Ancestor Stones

10 Hawa, 1965: The Music of Flutes

Well I suppose. Better I tell you than you hear it from one of the others.

Remember once you had some boyfriend you broke up with, and how you came home and refused to leave your room? You stayed inside moping, weeping, wouldn’t eat. All this for a man you didn’t even want. You told me you loved him, and yet it was you who refused to be with him. ‘It won’t work,’ you cried. ‘We are too different!’ What does this mean? I thought to myself, this girl can have whatever she wants and still she’s unhappy. Ever since then I have wondered at the world, how everything has changed and yet nothing has changed.

For me it was the other way. I had a husband, but he was not the man I loved. Everybody told me I could not have the man I wanted. Too different, they said, it won’t work. And they kept repeating these words, as if they were praying for it to come true.

For weeks I couldn’t get the stink of burned coffee out of my nostrils. The odour clung to my clothes, my hair, my skin; coating everything like an invisible film of shame. I didn’t shed myself of it until I left the village and went to live in the town. I had been betrothed, but of course my marriage plans went up in smoke along with the plantation. The groom’s family began to argue about the bride gift. Some time later another man was found for me who worked in the slaughterhouses. By then my choices were few. This man was so poor I became his only wife. I started my married life working like a servant.

Now instead of the smell of burned coffee I suffered the stench of dead animals. At night my new husband came to me. His skin smelled like an animal hide, his hands of blood, his breath of viscera. I pushed him away and told him to wash himself before he touched me. Then I would lie and listen to him out in the yard throwing water from the bucket over himself with a ladle. In the first year of our marriage he liked to whistle as he washed himself. Then he would come back to me, still whistling. But that kind of smell doesn’t wash off. So I pretended to be asleep, knowing he would never dare bother me.

I can’t say I either liked him or disliked him. I was prepared to live with him. To accept my fate for what it was. But always he wanted something more. My fate was no longer in my own hands. A marriage cannot be pulled apart easily as a dam in a river. When he caught me wrinkling my nose, he would tell me at least his was honest work, good work. And it was true we ate meat every day. Sometimes twice. Evenings he would arrive home with a parcel under his arm: maybe a rack of ribs, a sheep heart, a skirt of beef. If he was trying especially to please me he brought a cow foot. I’d put it in a pot with thyme, tomatoes and hot peppers. Boiled for four hours, it was tasty and tender as chicken.

There was so much meat; we had meat to spare. I wrapped up what was leftover and gave it to my other mothers, my father’s wives who clasped my hands to their hearts as they thanked me. At those times I would give a small smile, incline my head slightly. Shrugging off their thanks. As if it cost me nothing to do.

And though I didn’t encourage my husband I fulfilled my duties. I bore him three children. All boys. I lost two more. They were girls, and might have grown up to help me around the house. But there it is. Nothing to be done. What more could any man ask for? Each time my belly swelled, he would kneel, press his cheek against it and close his eyes. He stopped speaking for days after each of the two babies returned. Really, he was as tender and sentimental as a woman! Of course I regretted it, too. But deep down in my heart I saw it was for the best. I knew I could not stay this man’s wife for long.

My third son was born with hoops of fat round his neck and his stomach. Such an appetite! I employed a pair of wet nurses and he drained them both. So I fed him myself. And what lungs! When he wanted me he screamed, his little body rigid with rage. My husband called him Lansana. But at other times, when I was alone with my son, I would brush my nose against his small one. ‘Okurgba!’ I would whisper. Little warrior! My name for him. Born with the spirit of a fighter. I laid my son on the hide of an unborn calf. I knew I had borne the child who would take care of me.

After each child my husband left me alone for a while. When in time he ventured near me I told him I was too tired. At that he offered to help me with my chores. I insisted I could manage. Whoever heard of such a thing? Gradually he left me alone more often, but never quite enough.

The next child came early and nearly killed me. The doctor at the clinic smelled of tree sap, of indigo dye and starched cloths. He asked me how many children I had. ‘Six,’ I replied, counting them all: the living and the dead and this one.

They put a needle in my arm and sent me to sleep. In my dreams I laughed and danced to flute music as they pulled the dead baby from inside me. I woke up and wished I could sleep to dream those dreams again. I never asked whether it was a girl or a boy. After two days I went home. The months passed and I did not conceive again. I soaked bitter roots and cooked our rice in the water, my husband and I dipping our fingers into the pot to eat together. The months came and went. My breasts and my belly remained flat. At my husband’s urging I went back to the clinic, to see if the doctor had other medicine, stronger than ours.

I remember how I stood and waited in front of the wooden desk while the nurse searched through the drawers for my records. Ah, yes, she said presently, pulling a brown envelope from among many others. She bent her head to read what was written there.

‘Tubal ligation.’ I didn’t even know what the words meant.

‘Your tubes have been tied. So you won’t have any more children. It says here you have six already.’ She pointed at the words on the paper. Six! The way she said it sounded like an accusation.

While I listened to flute music in my dreams, while they pulled the dead baby out. This is what they had done to me.

Oh, I know what you would have done in my place. You would have talked about rights and consent: small words with big meanings. But I did not know how to think that way. I did not even insist she call the doctor for me. I asked no questions. I nodded as though I knew this already, accepting her words. I turned around and went home. Who was I to argue? In my mind I thought the doctor, whose qualifications hung on the wall behind polished glass, must have known better than me.

I told myself I still had three children. I had Okurgba, my youngest. And when I told my husband, no more children, I was thinking that perhaps then he might leave me alone.

And so my life continued. It was not the life I had chosen for myself, not the life that should have been mine. But I lived it anyway.

One day I saw the woman who had my life. She passed me, followed by a servant girl carrying a stack of differently coloured cloths. She did not recognise me. Why should she? She didn’t know I existed or that I had once been betrothed to her husband. I followed her to the tailor’s shop where I watched the owner jump up from her seat to greet her. I stood in the shadows of the entrance, next to a pile of offcuts. I bowed my head and pretended to search among the scraps. But I need not have worried, for nobody came to serve me.

I watched how they attended to her, flattering, praising her taste, holding samples of embroidery under her chin. She ordered maybe six or seven gowns, I never heard the cost discussed once.

Above me a shelf held stacks of coloured threads. Music from a plastic radio buzzed like a swarm of bees around my head. The sound of the treadles drummed in my ears. I wanted to knock the radio and spools from the shelf, upturn the Singer sewing machines, tear up the paper patterns. I wanted to run away as far as I could. But I did none of these things.

Instead I watched this woman through the half-light of the tailor’s shop. This woman living the life I should have lived. I knew I was no beauty. But I was prettier than this one. Maybe you wouldn’t believe it to look at me now? But then I possessed a complexion so fresh and smooth that even a fingerprint showed upon it. I had dimples high in my cheeks, and above my elbows, in the hollow of my back above each buttock. My waist was slim, my back curved just the right amount. By contrast this woman was as black and shapeless as a midday shadow.

On her way out she passed close by me. I turned away, but still I smelled her. Cloying and sickly. I almost choked on the odour. Vanilla.

You know what people here sometimes say, that death makes saints of us all. I was thinking about that only the other day. After my mother died suddenly all her co-wives who had thought of nothing but how to usurp her began to say what a sweet tempered person she was, how kind, how generous.

When somebody dies, look at how all the women go to sit for hours in the family’s front room, offering words of comfort when only the day before they bad-mouthed the lot of them. Look at the men giving money to the widows, even though they spent the last year trying to put this same man out of business. Today everybody will tell you what a good man your grandfather was. How wise, how honest. But there was a time when these people turned on us and drove us from our home. And now they pretend as if it never happened.

Of course nobody likes to speak of that time now. What’s past is past, they say. Too quickly. Wanting to shut you up. Well let them try now. Because now you are here, you want to know. And now I will tell you.

It was soon after I stopped working for the European, Mr Blue.

On that morning I woke up to the sound of singing. Not the joyful sound of a wedding party. No, something angry in the distance. I stepped out of the door of our house. All around me were people running, throwing sand on the cooking fires, slamming shutters. A child was standing by the well, wailing at all the uproar. A woman ran and grasped her by the arm, dragging her along the ground, causing the child to cry even louder. She pushed the child inside the door of her house and ran off in search of her other children.

The wind was blowing in great gusts that day. It raced through the village like an omen: whipping up whorls of red dust, scattering the grain drying in the sun, rolling balls of chicken feathers down the street.

Inside the big house Ya Namina was shouting orders to the servants. One of my small brothers stood at the open back door. My father pushed a box into his hands. The box was wrapped in tattered cloths, so I knew it must be very ancient. Out of the back of the house, I watched my brother dart into fields, his legs spinning like wheels. Then suddenly he tripped. I caught my breath as I watched him stumble for a few paces until he righted himself. My father looked around, saw me standing there.

‘Hawa, go with him. Help him! Run! Run!’

Out of the open door, through the banana groves, into the dappled shadows of the trees. I ran silently, not daring to shout to my brother. Just past the silk cotton tree, I caught him up. For a few seconds we ran abreast, like a pair of panicked animals. Then we turned off the path, out of sight, and dropped to the ground.

We waited. Catching our breath again. Then we climbed up to our old lookout at the top of the sapele tree from where we could see the houses. From there we watched the people marching through the village, up to our compound and the steps of my father’s house. The wind picked up their voices and threw them like echoes across the treetops. To this day I remember the words:

‘We have spoken. Who so denies us, he is lost.’

Then the singing turned into shouting, the shouting into a great howling. The wind joined in, shaking the branches of the tree, threatening to send us hurtling to the ground. We were frightened and slid back down the tree trunk to the forest floor.

Later in the day we waited with our backs against the tree. My brother complained he was hungry, but I did not have time for that kind of talk. I told him to dig the crickets out of their holes in the earth. He wandered around scratching at the ground and came back with a bundle wrapped up in his shirt. But we were too afraid to light a fire to roast them and so we waited with hunger growing in our bellies until we ate them raw and fell asleep.

Sometime in the night I woke abruptly. Somebody close by. I held my breath. A pangolin was watching us from a short distance away, weaving her head from side to side. Her den must have been close by. I sat up, the pangolin backed off. I could hear the caw of night birds. The air carried the smell of night blooms and rotting leaves. Somewhere close by a pod fell off a tree and split open, scattering seeds with giant-sized sounds, causing me to start. The fear settled in my bowels. I stood up, walked some small distance, propelled into the darkness by a sudden urgency.

How I wished to be at home! Safely asleep on my bed. How long we were supposed to stay out there in the forest, I had no idea.

Without realising it I was heading in the direction of the houses. Suddenly I heard voices, fleeing footfalls in the darkness. I pressed my back against a tree. The blood rushed around my head. I stood still, listening to the thud of my own heart, like the beating of a thousand bats’ wings. I pushed the heel of my hand against my chest to still the sound.

Shapes. Shadows. They passed me so close I could have reached out my hand and touched them. Bodies gleaming in the moonlight. I turned and pressed my face against the tree. I stayed that way for I don’t know how long, feeling the smooth bark against my cheek, wishing it was my mother’s skin. I whispered her name. The wish turned into a dream. For a moment I was in her arms. Then just as quickly the dream lost its colour, and turned back into a wish. Try as I might to hold on to the comforting feeling, it slipped away. I was alone and afraid again.

The moon shone like a blind man’s eye. In the dim light I saw the form of a man, coming towards me through the trees. He drew close, saw me and stopped. We stood still, gazing at each other through the grey. As I looked at him I had a strange feeling, like a scent that carries the memory of a touch, or a taste that brings a glimpse of something past. I had seen this man before. I felt sure of it. I did not move. I stood there as fleeting images formed behind my eyes. I saw the bolted gates of the miners’ compound. The men standing silently beyond. The police. Twists of smoke coming out of the barrels of the guns. Red and pink stains blossoming like flowers on the wet ground. And as the memories formed and dissolved I saw him staring at me, making up his mind what to do.

You see, I believed this man was dead. The same man who even before that was once mixed up in some trouble with one of the younger wives.

So now I made up my mind that this was no mortal man but a falang, come back to settle old scores against the people who had murdered him. I didn’t try to run away. For some reason I felt no fear. I was certain the time had come to die. In the pale light I could just make out the mark on his lip, the stain like a splash. He stepped towards me. My legs went weak. I closed my eyelids to shut out the darkness crowding in. When next I opened them I was alone again in the forest.

The rest of the night I spent with my body wrapped around the box of sacred objects entrusted to my father. I slept with my cheek resting on the lid. Inside the box was the skull of the obai who went before. We grow up and we are told a chief never dies. Instead his spirit flies out of the old body and into the new one. The elders keep the head of the last chief to bury with the body of the next. So the line goes on unbroken.

We slept and woke up damp with fright and dew. And when we woke up the rule of the new chief was already over.

And afterwards we heard how the rioters sang the same song all over the land. In town the pink and anxious Assistant to District Commissioner Silk gave the order to fire upon a crowd gathered around his office. Some fell. Those who didn’t took off through the chiefdoms, marching upon the compounds and houses of the chiefs, lighting bonfires of paper money, throwing radios and refrigerators from the windows, chasing the chiefs’ wives into the banana groves.

For days the ash and soot floated down like black rain. And that awful smell. Years later, even to make a cup of coffee for the man I was married to made my stomach churn.

The colonials held a Commission of Inquiry and blamed the disturbances on the chiefs. So they curtailed the powers of some, and others they deposed. Nobody could understand how this could be, since a chief is a chief for ever. Others said it was right. And yet others asked who had given the chiefs such power they were able to rule in defiance of their people?

Of course, the pothos were no fools. They knew better than to stay too long afterwards. They packed their bags, gave us back our country and whoosh — like the wind they were gone.

I met Khalil under my father’s roof, where he had come to live with my family as a ward. Nearly ten years had passed since the rebellion against the chiefs. My father no longer attended court. He lived in his house in town. The day I first saw Khalil I arrived struggling with my son in my arms. Okurgba escaped and jumped in a puddle, scattering some ducklings. Khalil ran down the steps and caught him for me. After that I would see him often; sometimes as soon as I turned the corner and came into view of the house, Khalil would appear and walk alongside me.

Later people said things about me. How could I, a married woman? And him so much younger than me. Still a schoolboy. Well, that was true. Ah, but he had a way about him, I don’t know. He knew things. In many ways it was as if he was the older of the two of us.

You see, I didn’t know anybody who had been to school. Mariama, yes. She was sent to the missionaries because nobody knew what to do with her. Your Aunt Serah, well she was born later than me. By then things were different.

