Ancestor Stones

14 Hawa, 1991: Sugar

It had rained during the night, an unseasonal rain. In the morning the ground was stained in dark patches, like sweat. The light was dull, there were no shadows at all. And yet the rain had done nothing to clear the air, which was heavy and hot. I woke early, went outside to urinate and afterwards I lay on my bed, looking up at the rafters.

From somewhere in the darkness above me a drop of water fell slowly through the dense air, shattered upon a rafter and showered on to me. I didn’t move. I felt the water sliding down my face. In my mind I saw the next drop, swelling and growing like a ripe breadfruit ready to drop from the tree. Instead of a drop of water I imagined a great fruit whistling through the air, smashing on the rafters and covering me in sticky flesh and juice. With that thought I pulled myself up.

There was a hole in the roof, and by the time the rains came the zinc would have rotted in a dozen more places. I told myself I must remember to tell him when he came home, so he could go and borrow a ladder from my uncle opposite and climb up there to take a look. He would know what to do. He would send into town for a hammer and nails, and some sheets of zinc. Then he would climb up there again to fix it, while I prepared him something to eat. Maybe groundnut stew, which was always his favourite with smoked catfish from the river. Or then again I would have made that to celebrate his homecoming. Maybe a bowl of pepper soup and some coco yams. Or sour sour. Or cassava leaves. There were no leaves left in my plot, I had lost them all to the locusts. I would have to go into town to the covered market, to see what I could find. I would buy only the best: the youngest, sweetest leaves.

Whenever he came home the truck dropped him off at the roundabout in town and he would walk to the house. Not sticking to the road, but in a straight line. Cutting across from one road to the next, through backyards and down the sides of the houses. His walk came from me, not his father. Of course, they taught them these things as well. How to walk in straight rows, swinging their arms and raising each leg up high, holding it there for just a moment, letting the heel drop to the ground so it sent up a little spurt of dust. Not looking this way or that. All the time with their eyes fixed straight ahead. When he came home people looked up to watch him pass. Little boys ran after him, begging to try on his cap or else placing their small feet in the prints left by his boots. Even before I saw him in the distance, I could always tell when he was on his way.

That dark morning I went out to the yard and called for the girl to get on and light the fire, while I washed. I untied my lappa and hung it up on the peg. I stood there for a moment and looked down at a body I no longer recognised. Loosening all over, as though I was shrinking inside. I pulled at a handful of my skin, and felt the flesh slip away from the bone. My body was nearly smooth, the hair no longer had the energy to grow. After all those years spent stripping the hair away. I soaped myself, using the last sliver of the soap my son had brought. Imperial Leather: the soap wore away until all you were left with was the label. And then I doused myself with water from the bucket, dried with the lappa, slipped on my plastic shoes and made my way back inside.

The girl came to inform me there was no sugar for the tea. Stood in front of me holding out the empty blue cardboard box with the red lion stamped on the cover.

‘So you told me yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that,’ I told her. ‘Perhaps you think I’m senile, that I don’t remember.’

‘No, aunty.’ But she didn’t go away, just stood there with the box in her hand. As though I would magically fill it up again.

So I asked her: ‘You think I can snap my fingers like that and make sugar for you?’

‘No, aunty.’ She spoke softly, especially when she was being rude. This girl could go back to her family for all I cared. If she ever became somebody’s wife they’d send her back with sixpence on her head in no time at all.

‘“No aunty, no aunty.”’ I mimicked her. ‘So what do you want me to do?’

‘Maybe you can buy some when you go into town.’ And she had the audacity to look me straight in the face when she spoke. Straight in my eye! Such insolence. I snatched the box and threw it upon the fire. You just had to watch the change come over her when Lansana was home on leave. Like a cat on heat. That sullen face suddenly all pouts and simpers. Encouraging his teasing. Brushing her breasts against him whenever she passed, hiking her skirt up round her thighs when she sat down opposite him. Then and there I promised myself I’d be rid of her before his next visit.

At breakfast the girl ate noisily. Swallowing great mouthfuls of porridge and plugging her face with hunks of bread. She’d eat me out of house and home, this one. I stood up and removed the dish, before she could finish the lot, otherwise there would be nothing left for tomorrow except carambola from the tree that hung over the wall from my neighbour’s garden. And that always gave me problems with my stomach.

‘Have you ironed my dress yet?’ I asked her.

‘You haven’t given it to me,’ she said with her mouth still full. Always with an answer. Too clever for her own good. I would have thrown it at her, but for the fact it was my best dress. I stepped inside to prepare myself.

I sat down in front of the mirror and creamed my face, using some of the face cream Lansana had given me. On the side of the jar along with some kind of Arabic writing was a drawing of a woman with black, black hair and eyelashes, red, red lips and white, white skin. She was holding a rose up to her face. A red rose. I dusted my face with a little talc and dabbed some perfume on my neck and between my breasts from the little bottle I kept hidden from the girl. I put it carefully back in its place behind the loose stone in the wall.

The girl came in with the dress just as I was replacing the stone. Now I’d have to find a new place for the bottle. I stood and watched her out of the corner of my eye as she laid the dress on the bed. She was making a good show of pretending not to be interested in what I was doing.

‘Go count the chickens,’ I told her, just to get rid of her. Go count your chickens before they hatch, I thought. She’d get a surprise soon enough when I sent her on her way. That would wipe the smirk off her face.

I slipped the top over my head. It was tight-fitting, with narrow sleeves to the elbow. I regretted then that I had sent the girl away. She might have made herself useful helping me, but it was too late for that. By the time I managed to get my head through and straighten the bodice I was damp with sweat. I stood with my legs apart while I wound the lappa three times around my waist and then sat back down again for a moment to catch my breath. My jewellery box was on the table in front of me. I opened it and rummaged through the odd buttons, hair clips and safety pins until I found what I was looking for. The pair of gold earrings.

I let them drop from one palm into the other. I pushed them through the holes in my ears and lifted the mirror up to my face. I turned my head from side to side, feeling the weight pulling at my lobes. The reflected light bounced from my cheekbones. I took them off and inspected them again. One of the hoops was very slightly dented. I rubbed my finger across the place, as if I might smooth it out. It didn’t matter. Nobody would see. All they would notice was the size of the hoops, the quality of the gold. Eighteen carat. Twenty-four probably. Such good quality, a son buys nothing but the best for his mother.

Outside I heard my neighbour calling. I didn’t answer. I stayed where I was. Let her think I wasn’t at home. She’d only be coming to bother me for the four cups of rice I borrowed from her the week before. Let her wait. She had plenty of rice. I had seen inside her storeroom myself. It was full of food. The Government had warned against people who hoarded food, driving up the prices so everybody suffered.

While I waited for her to clear off, I searched for my umbrella and when the coast was clear I stepped out of the house.

I walked to town. I didn’t have the money for transport. The rain was gone, replaced by the sun. I walked the whole way, carrying my umbrella aloft. When Lansana gave it to me I told him it was the widest one I had ever seen, and it was true. It provided me with a pool of shade to walk in.

With each step I felt the earrings swing against my face. Every so often I lifted my hand to my face to feel them again. I wished I’d brought the mirror with me so I could stop and look at them.

A tune came into my head and I hummed for a while as I walked. Then I remembered it was something my first husband used to whistle and I stopped. Both my first and second sons lived with him now, working in the butcher’s trade. They didn’t visit their mother as often as they should; I suspected him of turning them against me. But then they were as soft and foolish as him. Still, you can’t throw away a bad child. They were my sons. I would always be their mother. The rest of it is up to God. Now Lansana, my Okurgba, my warrior — he’d made me proud. Followed my brother into the Army, where he had been promoted I don’t know how many times. He wore stars on his shoulders and sent me gifts he paid for with his salary.

