by Paula Leyden
Bul-Boo
Today I was supposed to speak to Winifred. Again. She was at school, but she looked so sick and silent that I was afraid to speak to her. Tomorrow will be better. I noticed that she got most of her maths wrong. Well, to be precise, nine out of ten wrong. Something must be troubling her, she never usually gets even one wrong. I must remember not to tell Madillo, or she’ll start off again on her spirit theories.
It’s hard to get used to Winifred like this because she’s usually the one who stops us from being grumpy. One day Madillo and I had a fight on the way to school, a really stupid fight. I had seen an nsolo, a bird that’s called a honey guide because that’s exactly what it does: it leads animals and people to beehives so that after they have broken the hive open the honey guide can eat from it. Honey guides eat everything in the hive, even the wax. I love them. So I pointed this one out to Madillo. Now Madillo is more interested in things you can’t see, things that I think mostly don’t exist – spirits and the like. I’m interested in things you can see. So I know more than her about things like wildlife and birds and insects. But Madillo also likes to be right.
“That’s not an nsolo, Bul-Boo,” she said. “You don’t get them in town. If they lived in town, how would they get to the hives? And even if they did, there are no honey badgers in town to break them up, so they would have nothing to guide. No hives, no badgers, no food – therefore, no honey-guide birds.”
“It is! I saw it and heard it,” I said.
“You’re probably just imagining it. I think it was a drongo.”
That is probably the only bird name she knows, apart from things like chickens or peacocks, so I shouldn’t have got into an argument about it. I knew I was right, so it was pointless. Anyway, I did get into the argument, and by the time we arrived at school we weren’t speaking. It was Winifred who put a stop to it by asking, “You were fighting about a bird?” as if she couldn’t believe it. “A small thing like that?” Then she started leaping around us, flapping imaginary wings, which made us feel even sillier. We both got embarrassed at the same time, even though I had no reason to be because I wasn’t the one who was wrong. And that was the end of the argument.
I think Madillo gets her stubbornness from Mum. But apart from Mum’s stubborn streak – and the fact that she and Dad gave us slightly unusual names – our parents are OK. More than OK, really. If I had to choose parents, I’d choose them.
They can be a bit silly sometimes and Fred says they don’t always act like real parents. He’s one to talk – his own family is pretty weird – although he did say that after I told him about the time Mum decided to stop wearing shoes, so there’s some excuse.
“People have been doing this for thousands of years,” she’d said, kicking off her sandals. “Shoes are just a barrier between us and our world.”
That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.
First off she blistered – big, puffy, watery blisters, the kind that are very tempting to pop, but she wouldn’t let either of us touch them. Only Dad was allowed near them, because he’s a doctor. (The fact that she is also a doctor had passed her by.) Then she got hookworm.
The dreaded hookworm. I know the hookworm journey off by heart. They literally worm their way in through the soles of your feet into your bloodstream then head straight for your lungs. They don’t stay there too long, but wriggle towards your mouth, where you promptly swallow them. That’s how they end up in your intestines. Once they get there, they suck your blood and lay eggs. They live for ten years and can lay up to ten thousand eggs a day. You do the maths. I wonder if Sister Leonisa has a cure for them as well.
I didn’t intend for this to be a lecture about hookworm. It must seem a strange way to introduce my parents. Anyway, their names are Sean and Lula, short for Tallulah. If that was my name, I wouldn’t have shortened it. Mum doesn’t even have to make up an interesting meaning for it: it means “leaping water” in Choctaw or “fruitful woman” in Gaelic. I would opt for the first meaning, as there is something a bit gross about the second. It makes me think of a large, round woman producing endless babies from under her voluminous skirts. Her smile is beatific (I have been waiting for an opportunity to use that word) as they crawl around her, mewling and puking. And yes, that is a stolen line – from Shakespeare, as it happens.
