Often neither of these girls was at home with us. Leila’s father, however, continued his short calls, during which he’d build and repair things, such as our fences, and help Mum with heavy chores, like lopping overhanging branches from the mango trees, which banked up in his absence.
Mum obviously yearned to either have a man around the house or that I should have been a son. Although I was small and skinny, because of my personality she often made me fill this role.
I wasn’t afraid of spiders or toads or other things that made Mum shudder and my sisters cry. We had all manner of boxes and suitcases left by people stored up under our house, where the space was narrow and cramped. Lots of small creatures lived up there too, but they never deterred me from crawling around amongst them, inspecting these forbidden treasure troves. I seemed to have no innate fear of insects, even spiders with long thin gangling legs climbing and swaying awkwardly around in their webs. I always remember groping around under the house as a real adventure. I’d go there with my heart beating quickly and loudly, and suddenly become conscious of the sound of my own breathing, the nerves in my ears alert and straining to hear my mother’s footfalls on the wooden floor above my head. Any movement, the slightest squeaking of the floorboards, was likely to be a signal of her approach, of being caught, of being dragged away and hit. Quietly, so quietly, I’d creep forward, listening, and carefully ease open clasps which kept the cases closed. To touch something in the case—a brown hat with a piece of stiffened net attached to it, or a dress or coat across which I’d run my fingers lightly—my joy almost orgasmic.
Mum knew about my strange ways, and she’d say, ‘Bring me a hammer and two short nails from those boxes under the house—the ones you’re not allowed to touch!’ Later, she said I could go there but to be careful, and I wasn’t to take my sisters.
I made one of the boxes my own, and began storing up my own ‘treasures’: pieces of brightly coloured glass, a belt made of fabric and glue which I rescued from our rubbish bin, and other oddments. I always had my eye out for things to collect, combing through the piles, raking the dirt, and going through our own and our neighbours’ rubbish bins. Mum laughed and called me a bower bird for always picking up shiny pieces and stashing them away. I didn’t mind, I often found coins others had walked right over.
Mum nagged that I’d get bitten by something and die, or get tetanus from a rusty nail and die. I’d already been so close to dying during my illnesses that death seemed familiar to me. I felt I knew a lot about it already, and I wasn’t afraid of it.
I don’t recall exactly when my real lessons in the heavy stuff of birth and death actually started, apart from my own close tangos with death. I believe they started with the animals. We and all our neighbours always had a cat or two. If sterilisation or spaying was available, it wasn’t something I ever heard anyone speak of in relation to small animals. I suspect from the coarse jokes I heard much later about ‘prairie oysters’ that sterilisation by any means was reserved for much bigger creatures.
Once, when I was about eight or nine, our cat had kittens, an event I witnessed until I became tired of the slowness of it all and walked away. Mum had prepared a box for the birth, placing it under a bed, the opening level with the edge of the bed. She hunted the cat when it got near its time and managed to coax it to begin its litter in the carton instead of in a basket of clean laundry, where it had birthed previously and obviously preferred.
I don’t recall how many kittens the cat had in this litter. It’s enough to say it was multiple births, because they were always multiple births.
I was asleep late that night when Mum came for me. She pulled on my dress and drew me out into the kitchen. This was something unusual—I was much more used to her shooing me off to bed in the evening when I didn’t want to go than getting me up once I was asleep.
Laaka was sitting in the kitchen and he didn’t look too happy. From the frown on his face I could tell he was being asked to do something that didn’t meet with his approval. Mum’s comment, ‘Someone here has to know how to do it. Let her watch,’ was not reassuring to me.
We all trooped down the steep back stairs, Laaka walking slowly on his long legs so I didn’t have to hurry and perhaps trip on my shorter ones. Our laundry had no lights, but Laaka carried a torch. I was surprised to see there the box in which the cat had had her litter earlier that day, and even more surprised—given the lengths my mother had gone to set up a comfortable place for the delivery—to find the mother cat and kittens out in the night air.