Outside the Contehs’ house the awning had yet to be dismantled, though the chairs were gone. The opening of the house had been Wednesday past. I hadn’t been invited. I could have gone anyway, but I chose not to. The Contehs didn’t know it but I knew they whispered about me behind my back. That morning I would have liked them to see me pass, but the house was quiet. In fact, the street was empty. A thought came to me. I glanced around. I lowered the umbrella and rolled it up. I veered towards the front of the house. The thatch of banana leaves on top of the awning was already fading, the green bamboo poles that held it up had begun to blanch. Still nobody looking. I reached out and hooked the handle of the umbrella around the pole nearest to me, gave it a good yank. I walked on. Behind me the awning lurched violently as one corner collapsed. Never looking over my shoulder, I raised the umbrella over my head, and walked on to the end of the street.

There was the petrol station where the bicycle taxis waited. I hadn’t travelled that way in many months now. It wasn’t such a comfortable way to travel but it was better than being on foot. Anything else was unaffordable. The price of petrol was always going up. Always going up. Nothing ever became cheaper. None of the boys leaning on their bicycles looked up as I passed. Well, I wasn’t young any more.

In front of the covered market I slowed my pace a little, just to see what was on offer. I had a few things to buy, but that would have to wait until the end of the day, when the traders were willing to drop their prices just to be rid of the stuff. Other times I went to market in the early morning. The stall holders liked to treat their first customer well. Not for the customer’s benefit, I should add, only because they thought it boded well for the rest of the day.

Ahead of me two women entered Asana’s fabric store. I wondered whether she was in town or travelling. Who would choose such a life? No husband, no time to talk even. Always busy, working herself into the ground. Well, I suppose she didn’t have any brothers. But really, she should have had more sons. I bought the cloth for my dress there the last time she was out of town. Seven yards of brocade. The girl in the shop — who did she think she was? — looked as though she was about to refuse me credit until I reminded her I was family. I passed by on the other side of the road, deciding against going in. Wait until Lansana was home and then we’d go in together.

I imagined us walking down the street. Him so broad shouldered and handsome. Many months had passed since he’d been given leave. In all that time I had not heard from him, I could only imagine what duties he was undertaking. Who knew where in the country he might be, some place without a post office. And you know, sometimes they didn’t allow them to write, especially when the mission was important or secret.

Rain was threatening, a dark cloud rose up behind the mosque, though the sun still shone. The light shimmered, catching the white robes of the men gathered at the front of the building after midday prayers. Women, dressed in all manner of colours, made their way from the back door. Some people were waiting to cross the road by the roundabout, others stood about in clutches exchanging greetings at the same time as they eyed one another up and down. I slipped into the crowd, mingling, nodding to this person and that person, enjoying the looks that came my way. And sure enough presently I saw somebody I did know: the woman who was once my mother-in-law, in a manner of speaking. Remember Khalil? The one who betrayed me? His mother.

Well, I’m telling you now — it couldn’t have been better. I turned away and strolled on a short distance. When I felt her close behind me, I swung around like I had suddenly remembered something.

‘Aunty!’ I said, as though she was the last person on earth I expected to see there.

‘Hawa,’ she nodded. She would have liked to move on, but I was blocking her path.

‘I hope you are well?’ Or some such irrelevance.

‘As you see me, by God’s grace.’

‘And the family?’ I persisted, though I noticed she made no enquiry as to my own health.

‘They are all well.’ She glanced over my shoulder, wanting to get away. But I was not finished yet. The thing about niceties is that there is no end to them. I asked after every member of the family by name. She took no care to elaborate on her replies. Then I mentioned Khalil’s name. She looked at me directly, then. Suspicious eyes flickered over my face for a moment, until she caught sight of the earrings. I smiled and put my hand up to touch them.

‘A gift from my son,’ I told her.

‘Very nice.’ Thin lips stretched tight into a smile, a mouth like a rubber band.

‘Solid gold. Twenty-four carat.’ She was silent. ‘Bought with his salary, you know. He is in the Army. A Major. A promotion, another one.’ I wasn’t sure if that was correct, but it didn’t matter. And maybe I should have stopped there. ‘He’ll be coming home soon. On leave.’

‘Well, I am glad to see you are so well. Until next time, Hawa.’ And she stepped around me, which was annoying because I had wanted to be the first one to walk away. Still, the victory was mine.

I moved off in the other direction. There were still a good number of people outside the mosque, the imam among them in a long purple coat over his robes. I raised my umbrella over my head as I turned down a side street, passing the stalls selling second-hand electrical goods and suchlike, to where the Syrian traders — Lebanese, they were called now — had their shops. Looking about me I ducked into the nearest entrance.

The man behind the counter, shouting at somebody at the back of the shop, stopped the instant he saw a finely dressed woman enter and smiled at me.

‘Good day, madam,’ he said. That was how impressive I looked. I moved closer to the counter, underneath the dusty glass of which lay many pieces of jewellery, mostly gold.

‘How much for the gold?’ I asked.

‘To buy?’

‘No, to sell.’

‘What carat?’

‘Twenty-four,’ I told him. He raised his eyebrows.

‘Show me.’

I slipped my earrings off and dropped them into his outstretched hand. Oh, it was a difficult thing for me to do. He weighed them in his hand, scratched the surface with a dirty thumbnail and shook his head.

‘This is not twenty-four carat.’

I looked back at him. ‘Eighteen then,’ I said confidently. Still good.

He shook his head at that, and dropped them into a small set of scales. ‘Where did these come from?’

I decided not to mention my son. Not because I had anything to hide, but because these days too many people were saying bad things about soldiers, about the things they were doing. He would try to pretend they had been looted and use that to offer me an even poorer price.

‘Left to me by my mother,’ I replied.

Nine carat! Can you believe it? Of course he was taking advantage, but what was I to do? I didn’t bother to thank him. I took the money and put it in my purse. As soon as Lansana came home we would come back here and give that thief back his money. Redeem my earrings for the measly sum he gave me.

Outside the shop I stepped into a doorway for a few moments to adjust my headdress so that it covered my ears. A few people were still standing around by the mosque. I kept my chin high as I walked by. I could feel their eyes upon me. I looked neither to one side nor the other, but straight ahead, to the bicycle stand, and gave one of the fellows there my address. In full view of the lot of them I climbed on behind him and we rode away.

I felt the wind in my face. I sat sideways on the parcel shelf with my ankles crossed, feeling as demure as a girl out with a suitor. I felt something I had not felt for a long time.

I remembered the last time Lansana had come home, bringing with him a cassette player. He liked to listen to it all day, morning, noon and night. He took baths and changed his clothes, sometimes several times a day. Then sat back down, tapping his fingers or his foot on the floor, turning the cassette over every time one side finished. To tell the truth the noise got on my nerves: the repetitive sound of some man’s voice. One evening I asked him to turn it down. I had to raise my voice over the sound of the music, if that is what you could call it. I repeated myself once, twice. The third time Lansana suddenly swung around and faced me. For a moment he looked furious, I wondered if he had been asleep, dreaming, and I had woken him up. But then his face softened and he smiled. He stood up and grasped both my hands and swung me around, and had me dance with him to that terrible music. Yes, I really did. I danced.

I would not have that feeling of joy again for years to come. After that day when I was forced to sell my earrings, I waited for Lansana as long as I could. By then the girl had gone, I saw the people fleeing all around me, I was too afraid to wait any longer. I pushed three of my dresses into a plastic bag, that was all, there was no food in the house. We followed the footpaths to the main road, passing villages emptied of people. I saw a lad I knew, a salt seller, walking in the other direction. ‘Be careful, Ma,’ he warned me. They were shooting northerners at the checkpoints.

When I reached there I listened carefully to the answers people ahead of me gave. My turn came, I bowed my head, I muttered the name of the same town in the South. The soldier demanded the name of the headman, he narrowed his eyes: yellow eyes, dark at the core. I supplied it, giving the name I had just overheard, and passed through. My son is a soldier, I wanted to tell him. He’s in the Army. Perhaps you know him. But I dared not, I kept my head down and carried on walking.

There were no lorries. But there were more checkpoints, each time we passed through another the risk grew. So we left the road and walked through the trees, standing in the shadows whenever we heard people on the path. We were close enough to hear them, to smell them. It was impossible to tell one side from the other, soldiers from rebels, they all looked the same.