There’s nothing too poetic about Dad’s name. Sean is Gaelic for John, which means “God is gracious”. If it had been “God is great”, then in Arabic that would have been Allahu akbar, which literally translates into “God is greater than can possibly be described”. That would have been verging on the edge of poetic (although I added in the word “possibly” for dramatic effect). But his name is just Sean. Even though he has an Irish name he is not Irish, he was named after an Irish priest who had lived in Zambia and who his parents must have liked. Dad left Zambia when he was eighteen after he got a scholarship to study in Dublin. It was at university there that he and Mum met. Mum once told us that it was love at first sight, and Madillo said, “Mum, we don’t want to know.” Which was true, really. They are just Mum and Dad – the thought of them as young lovers is too much.
We all moved to Zambia when Madillo and I were only small, about three years old. Mum says it was because Dad was homesick for Zambia and she wanted to do something useful with her life by going where doctors were actually needed. I’d imagine they are needed everywhere, but she is right really, because of AIDS. I think AIDS is one of the saddest diseases there is. That and cancer.
In Uganda they call AIDS “the slim disease”, for obvious reasons. I know that there is treatment now, but it is so expensive that most people can’t afford it. Dad says that people in Africa with AIDS get thin and then die, while in Europe and America people with AIDS live pretty long lives. And they don’t even get that thin. There is nothing fair about that.
Ifwafwa
It was because of Winston that I left home. My mother told me that he would do to me what he had done to my grandmother if I stayed there. It was time for me to leave my mother’s home; I was at an age where I could work and seek a wife.
I did not want to leave my mother on her own but she told me that Lesa, the sky god, would look after her. I told her it wasn’t true. Lesa does not come down to meddle in our business but merely looks down from the sky and sees everything. The best we could hope for would be that he would kill Winston by sending a bolt of lightning down to him. He did not do that.
My mother would not listen to me, though, and sent me away with my heart full of sadness and pain. She gave me this bicycle so I could travel where I wanted, but she stayed behind. I never saw her again, not alive and not dead. He killed her, in the same way that he killed my grandmother. And he took her body away and hid it. He hid it so that to this day we have never found it. One day, when I feel strong enough, I will go back there and I will find him. I will make him show me where he put them both. My friends, those that slither along the earth on their bellies, they will help me. Perhaps, for him, I can ask the pale one for help. Then Winston will not laugh at me or ask me, “Where is your grandmother’s magic now?”
When he sees the pale snake coming out of my bag, there will be fear in his eyes. That is how it should be, because he, like all the others, does not believe that the pale one exists. The only time anyone believes is when they see it with their own eyes. Then it is too late. I will call upon my grandmother then, in his presence, and he will know fear. When I am strong enough.
Bul-Boo
Finally, today, I spoke to Winifred. And I was highly unsuccessful. I spoke to her at break but she wouldn’t answer me when I asked if something was wrong. She kept looking around to see if anyone was watching us and then just stood staring down at the ground. She almost looked ashamed, as if she had done something that was so bad she couldn’t even speak of it. Then she said I should leave her alone, she was tired. Winifred is never tired and doesn’t know how to lie very well – she should ask Madillo for some lessons if she is going to st
art that now.
Later she went missing, just like that. I didn’t see her go; I only noticed that she was not there. I asked Sister if Winifred had gone home and she told me, as I could have expected, that it was none of my business. I took that as a yes. I didn’t know what to do then. I hope it wasn’t my fault that she left.
Fred came round to our house after school and I decided to speak to him about Winifred. This, of course, meant that Madillo would be involved in the conversation and I’d run the risk of exposing Fred to the evil-spirit theory, but there was nothing I could do about that.
Fred lives next door to us. Apart from him, his family is not your average next-door type – you know, the kind who chat to you over the fence as they water their baby avocado trees, or who warn you about the puff adder in their garden that recently gave birth. (Given that puff adders can have eighty or more young ones and the babies come straight out of the mother ready for action, a warning would be neighbourly.)