How could you possibly understand? You would jump on an aeroplane sooner than you would ride in a poda poda. I had never left my home. I had never even seen the sea.

Khalil described the oceans for me. Told me of lands covered in snow. Of red deserts where nothing existed but sand and rock. The sun was a great orb of burning gas, he said. The moon was the size of the earth and only looked small because it was many miles away. Even the stars, though they might look like holes in the sky, were really planets whose light reached us years after some of them had already died.

One day I came back from the market with a package of oxtail. I had left some at my own house — by that time I had a girl to help me with the cooking and the children. The remainder I brought with me.

Khalil teased me, saying oxtail was his favourite: ‘I hope there’s enough for me.’ Of course he was only a ward, he would have to wait until my father and others had eaten.

I smiled and spoke with the same laughing tone. I wagged my finger at him: ‘You wait until I count up what’s left,’ I said.

‘How many did you get?’

I told him thirty. But then I had left two each for everybody at home. I remembered then I had forgotten about the girl, doubtless she would want to eat.

Khalil stopped walking and asked: ‘So how many are left?’

I told him I would count them.

It’s so simple for you. Of course I could count. But to add, subtract, multiply. To play with numbers the way you juggle balls. How do you know how to do these things unless somebody shows you? Khalil was the one who taught me. At first I was slow, embarrassed by my ignorance. But he persisted. Every day we drew numbers in the dust, subtracting, adding, then multiplying, dividing: heaps of beans, grains of rice, bowls of oranges, even the stars in the sky. And by the time we had finished I counted the number of times I thought about him in the space of an hour, I multiplied that by the number of hours in the day. And I realised I had fallen in love.

Step by step I moved into my family home. I found reasons to visit, reasons to stay over, reasons not to go home. I sent trays of food over to my husband to keep him from complaining. But I could not stop the rumours from reaching him. And when he finally sat up and looked around him, he realised that I had left.

After the rebellion a change had come over my father. Slowly at first. For days at a time he stayed shuttered up against the sun. In the darkness of his room his skin stretched until it was thin and dry as paper. The flesh moulded itself to his bones. His voice faded to a whisper.

When he had accepted my bride price my father knew he was marrying me to a man who was beneath me. The amount was so little. Like I was worthless, the last item left behind at an auction. And yet all the time I was growing up I had listened to the stories of Asana’s bride price, seen the listeners’ eyes grow as big as coins as the figure rolled out. She who hadn’t even held on to her man.

So one day I went to ask him to pay back this small amount of money, to free me from my marriage. My face burned as I stood there in that closed, dark room, listening to him tell me of the disgrace I was bringing upon the family. I remembered how it had been when I was a child and my mother made me sing for him. The terror I had of him then. Now I listened to my father talk to me as though I were that very child. I bowed my head, reached out and touched his feet.

But at the same time as I begged my father not to disown me, different thoughts began to enter my mind. I was thinking that my father was stuck with his head in the past. Oh, yes, perhaps he had been a big man, son of a chief’s daughter and a warrior, and all that. But that time was distant now. Peasants had set fire to his plantation. Dragged him from his house and set him on top of the rubbish heap, pelted him with jibes and taunts. Yes, these were the things that had happened. Never to be undone.

And as I left his room my father’s new wife passed me by carrying a platter of rice. Not a young girl offered to him by a humble family hoping for his patronage. Nor the daughter of a chief. A middleaged widow whose family were glad to be free of the burden! Brought here by Ya Namina to help care for my father.

Over the days that followed I made up my mind to ask my brothers to do what my father would not. Ibrahim and Idrissa. They were successful men now. Idrissa, an Army Major. Ibrahim a businessman with a big import — export business.

And then, as if to pre-empt my plans and prove he had never cared for me, my husband upped and left. Two days before Eid-al-Fitr. For Kabala, to where the Fula had driven their herds and work was plentiful.

Well, I moved back to my house. And after a while, when he had graduated from school, Khalil came to stay with me. I had no reason to go to my father’s house any longer. And so I did not. Khalil’s parents were angry and they sent his brothers to complain to my father. But I didn’t care. You see, it was my own father who had exchanged me for free meat. Who was he now to criticise me for living in this way with Khalil? There were those who said I had brought shame on the family. But the truth was — we were already shamed.

Besides — and it took me a while to realise this — there was really nothing anybody could do.

I was happy, even though it was hard for us to make ends meet. We ate fish. Fish stew, fried fish, pepper soup with smoked fish — into each dish I poured the gladness inside my heart. I wrote a letter to my brother Idrissa who was stationed at his Army barracks further north. Well, Khalil wrote it. It was good to have a man who could write. And he signed my name on the bottom. Almost always my brother enclosed a little market money in with his reply. I sent Ibrahim a letter at the same time as I wrote to my eldest brother. I dictated my words to Khalil: ‘This letter serves to remind you of your sister, who is always praying for your success.’ Khalil signed my name at the bottom. Madam Hawa Kholifa.

Now when I look back, through my whole life, my two brothers were the only people who looked after me. Yes. Even Khalil, in the end, betrayed me.

My joy lasted three years.

The problem began when I had to send the girl back to her family. I saw the half-smiles she had begun to give Khalil. Some weeks later, after a visit home, Khalil told me his mother complained she had no grandchildren.

I said: ‘Let’s wait and see.’ I smiled and settled against him. Khalil wrapped his arms around me.

But from that day on his mother determined to cause problems for me. The next time he returned from visiting her he repeated her words to me: ‘She says you’re too old.’

I saw something in his face when he said this. Something that told me he agreed with his mother. It was as though a snake had bitten my heart. Yet how could I possibly tell him the truth? I couldn’t go back to the clinic to find the doctor. He had gone, closed his practice and moved to the city to make more money. Either way there could be no more children for me. No children for Khalil.

I have to tell you why I did what I did. So you understand. You make fun of me behind my back. So glum. You pull your own mouth down at the sides with your fingers. Oh, no, Aunty Hawa has always been that way, you say when your children ask what they have done. Well, I was not always this way. I had a chance to be happy once. But let me tell you how much I loved this man. I loved him so much I sacrificed my own happiness for his sake.

I found Khalil a wife. I even begged one of my brothers to give me the money for her bride price, convincing them that this was what I wanted. I complained there was too much work for me, what with the trading I did at my stall in front of the house. I needed somebody to cook and to mind the children.

Zainab. I chose her myself. Her parents were dead so that made it all the easier. I watched her for many weeks before I made up my mind to approach her. Why her? Not fussy and vain like the other girls with black-lined eyes, always slipping away on any pretext when they should have been at their chores. Chattering to each other on the street corner. You could see from Zainab’s hands she was a hard worker. And for the most part she was quiet.

My problem, my mistake, was that I was always too trusting. Too ready to see the best in people. I had to learn to think differently. Sometimes when I look at my own face I see what you see. Eyes narrowed — against the glare of the real world. Smile bent out of shape. Grooves either side of my nose — worn by tears. This is what you see. But I know I didn’t always look like this.

At first the arrangement seemed suited to us all. Even me, I accepted it. The girl turned out to be as hard a worker as I had hoped: she could husk a bushel of rice in a morning. And the children liked her well enough. Khalil’s mother was satisfied, at least she stopped sending her complaints to my house inside her son’s mouth.

One night in the early hours of the morning, I woke from dreaming about a puppy I once owned as a child. I was holding it in my arms, only the dog was purring like a cat. Listen, I said, holding it up to my mother. She bent her head, but before she could reply the dream vanished. I was alone in my room. I could feel a weight at the bottom of the bed. I didn’t really believe in djinnas, none that would come visiting like that, at any rate. A rat, perhaps, or a snake. I sat up. Do you know what I saw? My neighbour’s cat. It jumped off the bed, ran across the floor and leaped out of the open window, the moonlight glinting on its fur.

The air, heavy and still, parted and closed around me as I walked through the house. At the back door I slid the bolt and stood breathing deeply. A short time later I pushed the door shut. And as I did so I heard the sound of another door closing, like an echo. I made my way back the way I had come, ears cocked, treading softly. I stood outside my door, but instead of going inside I reached out, opened the door and closed it again. A moment later and sure enough out she came. Like a mouse. Scuttle, scuttle. Along the wall and into her room.

Twice a year I would return to Rofathane to visit Ya Isatta who remained there living in my mother’s house. This time Zainab came to help carry the provisions. Lately there had been something. Something in the air. For one the girl’s attitude had changed. The previous evening I had called for her to bring me water. She served me, tilting the bottle over the back of her hand, letting the water slide into the cup. Everyone knows this is a most insolent way to serve a person. I tried to catch Khalil’s eye, but he looked at the ground. I let it pass. But it vexed me, made my scalp itch with annoyance to think about.

I was always a swift walker. I have my mother’s height. Not like these girls you see swinging their buttocks and slithering the soles of their feet across the ground. Gradually I put a little distance between us. They were talking; they didn’t even notice. As I drew level with a maize field, I stepped off the path and waited, hidden in the tall stems. Zainab and Khalil grew closer, I strained to hear their voices. They were speaking in murmurs. A name drifted up. Suffyan. Khalil’s father. That man who thought I wasn’t good enough for his son! What were they saying about him? Something about the harvest. That was six months away. I leaned forward to let the words reach my ears. Too far! I tipped forward, unbalanced and stumbled. I snatched at the maize, but the stalks snapped in my hands. I fell to the ground, landing back out on the path right in front of Zainab and Khalil. Their faces were still full of shock as Khalil helped me up and Zainab brushed my clothes. I straightened my headdress. Nobody spoke. We walked on.

In the days that followed Zainab became as lazy as an overheated sow. Twice I caught her sleeping in the middle of the day. On the bamboo bench at the back of the house, lying on her side, with her mouth open and her arm across her belly. I shook her shoulder. ‘What’s this?’ I said. I watched her rouse herself, wipe her mouth and move off slow as an anteater. Of course she wasn’t sick. Too strong for that. And anyway, if she was she would have said so soon enough.

Later, alone — I saw it. And at that moment the only thing I couldn’t understand was why I had been so foolish, so blind. Why had it taken me so long?

Zainab was having a baby.

I could see it all ahead of me, plainly. Like fields of rice rolling into the distance. A mighty river winding its way through the trees. The depthless blue hovering over the thin flat line of the horizon. This woman had come to take my life away.

A sister of mine was sick, I said. Khalil did not question me, did not ask which one. I packed a box with three of my best dresses, leaving all the rest stowed in my wooden chest. I took my small, blue teapot and the money I had from my last husband hidden in a cigarette tin. Later I sang Okurgba a song, one my mother sang to me. I sang it to you sometimes when you were a child. When you would let me. When you didn’t call for someone else to put you to bed, you preferred anyone to me. Probably you don’t remember now. ‘Why is a bump taller than a man?’ goes the chorus. ‘Because the bump sits on top of the man’s head.’ Okurgba liked to sing the reply. That night his eyes were already closed before I finished the first verse.

My son was still sleeping when I left the next morning. By the time I reached the roundabout in the centre of town a creamy dawn sky stretched over the earth like a great canopy. Some people were already waiting at the place where the buses arrived and departed, next door to the Agip petrol station. Dusty faces and feet told of the distances they had travelled. Inside the empty buses the drivers were still asleep, stretched out on the seats.

A child leading a blind man passed me once, doubled back and reached out his tiny hand. I found a few cents. So that one day fate might repay my act of kindness. ‘God will bless you,’ said the blind man three times, as though I had given them a fortune. I bought a pair of roasted plantains for breakfast and some oranges for later. Presently the drivers began to emerge from their vehicles. Towels slung round their necks, they disappeared to wash. On their return they climbed in behind the steering wheel and waited with the doors open.

I took the seat behind the driver, put my box under my feet. The bus did not set off until it was full, until somebody had been squeezed into every last place. The driver removed my box and stowed it on the roof. Out of sight, so I could worry about it for the rest of the journey. Still, I was glad I had the sense to sit where I did. Whole families jammed the aisles and others sat on the roof, wedged in among the sacks of rice and livestock.

Just outside the town we passed burning fields. The smoke blew straight through the open windows making my eyes smart, biting at the back of my throat, coating my tongue with a bitter taste. I thought of all that lay ahead of me. I had never been to the city on the coast. I cannot say I was afraid. No. The anger in the pit of my belly burned up all the fear. Whenever we hit a pothole, which was often, the bus bucked like a bull. The women around me squealed and covered their mouths with the backs of their hands. But I sat still, silent, thinking my own thoughts.

From time to time I gazed out of the window, saw the landscape shift from red to green, as trees and bushes grew up out of the earth. Great boulders sprang up. Once we passed a deserted quarry: black, silhouetted machines like giant insects. Ahead of us I could see hills, beyond which lay the city. Otherwise there was no traffic, just people carrying firewood, or making their way to the town. A line of ducks crossed the road in front of us, the driver braked suddenly to avoid bad luck. A man on the roof was nearly thrown off, his legs dangled next to the open window as his companions struggled to pull him back up. Oh, he was cursing and spitting. People called to him it was the ducks. Then he understood and began to laugh. Another time I might have laughed too.

The road was like a river, whose banks were lined with villages. At each stop buskers held their wares up to the windows of the bus: bananas, groundnuts boiled or roasted, jelly coconuts. I realised I was hungry already. ‘Half-half,’ I told the boy, who chose a coconut from the pile and sliced off the top with his machete, turning it into a scoop for me to use. I drank the milk, but the flesh was nothing more than a thin layer coating the inside of the shell. I paid the boy, subtracting half as a penalty. He fussed, but what could he do? The sound of the engine swallowed his protests and moments later we left him standing on the side of the road.

I kept my eyes fixed on the hills. But as the hours passed they only seemed to recede. Finally the bus began to wind uphill, the engine whining under the strain. The driver ordered all the cheap fare passengers off the roof and made them walk. At the brow of the first hill the rest of the passengers stood around, sucking oranges and spitting the pips into the long grass, waiting for them to catch up.

I crossed the road away from the others. Down below, here and there, single columns of smoke spiralled up above the trees. Beyond the forest I saw a river, grey and glittering, a viper winding across the plain. Further on and the viper transformed into the tree, whose branches reached upwards and outwards until they touched the sky and merged into it.

‘It’s so great even the birds cannot fly across it, or so they say. They drop out of the sky with exhaustion.’

It was the driver standing at my shoulder. He was gazing at the horizon.

‘What is?’ I asked. He looked at me, smiled and pointed at the sky, at the place where it turned from one kind of blue to another.

‘The sea,’ he replied. ‘Is this the first time you’re seeing it?’ I replied that it was. ‘Then you are very lucky to have done so,’ he said.