Once, a long time later, in the displacement camp, a consignment of food had arrived. All the women gathered around holding their plastic cups and measures, waiting to be given their own share. We had waited a long time for this food. But when the crates were opened there was none. A mix-up. The boxes were full of lipsticks, hundreds of them, in their gold coloured cases. The men in blue helmets immediately surrounded the vehicle and prepared for a riot. All of us had such hunger in our bellies. But a moment later they pushed back their helmets and lowered their sunglasses, to make sure what they were seeing was really true. The women rushed forward, myself among them, to snatch up these shining lipsticks. The many miles between us and our lost homes, our rotting feet, the grass and leaves with which we had tried to line our stomachs, the emptiness of the future: for a short while all was forgotten. We stood in the sun, laughing and ribbing each other, painting our mouths in vivid colours.

But all that was yet to come. For a few moments more I lifted my head up and savoured the sensation of riding on the bicycle, of people watching me from the sides of the street. We freewheeled down the main road, swerving to avoid the potholes, which somehow made it all the more enjoyable. And once we were around the corner and out of sight I tapped the fellow on the shoulder and got off the bicycle. Told him I had changed my mind and walked the rest of the way home.

When I reached the house the girl was there waiting for me, leaning against the door frame with her arms crossed. She smiled at me, lips closed — and did not stir herself to come help with my packages, but watched me as I walked towards her. She didn’t move even when I was inches from her, practically nose to nose. She was grinning openly by that time. Turning my body slightly sideways, I was forced to squeeze past her.

As I did so I reached for the box of sugar cubes in my bag. I dropped it into her hand. And watched the smile fall off her face.

Some people say he is living in America, that lots of soldier boys went there. To the land that created the blue jeans and trainers and rapper singers they love so much. I must confess though, I have a daydream about him, a new one. That perhaps one day he will read my story, there will be a knock on the door and there he will be, in his uniform, with white gloves and shining buttons as smart as the day I went to see him on parade. His eyes will glow with happiness, not glitter with the unfathomable anger that seemed to possess him towards the end. And I will hold out my arms: ‘Lansana,’ I will say. Perhaps I will cry, I won’t be able to help myself, it has been so long. And he will hug me and say something, anything, in the teasing way he did whenever he wanted to make me smile. And there I’ll be, laughing and crying at the same time, as I step aside to let him in.

15 Serah, 1996: The Storm

Once I stood thousands of feet up on the edge of an escarpment, side by side with Janneh watching a storm race across the plain below. In the distance tiny figures ran ahead of the dust, dark clouds bearing down upon them. They were huddled over, clutching at their clothing, holding on to children, trying to shield themselves from the fury of the storm. In between us and those terrified souls, I could see more people, just beginning to sense the growing tempest, hurrying along, not yet caught up in its violent swirls, gazing up at the sky in an attempt to read the signs. Directly below were others still, oblivious to what was happening only a few miles away, tending their animals, watching their children at play, sitting outdoors in the sunshine.

I remember how we wanted to shout and wave and jump up and down. But instead we did nothing. We were too far away. And even if they had heard nobody would have believed us, for where they stood they could not see the omens in the sky.

Sometimes I think this is what happened in our country. Nobody heeded the warnings, nobody smelled the rain coming, or saw the lights in the sky or heard the roar of thunder, until we were all engulfed by it.

In Italy before the war in Europe, Benito Mussolini made the trains run on time. I read that once in a history book. He also wore a white uniform and a helmet with a plume on the top, and knew how to talk to people in a way that made them want to believe him.

We had a new President. A young man, who might have been a Benito Mussolini, who was handsome and finely attired in his uniform and who wore mirror sunglasses and swaggered in front of other heads of state, men in their sixties and seventies whom he appeared to despise, perhaps because they reminded him of the President he had just chased from our country. Nobody wanted to be ruled by the old, fat President and his corrupt cronies and because the new, young President cleaned up the streets and emptied the gutters of filth and spoke about democratic elections and looked so fine, the people were happy. Women sewed dresses printed with his delightful features, young men copied his mode of dress and eyewear, everyone joined in the campaign to clean up the streets. Clean up the Government. Clean up the country. People turned over their mattresses, bleached the steps in front of their houses and hosed down the walls, swept the dirt from their yards into the street from where it was miraculously removed. We were putting our house in order.

It felt good.

Some of the fat men who had financed the old President feared reprisals and left. Good riddance. Others, less high profile, stayed quiet and bided their time. Overnight it became impossible to find a single person who would admit to ever having supported the former President. The shopkeeper on the corner of the street who had voted for the party all his life gave his store a lick of paint and stencilled the new regime’s slogan on his shutters. Ambrose printed up business cards and boldly offered his services to the new leaders.

The President’s face in his mirror shades appeared on the front of international magazines. ‘The youngest leader in the world,’ said the headline. He had not even celebrated his thirtieth birthday. We were so proud of our baby-faced leader: so slim and strong, not bloated on bribes and flattery. So proud we handed him our anguish and hopes and fears to carry on those broad shoulders of his. The rest of the world looked on, smiling fondly. Or so we thought. We could not see they were really laughing at our foolishness.

In their neat and shining homes, people settled down to wait. And waited. And waited. And just as they were beginning to wonder how much longer we might have to wait, to fear our leader was just a pretty face with a silver tongue, he was toppled by another young man with equally babyish features though he was not quite as silver-tongued. So that when, in a tarnished voice, he announced we were to have elections for the first time in many years few believed it, and many didn’t hear at all because they had given up listening a long, long time ago.

A Monday. The year, 1996. I was in my late fifties.

I stood before my reflection in the mirror on my wardrobe, watching my own movements in the half-light. No electricity for three days running. The clothes I had put out the night before hung from the door: a trouser suit in pale blue linen. I discarded it and instead chose an orange-gold gown embroidered at the sleeves and around the neck. In the dimness of the morning I made up my face, applying the brushstrokes from memory: foundation, powder, lipstick, mascara. Then I slipped the gown over my head. From the shoe rack on the back of the door I chose a pair of gold shoes to match the gown, with open toes and high heels and a strap that encircled my ankle, bought from Bally of Bond Street. I slipped gold bangles on to my wrists, clasped a necklace around my neck and hooked earrings in the lobes of my ears.

Since the early hours angry sounds had rolled over the city. Sounds like thunder from the direction of the Army base on the hill. A booming and the spit and crack of lightning. But in the morning, no sign of a storm, nothing to be seen at all, only a light dew on the ground that soon transformed itself into pale, curling vapours and vanished in the heat of the day.

In the lane a single hawker called his wares outside houses that were still in darkness. Silence everywhere. No car horns, no chatter of schoolchildren. Most schools were closed for the day. The corridors and classrooms of those that remained open were empty, as parents kept their children at home. A pair of dogs scrapping, a cockerel trumpeting: these were the only sounds.

From the verandah I looked out over the street. A woman emerged from a house and threw a pan of dirty water into the road, ducked back inside without once looking over or offering a greeting. A rumbling, growing in the distance. An Army truck loaded with soldiers rolled past the junction swiftly on out of sight.

At seven o’ clock when it was light I sat down to breakfast with Yaya. The bread was stale. No point sending out for a fresh loaf, the Fula shops would certainly be shut. I spread a slice with margarine and chewed a mouthful but, though I drank a glass of water, my mouth was so dry swallowing was impossible. The hunger was gone, replaced in my stomach by a tight, hard ball. I made a cup of instant coffee with the water in the Thermos and sipped at it. Its empty, bitter taste was all I wanted.

‘Are you still going?’ Yaya asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said, but a few dry crumbs caught in my throat and through them the word came out fluttering and small. I cleared my throat and coughed.

‘Yes,’ again. This time the sound of my own voice convinced me a little.

We waited together in silence, not in our usual companionable silence, but a taut stillness in which every sound echoed and reverberated.

The members of the women’s volunteer group had been told a car would be sent to pick us up. It never came. I wasn’t surprised at that. I gave the driver twenty minutes more, then I went to the telephone and dialled the number of the next woman. The receiver hissed faintly with static, the sound of the numbers clicking through, but again and again the call failed to connect. On the other side of the room Yaya fiddled with the knob of the transistor radio. There was none of the usual morning chatter, the endless announcements of births, deaths and marriages, the wishing of luck for exams, congratulations for scholarships, jingles for Mazola oil and Eveready batteries and Bennimix baby food. The dial passed station after silent station, like empty bus stops.

