by Paula Leyden
According to Wikipedia there were some people who quite literally looked for it. They went to the emperor and said, “We are Christians. Please kill us.” Which he did, until he got bored or tired because there were so many of them. Then he told them, “Why don’t you go to the cliffs and kill yourselves, if you’re so keen?” He had a point.
What I don’t understand is why, if all they were killing you for was believing in something different from them, they didn’t just lie and say they didn’t believe in it any more? If I was told I’d be killed unless I believed in a great god who had no eyebrows and was made of spinach, I’d say, “But of course I believe in him, he is the one and only.” What’s the harm in that?
Sister Leonisa said that she thinks our society is slowly rotting away because there are no longer people who will die for their faith. Then she did some of her drawings on the board to show the ways in which the martyrs were killed. Saint Sebastian was one of them. Every little part of his body had an arrow sticking out of it, and – so she tells us – the arrows didn’t kill him. Because all her drawings are of stick people, you could hardly see which lines were arrows and which were Sebastian’s arms or legs. Her follow-up drawing was of him being hit over the head with some kind of blunt instrument, which is what did kill him. And he was made a saint for that. That makes no sense to me.
Ifwafwa
When I was a small boy and had a pain in my stomach, my mother would take me to the bush with the healing leaves. She would place a small cloth around my eyes and lead me right up to the bush and I would eat slowly, leaf by leaf, until the pains were cured. As I stood there in the silence with my eyes blind to the world, my mother would pray to Lesa through our ancestors. My stomach pains always went away. The leaves are strong medicine, I know that, but it was Lesa who brought me comfort through the prayers of my mother.
I need his help now, but he does not interfere. He will not do anything to take this man away from the child. But he will know what I do and why I must do it. He is my parent far away and will watch over me when I need him.
When I am finished with this task, I will go to my home place and find the bones of my mother and grandmother. Then I will bring them back to the earth in the proper way. In this world there are the dead and the living, and we are all one. The dead go into the earth to become part of what makes us live. That is what I want, to bring my mother and grandmother some peace and to clear my head of the bad memories. Then their spirits can join those of our ancestors and bring goodness to this life. I do not want to think of them wandering, lost, without a home.
Bul-Boo
I asked Sister Leonisa today if she had heard from Winifred; if she knew why she wasn’t coming to school any more. All I got was a narrowing of her eyes and a strange high-pitched sound from her mouth, which I think meant either “No” or “Don’t ask me”. Sister Leonisa is one of those teachers who starts off the year by telling you that you can ask her anything at all, then when you do, she doesn’t answer. I suppose it makes sense – she never said she would answer.
I shouldn’t have made that my first question – I wanted to try and find out if she had Winifred’s address, but I realized she’d never give it to me then. At break I asked Fred if he’d find out for me. Sister Leonisa likes him because he always puts on this really innocent face when he speaks to her, puppy-dog eyes all over the place.
“Sister, we’ve collected money to buy Winifred a little present,” he said, “but we don’t know where to take it. Would you be able to let us have her address?”
“What a lovely thought, Fred – there’s a place in heaven waiting for you, dear boy. Of course I will. You come up here and I’ll give it to you.”
OK, so he got the address, but I don’t know why she thinks that booking his place in heaven would make him happy. He’s got years and years to go. Anyway, there it was in Sister Leonisa’s neat handwriting: Winifred, 10 B32/54 Alick Nkhata Road, Kalingalinga.
That, I suppose, was the easy part.
But as I thought about it, I realized that if we were going to go to Kalingalinga to find Winifred, we’d have to tell Mum and Dad. There was no way round it. To get there we’d have to cross a field and then a road and then another field. And then find the actual road. Kalingalinga is not small. And there are so many houses there that it would be hard. It’d be OK if it was just number ten, but when you got to number ten you’d then have to look for a whole lot of other numbers.
We decided to tell Dad that we wanted to invite Winifred over on Saturday and then ask him if we could fetch her. He’d have to come, obviously, because he’d be driving, but that would be fine. He agreed. Saturday seems a long way away, but we still have time.
Madillo and I sleep in a bunk bed – no prizes for guessing who gets the top bunk. She tells me it’s because of her numbers on the ceiling: she’d not be able to sleep if she didn’t have the numbers up there. And there’s Kasuba, of course, who apparently doesn’t like the bottom bunk.
We have a cupboard in our room that’s built into the wall. On the one side there is a big empty space for shoes. We don’t wear shoes unless we have to, so that’s why it’s empty. (Well, we wear them for school, and if we have to go out we put on flip-flops – but those don’t take up much room.)
So that’s where I’m going to make the bed for Winifred: the shoe cupboard. It sounds horrible, making a bed in a cupboard, but she’s quite small and I’m going to make it really comfortable with cushions and duvets. It will be warm, that’s the only problem, but at night we can leave all the windows open as well as the cupboard door, and she should be fine. If I were her I don’t think I’d mind where I slept as long as it was away from the old man. It’s the best hiding place in our room, anyway, because even if Mum comes in she doesn’t look in there. (Mainly because she says she cannot bear the sight. Winifred probably won’t be able to bear the sight either, as she’s so neat.)