As we travelled across the tops of the hills, climbing and turning, I kept catching glimpses of it. Each time I turned my head, gazing at the view until it disappeared behind the next bend. I felt lightheaded, my heart lifted. For a moment I forgot my sorrows, the place I had come from. I had only one thought in my head. I had seen the sea.

When I was a little girl and I was unhappy, when my mother was angry with me or my brothers teased me, I used to hold my breath until I fainted. When I woke up I would be in my own bed. Everybody crowded round me with big, worried faces. Happy to give me whatever I asked for. In that way I could make problems go away.

How I wished I was still that girl, to be able to make bad things better so easily. I stood in the place where I stepped off the bus for a long time, summoning the courage to move. Dust and people and terrible noises swirled around me, lashing me to the ground like ropes. I wanted to hold my breath until it all went away.

The first people I asked directions answered in a language I couldn’t understand. By chance the fifth person I turned to happened to be a townsmate. What luck! He carried my box on his shoulder while he showed me to the place I needed. ‘Watch yourself, sister!’ he told me as he set down my box.

Five days I was in that city. Five days that seemed like five months! It was already late afternoon when I arrived. I sat on my box and waited as the light dwindled. Two men playing a game of chequers on an upended crate threw glances at me in between games. In time one of them came over and asked me my business. I explained to him. I pointed at the building. He turned to his friend, who shook his head. Together they made me understand the address I had been given was the wrong one.

What was I to do? I had no relatives in the city. In those days there were no such things as hotels, and even if there were I could never have afforded to stay in such a place. I was stranded. The men seemed to understand this. One of them beckoned me to follow him. I suppose I should not have trusted a stranger so easily, but what choice had I? Besides, in those days it was different. People helped each other. Not like now. I followed him through the streets, long straight ones that soon became narrow and short. Here the houses were small and wooden, built side by side with no room in between. On the steps a woman braided another’s hair by the light of an oil lamp, a man sat in front of a python skin for sale, a thin puppy licked the dirty water from the puddles. We passed piles of stinking refuse and gutters foaming with filth. Next we were in an open space with a big cotton tree, children playing with a straw ball in the dusk. And presently we reached a small house where a woman sat next to a candle on a saucer, with a child sucking at her breast. From the way they greeted each other I did not imagine the man and she were very closely related to each other.

In exchange for a sum the woman gave me a place on the floor to sleep, yams and pepper soup with skimpy shreds of meat to eat. Later I lay listening to the sound of a man and a woman arguing in the street. My nostrils were filled with the stench of the pit latrine outside my window. I lit a small stick of incense. I dreamed and woke and for a moment imagined I was somewhere else.

In the morning the landlady taught me some words to use to find my way around. But the words were not enough. I went from one place to the next, grinding the stones of the streets into dust beneath my heels, while the sweat poured off me. Each day I exchanged a little more of my money for the woman’s food and a place to sleep, subtracting what I had spent from the little I had left.

All the time I felt the hope in my heart growing smaller and smaller, like the first piece of ice I held in my hand and watched melt away, until the last sliver disappeared and the enchantment was gone.

Still I persisted. You see, I had come to that city for a reason. I had to find the doctor, the one who had tied my tubes. To ask him if he might undo what he had done, so that I could bear children again. It was the only thing I could think of to stop Zainab from replacing me.

Maybe you think I was stupid to go to a city full of strangers, in search of a man whose face I couldn’t even remember. Only his hands and the certificates on his wall and the smell that clung to his clothes. But as it happened, on the fourth day I passed a building and I smelled that same odour. Something like starch and indigo dye and wood resin all rolled into one. I followed it to the place it was coming from. I entered the building, somewhere I had never been before. I found myself in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery. Not the same man I had come to find, but another one with clean soft-looking hands and certificates on his wall.

Yes, the doctor told me. The operation was reversible. Not easy, but possible. Even after that there was a chance I still might not bear children. I ignored the last part of what he said. I felt the hope begin to crystallise again. I was sure after all this time I was to be rewarded with some good luck. After all, hadn’t I seen the sea?

But a moment later, I felt all the same newly formed crystals of hope melt, drain away out through the ends of my fingers and the soles of my feet. He told me the cost. Six pounds!? I had never even seen so much money.

I returned home on a different bus. All the time I barely lifted my head to look at the landscape. I set my mind to thinking. I would write to my brothers. Perhaps they would help. I only had to work out how to ask them for the money in a way that meant they couldn’t refuse me.

These thoughts were still chasing each other in my mind as I walked the last of the way home. Too late, I realised I had forgotten to think up something to tell Khalil about my trip to see my sister.

The house was quiet. There was my son standing outside my neighbour’s house. I knelt down and stretched out my arms to him, and he ran to me, throwing himself against me. I lifted him up and held him to my chest, pushed my nose into his hair and breathed his good smell. I walked up the path.

The house was empty. No cooking smells. No children. Something strange. Where were Khalil and Zainab? I turned around and around on the same spot. Okurgba laughed as if this was a game. I set him down. I thought many things. Somebody ill? One of the children? I never imagined what was to come. I opened the door of my room. Everything was exactly as I had left it. One by one, I pushed open the doors of the other rooms. Khalil’s. Zainab’s. Empty. Just walls and a floor. Sleeping mats rolled up in the corner. Pegs bare. All gone.

They had left me.

The neighbour informed me of the manner of their departure. They had left my three sons with her. She relished my discomfort and the petty power her knowledge gave her, that much I could see. Watching me with gleaming eyes and a curved smile like that cat of hers. I half expected her to lick her lips as she spun the story out to see my reaction. I emptied my face, simply to deny her the satisfaction. But it came down to this: they left no forwarding address; hand in hand, they ran away like children.

When she had finished she pretended to comfort me, inviting me to sleep in her home, but I brushed her aside. I had only one question. When? I asked her. When did they go?

And she told me. Later on the same morning, the very morning that I had left for the city. At almost exactly the time I first laid eyes on the sea.

11 Mariama, 1970: Other Side of the Road

In the village where we lived people didn’t always greet each other in the usual way. Often they just said: ‘Baba?’ Like that, with a question in the word. A pair of doves somehow escaped from their locked cage and flew away, and people smiled knowingly: ‘Baba.’ If the bucket had been left at the bottom of the well, they said the same: ‘Baba.’ Or if a young girl had been made love to by some man whose name she refused to call, the other men nudged each other while the women spat into the dust. ‘Baba!’

When I was perhaps ten I asked Ya Sallay — who by then had become my mother: ‘Who is Baba?’ And she told me that she had asked the very same thing soon after she had married my father and come here herself. She was told there was once a man who went by that name. Babatunde was an unreliable type of person, the kind who would borrow something and not bring it back. This man owed money to everybody in the village, and was never ready to repay it. So his creditors decided to hold a meeting and sent a message telling him to attend. But Baba somehow got wind of the purpose of the gathering, and on that day he fled the village.

Well, the men went out looking. Even sent messages to the neighbouring villages asking after him. For days people searched the neighbourhood, and whenever they crossed paths would say to each other: ‘Have you seen Baba?’ And after many months and years the question became simply: ‘Baba?’ And then there came a time when the other began to answer in jest, as if to say, I am very well thank you: ‘Tunde.’

So this man’s name became detached from him and used for all sorts of other things. And in the end he stopped being whoever he had once been and became all the things they said about him.

Ya Sallay laughed when she told me this story. But I didn’t laugh. Rather I worried for Babatunde. I didn’t care that he was a scoundrel. I felt sorry. I wondered where he was and what had become of him. I thought about him living far away, among strangers, without his name, not knowing who he was any more.

Once I went to live among strangers and I learned what it was like to lose yourself. To feel the fragments flying off you. As if your soul has unhitched itself from your body and is flying away on a piece of string like a balloon. Lost in the clouds. You think, I only have to catch the end of the string. But though it hovers within sight, you cannot grasp it. You try and try. And then there comes a time when you are too tired. You no longer care. So you say: ‘Let it go. Let me just fall down here on the soft grass and go to sleep.’

I left home on the day our new President ordered everybody to drive on the opposite side of the road. In the crowded bus there was panic, because every time we looked up a car was hurtling towards us on the same side of the road. Unwary pedestrians stepped in front of vehicles. Drivers honked their horns. Cars swerved around each other. Our driver drove too close to the verge, skimming the wooden stalls. And when the bus reached the stop we all had to climb down into the traffic, because now the passenger door was on the wrong side.

By the time I reached the quay all I could think was how glad I was to be leaving. I showed my ticket, paid for by the Christian Mission who had given me a scholarship to study in England, to the man in a buttoned uniform who stood at the end of the gangplank. As the ship sailed off into the silence, some of the passengers, the Africans who had never left home before, gathered on the deck to wave goodbye to everything we were leaving behind. The sea swelled up and the sky stretched downwards. In front of our eyes the city disappeared and the coast shrivelled into a wavy line. And all of us saw how small our country really was.

A girl on her way to the United States boasted she would soon be seeing the cowboys and indians for herself. Foolish girl! Still I said nothing because although I knew in England women no longer wore bustles and carried parasols, there were no horse-drawn carriages or steam trains, no hot-air balloons, and no white rabbits with fob watches — I could not imagine what I was going to.

In England the air was flat and colourless; sharp to breathe like broken glass. The pavements came up hard and struck the soles of my feet. The people walked fast, but spoke quietly. And skimmed past, never touching each other. Everybody went about and minded their own business. Even when they spoke to you, they seemed always to be looking at something outside the window or on the other side of the room.

In the hostel where I stayed we lived in rooms on top of each other and next to each other. Names on the doors: Bidwell, Holt, Pichette, Clowes, Schenck, Buchan, Bersvendsen, Wilkinson. And I saw that was how people lived all over the land. Like colonies of the blind. On top of each other and next to each other, but without ever seeing each other.

A girl from Ghana was assigned to help me settle in. Emma. Without her I would have been lost straight away. I liked her. I wished she had been there for longer. Maybe, if she had, things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did. She would never have let it happen. Together we went shopping for warm clothes. The freezing air seeped through the fibres of my cotton clothes. Emma walked as swiftly as all the people in this place. Weaving in and out of the crowd like a needle through silk, and me a thread trailing behind her. In the shop she fingered woollen pullovers piled high on tables. Never had I laid eyes upon anything so luxurious, though the colours struck me as lifeless and dull.

‘Pah! Made in Hong Kong. And look at these prices!’ She wrinkled her nose, dropped the pullover as though it gave off an offensive odour and talked in a loud, loud voice. ‘Come on!’ She marched out past the security guard whose eyes followed her from the shadows beneath the peak of his cap.

‘They think we all steal,’ she told me out in the street.

‘Why would they think that?’ I said. To my mind nothing had happened. I didn’t understand why we were suddenly standing outside the shop.

‘Just the way they are. Suspicious minds.’ I was silent, I didn’t know what to say.

Emma watched the television news a great deal. Every evening, jumping up to change channels to listen to the same things repeated by a different person, deaf to the complaints of anybody else who happened to be in the common room. I remember pictures of an aeroplane with a bent nose, that flew faster than the speed of sound. One day everybody would travel the world in this way. The Chinese put a satellite in orbit and joined the space race. I had never known such things were happening. I watched it all with wonder. I had never even seen a television before. I thought of our new President and how the only thing he had done was order everybody to drive on the other side of the road. Then another day a jet flew into a mountain. Two days later a second one smacked down on to the runway, like a tethered bird that had tried to fly. On the news they played the last words of the co-pilot taken from the flight recorder. ‘Oh! Sorry, Pete.’ A moment later every single person on that plane was dead. A week later a third aeroplane did the exact same thing, only this time the people were luckier and mostly survived.

I stared at the terrible images of rescuers picking over debris. In my dreams I saw fizzing, flashing pictures like the images on the television. I saw planes bellyflop out of the sky, smash nose first into mountainsides. I wondered if the people on the ground could hear the screams of the passengers. Or even if they screamed at all. Or just said ‘Oh!’ And were gone.

Emma whooped with joy when a black man punched a white man so hard in a boxing match he knocked him out. In South Carolina black children were driven to school in buses with armed guards. I saw the expressions on the faces of the crowds at the boxing ring. And I saw the looks upon the faces of the white people as they threw stones at a bus-load of small children. And I saw how similar they were.

Somewhere along the line I started to become confused. Missionaries had brought me here. Given me a scholarship so at last I could qualify as a teacher. I must be grateful. Of course, I was grateful. Emma, on the other hand, didn’t seem grateful at all. If anything she seemed to be angry a great deal of the time. Though once, when she was short-changed by a stall holder over a bag of plums, she laughed like it was a huge joke.

‘What would my mother say?’ she asked me, holding the coins up under my nose on the flat of her palm. ‘She thinks an English man’s word is his honour.’ And when she saw my nonplussed face she laughed all the more until the tears welled in her eyes. ‘Oh, Mary!’ Shook her head and put her arm around my shoulders.

Later, how I wished I had asked her all the things I wanted to know. At the time all I cared was that she wouldn’t think me stupid. I didn’t even know what the questions were, the answers to which I needed so much. Just ask, people would say. But how do you know what it is you don’t know? When I needed someone to tell me, Emma was gone. Back to Ghana. At the end of her sabbatical she stopped by to wish me farewell.

‘Take care. Don’t think you can go behaving the way the girls here do. One of our sisters was murdered like that, out alone at night. They found her body, but they never found who did it to her.’ She kissed my cheek and squeezed my arm and was gone.

Alone I walked to the teacher training college. I dared not deviate from the route Emma had taught me. After classes I hurried home, nervous of the dimming light. I worked hard. I copied the words of my teachers down on to my exercise book and spent my evenings memorising them line by line. Still, in my first oral test I scored poorly. It was difficult for me. People pushed words through closed lips, made lots of ‘zh, zh’ sounds. I couldn’t understand. I watched the television. I went out and bought a dictionary, set about learning twenty new words every day.

Other times I watched the birds squabbling on the window sill, gorging on pieces of the town’s rubbish. On the other side of the thick glass I was only inches away from them. I could see how they tottered on deformed, toeless feet — useless for roosting on the branches of trees. Only good for balancing on concrete ledges and hobbling along the pavements.

At night, when the heating went off, I pulled my overcoat on to my bed and told myself how lucky I was. Outside the silent rain drifted above the houses. Half-asleep, half-awake fragments of dreams drifted through my mind: bathing among the drifting weeds; running through the rooms of Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay’s house and finding each one empty; riding in a bus that veered from one side of the road to another, the passengers screaming, the bus hurtling off the road and down the side of the hill.