The cat had cleaned the kittens. They scrambled blindly around her, eyes tightly closed, but still able by their sense of smell to find the way to her milk. Mum and Laaka each picked one up, rolled it onto its back in their palms to sort out males and females and to inspect its coat and colours. Eventually, they came to a decision about one of the kittens and it was put aside. Mum ran lightly and quietly back up the stairs and into the house while Laaka picked up the mother cat and the chosen kitten and followed her. He gently dropped the cat and kitten on their feet around the corner of the door and my mother abruptly closed it, and I could hear the bolt being slammed home, shutting off the light. Laaka came back and looked down at me in the moonlight. He shrugged. His English was poor at the time and he was unable to communicate very well with me.
Upstairs we could hear the cat scratching at the door, trying to get out, and soon we heard the sound of the window in the kitchen, which was over the laundry, being rattled noisily closed. It all felt a bit like a game to me, as we often closed the window when the cat was out sunning herself on the laundry roof, and she amused us by coming to the window and tapping on the glass to see if anyone would let her in, before easily stretching her sinewy body across from the roof to the stairs. Now the position was reversed, the cat inside and trying to get out. I knew she often moved into and out of the house through any and all of the windows, depending on her mood, so I was waiting to see how long it would take her to get back to us. Nothing else that was happening made any sense.
Laaka passed me the torch, indicating I was to keep it focused on the kittens. Squirming and nosing each other, and without control over their legs, they were more like fat grubs, yet to develop their kittenish appeal.
Laaka picked them up, put them into a soft cotton flour bag and dropped them into a kerosene tin which was more than half full of water. For me, the game of the mother cat trying to get back out to us was over. I was shocked. But Laaka worked quickly, using a stick to fully immerse the bag, which had billowed on the top of the water. Bubbles of air kept rising from the water, and Laaka frowned up at me as the light from the torch I was holding wavered and left him in the dark. As he took the torch from me, I thought I could see the shapes of the kittens’ heads through the cloth on the top of the water, swimming and bobbing around. Laaka used the length of the torch to reach under the bench and retrieve one of the good sized rocks that were kept there. He used it to weight the bag to the bottom of the water, careful that none of the cloth was on the top. He put a flat wooden board right over the kerosene tin and another rock on top of that.
After he washed his hands in the cement laundry tub, we went upstairs, but Mum wouldn’t let us in. The cat was still putting on a turn. I followed Laaka around the side of the house and we went in by the front door.
Mum asked me if I wanted a drink. I didn’t. I felt sick. She whispered to me as she walked with me back to the bedroom I shared with my sisters that I wasn’t to tell them anything. ‘You’re the oldest. You’re the only one to know,’ she said, transferring to my very young shoulders an awful weight not only of responsibility but also of silence.
It was never too hard for me to keep secrets from my sisters. As I was growing in knowledge, the things I told them often lacked meaning or importance for them. By the time they were old enough to be interested or to invite from me any confidences and secrets, I’d somehow, despite my youth, entered into a sort of conspiratorial pact with Mum and other adults ab
out the true but uglier aspects of the world.
For example, it was always me who helped our mother keep Santa Claus alive. My reward was to be woken quietly after my sisters had at last fallen asleep, and together Mum and I would tiptoe around, doing the last minute wrapping, printing names on cards in neat block letters, and putting the gifts at the bottom of my sisters’ beds or under a rough tree Mum had dragged in from outside. I helped keep the Tooth Fairy alive too, reminding my mother of who was to get the penny under their pillow when she, in her weariness, forgot. I always knew when it was Easter—Mum would creep into our bedroom and silently shake me awake, wanting a few of my tight curls to stick on the hen’s eggs she had turned into our Easter treats. Occasionally, our Easter egg characters had cotton wool for hair as they nestled in their shoebox home, but Mum didn’t believe in wasting money. She knew my hair would grow back, while cotton wool cost money. So much for the Easter Bunny.