The crackling again. Once, twice. This time from somewhere in the distance. Followed by the thunder of another truck. I crossed the room to look outside. Yaya called to me to stay away from the windows. I pressed my back to the wall and moved the curtain a fraction. Another truck, also full of soldiers, standing waving their guns in the air, singing songs as though they were on their way to a football match.

From the radio a single voice rang out. It made me jump. That’s how nervous I was; my heart felt like a trapped animal trying to claw its way out of a cage. A woman’s voice, expressionless and staccato as an untrained actress reading somebody else’s lines, announced the streets were calm, the polls had opened and people were beginning to vote. The elections were under way.

But the polls couldn’t be open. It was impossible.

Rofathane. The village was all but encircled by a river that was a wide stream in some places and a deep channel in others: in many ways the place I grew up was almost an island. The path to the playing fields was crossed by means of a footbridge: the slender, swaying trunk of a single palm tree that rested between one bank and the other, spanning the swirling waters.

My mother taught me to cross that bridge and at the same time she also taught me how to master my own fear.

By that time Yaya had taken my place on my mother’s back, but was still too small to play with. I used to tag along behind the older children and one day followed them on their way to the playing fields. But when we reached the bridge I stopped, too frightened to go any further. Instead I stood on the opposite bank, listening to the screams and chatter fade away, watching the water rise and fall, seeing myself already plummeting down and disappearing into a whirlpool.

The next time I came to cross the bridge I was with my mother. As soon as we neared it I clung on to her hand and dug my heels into the earth. My mother was unmoved. She picked me up and set me on the bridge, holding on to me lightly from behind.

‘Look straight ahead,’ she told me. ‘Don’t look back. And never look down. I’ll be right behind you.’ And with that she let me go.

I dared not disobey my mother, so although my knees trembled I did as she bade me, and when in midstream I wavered she prompted me. ‘One foot in front of the other. Don’t think about anything else, just look where you’re going.’

Urged on by her gentle certainty I summoned my courage up from the inside. And as the years went by, in this simple way I learned to have power over my own fear.

I had forgotten that time. But that morning, after I listened to the words being spoken on the radio, I walked to the gate of the yard. My mind was set, I looked straight ahead, I ignored the little knot of fear rolling around in the empty hollow of my stomach.

Yaya came with me to the gate. The look on his face told me he would have tried to persuade me to stay at home. But the look on mine told him I was determined to go. My look won. My brother put his hands on my shoulders, kissed me on each cheek and watched in silence as I started walking down the empty street.

I dug into my handbag until I found the laminated badge and pinned it to my chest. I placed one foot in front of the other, I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead, I refused to think of the danger. One street later I banged on the iron gates of Redempta’s house. She was ready, waiting for me. Never doubted that I would come, she told me later. I waited a moment while she fixed her badge to her chest. We looked at each other, we laughed because fear hates the sound of laughter. And we walked on.

Had anyone else been in the streets that morning they would have seen two middle-aged women, out for a stroll in the early light. But the words pinned to our bosoms told a different story: ‘Returning Officer. Presidential Elections 1996.’

One by one we collected each woman from her home, until we walked two, three abreast down the main road. At every polling station along our route we dropped off a pair of women until, once again, it was just the two of us, Redempta and I.

A great cotton tree with buttressed roots stood in the middle of the football ground in front of the schoolhouse. Beyond it, on the steps of one of the classrooms, sat a pair of soldiers. They stood when they saw us, began to move towards us. We, too, advanced at an almost identical pace, neither hurried, nor slow. Straight ahead, until we stopped and faced each other: the soldiers and their adversaries, two middle-aged women.

What did we want? We indicated our badges. Reporting for duty, it crossed my mind to say.

‘It may be dangerous to be out today, there might be trouble,’ said the second soldier, as if we would be so easily cowed.

‘Then so be it,’ I said. ‘We are here to bring in the vote. Now we need to get on, this station was supposed to open an hour ago.’ For some seconds nobody spoke or moved.

The soldiers were roughly the age of my two sons. I watched as the one in front of me bit his lower lip, twisted it and then suddenly dropped his gaze and stepped aside. We moved past him and into the building.

‘We will stay here for your protection,’ he called after us, in a voice that was hollow at the centre.

‘As you please,’ I replied.

My knees shook as I walked, my hands holding on to the handle of my bag were slippery. Once inside we freed the three ballot boxes from the padlock and chains that held them together and set them out in a short, neat row. Just seeing them there, squat and imposing, somehow made me feel better. In a cardboard box along with paper and pens, we found the sign that said ‘Polling Station’ with a big, black arrow and this we placed outside the door. From her bag Redempta unpacked her own special cheese and jam sandwiches, a flask, a can of Peak milk and two cups. I watched her smooth, placid face beneath that terrible cherry wig she wore, absorbed in the task she had set herself.

We settled down to wait.

A man pushing an icebox of soft drinks in an old pram turned the corner, saw the soldiers, thought better of it and moved on with his load. The minutes passed. Dawn had been and gone, not a bird in sight. Outside the soldiers ground one cigarette stub after another under the heels of their boots. That and the scratching of the bats in the branches of the cotton tree, the gentle unfolding and wrapping of wings around bodies, were the only sounds. I could sense my fear skirting the building, attracted by the silence, looking for a way inside.

What did I think of while we waited?

I can only tell you what I didn’t think about. I did not think about whether people would come. Nor did I waste the effort on wishing the soldiers away, because I knew they were there to frighten people off. I didn’t think about the trucks carrying more soldiers all over the city. I didn’t think about the other polling stations, sitting in pools of silence all over the country. Nor did I think about what we would do at the end of the day. Most of all I didn’t think about the fear clawing at the cracks in the windows, scuttling under the floorboards, crawling across the roof, looking for an opening.

Instead I thought about that day, a long time ago, when I sat in a rice-weighing station wearing my favourite pair of red shoes.

The smell of rice dust on a cool morning, so clean and pure. By contrast this room was sweltering and smelled of ink and sour milk. Then it had been the end of the rains, harvest time. The land had been opulent, bursting with hope and fertility. Now, halfway through harmattan, it was desiccated, a semi-desert. The sky was choked with dust. The city stank. Hope had shrivelled and crumbled away.

When people are afraid they stay indoors. They close shutters, bolt doors, hide behind the flimsy tin and cardboard walls of their huts. That day even the police stayed inside, safe behind the thick walls of their solid British-built stations. Only the madmen wandered the streets, dazed and smiling, unexpected lords of the city.

There is but one reason people would venture outside on such a day.

Women’s voices as muted and soft as the music of water. I had fallen into a kind of wakeful reverie, at first the sound drifted over me as though it had escaped from my dreams. I stood up and walked across the room to the door. The standpipe was on the other side of the football ground. The women approached it up a steep, rocky path hidden between the houses, bordered by tall grass on either side. Some were carrying plastic containers and brightcoloured buckets. They were barely clad, a tank top over loose breasts, a lappa carelessly knotted around hips or hitched up and tucked into underwear. Theirs was hot, damp, effortful work.

One of the soldiers, leaning against a door frame, had been picking his nose and flicking the hardened snot at an empty tin. At my appearance he straightened and followed my gaze in the direction of the women. I emptied the remains of my cup of coffee on the ground, nodded at him and we stood, both of us, watching.

A young girl at the water pipe with a baby on her back looked over briefly. I waved. She hesitated, then raised her hand and waved back.

‘Morning-o,’ I called and she echoed my greeting before bending back to her work. I called again, to a woman in a black dress with a comb stuck into her partially braided hair. Then to a girl in an old print frock. Within moments the women had formed a cluster over the water pipe. From time to time one of them straightened and looked over in our direction. More women arrived, were beckoned over, set down their containers and joined the huddle.

Beneath their slouched bodies I could feel the alertness, the muscle and sinew quickening under the skin, as the soldiers watched the water women beneath hooded lids.