Mornings I woke early, watched my breath escape from me in thick plumes taking the memory of the dreams along with it. The dampness in the air reminded me of home, but that was all. I set my feet down on the freezing lino, in the tiled chill of the bathroom I waited for the water heater to produce a thin stream of hot water. Outside the sun shone brightly, invigorating me with hope. But by the time I stepped into the street the sky was suffocated by clouds and the sun was gone, like a promise broken every day.

Evening time I sat alone in the big refectory on the ground floor of the hostel. One day the cooks served roast chicken for supper. The flesh was pale, flaccid. Kept lukewarm under bright lights. The chickens here were so much bigger than at home, but tasted less good. How I yearned for a bowl of pepper soup, prepared the way my mother used to make it when I was ill with a fever: a little lime squeezed into the broth.

Still, I was hungry. The meat slipped down my throat. Afterwards I picked up the bone in my fingers and began to chew the ends. I cracked the shaft between my molars and licked out the marrow, careful to spit out the shards, making a pile of them on the side of my plate. A girl with pale hair and skin so thin you could see the blue veins in her neck came and set her plate down opposite me. For a moment she glanced at me and just as quickly looked away. Then she slid her tray off the table and moved to another place. Afterwards I noticed the way she kept glancing across at me. As though she had seen something dreadful, that never the less compelled her gaze.

That night I gazed into the mirror in my room. So many mirrors in this country. So much glass. In shops, on the sides of cars, on the outside of buildings. Everywhere I went I saw my image reflected back at me. Everywhere except in the eyes of the people. Nobody looked me in the eye. I saw how they watched the ground as I passed, only to feel their eyes boring into my back. Except, like the girl that evening, when they didn’t think I was looking. Caught out, they closed their faces and shifted their gaze as if, all the time, they had been looking at something else.

As I examined my reflection I wondered what it was she had seen. At home people did not look at my sliding face as if it was so strange. Then I remembered the time after my mother went away, and the people in the village, my father’s wives — how they fell silent when they had been speaking and saw me there. And how their eyes had begun to glide over me, as if I was invisible. And here was a girl who looked at me with a scared look, so scared she could not bring herself to sit near me, but moved away.

Dear Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay,

I have arrived in England. I have my own bed and even my own room. How happy I am to be here and for this most wonderful opportunity to expand my knowledge and to advance myself. There are so many things to learn. I am endeavouring to study hard so that you and all of my family will be proud of me.

It has been easy to settle in. I feel at home here already. The people are very friendly. Already I have made two new friends with whom I explore the town in my time away from my studies.

Please send my regards to my father, my mothers, my brothers and sisters.

Your respectful daughter,

Mary

I enclosed a portion of my scholarship money. Enough to buy two sacks of rice, plus a little left over to pay for the letter-writer to read them my words. I also sent a photograph of myself, taken soon after I arrived. The image was badly underexposed, my face a mass of shadows. At the last minute I picked up a pebble from the side of the road and pushed it into the envelope.

I went to live among strangers. Something happened. I have never told anybody, and nobody ever asked me, except you. It was nothing like what happened to the girl Emma told me about. The truth is, I can’t remember so much about it. I have some memories, a few. But when I look back to that time everything I see is like the photograph of me, a cluster of shadows. I have some memories, a very few — but they exist without clues.

Emma had left. I was alone. I moved through time, passing from day to night to day. I don’t know how many weeks or months went by. The days merged into each other, except for one day. One day was different.

I went for a walk. I had been feeding the pigeons on my window sill — pieces of dried up mashed potato. Increasingly I had taken to carrying my meals up to my room. In a strange way I had become quite fond of those ugly birds. They were not at all timid. I watched them land and take off, carrying pieces of potato in their beaks and I had the sudden urge to escape from my room for a few hours. I put on my duffel coat, pulled the hood up over my head and pushed my hands in my pockets. Outside the hostel I turned right, away from the college. The pavement followed the curve of the hill. I passed a shop selling newspapers and sweets. The road was lined with plane trees, their height and great leaves reminded me a little of home. At the bottom of the hill I found myself at a place where several roads met. In the middle was a small green, a duck pond, a parade of shops: Dewhurst Butchers, a bakery, a shop selling dressmaking fabric. In the window was a dummy draped in fabric fashioned into a flowing dress. I thought perhaps of buying cloth to send home; I didn’t dare go inside.

On and on. Here the houses were fewer, mostly bungalows with gardens all the way around, some with garages. In front of one house plastic toy windmills stuck into the grass turned in the wind. The whirring sound they made was the same as the call of a little black and yellow bird at home. I walked on, passing rows of mismatched allotments until there were no more houses. By now the rain was coming down. The path narrowed, my shoes slipped in the mud. Empty fields on either side, no crops but hillocks of rough grass. I pushed back my hood and felt the rain on my face, numbing my lips and my nose. I lifted my head to the sky.

The scent of rotting fruit: a plum tree had scattered its fruit across the path. I sheltered beneath it for a while. I was hungry, I picked up a plum and bit into it. The fruit was acidic and fizzed faintly on my tongue. Still it tasted good. I gathered several more, searching for the ones that hadn’t been attacked by the birds. For a while I ate greedily, then I collected up more of the fruit and pushed it into my pockets to feed to the pigeons on my window sill.

More time passed, how much I don’t know. I wiped my chin on my sleeve. I was cold, I decided to start back, to get back into the warm. The rain had eased off a little. On the way I passed the house with the windmills. I stopped to watch them, their red and yellow sails rotating, picking up speed as sluggish gusts of wind blew through them. I stared at the turning wheels, felt them sucking the thoughts out of my mind. One by one, the thoughts whirled away from me until they were caught by the rotating blades and spun out in all directions, across the garden and up into the air. At first I tried to catch them, but changed my mind and flew after them instead. Then I was floating up in the sky, side by side with the birds, gazing down at the shrinking dot of the town, heading far out to sea.

A child’s face. At the window, framed by curtains, a child was watching me, unblinking black eyes. For several seconds I stared back. The child didn’t move and neither did I. Just gazed into each other’s eyes. I felt peaceful. For a moment I caught a glimpse of my own face among the reflections in the glass, my head superimposed upon the child’s shoulders. The image wavered. I saw the child’s eyes grow wider and its mouth open, though the sound was drowned out by the rain and the flapping of wet wings. A woman appeared behind the child. I saw her look up and take a step towards the window, pushing out her chin and drawing it back with a jolt, something like shock.

I turned away, pulled my hood back over my head. I walked fast, until I broke into a run. My heart was beating. I began to feel afraid. I worried the woman might leave her house, come after me, demand to know what I was doing. Suddenly the fear reared up, like great shadows behind me, chasing me. Faster and faster, I ran all the way to the hostel.

The next day it was cold, too cold to get out of bed. I lay there, pulling the cover over my head to block out the slow light that burned through the window. I dozed and dreamed. And in my dreams I saw sometimes the child, and sometimes the face of Bobbio my childhood friend. Another time I was snatched up by a great, black bird, carried through the air and dropped into a nest, where I lay on soft feathers, surrounded by jostling chicks. I woke up to the sound of tapping, saw a pigeon’s red and yellow eye staring at me as its beak struck the glass.

The room grew dark and light again. How many times I don’t know. Once somebody knocked on the door of my room. I didn’t answer, I waited until they went away. It was quiet again, I was pleased at that. Silence, except for the sounds of the pigeons on my window sill, but they were my friends. Another time, another knock. Still I didn’t reply; the person came in anyway. She looked a bit like one of the nuns from the boarding home, so I let her urge me out of bed and slip my duffel coat over my shoulders. I put my hands into my pockets and felt the slimy mush that lined the bottom. I wondered what it was.

Next I was in a car. The driver kept turning around to look at me, asking me questions I couldn’t hear so instead I looked out of the window. A stone horse reared up from a plinth. The rider, halfrisen in the saddle, stared straight at me. A man leaning out of an advertising billboard, proffering a cigarette, fixed me with his gaze. A woman beckoned me with a sideways look, raised a steaming mug of drinking chocolate. A dog’s bulging, brown eyes followed my progress from the kerb.

A man asked my name. ‘Mariama,’ I replied. I don’t know why I said that. I had been Mary for a long time. We were out of the car now and in a new place. More questions followed. I couldn’t find the English words so I answered him in my own language. He spoke to the woman who had brought me. Meanwhile I sat in my chair and looked at him. There was something strange about him. I stopped listening and watched him closely; still it took me a while to put my finger on it. Then I saw: he had no teeth! No gums, no tongue. Just a black hole behind his barely moving lips.

It was dark again when I woke up. A soft bed. A hard, square patch of white light fell on to the floor like a trapdoor. Behind the glass murmuring voices, careful footsteps. I sat up and twisted my body round so I could see out of the window behind me. It must have been the early hours of the morning. The street was empty, save for a lone figure who waited at the side of the street for a bus or a taxi. I was on the second, maybe third floor of a house. I looked up and down the street, at the puddles of light below the street lamps.

The figure below me moved, the slightness of his frame told me it must be a young man or a boy. I watched him idly for a few minutes. Something about him seemed familiar, something in his walk as he sauntered between one lamp post and the next, as though he had nowhere particular to go. Briefly he stepped into one of the circles of light. I caught a glimpse of his profile. The high forehead, the shape of the skull, the upturned edges of the lips, the man below me was an African. He looked up, straight at my window. Bobbio!

Yes, it was he. Oh, how happy I was to see him. I cannot tell you. I waved. I worried about making a noise, I don’t know why exactly — the place was so hushed, you know. But I knew Bobbio was there for me. All I needed was to tell him I had seen him. I tapped on the glass. Bobbio grinned at me. Waved back. Oh, Bobbio. I pressed the palm of my hand flat against the glass and I stayed like that for a long time, looking at Bobbio who clasped his hands together, held them up and looked right back at me.

I slept soundly, the bed like a big boat, bobbing on the waves of a warm, blue ocean. In the morning I jumped up and went to the window. At first I couldn’t see my friend, just a line of people waiting at the bus stop, shuffling in the cold. But I never doubted he would be there. I searched the line of people. The bus arrived. The queue inched forward. Ah, there! A glimpse. Behind the woman in the blue anorak and the boy with his hands stuck in the pockets of his striped blazer: bare feet and the hem of a duster coat. Other people came and stood, blocking my view. I didn’t know what Bobbio was doing or how he had found me, but none of that mattered. Bobbio was there. And while he was outside I felt safe.

I remember that time, because although it was supposed to be a bad time for me, in some ways it was a very good time. The big shadow of fear shrank and slipped away under the door. I lay there and thought of nothing at all. I forgot about what I was doing in England. I cared nothing for the passage of time, instead I watched the patterns of light on the ceiling. Sometimes I sat at the window looking for Bobbio, until somebody came to put me back to bed. At the time it felt like years were slipping by, but now I think perhaps it was only days.

‘Hello dear, visitor for you,’ the nurse put her head around my door. It was she who brought me my meals and made me understand I was in the college sanatorium. She tended to talk a great deal as she moved about my room, turning off the night light, rearranging the bedclothes. I had always been sure to reply politely to her enquiries, I didn’t want her to think me rude. Once the doctor with no teeth had been back, but had examined me only briefly and directed all his questions away from me.

‘Eating much?’

‘Yes,’ the woman had replied. ‘Nothing wrong with her appetite.’

‘Said anything?’

‘Nothing I understand. They’ve called. Apparently somebody’s on their way. Somebody who can translate.’

That afternoon a young woman followed the nurse into the room. She was black and slim, dressed in European clothes, though she moved easily in them as if she wore a simple kaftan; not at all the way I always felt: tight and trapped. She swung her hip on to the side of my bed, perched there. Leaning forward, she took one of my hands in both of hers and looked at me. I saw deep, brown eyes, tilted upwards at the corners. Buffed skin. When she smiled she showed all her teeth at once and a wrinkle appeared across the bridge of her nose. I let her hold my hand. I even smiled back at her, she seemed so kind.

‘Who are you?’ I asked. The woman held me in her gaze for a few moments.

‘I’m Serah. Serah Kholifa. Your sister.’

Yes. It was your Aunt Serah. I didn’t recognise her, so many years had passed since I had seen her. She had been just a small girl. Now she was studying in Liverpool. Oh, yes, I knew this. But the distance was great. She had written suggesting I visit during the holidays, when they came. But they were a long time in coming, I never made it. On my college registration form Serah was listed as my next of kin. That day when she arrived at the sanatorium, she had only to take one look at me to see what had to be done. She took me away from that place.

We left in a taxi. I was impressed at that, how easily she made it happen. At the gate I swung my head this way and that.

‘Have you forgotten something?’

I replied I was looking for Bobbio, my friend. She frowned and the wrinkle appeared on her nose again.

‘Oh, yes. I remember him.’

‘He was here.’ I couldn’t see him any longer. ‘I never asked him what he wanted.’

My sister looked at me. ‘Oh, Mary,’ she said. ‘I expect he came to tell you something.’

And she took me in her arms and held me.

How long ago, how faraway it had all seemed. The smell of the earth. The whiteness of the sun. The way night arrives like a thing unto itself, instead of the creeping darkness that comes to steal away the sunlight. I returned home the way I departed. I stood on the deck watching the coastline widen in front of me, felt the sea breeze, the molecules of air, salt and water attaching themselves to my skin. Even the whiff of fish and oil at the dock was like a perfume. And the people! The pride in them as they looked and never looked away. For the first time in a long while I saw myself again, reflected in their eyes.

That’s it, my story. Why do I tell it to you? Not so that you may feel sorry for me. No. But because that day you came home — the very first time, when you brought your new man and your babies, I saw in you a glimpse of something that brought the memories of that time back. Not in a bad way. Not in a way that hurt, but rather an echo of something I have known. I watched you then, and I have been watching you ever since. At that time you were nervous, smiling and laughing maybe too much, trying too hard in front of your husband and your children, your fingers fluttering like butterflies in front of your mouth. And the same again when you came back to us a few weeks ago. Until yesterday when you came out, for once not wearing one of those T-shirts that show your nipples, but in a gown Aunt Serah let you borrow.

And today you asked me to braid your hair. All that combing and fussing with those hair creams that have to be imported from America had become too much trouble, you told me — here, with only river water to wash your hair. So I plaited your hair, just as I did when you were a small girl, me on a stool, you sitting between my knees. And while I worked the strands I let you listen to my story.

