinise it, picking it over with a stick. It wasn’t that she was interested in death, as such, it was the opportunity its stillness afforded. She could study whatever she found at leisure. It couldn’t run or fly away. In the aftermath of death she could do what she wanted: she could discover how bodies worked. Beth said she wanted to be a vet; either that or a jockey at Aintree.
Similarly we were interested in True Murder not only for its lurid details but for what it told us about life: the relationships within families that end in sudden explosions of violence. That night I had just finished the magazine’s account of Ruth Ellis, the last woman in Britain to be hanged, and was reading a column by the magazine’s resident detectives, Lieutenant Eugene Malone and his partner, a native of Louisiana called Beau Leboeuf, when I realised that Mrs Derby had just come in and was waiting to turn the lights out. Had I slipped the magazine away quickly, perhaps she would have left me alone. Unfortunately, I was engrossed in Malone and Leboeuf’s ideas on the Basic Principles of Detection (Observation, Interrogation, Persistence and Intuition, give or take a Lucky Break or two) when I saw Mrs Derby. I must have looked guilty, for she walked over to my bed and picked up the magazine.
‘Are you reading this, Ajuba?’
‘Pardon?’ I said, playing for time.
She flipped through the pages. ‘Is this yours?’
She must have realised that the magazine wasn’t mine. Major Derby had interrogated the True Murder brigade one by one: Joshua, Maria and Polly. According to reports, his interrogation method of dim lights, protracted silence and encouraging nods when the suspect started squealing would have made Malone and Leboeuf proud. It had come out that the game was Polly’s idea. The props and cards Polly had given us were confiscated and everyone was made to promise that True Murder would never be played again.
Nevertheless, I didn’t know how to respond to Mrs Derby’s question. After a moment’s hesitation, it seemed to me easiest to nod assent. The magazine was mine.
‘Are you sure?’
I nodded again.
‘After what happened to Beth, Ajuba, I’m very disappointed in you.’
Lying in the bed beside mine, Polly sat up. ‘It’s my magazine, Mrs Derby.’
The headmistress looked from Polly to me, and then, adopting a stern expression, she thrust the full weight of her moral outrage on Polly. ‘I’m going to say this once and only once, Polly. I don’t want to see this magazine again. Or anything like it. Not in my school. Murder isn’t a game and it isn’t entertainment. The sooner you understand that, the better for us all. Do I make myself clear?’
Polly didn’t flinch. ‘Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry.’
Holding the magazine as if handling a dead mouse by the tail, Mrs Derby marched out of the room. She turned off the light without saying goodnight to anyone.
We fell asleep quickly that night, worn out by the events of the past couple of days. Later that night, Polly woke me from a deep sleep, the touch of her cold hand on my cheek. ‘Move over,’ she hissed.
I gathered my bedclothes around me. I didn’t want her in my bed.
‘Move over,’ she repeated.
‘No! You’ve got your own bed. Sleep in your own bed.’
Her own bed was wet, but I didn’t know that then. Her hair fell about her face, a jumble of tangled curls. She appeared distressed.
‘I keep thinking of Jacinth,’ she said. ‘Let me in. Please let me in.’
Apart from when she was saying goodbye to her father, I had never seen Polly about to cry before. It was so unusual that I eased myself over, making space for her. She climbed into my bed. I noticed now that she smelt faintly of urine.
‘Do you miss Jacinth?’ I asked.
‘Do you miss your mom and dad?’ She clearly thought my question stupid.
‘I miss my mother.’
‘I’ll trade you mine any day.’
‘I wouldn’t swap my mother for anyone.’
‘Hey, you haven’t met Isobel yet.’
‘Who’s Isobel?’
‘My mother.’
I was struck by the way she spoke about her parent as if she were a gem she wanted to give away. And she called her
by her Christian name, a liberty I would never have taken with mine.
‘You’re welcome to come home and try her out, if you like. We’re moving into our new house, Graylings, soon. It’s a great big house in the country. Isobel says that in the end every family needs a home to go to. Want to come and try her out?’
‘Polly, I’ve got my own mother.’
‘I was kidding, OK?’
‘You shouldn’t joke about things like that. Mothers are special.’
‘Lighten up, Aj.’ Then in a voice devoid of sarcasm, she added: ‘Aj, thanks for covering for me earlier.’
I was surprised she had bothered to express gratitude. Polly’s superciliousness rarely succumbed to appreciation of others.
Settling deeper into my bed she asked: ‘Do you really miss your mom?’
‘Of course I do. Don’t you miss yours?’
‘I miss her not being on my case all the time, but apart from that, I guess not. I miss Peter most of all. Major Derby let me call him tonight.’
‘Did you tell him what happened?’
‘Sure. I prepared him for Isobel’s wrath. She goes on and on at him whenever I’m in trouble. That’s why I’m here. I knew it wouldn’t work out.’ Lying very still, her head cradled in her arm with her face turned towards mine, Polly appeared soft, almost malleable. ‘I told them it wouldn’t work out but they wouldn’t listen. Adults never listen. At least not on Planet Earth they don’t.’
‘Do you think you’re going to get expelled?’ A part of me hoped she would.
‘No such luck. Jeez, Aj, you just don’t get it, do you? Adults like a challenge. They see a kid like me, they want to reform me. It makes them feel good about themselves.’
‘Like Maria’s mum and her victims?’
‘You’ve got it. They have no idea what it’s like being a pre-teenager.’
I wasn’t sure I had any idea either, but the longing in her voice spoke to me. What was more, I had an inkling of Polly’s frustration at being somewhere she didn’t want to be, and, like a divining rod searching for water, I found myself drawn to every word she said.