Redempta came and stood next to me. She was a big woman. I’m sorry you never knew her. She was not so tall, but wide and straight. We stood shoulder to shoulder. Redempta began to hum. I remember that, because at first I wondered what she was doing. And then quickly I realised and I joined in. It was a woman’s song, one that we were taught by our elders, we used to sing it on the way to the river with our water jars and again on the way back when they were full and heavy. Perhaps the soldiers knew this, perhaps they didn’t. They must have had mothers and sisters, so I guess they did. We hummed in unison and the sound of our humming carried across the empty ground to the women on the other side and gave birth to the miracle that followed.

Those that still held on to their plastic containers set them down, they began to wander over. In the lead was the woman with the baby on her back, she was dressed in an old slip that fell off her shoulders, a green cloth tied around her head. There was something slightly unusual about her, something that made you want to stare. I think it was her eyes, they were hazel instead of deep brown, she was a fair skinned woman. Too fair for most people’s tastes, still I remember even then thinking that she was beautiful. I saw the caution in the tread of her feet on the ground, but nobody watching would ever have guessed it from the way she carried herself, the way all the women carried themselves, as though they had never known a day’s fear.

I straightened the board with the sign on it. I went back inside to take my place. A few moments later I heard Redempta giving directions:

‘Collect a voting paper. Behind the curtain, doesn’t matter which one. Mark your X. One X only, against the name of the candidate of your choice. Sign your name, or make your thumbprint before you leave. Thank you.’

After the women, word went around. Within a short time a queue had formed that flowed across the playing field and looped around the cotton tree. At first people came silent, shuffling, with lowered eyes. But when they saw us going about our business, when they saw how our will had triumphed over the soldiers who now stood uselessly to one side, they raised their heads, took their voting slips and pushed their thumbs into the ink pad with a flourish.

A man with a cockerel under his arm shook my hand and offered me the bird as a gift. I told him I was just doing my duty. A woman pressed a pair of skinned oranges into my hands. This time I accepted, I handed one to Redempta and sucked the juice out of the other. I was thirsty. There were other gifts, but the greatest reward of all came those times I pushed back my chair and went to the door to stare, with wonder, at the long line of people. Once I looked over at Redempta who, at exactly the same moment, raised her head from the pile of papers she was sorting; our eyes met, she gave me a wink and the slow smile that was hers.

Through the tightly woven streets in the east of the city, west to the whitewashed villas of the wealthy, south to the fishermen at the wharf, news that people were turning out to the polls spread through the city. Until finally, it reached the northernmost point, to the Army barracks on the hill with the painted cannon in the courtyard.

Nobody heard them coming, we were too busy taking names and counting heads, filling in voting slips and making thumbprints. Maybe we were too busy telling ourselves how clever we were. Maybe we had stopped paying attention.

The truck barrelled out of a side road, straight across the open space, sending people in every direction. From the canopy at the back jumped one, two, three — a dozen or more soldiers, guns at the ready. The people didn’t wait to find out what was happening. Inside the station papers fluttered up like doves as people scattered. I wanted to run after them, to shout: ‘Come back!’ I wanted to scream and weep to see them go like that, knowing they were gone for good.

It was for our protection, the Commanding Officer told us. Tensions were rising in the city. All the time he was speaking his eyes roamed around, gathering details. He ignored us when we thanked him and said we did not need his protection. Voting here had been peaceful. He clicked his fingers and pointed. There, two soldiers set off at a trot. There, another two, guns at the ready. There, there, there! Men raced hither and thither at his command, and when the activity came to an end, I saw they had the entire polling station surrounded.

Nothing to do then, but go back inside and wait.

Redempta and I, neither of us had a word to say to each other. We moved about the room, tidying the papers that had fluttered up in the panic, setting the chairs and the table back. When we sat down again we did not meet each other’s eyes, but looked mutely at our hands. There was nothing left to do.

In the heat the minutes stretched out, one by one. I don’t know how much time passed, less than an hour I would imagine although it felt like an eternity. Then came sounds of life from outside. I straightened in my chair, cocked my ear. Redempta raised her head. Together we crept over to the window.

Advancing down the lane: boys, you know the ones, always hanging around hustling for a little money here and there, offering to watch your car, playing their music too loud. They came waving palm fronds, marching in choreographed mockery of the soldiers, in formation, until they were ranged on the opposite side of the football field. For a while they threw insults across at the soldiers, such colourful words, at another time I might have closed my ears. That day I listened and I watched intently.

There was one lad, dressed in denim shorts and a ragged T-shirt. Not a ringleader. More like a younger brother or cousin, somebody on the edge of what was happening but who yearns to be at the centre. It didn’t take much to imagine his short life so far. Born with legs as skinny as bamboo that refused to grow straight but were bowed out and kept him home with his mother while the other boys were out playing. But later he became good at other things: mending stereos, fooling passers-by with card games. They give him a nickname and make him feel part of the gang. Most of the time. Except on the nights they put on their dark glasses and jeans and leave their homes, arms around each other, and come back in the early morning, with sour breath, smelling of cigarettes and perfume.

This lad threaded his way through the line of his companions, found himself a vantage point and stood square to the soldiers, a rock concealed behind his back.

The soldiers were a poorly trained lot. So many young men wanted to join the military; not for the pay which was miserable and on many months was never paid at all, but for the benefits — the unofficial ones, with which they supplemented their incomes. Everybody knew about the things they did, and yet even their parents and grandparents showed them respect, afraid to do otherwise. Everyone, that is, except the street boys. They had grown up side by side with the soldier boys in the same slum. The street boys knew which taunts were the most exacting. The soldiers stiffened and bristled to hear their mothers and sisters spoken of in such a way. An intake of breath, a sucking of teeth.

And somewhere among the ranks of the soldiers the bow-legged street boy’s counterpart. One-time victim, now with a gun in his hand. Unconfident, nervy, his trembling forefinger wrapped around the trigger of his weapon.

A lizard scattered suddenly, foreshadowing what was about to happen. Another barrage of insults, and the bow-legged boy brought the rock out from behind his back and flung it with all his might across the divide. It fell short, sending up a small shower of dirt. Nobody was hurt, but somebody’s nerve broke. A single shot, followed by another. Two bullets skidded through the earth. The third shot brought down the bow-legged boy, sent him flying backwards, legs and arms at awkward angles, like a scarecrow caught by the wind. The cotton tree shuddered, as a thousand bats flinched.

Time paused, as if considering whether to move swiftly on or turn back and reverse what had just happened. Time moved on. Realisation descended in an instant. Anger and outrage burst forth, the street boys began to advance. More stones. A volley of shots. This time aimed at the air above their heads, there would be no more casualties. The boys retreated with their wounded companion, swearing, holding up their fists, some still managed a swagger. Retreating all the same.

The colours of the day had fled, darkness was approaching. Redempta and I sat alone in the polling station among the ballot boxes.

A truck had arrived, collected some of the soldiers and driven away again. By my best estimate six, perhaps eight men remained. The van that was supposed to collect the ballot boxes was due in the next half an hour, but who knew now whether that would happen. At some point the soldiers would have to decide what to do with us.

I listened to the blood thumping in my eardrums, my breathing growing louder as the darkness closed in. Outside I could hear the bats leaving the cotton tree, taking to the skies one by one. I could see them through the window, watch them spiral upwards, their dark shapes outlined against the silver-blue sky, stretch their wings and turn towards the sea.

I could only just make out Redempta’s form in the half-light. I inched my way towards her through the gloom and whispered into her ear. She nodded briskly. We got down on to our hands and knees and crawled around, groping in the darkness until we found what we were looking for: the chain that had held the ballot boxes together. I removed my headdress, wrapping it around the chain to muffle the sounds, in case the soldiers should hear us. We sat back to back, passing the chain around and between us.

Whatever happened next we were as ready as we ever would be, we sat and held hands in the dark.

Footsteps. The door was opened, the young officer in command stood silhouetted against the sky. Behind him the cotton tree encircled by flying bats. Polling had now officially closed, he informed us. We had done our job. From this point on he would take charge of the ballot boxes.

‘We are instructed not to allow these boxes to leave our sight until they are properly handed over to be counted.’ Redempta’s voice was steady.