And now I look at the change in you and I feel happy. For I know what it is to forget who you are. To feel the pieces falling away. To look for yourself and see only the stares of strangers. To search for yourself in circles until you’re exhausted. And I wonder if my story means something to you. If perhaps what happened to me, little by little, isn’t the same thing you felt happening to you. The very thing that brought you back home.

12 Serah, 1978: The Dream

Well, this story is no secret. Heaven knows, there are no secrets in this town.

Congosa! Gossip. It’s what people here do all the time, because they can’t be bothered to work. They stick their noses into other people’s business and think they know it all, but of course they don’t.

The truth is we were the envy of the whole country. Because we were the dream, did you know that? Every parent prays for a special child, and then suddenly — a whole generation of us. As though some maleka, some angel somewhere up above had tripped and scattered her load of blessings all at once. We were the gilded ones. We went this way and that, flying on the wings of our dreams. Me to England. Yaya first to Germany to study design and then architecture in England. We did not miss what we were leaving behind, when we kissed each other goodbye there were no tears. Only Ya Memso cried a little to see us go, but even then there were more tears of joy mixed up with the tears of sadness.

Neither of us looked back at the old, only forward to the vision of the new.

People will always say women forget the pain of childbirth, which is strange because I remember it perfectly clearly. What you do forget, utterly, is why you once loved somebody. The physical pleasures, the joy of a newborn, the disappointments, the betrayals, these things you can remember — but when love itself is gone, it vanishes without a trace. It leaves nothing behind.

When I think about Ambrose now, all I can really remember is his voice.

He had a way of speaking. He would tell me I was beautiful. ‘You aah beautiful,’ a long exhaled sound, like a sigh, as though he couldn’t quite believe it himself. Often, when he spoke on the telephone the person at the other end didn’t realise they were talking to a black man. He was particularly proud of that. And then there was the way he dressed, so stylish and so neat; when I first met him I thought he must be from Senegal or another of those French places.

There was a black American girl on our course. African American as they say now. She liked to hang around the African students, and when she talked everything was ‘black this’ and ‘black that’. She called me sister. ‘Sistah’. That’s the way she said it. For some reason it made me giggle, even though I liked the way it sounded. I didn’t think like her. We didn’t think like her. We hadn’t reached that place yet. To be honest, I’m not sure we ever did.

She told me I walked like a queen. I longed to be Carmen Jones. I took up smoking: Sobranie Cocktails, with gold tips and pastelcoloured papers; spent hours hot-combing my hair in the same style as Dorothy Dandridge. Later I changed and had an Afro, because by then they were all the rage. People told me I looked just like Cleopatra Jones.

Well, Ambrose certainly treated me like a queen. When we went out he would hold doors open for me to walk through. If I was carrying a parcel he would insist on taking it from me. He invited me to eat in restaurants where he called for the wine list and talked to the waiters without bothering to look at them. When the food came, those same waiters served me first, only coming to Ambrose second. And he behaved as though this was the way it should be, and I pretended I was used to it although the opposite was true. The way I was raised, only after all the men had eaten did the women sit down to share what was left. And it was the women who fetched the water and carried the heavy loads.

I loved him so much I even used to buy Ambrosia Creamed Rice. Just for the name. Bloated, sweetened, milky grains: nothing like rice at all.

These are the things I remember. As for the rest, the years — like an army of silverfish — have eaten them away.

Some months after we met we spent a weekend in Lyme Regis. Ambrose had promised to show me Venice. ‘Show you Venice,’ he had said, and the words slid off his tongue. Of course I knew he had never been there, but what did it matter? The way he spoke made me believe in him. It would have been impossible for us to travel, we were overseas scholarship students, we would have needed visas. Still, for a few weeks I let myself dream about it.

In Lyme Regis a family dressed in oilskins, slick as seals, watched as I waded into the sea. Underfoot the pebbles were slippery, the water so cold it made my ankles ache; I waved to Ambrose standing in his polished brogues and sheepskin jacket on the shore. Back at the guest house, where the hall smelled of smoked fish and the sweet-sherry odour of elderly English people, I warmed my hands and feet against the clanking radiator in our room and later my feet were swollen, shiny and itching. In the mornings we lay together in bed until we heard the woman who ran the place banging on the door, insisting we let the maid in to clean the room.

That’s as much as I remember about Lyme Regis. The greasy feel of the rain, the ceaseless rolling of the ocean, the metallic taste of stewed tea and the guest house owner hurrying along our love-making. I didn’t know it at the time, but by then I was already pregnant.

I spent far too much money on the wedding cake. Three tiers, with a little model bride and groom on the top. The bride had ridged, yellow hair and blue dots for eyes, the groom’s face was a pink splodge under a slick of black. Ambrose laughed, joking they didn’t look much like us. Still I had set my heart on such a cake.

I changed my name to his. It had become the fashionable thing to do among African women, to take our husbands’ names. Now, of course, your generation are all busy holding on to their fathers’ names, to show how emancipated you all are. Well, then, it was the other way around. To the African way of thinking, we took our husbands’ names to show how sophisticated, how Westernised we were. And most of all how different from our own mothers who kept the names they were born with all their lives.

Ya Memso wasn’t happy about the marriage. She didn’t think Ambrose’s uncles were serious people, the way they behaved over the bride gift, you know. By all accounts my father was most exacting, because by then I was an educated woman. Ambrose’s family didn’t like that, not at all. They were city people, they thought they were doing us a favour. They were already vexed at having to travel all the way up to the provinces. In their view my father was a bumpkin with too many wives and far too many children.

So Ya Memso walked all the way to town and hired a letter-writer. Then she carried the letter to the post office. But she had no address for me in England. What to do? The clerk standing behind the plywood counter smiled and took her money. It was a small matter, he assured her, he would look it up. And she believed him. Went away comforted in the knowledge that the addresses of everybody in the whole world were contained within one giant ledger.

It happened that once a month the overseas students gathered at the registrar’s office in the university to collect their Government grants. One such day everybody received a brown envelope with their name in the window as usual, with the exception of Ambrose and the other students from our country. At first nobody worried. Some kind of a mistake. But the next day Ambrose returned home empty-handed, and the next.

Four days later one of the students appeared in the common room with a newspaper. On an inside page was a short article, just a paragraph, and a photograph above. The picture was of a crowd gathered outside the closed doors of our own national bank building. Even given the bad quality of the picture, you could just make out the angry expressions on the faces of the waiting people, the blank looks of the security guards and, at a window of one of the upper floors, the managers looking out.

I had given up my postgraduate course once Junior was born. Now I went to work at the Lyons Coffee Shop, in order that Ambrose could finish his own studies. It was mindless work. But once I had worked out how to fill the teapots with hot water from the spout of the machine that hissed and spat without scalding myself, it suited me. I liked the drift of people, the banter among the other girls, the paper bags of teacakes we were given at the end of the day and ate for breakfast in the morning.

There was a game they played among themselves, surreptitiously, mindful of the manager who would have sacked them if he had overheard. A man would come in and they would award him points out of ten. Whoever had the highest score won a date with him. Not really, of course. But they would go on to describe the evening, where they might go, what they would wear, imagine what this man they didn’t even know was like. These were their dreams. To ride with a man in a car. To be taken up town to the theatre. I thought their dreams very small indeed. To the customers I might seem the same as these girls but I told myself my destiny was far greater. I thought I was better than them.

As a rule I was not included in this game.

‘What about him, then?’ Jeanette said to me once, picking at a lipstick-stained strip of skin on her lower lip. But before I could reply Shona gave her a nudge:

‘She can’t …’ she hissed.

‘Why ever not?’ Jeanette frowned.

‘Well …’ Shona pulled a face and stretched her eyes wide, looking at Jeanette all the time. Jeanette gazed back blankly. Shona wavered, only for a moment. ‘She’s married!’ She sounded relieved when she said that. But of course I knew this wasn’t the reason. Grace played, she was married.

Shona was a stupid girl, too stupid to worry about. Another day she tried to make amends, pointing to a man on the far side of the room: ‘Look, love. There’s one for you.’ The man, a black man, was sitting at a table in a windowless corner of the room. He was alone. On the table in front of him lay a pair of gloves and a folded newspaper. He was writing, scribbling furiously, in a notepad. I was silent, not speaking for a long time. Beside me Shona shuffled, a tickle of discomfort. ‘I don’t mean just because …’

Still I didn’t answer her. I was staring at that man, feeling everything around me, the lights, the noise, grow faint. Even the sound of Shona’s voice. I stepped out from behind the counter and walked across the room, without bothering to pick up a pad or collect a menu. I stood in front of the table where he was sitting, my hands by my sides, until he looked up at me.

‘Hello,’ I said softly. At that he stood up suddenly, pushing back his chair so that it fell over. I didn’t try to catch it and neither did he. Instead we took a step towards each other.

‘Hello,’ said Janneh.

So that was how we found one another again. Seventeen years had passed. Janneh walked me home at the end of the shift. Night-time was coming, bringing with it the cold. I pushed my hands into the pockets of my thin coat. In England my hands and feet were always, always cold. Even in what passed for summer. Without a word Janneh removed his gloves and handed them to me, and I slipped my fingers into the warm place inside.

Janneh was working as a journalist. He was in England for a short time only, looking for a second-hand Linotype printing press. He planned to set up an independent newspaper: ‘A free press, you know. One the Government can’t control.’ I smiled, even though what he was saying was serious. I remembered that about him, the way he punctuated his conversation with certain phrases. ‘You know,’ was one of them.

At home I invited Janneh to stay and eat with us. Ambrose would be back soon. So Janneh accepted and squeezed in next to me in the tiny kitchen, peeling onions while I squeezed lemons for chicken yassa. When he asked me my news, I told it to him, including how I came to be working at the Lyons Coffee Shop. Ambrose joined us, we fitted the extra leaf in the table in the sitting room and sat down, and for the first time I heard about the things that were happening back home.

Government ministers who built houses high on the hill. Houses with east and west wings, pillared porches and glass chandeliers. On the outside homeless people built their little panbodies against the high walls. The wives of these big men drove around in shining Mercedes, frequently flew out of the country with their husbands on official business, shopped and slept between Egyptian cotton sheets in smart hotels. Meanwhile the price of rice climbed higher every day. People went to withdraw their savings from the bank and found they were refused their own money. The poorest souls walked around with swollen stomachs and feverish eyes.

These were the things Janneh wrote about in his newspaper column. He discovered and published the official salaries of the Government ministers and demanded to know how they could afford to live so well. He worked late into the night, alone in his office, sometimes only returning home to change his clothes. Once he pushed open the door of his flat in the small hours to find men in safari suits and smooth-soled shoes searching through his belongings. Janneh waved his arms and shouted at them. They set upon him in a flurry of punches, winded him and broke one of his ribs. It still hurt him to breathe.

Some days later his editor had called him in. Janneh’s boss was a good man, a widower with three daughters whom he loved. Janneh noticed his editor kept glancing at the framed photograph on his desk, how he never looked Janneh in the eye. He told Janneh he was working too hard, gave him a six-month sabbatical. Janneh cleared his desk, he knew he would never be able to go back.

‘Thank you, that was very good indeed.’ Janneh lay down his knife and fork and smiled at me. ‘We need people, you know,’ he continued, this time switching his gaze to Ambrose. ‘Educated people, but most of all good people.’

I carried the empty plates into the kitchen and set them in the sink. I heard Ambrose offer Janneh another beer. Janneh declined, he continued talking: ‘People who understand the world. People with experience. People who know what needs to be done.’

The pineapple I had bought two days before was ripe. I found a knife, sliced off the ends, then I cut diagonally into the skin. The pineapples in England were so small, I often wondered where they came from. Ambrose still hadn’t spoken.

‘Well, what do you say?’ Janneh again, addressing him directly this time. I waited for Ambrose to say something. Something that would tell Janneh he was a person who knew how to do what was right.

‘So what are you saying? I mean how exactly do you plan to go about this? Are you going to take over the Government?’ Ambrose was using questions to answer questions. It was something he did to avoid giving a reply, I knew. He did it whenever we had a disagreement, especially when he knew I was right. It was a lawyer’s trick. Round and round, I scored deeply into the pineapple’s flesh.

‘Of course not,’ Janneh laughed lightly, grew serious again. ‘But we need to draw the people’s attention to what is happening. These guys are lining their pockets, man. Grabbing what they can while they’re in office. And it’s our money. Yours. Mine. Everybody’s.’

‘And you think they’re just going to stop because you say so?’ Ambrose was refusing to budge.

‘Not because I say so. Listen, we have to get out there and inform the people. Once they know what’s going on, that their future is being stolen … The newspaper is just the beginning. We can’t take this lying down.’

I glanced up, I could just see Ambrose leaning back in his chair, Janneh was hunched over the table. Ambrose had his hands clasped across his chest. Janneh seemed to be worrying at an imaginary spot on the table surface. Ambrose was shaking his head in mock weariness. Oh, how I wanted to run over and seize him by the shoulders. To yell at him, for God’s sake! I raised the knife and cut the pineapple into slices.

‘Janneh, dear fellow, I don’t want to disappoint you but the trouble with the black man is that he just isn’t ready to govern himself yet. He hasn’t learned how. And frankly, I’m not sure he’s up to the job. The same thing is happening everywhere.’

‘Precisely!’ said Janneh, pointing his finger in the air. ‘The very reason we must act now.’

Ambrose let his chair tip forward. ‘Open your eyes, my friend. Look around you!’ he said. ‘Just name me one country, one country on that whole damned continent that has made a success of itself since the white man left and I’ll join you tomorrow. But you can’t, can you? And do you want me to tell you why? Because none of them have!’

And with that he leaned back again, as though the discussion was over.

All the time Ambrose was speaking I grew more and more ashamed. Dismissing Janneh as though he were a teenage hothead. I admit, I used to be impressed by his lawyerly language, the way he could handle anybody with his clever words. I carried through the pineapple, three plates and three forks. Ambrose was smiling, not showing his teeth but with the ends of his mouth turned up, still swollen with self-importance. Janneh had stopped fiddling and sat staring at his hands on the table in front of him. For a moment he looked defeated. Then he raised his head and faced Ambrose squarely. When he spoke his voice was low, the inflection contained in a single word.

‘None of us, Ambrose. None of us.’

And I saw my husband shrivel up and shrink, right there before my eyes.

After Janneh had gone, Ambrose and I lay side by side on the divan, not touching, cold under the nylon quilt. Ambrose was still awake. I could tell by his breathing, and by the fact he was lying too still. That meant he was brooding.