Some weeks after the late-night episode of Laaka and the kittens, Mum again drew me aside. Mrs Scott’s cat had had kittens. Mum asked me if I thought I could put them in a bucket of water, as Laaka was back at sea. I was already in the habit of doing lots of things for our neighbour Mrs Scott, such as running messages, and I thought her a kindly lady. She sometimes blessed me with pennies and threepenny pieces with which I could buy lollies. My mother said if I drowned the kittens, Mrs Scott would reward me.
At first I said no, but there was no walking away from Mum when she was talking to you. She kept insisting I should do it, and trying to impress me with a lot of reasons, all of which had to do with how it would be a great favour to Mrs Scott and how pleased she would be. When I continued to refuse, my mother put her face down to my level—which was always a sure sign things were getting serious—and asked me why not.
I told her straight. ‘I don’t want to get up in the dark. I’m frightened to come down here by myself. Why can’t we wait until Laaka comes back and let him do it?’
I knew Laaka wasn’t due for many months, but I didn’t know why we couldn’t wait. The kittens, it seemed to me, would have been able to enjoy a few months of life before it was all ended for them in the bottom of a bucket.
Mum laughed when she heard the cause of my fear, or at least the cause I was able to speak about. ‘You don’t have to do it at night. You can do it right now, if you want,’ she said. I didn’t want. I asked why she couldn’t do it herself, and she reminded me that she didn’t have the stomach or nerves for that sort of thing. I’ve no idea why she thought I did, except for her need for displacement.
Mum made me fetch a page from a notebook so that she could illustrate the point she wanted to make. Mrs Scott’s cat had had six kittens, she told me, and they would all grow up into cats. She made me write ‘6’ at the top of the page. Mrs Scott, an elderly widow, couldn’t afford to feed six cats. Besides, cats aren’t like people. Even if there were no other cats around—and of course there were, including our own cat and her kitten—Mrs Scott’s cats would mate with each other and beget even more kittens. So, if half the new kittens were females, and in a few months time the female kittens all had more kittens, how many cats would be added to the world? With my pencil I came up with the answer, eighteen. That’s on top of the cat she’s got now, and the six others, so add all those in. The answer’s not eighteen at all,’ Mum said. ‘Now, if even half the eighteen are female, and they all have six kittens, how many cats will Mrs Scott end up having to buy food for?’
The enormity of the problems posed by the cat population explosion which would come about if I didn’t drown the kittens, became apparent to me. It would all be my fault. Mum made me feel worse by adding that Mrs Scott’s cat would have another litter again in a few months, so how many would that be, and their kittens, and their kittens’ kittens?
Mrs Scott was ready for me when I arrived. She’d tied the kittens into a cotton flour bag already, so I didn’t have to see them. They were making squeaking noises from inside the bag, and I could see their bulky little sausage-like bodies heaving around and changing the shape of the bag. So I didn’t look.
Mum told me I was to drown them in our laundry, not Mrs Scott’s. When I brought them around the side of the house, Mum was indoors, giving my sisters some sort of treat to keep them inside and distracted while I ‘got on with it’. I had to fill the kerosene tin up with a scoop because, even half filled with water, it would have been too heavy for me to lift out of the tub. I got everything ready, the bucket poised on the edge of the laundry floor so I could just tip it over on the ground when the time came to drain it.
I sat for a long time looking at the squirming bag, feeling sorry for the scraps of life that would never grow up and contribute to the big cat problem. I felt angry with God, who I’d been learning about in school and who had set this all up, and angry with my mother, who put the animal population problem onto me. I was aware of her weakness, and I knew I’d always have to be strong to look after her and do all the nasty things she wasn’t able to do. I would do them to please her. I would do them because somebody had to do them.
Mum yelled from out of the kitchen window. ‘Roberta’—when she was stressed she always said my full name and broke it into two separate syllables—have you finished that job yet?’
‘I’m just doing it now.’
‘Well, hurry up. The longer you leave it, the crueller you are.’ I knew she was speaking in code, not mentioning exactly what it was I was doing, to maintain the secret between us.
I picked up the bag and dropped it into the water, using the stick to keep it submerged until most of the air was expelled. I lowered the rock into the water, careful not to crush the kittens with it, merely to catch and weigh down the fabric of the bag to keep them underwater.