Fred’s mother is called Sarah. She is from somewhere in England, I’m not sure where. She is very small and so shy that I have never once heard her speak. For all I know, she could have a big, deep voice inside her little body. Or no voice at all. Madillo and I sometimes try to get her to speak to us over the fence by waving, giving her frights or asking her how she is. But we’ve heard no sound yet: she just smiles at us. She has a nice smile. She is always in the garden, working away, and she wears a big straw hat, almost like a sombrero. We call her Fungi-san – not loud enough for her to hear – but she does look like a mushroom wandering around their garden, popping up silently in unexpected places. (In Japanese you add san onto a name to show respect.)
Fred’s dad, Meshack, is Zambian like our dad, but from a different part of the country. I would say he’s almost twice the size of his wife. In fact he is probably as wide as she is tall. He is more talkative than she is – not really hard, I suppose, to talk more than a silent person – and he always greets us. Because he’s so tall, he can spot us from anywhere in their garden and he shouts out, “Hey, twin. I can see you,” which can be a little unnerving, especially if you are at the top of the kapok tree. It is a very tall tree and very leafy. And I know that all trees have leaves, but this one seems to have more than most. If you wore green, there’s no way anyone could see you. Anyone but Fred’s dad, that is.
One day we were sitting right in the middle of the tree and Madillo said to me, “I bet you fifty kwacha that Meshack ‘extraterrestrial perception’ Mwamba will see us here. Watch him: he’ll stand in the middle of the garden with his eyes closed and still he’ll see us.”
I took the bet because Madillo always thinks that people have undisclosed powers. Unlike me, she doesn’t rate evidence very highly. What’s more, I have explained to her many times that there is no such thing as extraterrestrial perception – it is extrasensory (if it even exists) – but she won’t listen. And as Meshack always wears sunglasses, we wouldn’t be able to see whether his eyes were open or closed. As it happened, we had hardly shaken hands on the bet when we heard him: “Hey, twins, get out of that big tree, there could be a green mamba waiting for you.” Then he laughed. It was almost as if he had heard us talking about him.
We came down, and I lost fifty kwacha.
Between them, Meshack and Sarah have two children: Fred and Joseph. Both of them are boys, although Madillo thinks the youngest one, Joseph, is a hermaphrodite. She only thinks that because of an article she read in the New Scientist and because she likes the notion of hermaphrodites. As you may have guessed, I have explained to her that there is no such thing as a human hermaphrodite. Chimera, yes; hermaphrodite, no. If Joseph (Fred’s eight-year-old brother) was a worm, then she may have a point. But he isn’t.
Fred is where this all started. He’s the best person in the whole of Zambia – in fact, maybe in the whole of Africa. Madillo’s theory on this is that he is actually not Meshack and Sarah’s child. She didn’t go so far as to say he was a changeling, just that there could have been a mix-up in the hospital. It does happen, I know. And I kind of like the theory because he is so different from the whole lot of them. But it’s hard to get over the fact that Fred looks like someone who came out of a shake-up of his mum and his dad.
Then there is his great-granny, who I’ve mentioned already. Fred says that she lives with them because if she had stayed in the village, being a famous witch and all that, the other villagers might have killed her. Well, what he actually said was, “They would have torn her limb from limb and thrown her body to the lions.” I don’t know how he came up with that, but any time I see her, a ghastly image of her being torn limb from limb comes into my head. The thought of having a witch as our neighbour thrills Madillo, and if she ever sees her in the garden she lowers her head – “Respect for the witch,” she says. To me she is just a funny, very old lady.
When Fred came over this afternoon, we went down to our spot at the bottom of the garden. I had told Madillo it was only fair that I got to tell him the story, as it’s me Winifred sits next to – and anyway, I was the one who first noticed that something was wrong. My main reason for insisting on this was so I could get the right version through to Fred.
When I had finished telling him, he just sat there looking puzzled. When Fred looks puzzled, his whole face screws up.