‘You know, you ought to warn that friend of yours he’ll end up behind bars,’ Ambrose said eventually, speaking into the dark. ‘You mark my words. He’s looking for trouble in the easiest place to find it. They’ll lock him up and they’ll throw away the key.’

And with those words he rolled away from me.

A friend of mine once was ill. I remember I went to visit her at a time when she must already have been sick. Her skin was luminous, her eyes shone, when she smiled she showed pink gums and white teeth, her hair was braided into thick plaits. In every way she appeared as beautiful as before. But the disease was eating her from within. When she brushed her teeth her gums bled. Her teeth were loose. The plaits were all that held her hair close to her scalp and when she undid them, it fell out in great clumps. She told nobody how ill she was. Gradually those closest to her noticed the changes, but they said nothing. Her flesh wasted away, her teeth fell out and she tied a cloth round her balding head. Still she refused to admit to her illness or go to the doctor and though her family, her friends, even strangers saw that she was dying, nobody said out loud what had become evident to them all.

That was the way it was with this country. Those who noticed refused to speak of it, as though they feared that to do so would make it real. Others drank and danced, partied into the night as though tomorrow was a long way away. And so it seemed as if everything was fine.

When I first arrived back all I thought about was how much I had missed it. There’s a beauty about this place, one that cannot even be imagined. How small a hummingbird truly is! I sat on the verandah of our new bungalow and watched a tiny, shimmering bird flit from flower to flower before coming to land on the stamen of a scarlet hibiscus, as though it were a tree branch. Under the bird’s weight, the stalk merely bowed, the petals quivered as he disappeared into the hollow. A moment later I watched him fly away, a blur of beating wings. The giant fan palm in the garden, its leaves spread out like a peacock’s tail. The lustrous evening light, the colour of mother-of-pearl. These were the things I saw.

I travelled upcountry to visit my home and left money with Ya Namina to pay the doctor’s bills for my father. A month later Ya Memso came to stay, bringing with her all the contents of my marriage box. I saw how round her eyes grew to see the way Ambrose and I lived, with indoor toilets and hot water pouring straight into a tub and glass windows that closed out the rain and the dust, but allowed the sun inside. The manager at the coffee shop had given me a farewell gift, a bonus on my last day. I kept it until we were on our way home to tell Ambrose. How delighted he was, hugging me and lifting me up off my feet to swing me around. He put it down as a deposit on a Volkswagen and promised he would teach me to drive.

Ambrose said there was no reason for me to work, and so I stayed at home with Junior and little Yaya, who was born soon after we returned. I enjoyed myself, why not? Though sometimes I wondered what the years of study had been for. Every morning I waved goodbye to Ambrose as he drove to his job in the Attorney-General’s office where he was helping to draft new Acts of Parliament. I made friends among the wives of Ambrose’s colleagues and spent my days visiting, going from house to house. I would sit in their parlours, being served cold drinks by the houseboy, eating honeyed sesame cakes and roasted groundnuts while our husbands worked late.

Hannah, my dear friend Hannah, had never married. She never did go to study in England, despite her father’s connections which should have been enough to secure her a Government grant. Instead she had taken a shorthand and typing course at the Young Women’s Christian Association and as it turned out was working as a legal secretary at the Attorney-General’s office. In the evenings Hannah would come around and we would hide away in the bedroom I shared with Ambrose. She would try on my clothes and my shoes, which were far too big for her and afterwards we would lie on the bed giggling like schoolgirls again. ‘You have found a man who really knows how to look after you!’ she teased me. ‘Why don’t you find one for me?’ And she wore my shoes to work with paper stuffed into the toes.

It bothered me that Ambrose did not take to Hannah. There were times I found myself defending her. One evening as I sat with Ambrose I suggested to him perhaps I might take a job. After a few months I had begun to find the gossiping and endless keeping company dull, I needed more to fill my days. Ambrose wouldn’t hear of it.

‘You’re a decent woman, Serah,’ he told me. ‘Why do you want to be like those girls? Men don’t respect them. With those tight clothes they wear and that stuff smeared on their faces.’

I bridled at that: ‘You mean like Hannah?’ I retorted. But Ambrose only told me not to be so ridiculous.

It occurred to me Ambrose had never objected to me working when we were in England, but I pushed the thought to the furthest place in my mind. And, if I’m honest with you, I didn’t really know what I wanted. Part of me was pleased Ambrose wanted me to stay at home. Ya Memso and my father’s wives, always so busy with their gardens or else harvesting coffee or taking food to the workers. Ya Namina balancing the books. My mother’s hands, the stained crescents of her cuticles. Sometimes I imagined I was one of those women on television in England, with a carpet sweeper and children I fed on instant pink desserts, and a pet who dined on food that came in special tins.

So you see, this is how I was thinking when I came home. I was thinking in a small way. I had forgotten Janneh’s warnings. I bought food for the table with the new money with the President’s face on it, but did not notice the prices because Ambrose’s salary was enough to cover our needs. At the post office I bought stamps with the same man’s face on them. The world’s first self-adhesive postage stamp was invented in this country. Did you know that? Some countries produced the smallpox vaccine. The atom bomb. Canned peas. Permanent press cotton. The microchip. We had flower stamps. Bird stamps. Stamps in the shape of diamonds. Country-shaped stamps. Stamps in the shape of the continent. One with a small hippopotamus who lived only in our swamps. Stamps that required no licking. Stamps with the President’s face on them. Yes, we would be remembered for our stamps.

At the time I did not think things could be so bad if we had new stamps and our very own new money.

It’s true there were occasional power cuts and the drainage in the city was poor, the smell sometimes drifting into the house. I planted frangipani between the fig trees, beautiful pink frangipani. I picked the blooms and floated them in bowls of water and placed them all around the house. And soon all you could smell was the scent of those flowers.

* * *

One thing I forgot to mention, I saw my mother again. I mean just that, literally — I saw her. On my way back to the city from travelling north to see Ya Memso and my father. It was at the junction of the roads heading north, south, east and west. At the time I was sure it was her, passing through the crowd. She didn’t see me. So many people were gathered around the car, some selling, others simply staring. A private vehicle was still a rarity in those days. People were curious. Just as we had been, Yaya and me, that time when we went to the East with her and we travelled in a truck and chased shiny cars up and down the streets of the mining town.

My heart thumped hard inside my ribs. I told the driver to wait, got out of the car, and stepped towards her, but a woman carrying a tray of fish upon her head passed in front of me. The fish were packed into tight circles with all the care of a flower arrangement, their mouths open, pointed at the sky as though they were catching raindrops. For a few moments my view was blocked and when the way was clear again, my mother was gone. I craned my neck, searching for her among the people changing buses, but I couldn’t find her again.

All the way home I wondered what I might have said to her. What kind of life was she leading? Did she even know I was back home?

Then I decided maybe it hadn’t been her at all. Just a woman with the same look. Why, I probably wouldn’t even recognise her now. By the time I was in front of the gates of my house I had decided I had been mistaken.

Ambrose’s work kept him late at the office on many evenings. There were times when I was already asleep by the time he came home. The lawyers in his office were labouring around the clock drafting the new constitution to turn us into a republic. It was important work.

One evening he arrived home bringing a friend of his, a townsmate whom he had happened upon in the street. I don’t mind telling you that from the very start there was something about this man that I didn’t like. He sweated and wiped his forehead with a flannel he kept in his pocket. He wore a suit, shiny at the lapels. And shoes made from two types of leather like a Nigerian pastor. He held on to my hand for too long and pushed his face into mine, his breath was sour and the look he gave me was of hunger mixed with something knowing.

It was a Thursday, the servants’ day off. I went to the fridge and fetched cold beers, poured some nuts into a dish along with some of Ambrose’s favourite fried dough pieces and carried them out to where the two of them sat at the front of the house.

How this man liked to talk! And to drink. Several beers were downed, Ambrose went to fetch a bottle of Scotch and set it on the table. I watched as the man filled his glass right up to the brim. I tried to replace the bottle with a bowl of cashew nuts, but he waved at me to put it back. Time passed with no indication of when he might be leaving. We sat side by side on the settee watching him drink, until Ambrose was obliged to invite him to eat with us. I whispered into Ambrose’s ear there was no food. Ambrose’s erratic hours meant he had taken to eating on his way home. I ate with the children. It was too late now to start cooking.

’OK, we’ll go out.‘ Ambrose picked up his friend’s jacket just as the man poured himself a third glass of whisky.

‘What? Hey! Out you say? But I am very comfortable here. This is a fine place you have.’

Ambrose apologised, explaining there was nothing to eat. His friend belched and laughed, a big laugh, fat with scorn.

‘Let your woman cook some rice for us. What do you think a wife is for, my man? Or don’t you know? Maybe you’d like me to tell you.’ This time his laugh was harsh: a coarse, dry cough.

Well, I’m sure you can guess by now Ambrose didn’t like to be mocked. Who does, after all? I would have felt better if he’d told his friend to watch how he spoke in front of me, but instead he tossed the man’s jacket towards him.

‘Come on. We’ll get some roast meat.’ He turned to leave, without looking once at me, though the set of his jaw betrayed his mood.

But his friend was too drunk to notice. I saw him clap Ambrose on the shoulder as he staggered out, heard him teasing Ambrose about what a spoiled wife I was. ‘Is that what they teach you in England?’

And that laugh. ‘Heh! Heh!’ All the way down the lane.

I sat in the house listening to that laugh, like a bad odour, mingling with the smell of the frangipani. I went to the bathroom and took a cigarette from the packet of 555s I kept wedged behind the cabinet. Ambrose, who once used to light my cigarettes with a lighter he kept in his pocket, now forbade me to smoke.

I remember my grandmother once made a joke at my expense soon after I made her buy me a pair of new shoes, too tight because I had been in so much of a hurry to possess them. She had caught me hobbling around the house as I tried to walk in them. ‘Who knows how much a pretty pair of shoes pinch, except the person wearing them?’ she said, because I was always wanting something more, something that somebody else had, and this saying now fitted my predicament in more ways than one. My grandmother laughed some more.

The grass is always greener, I suppose that’s the nearest saying. Or perhaps it’s about appearances and how they can be deceptive. Or does it really mean be careful what you wish for? Perhaps it means whatever it needs to mean, some combination of all three. The truth is I did not care for who I was. I closed my eyes and made a wish. The wish came true. I closed my eyes and made another wish, and that came true, too. So I kept my eyes closed and kept on wishing.

Come to think about it, the old shoes were soft and made of canvas. The saying must have been invented later.

The point is, I had nobody to turn to. My grandmother had passed on years before. Even if she had still been alive what did she or Ya Memso or even my mother know of the way we lived now?

Those days Ambrose was so busy he still hadn’t got around to teaching me to drive. When he found out I was riding the poda podas he told me I should take taxis instead. What would people think? But taxis were expensive and the truth is I liked the minibuses. I liked the rattle of the day’s talk in my ears. I liked the dense scent of sweat from a hard day’s work. Gradually I learned what hardships people bore by the things they joked about. A woman so fat the bus boy charged her for two places was comforted by a passenger who reassured her she would soon be as thin as everyone else. A market woman pushed her nose in the air and imitated the voice of our first lady, her friends laughed until they noticed the man on the back seat watching them through narrowed eyes, and one by one fell silent. ‘We’d all run away from this place if we could,’ to a girl whose fiancé had jilted her and gone to live in another country. Even through her tears, the abandoned girl agreed.

One Friday in the late afternoon I was returning home from Fula Town. I had to switch buses at the big roundabout in the centre of town near Government House, close to Ambrose’s office, and I was waiting there for a poda poda headed west. I was thinking idle thoughts, listening to the music of the bus boys calling the different destinations, when I saw Ambrose drive towards me. What luck! I thought, perhaps he had time to quickly drop me home. I stepped off the kerb and waved, the sun was in my eyes, I shielded them with one hand and carried on waving with the other, but Ambrose didn’t see me. The car, in the middle of the traffic, swept on by. Too bad. I shrugged. I stepped back on to the pavement, but just as I did I heard the slow wail of a siren starting up. A policeman raised a white gloved hand, the traffic came to a standstill. At the top of the hill the President’s convoy came into view.

I looked this way and that for the car. Ambrose was on the other side of the roundabout. If I was quick I could just make it. I began to hurry over. But as I wove through the cars I saw I had been mistaken. The driver of the car was a woman. Though I couldn’t see her face, I could see her hands resting on the steering wheel. And yet again the car was identical in every way to our own. I paused, I checked the number plate. No, I had not been mistaken. It was our car. So who could be driving it, if not Ambrose?

The policeman lowered his arm, the cars moved forward. The sun was behind me, reflecting off the chrome of the cars, lighting up their darkened interiors. The traffic gathered pace, the profile of the driver came into view, and briefly she turned her face towards me. It was Hannah.

At home I smoked three 555s in a row. I was angry, yes. But I felt sure there was an explanation, I just did not think it was right a man’s wife should use common people’s transport while her friend drove about in the man’s car. I hadn’t even known Hannah could drive.

I was angry, yes. Suspicious? Not so much. I did not reckon on Ambrose’s reply:

‘You are my wife and Hannah will never be a threat to you.’ Those were his words. I stared at him, my brain felt sluggish and cold. Then it dawned on me — Ambrose was confessing to an affair.

Afterwards I realised he couldn’t help himself. I don’t mean about sleeping with Hannah. I mean in telling me. There had been no tears, no threats or recriminations. I hadn’t even had time to think such a dreadful thought, let alone utter it. And the expression on his face: it told not of shame, or fear or even guilt.

‘Now Serah,’ he had said in his lawyer’s tones. ‘Now Serah. You must understand. This is Africa. We are in Africa now. And I am an African man. That’s just the way it is.’

No, Ambrose hadn’t been confessing at all. Not at all. He’d been boasting!

I heard about it all in the months that followed. Everything. The gossips made sure of that. The shop where Hannah charged new clothes and shoes to Ambrose’s account, the bars they visited, and the parties Ambrose’s face-wiping friend took him to. Parties where men brought girls like Hannah. Parties for men like Ambrose — men who wanted the best of both worlds.

Hannah’s place was up on the hill and she was not at home when I arrived. The houseboy let me in and showed me into her tiny sitting room. A moment later I heard him at the back of the house, pounding clothes in the basin under the standpipe.

I only meant to talk to Hannah. To sort the matter out. I had even rehearsed what I was going to say, up to a point anyway. I had made a vow not to allow myself to ask details of their betrayal, I’d heard enough already. No, I would take care to talk to her as a friend, we would both behave in a dignified manner. I wasn’t the first woman to find myself in this position, and I wouldn’t be the last. But there was no question of allowing Hannah to continue to see Ambrose. None at all.