I don’t know if this is going to work, but if I wait for Ifwafwa we’ll be too late. And the great-granny isn’t an option because she’s just plain scary.
Ifwafwa
I do not have much time left to prepare for this. I do not want to leave it until the last minute, as anything could go wrong. And they might decide to make the wedding earlier. I cannot take any chances with this thing.
Sometimes, when there’s no time to think about things over and over again, it is better. When I was small I used to think too hard about everything until my head became sore. As if it was going to burst. My granny would take leaves from the banana tree and wrap them round my head to cool it down, then she would make me sit quietly out of the sun and tell me to think about the way that the trees grow. She said that my headache was caused by too many thoughts jamming hard against each other, and that if I thought about things that were very slow then I would feel better.
A tree grows so slowly that you cannot see it move, so I would think carefully about how each tree comes from a small seed and then about how many rainy seasons and dry seasons it would take for the tree to grow its branches and leaves and fruit. Then one small fruit would fall or one pod would burst and scatter its seeds and the tree-growing starts all over again. That kind of thinking would send me to sleep.
Now I don’t have time for fast or slow thinking, all I have time for is doing. The time is coming soon, and I will be ready.
Bul-Boo
I saw Ifwafwa today but he didn’t see me. Or I don’t think he did. Maybe he’s like Fred’s great-granny. Madillo says she sees without seeing: sees through hedges and walls, across roads and rivers for miles and miles. Madillo has decided that that is the great-granny’s special witch gift.
Madillo has a thing about gifts. She doesn’t question whether there is such a thing, her only problem is deciding which one to choose. At breaktime today I was the one who had to listen to her theories because Winifred is not around. Normally it would be Winifred on the receiving end, or Fred, because both of them find it funny. Fred believes about half
of it and Winifred normally pretends to but you can see her laughing underneath. Madillo doesn’t always see her laughter, because when she’s spinning a tale she doesn’t notice anything apart from how amazing her own story is.
So today there I was wondering if we were going to have a maths test and Madillo was deciding whether she wanted a turning-people-into-things gift or a seeing-into-people’s-heads gift.
“It’s hard not to want the gift of turning people into other things,” she said. “That’d be fun. You’d have to be careful, though – if, for example, I turned Sister Leonisa into a tapeworm, she’d need a host. And knowing her, she’d find me, wherever I was, and creep down my throat. I couldn’t change her back once she was comfortably settled in my stomach, so I’d have to do the saucer-of-milk trick and I think I’d rather live with a tapeworm inside me than pull it out through my mouth.” As she said this she opened her mouth wide by way of demonstration and I found myself imagining Sister Leonisa being changed back into herself while she was still inside Madillo. Gross.
“With the seeing gift, on the other hand, there’s no downside that I can think of,” said Madillo thoughtfully. “Except that it might turn out to be a bit much. If all the thoughts were floating around for you to look at, the air would be so crowded you’d probably forget a lot of them. And you wouldn’t be able to think straight. I find it hard to talk straight anyway, because my head is filled with more thoughts than I can actually say. It’s not that there are so many of them, I suppose – it’s just that they would sound funny to other people. So I keep them to myself. Are you like that, Bul-Boo?” she said, as if she had suddenly remembered that she wasn’t the only one who could speak.
“I suppose so,” I said, “but I think I keep even more of mine inside than you do. And I wouldn’t like to see what people think but don’t say. I wouldn’t like anyone peering into my head, so I shouldn’t be peering into theirs.”
“Maybe,” Madillo said. “I suppose it’s different for Fred’s great-granny. She was born that way – she can’t help it. She didn’t ask to be seeing things, so you can’t call her nosy. I think I’ll choose the turning-people-into-things gift. I just won’t use it too often.”
“As if you’ll get any gift at all,” I said. “Even if there was such a thing you’d be at the end of a long queue, and seeing as there isn’t, it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“So you’re saying Ifwafwa doesn’t have a gift?” She knew I wouldn’t have an answer for that.
The bell rang then, which made it easy not to answer. The difference between Madillo and me is that I wouldn’t call what Ifwafwa has a gift, like some spooky thing. I think he just knows snakes much better than anyone else.
When I saw Ifwafwa, he didn’t look like himself. He was pushing his bike, his snake bag was empty and he didn’t notice anything or anyone around him. I wondered what was wrong. I didn’t call him over because he would think I was going to ask him what he had done about Winifred (I wouldn’t do that) and then he’d know that I’m impatient with him – which I am, it just seems as though time is passing by and nothing is happening.
We’ll just stick with the cupboard plan. If he does something too then that’s fine, but I can’t depend on it, gift or no gift. It was horrible to see him looking so sad, though. It makes me feel bad for asking him to help us.