He would have expected us not to give in straight away. He replied smoothly: ‘Well, I am an officer of the Army. You can regard yourselves as having placed the ballot boxes in safe custody.’

‘We cannot do any such thing.’ I spoke up, to show we stood together. ‘We are very clear about our instructions. The boxes must go to the centre to be counted.’

‘Exactly. And that’s where I will make sure they are delivered. Believe me.’

Liar! He would have burned them, emptied them, thrown the ballot papers in the gutter, where they would float down to the sea like paper boats.

We were silent, Redempta and I.

‘Eh bo, aunty.’ His voice was changed now, softer, respectful almost. ‘You’ve done your duty. You can tell that to your grandchildren. Now let me do my own. Look how dark it is already. My men will take care of you, make sure you get home. The streets are unsafe, nobody will come to collect these boxes tonight.’

Neither one of us answered. We both thought this last bit was true. We had been forgotten. It was just us, this man and his soldiers.

‘Get up now. My men will help you.’ The officer switched on his torch and directed the beam at us.

It makes me feel like laughing now to think of the sight we must have made. Two middle-aged women, dishevelled and squinting in the sudden brightness, sitting on the dusty floor of a classroom in our gowns and good shoes, holding on to our handbags. The chain that bound us together went around our waists and then through the handles of the three sealed ballot boxes. The key to the padlock was tucked down Redempta’s bodice. As good as at the bottom of the ocean.

The stand-off could not last for ever, but it lasted just long enough. Minutes later, out of the darkness — the sound of an engine. Yaya! He had spent the day waiting, listening to the nonews coming from the radio, knowing the less that was said the worse things must surely be. When night arrived he collected his car keys and stepped out of the house and drove through the streets, not daring to switch on the headlights, until he reached our polling station. Together we loaded the ballot boxes into the back of the Peugeot under the sullen stares of the soldiers, and though every moment we thought that they might stop us or that some authorisation might arrive to arrest us, deep down we knew we had called their bluff. We were not street boys, but three middleaged citizens. The truth is, once we were no longer afraid, there was nothing they could do.

At the counting centre, Redempta, Yaya and I, we handed over the boxes to a white woman wearing a T-shirt printed with the words: ‘INTERNATIONAL OBSERVER’ in bold letters. And after our mission was complete, we drove home through the dark, silent streets, laughing as we went.

Oh, Redempta! My dear, Redempta. She lived long enough to see how all our efforts had been wasted. Even as we sat chained to our ballot boxes, on the other side of the country people with telltale purple thumbs were having their hands sliced off, to punish them for daring to insist upon their own leader. The Army handed over power with one hand, only to seize it with the other a year later. Old enemies created new factions and joined together against a common foe, us: the women and the children and the ordinary people. The new President, who was an old man, shook his head, climbed into his waiting helicopter and disappeared into the clouds. From those same clouds a maelstrom was unleashed, and of the many lives destroyed by its rage, one was Redempta. Murdered, alongside her husband, her children and countless others, the day the rebel army stormed the city.

I had a dream. In that dream I was playing with my children in the sun, not a cloud in the sky. I looked up, and high above me I saw the ghost of Janneh. From the top of the escarpment he was waving at me and shouting, but he was too far away for me to catch the words, so I smiled and waved back at him. A cloud crossed in front of the sun, for a moment I could hardly see him, I let my hand drop back to my side. Janneh was still calling to me. But it was too late, too late! The gathering winds swept his words away and hurled them out to sea.

And from somewhere in the distance, I heard the first, faint roll of thunder.

16 Asana, 1998: The Box

Five months earlier I had woken to a dawn the colour of steel. The curious light lasted through the morning and into the day as if the sun had never risen. The land glowed in silvery shades. Here and there pools of quivering light rested upon the side of a house, on the great leaves of the vine that climbed the wall around my yard. In the middle of the day I looked up at the sky expecting to see clouds, instead I saw the sun, a white disc.

A hawk dropped out of the sky and drank from a puddle of water. A superstitious person might have made something of it, otherwise nothing else remarkable happened. My granddaughter had baked black banana bread and she brought me a piece of it on a dish with a glass of water, staying to keep me company. My appetite had waned as I had grown older, and I covered the dish with a cloth, telling her I would enjoy it later. We spoke little, content in each other’s company. I liked simply to watch her liquid movements: flicking a fly with the corner of her dress, fanning her face with her hand, twirling the end of a plait. She sat on the step with one leg stretched out in front of her, the other bent, her cheek resting upon the knee, facing away from me. In the half-light of that day I gazed at the back of her neck, the soft furrow that ran from the nape of her neck down between her shoulder blades; from behind the curve of her waist belied the child she was carrying, just now beginning to show in the roundness of her stomach. With each passing week the birthmark above her navel widened and stretched.

Adama had been eleven years old when her great-grandmother died. Too young to really remember, old enough not to have forgotten. She had loved my mother fearlessly. In a way I had never been able.

When she was three, ignoring Kadie, her own mother, she strode with tiny steps up to her great-grandmother and demanded loudly to be taken to the toilet. My mother threw up her hands and stared aghast, as though she had never cared for a child in her life. Kadie quickly led the child away. But my mother had been amused. The girl called her Ya Mama and sometimes Yammy, and my mother encouraged it.

I know, it’s the oldest story in the world. The fresh spirit who frees one that has been bottled too long.

She had been away when Ya Mama died. And she had appeared to accept it as children do when they have yet to learn the meaning of for ever. Years later she began a game, which she played obsessively for a while. I came to think of it as the ‘remember’ game.

‘Remember when that bird landed on Yammy’s shoulder …’

‘Remember when I made her coffee …’ Mud and river water, mixed together in a tin cup. My mother had been fooled into taking a hearty swig. Later, in the mornings, real cups of coffee just as I had brought to my own grandmother a long time ago. Afternoons, they napped together on the four-poster bed that once belonged to my father.

‘Remember Ya Mama’s feet …’ My mother took care of her feet, soles as smooth as paper, nails dipped weekly in henna. When she could no longer bend to reach them Adama buffed the undersides with pumice.

We would sit for hours sharing memories: fleeting, brightly coloured, sometimes surrounded by darkness, passing them back and forth until I was no longer certain whose were whose. She lent me her own memories of childhood with which to remember my mother.

We had played the game the day before for the first time in a long while. Sorting reminiscences the way we had baby clothes. Storing some and putting others aside for the new baby, creating space for new things. That afternoon, though, there was no game. We sat together in a sleepy silence, I watched her head sink, listened to her breathing come in slow sighs.

I stood up to fetch a cloth to fold under her head. On my way I reached for the plate of banana bread. Hali! The plate seemed suddenly as heavy as if it was made of iron. My arm dropped. The plate slipped from my fingers, clattered and spun on the stone floor. Adama, startled, leaped to her feet. The heaviness slid down the side of my body into my leg. I tried to take a step, but I couldn’t pick my foot up off the floor. Falling, I felt myself falling. With my other hand I reached for the table and missed. Through the gathering darkness I saw Adama hurrying towards me as I toppled forward.

Later I realised it had been haunting me, stalking me all that day: the steel-grey light — I would forever see the world in shadowy twilight. A doctor was called, a quack who gave me headache pills. Then a proper doctor who had studied in China. And he told me I had had a stroke.

I still went to the store. Adama pushed me in a wheelbarrow. The roads were too rutted to allow a wheelchair to pass. Kadie wanted me to stay home and rest. But I missed the smell, the feel of the place. ‘When did you ever see a mother sleep while her child was crying?’ I told her. There was always work to do. On days when Kadie went to visit our other shops, I worked the till with my one good hand while Adama climbed the stepladder to bring down the cloths.

My sister Hawa came to see me. Looked at me with sad eyes and shook her head. ‘Nothing happens for nothing,’ she pronounced with hidden pleasure. I gave a wave of my good hand, dismissing her. There’s a certain kind of person who can always find an explanation for things that happen. My sister was one of those. Something bad befalls somebody they don’t like and they say that person must have brought it upon themselves. When precisely the same fate comes their own way, this time it’s a spirit bringing bad luck. A person they envy prospers only because that person made a bargain with a powerful spirit. But when they lose their own business, is it because they didn’t work hard enough or because they ate all the proceeds and failed to reinvest them? Of course not. It is a moriman’s curse, purchased by a rival!