I smoothed my skirt and sat down in a low chair. It was some months since I’d been in Hannah’s flat. I wondered what she earned and whether Ambrose was giving her money as well as gifts. The minutes passed. I stood up and wandered about a bit, going over my lines in my head. Back and forth. On the table at the other end of the room was a pile of Hannah’s belongings. I caught a glimpse of a record: Orchestre Bella Bella, a Congolese band. I owned exactly the same record, except it occurred to me I hadn’t seen my own copy in a while.

Outside the pounding had ceased. I heard footsteps: the click of heels on concrete. I spun around. I could hear Hannah’s footfall along the exterior wall of the house. Suddenly I was unprepared. I didn’t want her to see me when she passed the window. I moved and stood beside the door, where I would be ready to greet her when she came in. In my haste I brushed against an umbrella standing there, flustered now I reached out and caught it before it hit the floor. I stood with my back to the wall holding the umbrella in front of me. Outside I could hear Hannah rummaging in her bag for the keys. I tried to prop the umbrella in its place and as I did I glanced down at it.

James Smith & Sons. On New Oxford Street. I still remember the look in Ambrose’s eyes when I gave it to him on his first day at the Inns of Court. He had opened it in the living room and twirled it around and around, even though I warned him it was bad luck. It was raining the morning he set off, a soft drizzle. He had clicked his heels and sung a chorus from ‘Singin’ in the Rain’; it was so unlike him, so endearing, I laughed and embraced him. He kissed me in return and promised to cherish it always.

The door opened.

Am I proud of what I did? At the time, no. I was angry. I wasn’t proud of myself, I was miserable. Only later I became defiant. Am I proud now? Well, now you’re asking. Now I’m thinking back on it. Yes, actually. I believe I am.

I hit her. Again and again. Oh, what a noise she made as she went down. She begged me to stop. But I didn’t stop. I beat her the way you beat a snake, to make sure it’s dead. And maybe I would have killed her if the houseboy hadn’t heard the palava and come running. He caught my raised hand. ‘Stop, Ma. I beg.’ So softly, it brought me to my senses. And ever so gently he removed the umbrella from my hand.

I had spent my whole life trying not to be like my mother. I had taken the opposite path and hurried along it, all the time looking over my shoulder instead of ahead, so that I failed to see how the path curved back again in the same direction.

When a woman is thrown out by her husband, there aren’t many places for her to go. Ambrose said I had humiliated him, by playing into the hands of the gossips. That might come as a surprise to your way of thinking, but it’s true. In the city appearances were the thing that mattered most. I had caused us to lose face; next to that Ambrose’s fidelity was unimportant. Of the two of us, it seemed, I was the one who was in the wrong.

So there. No home. No husband. No job. The first person I went to was my sister Mary. And she was there for me, just as I had been there for her once, she made space for me and my sons in her tiny room at the Catholic Mission School for the Blind, but it was clear we couldn’t stay there long. What I’ve learned, though, is that luck likes to stay out of sight until she’s needed. Ya Memso had not seen my mother for many years, since before I left to go to England. From the time I married up until that day she had held on to my mother’s share of my bride price. Well, the marriage was over, so she gave it to me to rent a place until I found a job. My qualifications were good, it didn’t take me long. And with the rest of the money Ambrose had given me I paid for driving lessons and in time bought a small car of my own.

So you see, in this way my poor mother, bound to my father by her own bride price, unexpectedly gave me the keys to my freedom.

And do you know what else I think? I think Ambrose was bluffing when he ordered me to leave our house, imagining I would soon beg him to take me back. He didn’t know I was my mother’s daughter. He didn’t know I preferred to make my way alone than live with unhappiness. Yes, Ambrose was wrong about that, just as he was wrong about many things.

There was one thing he was right about, though.

A single issue of Janneh’s newspaper appeared on the streets. The next day the police rounded up all the newspaper vendors and put them in prison. As for Janneh, he simply vanished. His empty car, the headlights dying, was found at a crossroads one morning. Other people disappeared, too. A nursery school teacher here. A city councillor there. A poet ordered down from his crate in the marketplace. One by one, like lights going off all across the city. People talked about a labour camp in another country where the President was a friend of our President. But it was only a rumour. Nobody had ever come back to say whether it was true or not.

As for me, the gossip-mongers soon found new victims to torture with their tongues. Tongues like leather cords, tying a woman down, cutting into her every time she tried to break free. They laughed, not knowing that the last laugh belonged to none of us. Ambrose spent his days at the Attorney-General’s office drafting new laws to take away our freedom little by little. And they never even noticed, they were too busy tittle-tattling. But one day they would find out what some of us already knew. That the reality was not so brightly coloured as the dream. That the dream no longer existed, maybe had never existed. It was all just a rainbow-coloured hallucination.

And when you reached out to touch it, your hand went straight through to the other side.

13 Asana, 1985: Mambore

When I was a child Karabom warned me of the dangers of breaking the rules. I must be careful not to trespass in the sacred forest, she said, or the men who belonged to the secret society would snatch me and take me away and I would not see my mother for a long, long time. This was what happened to children who played truant, or who went wandering alone in forbidden places.

I heard these warnings all my life. Sometimes they came to town, the members of this fearsome order — to stir our terror in case, untended, it congealed into something resilient. Women and children ran away to hide, we were not even allowed to gaze upon them. Such was the power of the society, even the chiefs obeyed them for in times of peril it was the society we looked to for protection. For centuries people feared them even more than they came to fear the army.

Another day Karabom had warned me against keeping bad company. Two girls were walking home, she told me. One a girl of noble birth. The other a girl from a disreputable family, the kind of people who move from village to village like nomads. She had grown up doing as she pleased, disregarded her chores and never learned to cook. On their way they passed a place where the society men were busy in the forest. They could tell this by the tools left lying at the side of the path, among them the tortoiseshell drum they beat to warn people of their approach. The errant girl picked it up and, despite the protests of her friend, banged on it loudly, laughing wildly as she did so. Within moments they were surrounded by masked men, who carried them away deep into the forest. They were not seen for a year or more. Even the wealthy father, with all his connections, could not find his daughter or free her from the men of the secret society.

‘What happened to them?’ I wanted to know.

‘Who?’ said my grandmother, knowing perfectly well. It meant she was finished with talking.

‘The girls.’

‘I don’t know,’ said my grandmother. ‘It’s not important. They came back, but their chances were ruined. What man would want to marry girls like that?’

The question itched me like an insect bite for a few weeks, and then I forgot it. I was a child after all. Such was the awe in which the society was held that it was forbidden to speak of their doings, but still, there were whispers. I can tell you now the girls were not ravished, nothing like that. The society was an ancient and honourable one. But one that guarded its secrets and demanded respect. Those for whom awe proved insufficient were bound instead by its oaths of allegiance.

Remember when you were a child you used to ask so many questions? La i la! Aunty, what’s this? Aunty, what’s that? Your father spoiled you. Letting you talk too much. He should have used a firmer hand with you, I told him so. But your own children talk even more. Just open their mouths and say the first thing that comes into their heads, doesn’t matter who else is speaking. When I tell them to be quiet, you frown at me. Oh, it’s natural to be curious. How else are they supposed to learn? Aunty, you mustn’t stifle their imagination. And you turn away from your elders to answer the questions of a foolish child.

But sometimes a child learns best by finding their own answers.

Look at this lappa. You see a piece of cloth, isn’t it? Me? I see a head-tie. I see a skirt. I see a sling for a baby. I see a cloth to dry myself. I see a sheet to lay upon my bed. I see a covering for a door or a window. Or this empty tomato puree tin? You would just throw it into the rubbish, eh? But to the girl selling groundnuts here — it’s a cup to measure her sales. To that woman sitting behind her stall, it’s an oil lamp. To our way of thinking there are many ways of looking at the same thing.

Sometimes you think you are trapped. Either you walk one way down the road or the other. A road to the left. A road to the right. Choose, it doesn’t matter which. Neither one is what you want. But sometimes, if you look very closely, you can see the path curling through the trees. Hard to see. But only because nobody has yet trodden it.

Does any of this make sense to you? You think so? That means you don’t understand at all. Maybe I just have to tell you how it happened.

‘No married woman ever bore a bastard.’ Those words of my mother came back to me twenty years after she uttered them, soon after we buried my father.

The year was 1985. I was watching those of his wives who had outlived him still sitting on the mat. Some had even come back from their families to sit there. Not cooking. Not fetching water. Doing no work at all. Spending their days idle while the rest of us waited on them hand and foot. These women would not bear a bastard, it would be a miracle if any of them bore a child at all. Most of them were older than me. But still, we must all pretend to wait and see. They would sit there for a whole other month, while everybody else looked after them. Because this was our custom and it was a very old one. Nobody would challenge it, for fear of being called disrespectful.

Our father lived to be over a hundred years old. He had married eleven women and he was the father of some three dozen children, most of whom were believed to be his. But in the end he died alone. Out in a worker’s hut, surrounded by the forest and close to the fields he had gone out to inspect. He must have felt unwell and lain there to rest. The creatures of the forest found him first. My mother, Ya Namina was away. Ya Isatta should have been in charge, but she was a weak woman and least favoured of all the wives. And since nobody bothered to tell her anything, she thought he had gone to be with one of the others.

The corpse was in an appalling state, the silence surrounding it confirming every suspicion. Still, the elders insisted my father had been dead no more than twelve hours, so like a good Muslim he could be buried the day he died.

Cloths were hung in front of the windows. Photographs of my father displayed on every surface. Two bolts of black calico purchased and transformed into mourning robes. My mother instructed the tailor on the style in order to avert disagreement. She waved away all help, for she had already buried one husband, and by that time so had I.

The day my mother made that remark about married women came soon after the birth of Alpha, my second child. I was still wearing black for my second husband, whom I mourned an entire year because I had loved him a great deal but also because it gave me more time alone. She had watched my belly with narrowed eyes, counting off the months in her head. An afternoon as I sat playing with my new son, she urged me to make myself respectable. In case there were other children waiting to come.

My mother always thought I should have become a head wife like her, to have other wives to do as you say. She could not imagine how a woman could want anything else. But I was not married to my second husband for long enough to go looking for younger wives, even if I had wanted to. My husband was a good man, but too much given to discussing politics. Mostly he argued with his friend Pa Brima, and always both men ended up standing and shouting at each other across the table. Pa Brima was always the first one to sit down. One day, though, he stayed on his feet. My husband was greatly vexed. So much so that he came home still full of anger and sometime during the night choked to death on his own opinion.

That night they had argued over whether everybody deserved a vote. One man, one vote. This was in the days before those sorts of elections. Pa Brima thought it was the most foolish thing he had ever heard. ‘You take some useless youth and you give his opinion the same weight as one of the elders?’ he demanded. Later he blamed himself, wept that he had killed his best friend. I remembered that argument of theirs years later, when we had elections but everybody already knew who would win. All of us with a vote, but nobody to vote for.

After a respectable period, suitors began to appear. Don’t forget, this was a long time ago. I was still a woman many people considered to be attractive. I knew how to dress, how to carry myself. I knew how to keep house. I was still capable of bearing children, that much had been evidenced.

The first man told me all about his many possessions. How many pairs of shoes he possessed, how many shirts. He even owned two Western-style suits as well as many dozens of robes and embroidered tunics. Oh, and so many other things! On his fingers he ticked them off one by one. Leather-bound copy of the Koran: one. Camel hair carpets: three. Electric fans: two. Transistor radio: one. Refrigerator: one. He handed me a picture of himself standing next to the fridge. Only in the photograph the fridge was a painted one, because it had been impossible to carry the real fridge all the way to the photographer’s studio. In my head I saw him one day counting me as one of his possessions. The two of us posing together for a photograph. Me, with flawless matt skin, gazing up at my husband: unblinking eyes, lips parted in a frozen smile, gleaming teeth. A perfect, painted wife.

An old man stared at me through watery eyes, squeezed my breast with trembling fingers and told me to be at his house in the morning.

The sabu who was representing the next suitor gave me one week to make up my mind. She had another prospective bride in mind. After three days she returned and told me to hurry up. Their number two choice was now in receipt of a rival offer.

The fourth man had dead eyes and a shadow that seemed to follow him, hovering behind his shoulder. When he sat down he was entirely still, all except for his leg, which jigged up and down as though it had a life of its own.

I turned them all down, but it seemed as though every time I answered the door another one fell over the threshold.

* * *

Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay did not sit on the mat. They stayed only a few days and returned to the house they had continued to share in Rofathane, coming back to help with the preparations for the forty-day ceremony.

I watched how alike the two sisters had grown over the years. Throwing their heads back and clapping their hands when they laughed and they laughed easily, the same phrases, in the same lilting voice, the same gesture, wiping sweat from their foreheads with the insides of their wrists.

Their father had been counsellor to the chief of a neighbouring chieftaincy. Jeneba and Sallay were the daughters of the same wife, belly sisters. Jeneba the eldest by about thirteen years. Their mother died before Sallay was old enough to remember her. And though she was wet-nursed by another of the wives, it was Jeneba who cared for her sister. Carried her everywhere, played with her, plaited her hair, bathed her and slept with her at night — like a favourite doll. Nobody called Sallay by her name, instead they called her Baby Jeneba. Jeneba’s marriage to my father was a dynastic one, agreed by the families. When the time came for Jeneba to leave for her new home, Sallay ran after the hammock bearing her sister away. She ran and ran until somebody picked her up and carried her back. She would not stay, so they tethered her to a tree by one leg like a goat. The child sat down and refused to eat or drink, or speak. Nobody had ever witnessed such stubbornness in one so young. Some wondered if she wasn’t one of those children who could exist on nothing but air. Whatever, if she took no food or water she would become a spirit one way or the other. The trouble was that every time they untied her, she ran away down the path and into the trees to find her sister.

So they sent her to live with Jeneba. Such arrangements were not uncommon. When Sallay reached marriage age, the two sisters wept anew at the thought of being separated. So another solution was found. Sallay became my father’s wife.

While I searched for ways to forestall my fate, my daughter seized her own destiny. She had chosen her husband: a young man from a family of bakers, softly spoken as a result of a cleft in his palate. Towards me he kept his eyes lowered, but when he looked at Kadie his gaze burned with such intensity I half expected to see my daughter swallowed up in flames. He brought her sculptures made from dough. One was fashioned as a pair of doves, another a cat curled up asleep. As his wooing grew more determined so the sculptures became more elaborate: a deer standing between the trees, a man and a woman sitting side by side, a nest of baby birds.