Bul-Boo
We had the day off school today for Zambian Independence Day. Dad said that when he was little they never got the day off. But the way he talks you would think he never got a day off school ever: that it was just 365 days’ hard slog, no messing, no fun. Mum says he exaggerates everything. She says that when she met him he told her he came from Zambia, “the butterfly-shaped heart of Africa, a land of poets and princes”. I don’t think that’s a particularly good example of him exaggerating, because Zambia is the butterfly-shaped heart of Africa, and the bit about poets and princes was just him trying to put it into words that Mum would understand. Because at that stage she knew nothing about Africa at all, so she wouldn’t have understood if he had said it was a land of chiefs and tellers of tales and all sorts of wondrous things. Which it is. (But I agree that he exaggerates about what school was like.)
Anyway, Mum exaggerates too, so she can’t talk. She was at a convent in Ireland and the way she tells it we are lucky to have Sister Leonisa, because at least she doesn’t hit us or twist our ears or make us stand in dark corners until we “forsake the ways of the devil”. Which is a relief.
Since we were all off for the day – Madillo, Fred and I – we decided to spend it at Fred’s house. I only agreed because the great-granny was out. Fred said she’d gone to visit the graves of her ancestors and would not be back until late that night. I cannot imagine her going out, she looks too old to go anywhere. If I was her family, I’d be worried she’d just disappear, fall down a pothole or something. Her supposed witchly powers wouldn’t do her much good then.
I found myself wondering the other night – when I had started thinking she might actually be a witch – that if she was, why had she let herself get so old and weak. Dad is her doctor and he often goes over there to give her medicines. I have never heard him say she’s a witch. Surely a proper witch, if such a thing exists, would heal herself.
When we got to Fred’s house, he said that because everyone was out, even his mother, he would take us into the great-granny’s room – maybe we would find something we could use to help Winifred. Madillo was really excited and I agreed to go along with it because I wanted to see what the great-granny’s room was like. It’s not part of their house, it’s a small house by itself round where the mango trees grow. Fred knows that she keeps her key under a stone near the back door. I asked him why she needed a key if she was a witch, but he just hushed me up. When Fred is in his own house he gets a lot bossier.
He opened the door and called us to follow. When we got inside we just stood and looked around us. The room was quite dark and Fred couldn’t find a light switch, but we could make out a very tall bed in the corner.
“How does she even get into that?” I said. “Does she fly?” I giggled, which is not something I normally do. I laugh; Madillo giggles. But there I was, giggling.
“No, I don’t,” said a voice that definitely wasn’t Fred’s or Madillo’s. Fred, by this stage, had found the light switch and I saw a familiar small head tucked up in the bed. I screamed. Madillo screamed. And Fred just ran out of the room.
I couldn’t move; it was as if my feet were stuck to the ground.
“I don’t fly. I don’t even run or jump. But I do climb.” I saw it then: a small ladder at the end of the bed.
I couldn’t speak, and I turned to discover that Madillo had mysteriously abandoned me as well.
“What do you want, little girl, with your scared eyes? Come here so I can see you,” she said.
I moved towards the bed – there was nothing else I could do.
When I got closer I could see her hands holding onto the sheet. They were like the claws of a bird we’d once rescued. It was a small bird with yellow on its wings – Dad said it was a weaver bird. When it started getting better, it used to grab hold of my finger with its feet and wouldn’t let go. That was what her hands looked like. Thin and grabby.
“I’ll tell you something, little girl. You have asked my friend, the one who knows snakes, for his help – for your friend who is young and clever. That’s right?”
I nodded.
“My friend, the man who rides the bicycle, will help her. He is a good man. You must not make him rush. He needs time to think. Do not be impatient, it will not help her. Now go. And tell Fred I will move my spare key from under the rock because he must ask me when he wants to come here. I will say yes, but he must not go through doors that are not his to open.” She lay back on her pillow and closed her eyes.
I walked out backwards, slowly, in case she changed her mind, then turned as I reached the door and dashed out, closing it behind me.
Fred and Madillo
were waiting behind the bougainvillea creeper.
“I have a message for you, Fred,” I said in my calm but irritated voice.
“Yes…?” he said.
“Do not go through doors that are not yours to open. Ever again. And the key to that door has gone, she will not leave it there for you to find. Do not bother looking for it; it will be far, far away. And if you do try to look for it, things will be hard for you.” (OK, so the last bit was pure embellishment. Whenever Madillo is trying to explain something, Mum always says, “Madillo, if you left out the pure embellishment you’d be able to say what you wanted to say in one sentence.” Which is true, but now it was my turn to embellish a little and I was enjoying it.)
“She said that? I don’t believe it. I’m her favourite – she doesn’t mind what I do. You’re lying,” Fred said.
“I’m not,” I told him. “And the last thing she said was that you must never take anything for granted. You’ll find that if you do, it will disappear before you know it. Maybe you were her favourite, but things change. And Madillo, she had a message for you, too.” Now that I’d started, it was hard to stop. It must have been the Madillo in me coming out.
Madillo actually looked scared. I almost felt sorry for her.
“She said that you shouldn’t always believe everything that Fred says. Think for yourself. She also said that Ifwafwa will help Winifred and we must not worry—”
“I told you that, but you wouldn’t listen!” Madillo said. “And I do think for myself.”
“Fred, was it you who told your great-granny about Winifred?” I said.