The doctor had explained to me exactly how it happened. A blood clot stopped up one of my arteries so the blood couldn’t reach my brain. Like a dam in a river. Even I could understand that. He wrapped a rubber tube around my arm and took my blood pressure, tested my pee for diabetes, wrote a prescription and ordered me to cook with less palm oil.

I took advantage of my state not to offer Hawa anything that might encourage her to stay. She only ever visited when there was something she needed. This time, though, she seemed to want to stay for ever. I peered into her shadowed face.

When had this secret war between us begun? I wondered.

Five months later, though, her words came back to me. Terrible things began to happen to all of us. It was as though the end of the world had come. The earth crumbled, the sky rained down, people fled for their lives. Nothing happens for nothing. I wanted to straighten my crooked body, I wanted to stamp the earth, raise both my fists and scream at the skies.

What in the world had we all done to deserve such a fate?

When I think back now, we kept the knowledge a secret, even from ourselves.

Lorries travelling roads in the South were held up by gunmen who hauled the driver down from his cab, thieved the goods from the back of his vehicle and carried them away into the forest. They set fire to the lorry, sometimes roping the driver to the wheel. Other times slicing off his ears and stealing his shoes before leaving him to walk home. A band of miners were marched away from their workplace and not sighted until months later when they appeared on the other side of the country. Their kidnappers never said who they were or what it was they wanted. There were rumours of tattooed strangers who arrived in towns and moved among the people, members of a secret clan, whose mark was worn by the women under one breast and by the men on the buttock. They looked just like you or I, it was said, some spoke in languages nobody could understand. They disappeared as quickly as they came. There were stories of young men and women who slipped away to join them. The youths’ families claimed their children had been stolen and scoured the countryside. Then there were other stories, ones that made your eyes stretch. Of beings that could become invisible, that could fly, leap over houses, that gathered to dine on the hearts of their victims from whence they derived their supernatural powers. There came a time when everybody had heard these stories, some had even claimed to have witnessed them with their own eyes.

Yet who the strangers were, nobody could say.

Members of the ancient clans, the leopard and the crocodile, outlawed for many decades but still continuing their fearful practices, said some. Others insisted such feats were beyond the power of mortal man. And others still said everybody else was talking nonsense, these deeds were the acts of the Army, devious in their hunger for power.

On the radio a Government spokesman reassured us. Small groups of insurgents were at work in some parts of the country. The Army was involved in a series of mopping-up operations, they said. He made it sound as harmless as spilled milk.

What an insurgent was, nobody knew. Then somebody said it was another word for rebel. Rebel!

People whose children had vanished hid their faces. People reporting fresh disappearances had their homes turned over, the roofs torched. People fell silent, dared not open their mouths to speak. There was a stillness in the air. From the outside it looked like calm, but beneath the surface were turbulent, invisible currents: fear, suspicion, confusion.

Still, life continued, for none of us had the luxury of pausing. For many years that was the way we lived. Finding scapegoats. Turning our faces from the truth.

A rooster used to call false dawns all through the night. I remember because when I woke up his voice was the first sound I heard. By then I had begun to find myself more and more a stranger to sleep. I knew I’d be awake now until morning. It was age, of course, and an effect of my condition. I couldn’t keep my eyes open after lunch, only to be awake in the early hours, lying on my back, alone and floating unhinged upon a tide of darkness. That particular morning I woke with a full bladder. Impossible to wait for morning and Adama to come and help me. I put out my hand, felt for my stick, knocking it to the floor. I groped, found it with my fingers and hauled myself up.

Outside the air was cool, damp. I made my way slowly, inching forward with my now sideways walk, like a crab across the ground.

I didn’t bother to go all the way to the latrine. I urinated out of doors, something I liked to do: the feel of the air on my thighs, the breeze murmuring in the trees, the smell of damp grass, the sound of the night birds interrupted by the hiss of steaming piss. I pulled up my lappa. It amused me to think I was doing something possible only under the disguise of the night. What, I sometimes wondered, would happen if I were to do the same thing in the middle of the day? They would think I had finally gone mad, but men do it all the time, don’t they?

Ah, my eyes, my twilight eyes. But for them I would have noticed sooner.

I urinated with my back to the house. I closed my eyes, savoured the weakness that follows the release. Finished, I opened my eyes and squatted there, in no hurry to go back inside, slowly generating the energy to stand up. My eyes rested on the horizon. I blinked. I squinted. Looked again. Brilliant dancing lights of orange, green and gold in the east. Not the warm glow of a bush fire, these were flashing lights, more like Chinese fireworks. I looked up at the night sky and saw the moon still high above me. I stood up, watched the shifting hues of this unearthly display. For a long time I was still, not knowing what to do.

Inside the house I shook Adama’s shoulder, we were alone, the two of us. I showed her what I’d seen. We did not sleep that night, we kept a vigil on the back verandah, watching the lights on the horizon.

Early prayers and the mosque was full, my neighbour stopped by with this news — for I had long given up going. Afterwards everybody wanted to talk about the omens in the night sky. At ten O’ clock my nephew came and pushed me to town in my barrow. Those days, the effort was far too much for Adama. Twice we had thought her labour was beginning, twice the birth attendant had been summoned. Both times it turned out to be a false alarm. Still, Kadie and Ansuman had delayed travelling to Guinea. In the end, though, Adama had urged her parents to go. Even if the baby came, we would manage.

Adama walked alongside me. The streets were quiet as we made our slow progress through them. In the square I noted half a dozen empty stalls among the regulars. No charcoal. Now, that was interesting. Charcoal was delivered from out of town first thing in the morning. I noticed one other thing, though I mentioned none of it to Adama — all the traders had already sold out of bread.

We opened up the shop, customers were scarce. A little after eleven Mr Wurie passed by with news of strangers sighted on the main road out of town. It was only a rumour, he told us quietly, but we ought to know. I thanked him for that and his offer to help us in any way he could.

At midday I closed up the shop. Other shop owners had already done the same. We spent a short time moving stock to the storeroom at the back. I took the money box and hid it under the stairs. Afterwards we pulled down the metal shutters and set off home.

Just two streets from the house, past the old railway station, there is a place where the wall of a house juts out and the road curves sharply around it. We turned the corner. On the road ahead of us I spotted Kamanda, the madman. He was wearing an old fisherman’s sweater and a pair of trousers with the seat torn out. Around his neck hung a necklace of bottle tops and crumpled drink cans. Kamanda’s face was running with sweat, he was babbling, spraying great gobs of spit. His calloused feet with their long, grey toenails stamped the earth as he marched up and down, up and down, swinging his arms.

‘Kamanda! Kamanda!’ I called. For he was a gentle soul. I had often given him the off cuts from reams of fabric, which he wrapped around his head or tucked into his belt like fluttering handkerchiefs. I had never seen him like this. I tried to calm him with my voice, but there was no reasoning with him at the best of times. For a few moments he seemed to settle, only to jump up, as if to attention, and begin striding up and down again.

At home I sent my nephew back to his house. ‘Hurry! No shilly shallying,’ I urged him. Then I busied Adama, telling her to bring the washing in, round up the chickens, and to light a fire.

While she was occupied I went around the house collecting up all my jewellery and precious things. From the suitcase under my bed I fetched the gifts I had bought for Adama’s baby, a silver coin with a hole in the middle and a gold chain to hang around the baby’s waist. Along with my most valuable pieces I tied them up in a cloth and dropped them into the water jar at the back door, then I sank a large stone on the top. The lesser pieces of jewellery I spread out on the table in the middle of the room.

Outside I loosened the tether of the goat and waved my stick at her until she bolted into the bushes. Afterwards I went to the yard and ordered Adama to bring the biggest of the cast iron pots and twelve cups of rice. Adama exclaimed upon the quantity, but did as she was told.

A lot of rice. Yes, indeed. I intended to cook enough to feed an army.