Kadie showed no interest in the wedding plans, was heedless of the negotiations over her bride gift. Whenever I showed her swatches of cloth she yawned and kissed me. ‘Whatever you think, mother,’ she said, before changing the subject back to her beloved.

One evening as I looked at my daughter, I thought for the first time how much the nature of love had changed, so much so it was almost unrecognisable.

And then I shook the thought out of my head, because I was her mother and, after all, one of us had to be practical.

The stores in the city sold cloth far superior to any in our town. I stared at the towering piles of folded cloth behind the shop owner. So many to choose from! She was wearing a heavy woven cotton of dark red, shot with gold thread and the highest headdress I had ever seen. I decided to ask her advice.

‘What is the occasion?’ she asked me.

I told her: my daughters wedding ashobi.

‘Come.’ She moved out from behind the counter, beckoning me over. From a glass-fronted cabinet on the other side of the room she pulled out bolts of the finest fabric I had ever seen.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, fingering an edge. Printed on two sides, too.

‘Sheku lappa,’ she said, ‘from Nigeria.’

It was a hot day, she clapped her hands for two glasses of water while we settled down to make a deal. Many dozens of yards of fabric were required to make ashobi outfits for everybody. In the time it took to agree a price we talked of many things. I learned how she travelled to Lagos and brought back the cloth herself. How her shop was the first of three stores she planned. Another in the North and then the South. In time, outlets in the East and West as well. Hours passed before we concluded our business, both of us delaying the time when we would arrive at an agreement and our conversation would come to an end. I decided I liked this woman. I liked her broad, flat face, which was honest — especially for a shop owner. We exchanged names and parted company, but I thought about our conversation for a long time. After the wedding I left Alpha with my mother and travelled back to the city. I was a widow. My daughter had just married. I had negotiated her bride gift well and since my husband was no longer alive, all of it came to me. Well, not exactly all of it. There was family to consider, but even once those obligations were met, a good sum remained. Enough to go into business.

Madam Turay shook her head at me: ‘Pack one good dress, but wear something not so good for the journey,’ she told me. I was wearing my best dress for the trip, I did not want to be shamed in the streets of Lagos.

A saltwater wind whipped our faces as the ship gathered steam. The deck tilted first to one side and then to the other, making it impossible to stand and so we stayed huddled on the floor. I stared at the sea, which from a distance had seemed so inviting but now writhed and roared like a beast. The wind sculpted the water into great white crested waves. I felt certain we would soon all be dead. I could not understand how a boat made of iron could possibly float, but I saw no creases mar the features of Madam Turay’s flat face, so I told myself perhaps we would be all right. Madam Turay found us a place near the middle of the ship, close to the great chimneys where we were sheltered from the worst of it. I pitied the poor souls out there on the open deck in front of us, and I envied the paying passengers in their bunks down below. With each movement of the ship my stomach lurched, as though it had broken free and was rolling around my insides. Madam Turay lit a small stove and set about brewing us some tea. She told me to fix my eyes on the horizon. I did as she bid me and gradually I began to feel better. The horizon looked so close, I assured myself we would be there in no time at all.

Three days and nights the ship sailed. The first night I watched the sun set behind the mountains. In the morning the coast had disappeared from view. Sometimes the sun was in one place and sometimes in another, but the horizon always stayed in the same place. When night-time came the sky burned with a million stars. But the sight of them was nothing compared to the sea. Hali! If I tell you how the sea glowed with sparkling green lights that came from the deepest parts and lit up the sides of the ship. To see it made my hair stand on end. A woman next to me — we were almost all women there — began to weep and pray. Another burst into song. A deckhand tried to calm them, telling us these were not supernatural beings but living creatures so tiny as to be invisible, but whose tiny bodies gave off a certain electricity. He took a pebble from his pocket and cast it into the sea, and where the pebble landed a flash of lights lit up the water. She did not believe him, and I only pretended to because I appreciated his good intentions.

The next day I saw a black heron flying overhead. And then a praying mantis, weighed down by sodden wings, clinging to the railing. I put her in an empty cup until her wings dried out again. I saw the flags of a line of herring boats on the horizon. We were close to land.

All morning it took for the ship to dock, my stomach flipping like a beached fish every moment. Despite the tea, my lips were parched and flaking. The salt glistened on my skin like powdered diamonds. My clothes, which had been soaked and dried several times, were now stiff as paper. Still, my discomfort was soon forgotten as I followed Madam Turay through the streets of the city.

Lagos! It smelled quite like our city, and it looked and sounded a bit like it, too. But, oh, in every other way the difference between them was immense. Our city was a simple melody, whistled by a solitary man. Lagos was one hundred pipes, horns and drummers. There was so much to see, I can’t tell you. What I can tell you is the thing I remember most. The women! So tall and proud (and frequently hard faced), who wore their headdresses as high as the roofs of the houses.

Madam Turay worked fast and I followed at her heels, my ears, eyes and brain absorbing everything. Shop owners pulled out bolt after bolt of fabric at the wave of her hand: Dutch Wax, batiks, prints. And other fabrics, delicate to the touch: cambric, georgette, crêpe de Chine, organza, brocade. Still others I had never heard of: shantung, duchesse, bombazine. The shopkeepers who were sometimes Indians and sometimes Syrians indicated which cloths were currently in fashion among the women of Lagos. Prices were agreed with a barely perceptible nod of the head. At night we returned to the house where we stayed with four other women. Two from Ghana. One from Guinea. Another from Upper Volta. All doing the same thing we were doing. All traders. Some buying. Some selling. The Ghanaian woman showed us some samples of cloth, heavy machine-loomed cotton in green, yellow and gold. She told us we could order in any colours we desired, for she was the owner of the factory where the cloth was made.

Within two months of our return all the cloth we had bought was sold. Madam Turay was delighted. She had given me thirty lappas, each measuring two yards, to sell initially. She offered me a ten per cent commission, we agreed twelve. One evening I cooked and invited a number of women round to my house. After we had eaten I opened my chest, the big one my mother had once owned, and I displayed the lappas. For those who bought three I discounted the last. I encouraged the women to return the next week and bring a friend. Whenever a woman introduced me to a new customer she was rewarded with a discount on her next purchase.

I followed Madam Turay to Lagos and then to Accra. Four months later we went into partnership and I began to make the trips alone. The following year we opened a store right in the centre of town, close to the Agip petrol station and the place the long-distance buses arrived and departed. On the morning we raised the sign ‘Kholifa Turay Cloth Merchants’ there was already a sizeable crowd outside, we could only allow six inside at a time while the others waited outside, some under the shade of the awning, the ones at the back sweating in the sun.

To my house I added a two-room extension for Ansuman and Kadie, who by now were expecting their first child. And one Friday, after prayers, we moved them in together with their small amount of furniture. Ansuman brought me a gift, a dough sculpture. It was a house, with a roof and a door and windows that opened to reveal children peeping from within.

Later the same evening, long after the two had gone to bed, I sat outside on my stool at the back of the house fingering the keys on the belt around my waist, watching the patterns in the darkness, thinking about my dreams. Along time ago I learned how to read my dreams. Not in the way you’re imagining, with some kind of magic, but to look at them in such a way as allowed me to read what was in my own heart.

In my dreams I lived in a house. A small house, not too big. Sometimes a round house, like the kind I was brought up in when my grandmother still lived. Whitewashed with painted shutters and a place to grow vegetables at the back. Other times a square townhouse with a new wing, like this one. In my dreams I lived in this house with my children, everybody fat and smiling.

One day I noticed something about this dream, which I had had a great many times before. Something missing. I stood back and looked at my dream, the way you might look at a painting or a view. I looked everywhere, from the path leading up to the door, to the empty hammock swinging at the front of the house, I even searched the corners of the rooms. Nowhere. You see, in my dream there was no man. Just me and my house and my children.

And I knew I was as happy as I ever would be.

On the final day of my father’s forty days, my mother stood alone and naked in her room, waiting for the women to come who would wash her. The house had been swept, the drapes removed from the windows, shutters opened, mirrors revealed, the pictures of my father gone, too — given away to friends and relatives as keepsakes. All but one: a photograph taken before his slow death began. It showed my father standing alone in front of his house. Whenever he was photographed, which was not often, it was alone. Always. Except for the picture of him sitting alongside the other advisers to the obai, the one you once showed me in a book written by an American academic who came here as a young Peace Corps. He was leaning slightly forward, unsmiling, gazing with a terrible intensity into the camera lens as though he was trying to look into the future. Either that, or he had some unspoken dislike for the photographer.

The clothes she had worn during her mourning were gone too, with the exception of one simple house dress left for her to wear. It lay across the bed behind her.

My father would be my mother’s last husband. There were no brothers for her to choose a new husband from, the way she had chosen him. Maybe a cousin or a nephew could be brought in to take care of her. Maybe she would become a praying wife, join a household run by another woman. But in my heart I knew my mother would never be capable of living like that, she who had always been a head wife.

Outside, smoke from a charcoal pit drifted across the compound. the carcasses of a sheep and a goat hissed on their spits. Vats of rice bubbled on a row of three-stone fires. Women called to each other, lifted lids, passed wooden spoons from one to the other, heaved huge pots, cuffed a child here and there or clapped hands at the dogs who wove their way through the fuss. There would be prayers, then libations performed in my father’s honour by members of the society, heedless of his Muslim faith.

I should not have looked in at my mother, but I did. Hidden where she couldn’t see me, behind the shutter of the open window. In all my life I cannot remember having seen her naked except that one time. I had never even seen her without her hair covered.

There she stood, in the centre of the room, like a child waiting for her mother to come and dress her. Arms by her side, palms turned out, staring into the shadows. Folds of empty skin at her belly. Long, flat breasts. Her hair white and soft as the clouds.

Her lips were moving, a murmured prayer. In less than a minute the women would arrive to lead her to the stream. She knew what was coming, she’d been through it before. They would remove the last mourning dress, would wash her arms and hands, her body and her face. They would give her water to rinse and spit. They would wash away her old life and warn my father’s spirit from coming back to her. For she was no longer his.

Then I realised she was not staring into the shadows, but at the portrait of my father. And though I couldn’t hear what she was saying I realised she was not praying, but talking to her husband one last time. Once she gestured with her right hand and as she did, offered a glimpse of her face to me. I saw the grief and the love there. And suddenly I felt hot with shame for spying on her. I turned and walked away.

Once when I was a teenager I accompanied an aunt on an errand to another village. We passed a woman bathing alone in a stream. She acknowledged the two of us by inclining her head.

‘Good morning, Ma,’ I returned.

My aunt shook her head. ‘Good morning, Pa,’ she corrected.

I had heard of women like her, though I had never seen one. They were women who had become members of the men’s society, not like the silly girls who banged the tortoiseshell drum — they were being punished. No, rather these were women who had already married and borne their children, women of age and wisdom, who had earned a certain kind of respect and whom the society honoured with their title. As we continued I turned my head again and again to look again at the woman, standing there up to her waist, alone in the water.

The memory of this came to me as I sat with my mother, Ya Isatta and several of my aunts, among them the one with whom I had walked from one village to the other. They were visiting to congratulate me on the success of Kholifa Turay Cloth Merchants, though in a remarkably short time the talk had turned to my continued unmarried state. My elders had turned out in force to urge me to take a husband. The store was a success, they were pleased at that, naturally. But now I would need a man to help me. I could not see why they should say this. They were telling me to give away what I had worked so hard to build up. Besides, I was happy.

Once, in the hollow of a dead tree behind our home, a wildcat gave birth to her kittens. I used to climb a nearby tree and watch them for many hours, playing outside the den while their mother caught rats and mice to bring back to them. After a few months they began to accompany her on hunting trips in the early morning. In those times she taught them to creep up on a partridge until they were inches away, to avoid the cobra’s lair and to steal the eggs from the nests of birds. The seasons passed, the tree crumbled into soft powder, an aardvark dug a warren beneath it. At night sometimes, rarely, I would catch a glimpse of her and her tiny dark-skinned baby scratching at the termite hills. Another time a she-leopard and her two cubs were mobbed by monkeys on the banks of the stream; the mother fought her assailants tooth and claw, bringing down four or more and lacerating a dozen others before she retreated.

My aunts thought that I was unnatural not to want a man in my life, but to me it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

I said nothing, I watched my aunts’ faces, I nodded and dreamed and at some point my mind travelled back to the day I went walking with my aunt and saw a mambore for the very first time.

From the day a woman joined the men’s society she would be called Pa, give up her creel and learn to use a line and hook, exchange the stool at the back of the house for the hammock at the front, swap her snuff for a pipe. And she relinquished her place in the society of women.

The mambores. The women who lived as men.

My aunts’ voices droned on like flies in the summer. I stopped listening and dreamed. I saw the house that was sometimes round and sometimes square. I saw the fat, happy children. I saw the empty hammock swaying in the early evening breeze.

And in that moment I saw something else.

I saw the hidden path curling between the trees.

My mother was ready. The women had knocked on her door and now she preceded them down to the river. She walked with her chin up, one shoulder bare where her dress had slipped. The silence blew through the gathered crowds like a breeze, people stood and watched in awe.

Women were coming from every direction, out of houses, up the path, through the crowd, women laying down their cooking spoons, women preparing to leave the fires unattended, women squeezing through the people. One, two, three. Ten, twenty, thirty. Seventy, eighty, one hundred. One by one the women fell in behind my mother, from the oldest to the youngest.

Every woman in the village. Except one, and that one was me. I let them pass. I stepped aside to join the men.

Yes, it’s true. I can see you’ve guessed it, but don’t know quite whether to believe it. Me, your own aunty. Well, you’ve guessed right. It was nothing dramatic. I let the men of the society come to me. I let it be known that I would consider relinquishing the birthright of womanhood in exchange for the liberty of a man. And in time they found me. After all, there are few women who would choose such a life. Naturally, there were those things I missed, mostly the company of other women. But I had made the life I dreamed of, and it suited me. I had taken my own path, neither right nor left.

After a while we heard the singing and knew it was over. When the women reappeared their mood was changed, they were dancing, shuffling their feet through the dust, swaying their bottoms. Somewhere in the centre of them all she walked alone. They had dressed her in a new costume made from a heavy blue fabric: a silk damask of four hundred threads, real damask from Syria, double-sided with highlights of silver woven through the design.

I knew because it came from my own store, I had chosen it myself. On her shoulder she wore a sash of the same cloth, her hair was hidden inside a tall headdress. My mother, walking towards an unknown future. As beautiful as a bride on her wedding day.