“I thought you were going to tell me something exciting… This is nothing. Nothing has happened except that Winifred doesn’t put her hand up any more and she looks down at the ground when you speak to her.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s just that she’s changed, and so quickly that we think something is very wrong. She doesn’t even smile any more. There has to be something wrong with that, doesn’t there?”
Enter Madillo. “There does, and I think I know what it is. One of the things we’re thinking is that her body has been taken over by an evil spirit.”
We?
Fred’s eyes slowly started to open. “Ah,” he said, as if suddenly my boring story had become an interesting one.
Give Madillo an audience and there’s no stopping her. “Yes – she shows all the signs of it. Yesterday I saw her sitting at her desk and her head began to loll to one side. I didn’t see her face, but it was probably contorted—”
“Madillo! Don’t lie,” I protested.
“Calm down, Bul-Boo.”
Madillo knows there is nothing I hate more in the world than to be told to calm down. “You weren’t in the classroom at the time so you don’t know.”
She turned back to Fred. “I have sometimes seen Winifred walking and it looks like she has some kind of limp: she drags her left leg slightly, as if something is pulling on it. I was wondering if we should speak to your great-granny about it. Does she have exorcist powers? Because I’m not sure that all witches do.”
Before Fred could answer, I stood up, tired of listening to all this. “Do I need to remind you that this is one of our best friends you’re talking about? I wish I’d not told either of you. Winifred is upset about something and all you care about is proving some crazy evil-spirit thing. I don’t want you to speak to anyone about it. I’m going to find out what’s wrong and then decide what to do. You can help then if you want to. You should care about her, Fred, as she has half your name.” (Stupid thing to say, I know, but I was mad.)
Fred laughed. “You get so cross, Boo. You should do what my mum does: breathe in deep, then hold your breath, then breathe out. I’m sorry, anyway. I’ll listen now.”
I tried hard to imagine Fred’s silent mum breathing in deeply. I could almost imagine that, but not her getting angry in the first place. What would she do? Stare angrily at the person? Have a big, silent tantrum? Then breathe deeply?
“I won’t get angry if we can have a proper conversation that doesn’t involve non-existent things. And her head did not loll, Madillo – that’s just you.” I found it hard to stay cross with either of them, so the fight didn’t last long. But it did make them stop with the possession talk.
At the end of it all we decided that I should try and speak to Winifred again the next day, and the next, and even the next, until she eventually answered my question. If that didn’t work then we’d make another plan.
After that discussion I wrote a small but very useful observation in my notebook: When Madillo lies, she talks a little louder and scratches the back of her neck. If she thinks you really, really know she is lying, she will eventually just stop arguing about it.
Bul-Boo
This is what I wrote in my notebook today: There are some things that are so awful you wish you had not heard them. Ever. What Winifred told me today is one of those things.
I was not prepared in any which way for what Winifred told me. And she could see that when she said the words. I did not know what to say or where to look. That made it worse for her, I know that, but I couldn’t help myself. It is too awful. I don’t know what I was prepared for, but I think even the evil-spirit explanation might have been easier to accept.
It was my third day of trying to get her to talk to me. I think she just gave in because I kept pestering her and following her around. Eventually she turned to me and I could see she was crying. Big, slow tears were running from her eyes. “Bul-Boo,” she said, “I will tell you. But there’s nothing we can do about it.”
She turned away and I followed her. She walked towards the corner of the playground. No one else was there. Then she crouched on the ground and began to speak, keeping her voice low and quiet. I had to crouch next to her to make sure I heard properly.
“My father died – you know that, Bul-Boo – he died last year. My father loved me,” she added, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt. “Nothing has ever been the same since then, and each day it gets worse. It is my uncle’s fault. My uncle, who forced my mother… It’s tradition, she tells me: the brother takes what has been left behind… But it’s not tradition for him to carry on staying after that first night.”