I climbed up to the tubs and washed my hands before I went back upstairs. Mum raised her eyes quizzically at me, and offered me food and milk when I said the job was done, but I wasn’t hungry. I began to wonder how long I was supposed to leave them there, and what I was to do with them once I emptied the bucket—things Laaka hadn’t shown me.
Mum organised our games and chores indoors that afternoon, and when evening arrived, she said we were going for a walk into town. ‘Town’ was four blocks away, and we, and many other people, often strolled around when the heat of the day had subsided. Sometimes on these walks, if Mum could afford it, we would have the rare treat of an ice-cream, which cost two pence each, or an icy-pole—she could buy three for tuppence at the Greeks’ store. I could feel an ice-cream due to me that evening.
I was sent down to empty the bucket but, with the rock in it, it was too heavy for me to tip over. Mum had to do it herself. My sisters peered at us from the top of the stairs, wanting to know what we were doing, ‘Just fixing this bit of washing,’ Mum replied to their nosy questions.
The bag began to dry out while Mum was getting us ready to go, and the shapes were discernible through the cloth. She had me wrap it in a bit of paper, then put it into an old hessian bag. We were taking it with us. In answer to my probing, she said we were going to throw the bag over the bridge into Ross River when it got dark. And what would happen to it then, I asked, visualising the dead, drying and rotting toads I had seen squashed on the roads, and wondering if dead kittens were anything like them. ‘The sharks will probably swallow the bag for their lunch,’ replied my mother, ‘and if they don’t, crocodiles will probably eat them.’
How many kittens I fed to how many sharks and crocodiles over the years, I don’t know, I was unable to keep count. As word of my skill spread, old widows further afield were permitted to make use of my services. How much my mother received for loaning me out like this, or even whether she was paid at all, I still have no idea. Although I received ice-creams and other treats, the occasional chocolate bar and so on, my sisters had to get them too or, so my mother would warn me, they’d ‘guess there’s something going on’.
I came to understand that there are terrible secrets in this world, and that, for
reasons which may have nothing really to do with the individuals, some people get to know about the secrets, and others don’t. There were all these people who were much older than me, yet I was having to do their killing for them. I suppose my desire to please, to be helpful, and hopefully to be loved in return, extended to my mother, although I wasn’t delighted about the nature of the efforts she expected of me. Having to ‘do’ for the old ladies, I didn’t understand at all, but it seemed somehow to fit in with what I was learning at that time—that Mum and I were expected to do a lot of work for white people generally.
Mum’s ‘weak stomach’ prevented her from doing all sorts of things which were then left to me. She wasn’t happy to remove splinters or fragments of glass from kids’ feet, or even her own. When I was too young to be trusted to strike a match, Mum would run the little flame over the tip of a sewing needle—‘to sterilise it,’ she said—and give it to me to pick out the splinters and pieces of glass from my own or my sisters’ feet. Sometimes, while I was taking care of injuries, she busied herself with preparing a bread poultice—hot water poured over a thick crust—to whack onto the affected area to draw out any unseen fragments. Her bandages invariably fell off, she could never quite get the knack. She borrowed a book from the library for me to study how to tie up wounds, this was her way of coping.
After I’d been given the chore of preventing a local takeover by cats by drowning them, I was drafted in for the bloodier task of beheading poultry. To add to my little store of sparkling treasures, Mum gave me a tack hammer, a tomahawk and a good file.
I was never on first call for killing the chickens. Mum would search high and low to get some man to do it. Unlike the arrival of kittens, which would precipitate calls on my deadly skills at unexpected times, with poultry we usually knew in advance that someone would have to do the deed. There was always at least one bird killed at Christmas, often a rooster we’d been fattening for the occasion, but Easter, visits by Aunty Glad and her children, and other special events, also meant the preparation of a bird or two. I was to learn how to do it, and be prepared to knock off a head when no one else was available. I was to be Mother’s ‘good helper’, doing another of the things she couldn’t bring herself to do.
Snake Cradle Page 6