There was a town I used to visit. I had been there many times before. In that town was a factory which manufactured dyes and finishes. Every once in a while the owners produced a new range of colours and invited all their customers to view them. I always took the job of going to see the new range myself. Before I had my stroke it was something I liked to do. I liked the metallic tang in the air inside the main hall of the factory, the wooden vats of colour stirred by men with iron paddles, the smudges of colour on the walls. Mr Bangura, the foreman, was a cheerful fellow. A widower, whose wife had died of cholera, he had never remarried. On the third finger of his left hand he wore a ring. Not an ordinary wedding band, but a heavy gold signet ring engraved with two sets of initials. We always conducted our business upstairs in his office across a table holding many jars of pigment and glass tubes of colours. When our business was concluded he would serve me a cold drink out of the fridge behind his chair while we chatted about many things. Once he had joked that with our occupations we would make a good pair. And though I replied in a teasing voice that I was past all that, it occurred to me there was once a time when the idea would have not seemed such a bad one.

My visits to the factory also gave me a chance to see Alpha who worked nearby as a teacher’s assistant in a boy’s secondary school. He would cycle to meet me, carrying lunch for us both in aluminium pots wrapped up in cloths. We would share our meal, catch up on each other’s news and after I had rested a little and Alpha run whatever errands he had in town, we would set off to the factory, Alpha walking his bicycle, me alongside him.

The last time I visited, the heat had been dazzling, the sun directly overhead. The grass was pale yellow and bone dry, rustling in what little breeze there was. The great, black boulders scattered at the bottom of the hills glistened in the sun. The sky was hazy, streaked with clouds. It was too hot even for the birds, who hid from the heat in the branches of the trees. The factory was some small distance from the town. Despite the heat Alpha and I walked without stopping, lost in the pleasure of each other’s company.

There was no guard at the factory gate. We passed through, still chattering and we walked on up the empty drive. Mr Bangura didn’t hurry down to welcome me, or wave from his office window as he usually did. I noticed, yes. But did I think it so very strange? I don’t know, perhaps I only think so now.

The big factory door stood open. We stepped through. Inside the main hall, silent pools of colour. A paddle lying on the ground by my feet. Not a soul in sight.

For some reason we did not call out. We stood still and stared around us. Only a moment or two later did we open our ears and listen, and when we did we heard a sound that must have been there all along. A buzzing, like a faint whine, like an aeroplane engine high in the sky. We followed the sound across the factory floor towards the great, double doors that led out to the back, where deliveries came and went. On the opposite side was the storeroom where the tubs of pigment were kept.

One thing nobody ever mentions afterwards is the smell. The indignity of it, I suppose. Such a commonplace smell. One to make your mouth water and your stomach rumble. For the rest of your life at a family gathering, a festival, it will serve to bring back the nausea, return you to the horror.

What is it? It is the smell of roasted meat.

The roof of the storeroom was mostly gone, what remained had collapsed into the building. The windows were ringed with black, shards of darkened glass like broken teeth stuck out of the frames. On the ground below one window lay a tub, partly melted, the spilled violet powder a shock of colour. The door had turned to charcoal, and split apart as Alpha kicked it. The sound of buzzing soared. All around us briefly turned to black as we were engulfed by a great mass of flies. I covered my face and hit at them with my hands, and once the air cleared I saw what was inside.

They had been rounded up and herded inside at gunpoint. We know this because it happened later, to others. Those few who survived all told the same story. At first they imagine it is a robbery, they are being locked up to stop them from raising the alarm. From the window they watch carefully the movements of the armed men. Then they see the plastic containers, smell the petrol as it is splashed on the walls and roof of the store. Men with guns encircle the building. Those inside begin to shout and hammer at the door, frantic now. Somebody takes a tub of dye and throws it at the window, it smashes the glass. They scramble over one another to escape the stifling fume-filled air and the certainty of death. The first one to try to climb out is shot.

The screams of the men as they burned must have been terrible, must have filled the air, sent the birds and animals fleeing. And yet nobody hears them. Their killers are deaf to them. There is no one else for miles. And afterwards, when the gunmen are gone, have ransacked the office and made off with the vehicles, silence follows. A desperate, resilient, unbreakable silence.

Alpha and I uttered not a word, not even a gasp, except the grunt he gave at the effort of kicking in the door. We moved around the corpses, who stared up at us through melted eyes, reached out to us with charred and twisted limbs. Some lay alone. Others were fused together, so here a corpse which seemed to have too many limbs, there a pair in apparent embrace. Most of all I remember the hands, by which I tried for a short while to identify Mr Bangura, searching for his ring. Brittle, blackened sticks reaching out. For what? Curled claws, trying to hold on. To what? To life itself, I can only imagine.

So you see, on that day I believed I knew what was coming. I sat outside on my old stool and positioned myself where I could best see the road. I settled down to wait. Whatever was out there was on its way. On its way to us.

Adama sat next to me, I watched her hands as she unpicked the frayed edge of a basket and prepared to repair it. I saw how her usually nimble fingers stumbled over the repair, weaving and unpicking the same few inches over and over. At that moment she turned her unblinking gaze up at me.

‘Let me fetch you something to eat.’ She was concerned for me, as I was for her. Each one pretending for the other’s benefit. I had no appetite, my mouth was dry as sand.

‘Yes, please. I’m a little hungry.’

As she rose she pressed the heel of her hand into the small of her back and stood there for a moment. I watched her cross the yard and bend over the cooking pots. For a while she remained doubled over. When she straightened again I saw her features tremble with pain.

Dear God, I said to myself. Not now.

She saw me watching and tried to force her lips into a smile. ‘Another false alarm.’

‘With your mother it was just the same,’

We sat and waited, the cooling feast spread out in front of us. We saw nobody. No visitor come to pay respects, no neighbour to exchange the news of the day. Not even a single passer-by.

In the last part of the afternoon I sat up suddenly, cocked my head and listened. I could hear dogs barking. Not the snarling, yelping of a scrap. Nor the howling call and answer that went on through the night. Rather a relentless, monotonous barking that started and did not stop. I sat listening while I worked out where in the town it was coming from, tracing its progression through the streets towards us.

I stood up and went, quickly as I could manage, into the house, unlocked the storeroom and gathered up a few pieces of smoked fish, some dried cassava. I poured two cups of rice into a handkerchief and knotted it. I found a packet of matches, a little money and a tin cup, tied them all up in a lappa. By the time I had finished I was exhausted.

I thrust the bundle into Adama’s hands. I told her what she must do. She shook her head: ‘No!’ she said. The baby might be on its way, I told her. I knew the pains had been coming all afternoon. I had seen her turn away from me every time it happened. The poor child began to cry, and, Oh, how I wanted to cry too, to clutch her and weep, for this wasn’t how we had imagined it would be when she came home for the birth. Instead I reached out and gave her shoulder a shake. In the distance came the sound of gunfire. Somebody ran past in the street shouting a warning. I still had my hand on her shoulder, now I pushed her as hard as I could towards the door, telling her to find the neighbours and join them.

She went. She did as she was told. I said I would follow as soon as I could. Maybe the baby would come today, maybe it would come tonight. Maybe it would come next week. But it would come. I could only pray I would be with her when it happened. I kept sight of her as she walked through the banana groves. My ears followed her progress long after she was no longer visible. For several minutes I stood and listened to the clicking of her fingers fading as she walked into the arms of the forest. Only then did I turn to go inside.

When my mother died she left me her possessions, among them the great chest in which she once stored her belongings. It was empty now. I went over to it, dragging my bad foot along the floor. I opened the lid, laid my stick inside. With all the strength left in my one good arm, I hoisted myself up on to the edge. I balanced there for a moment, then I leaned forward and let myself topple in. I lay there, a little winded. Then I reached up and pulled the lid down over me. I curled up in the darkness and went on waiting.

I could hear nothing save a few muffled sounds. And all I could see was the narrow beam of light that came from the space between the lid and the box. For the first time I began to feel afraid. For a while I did nothing, just listened to the sound of my own breathing. In the closed space my breaths seemed raucous, as though they had transformed into vapours, clamorous with life, swirling around, searching for a way out.

I tried to make myself comfortable. I should have put down some cloths or sacking to line the inside. Too late now. I was lying on top of my stick and I squirmed until I managed to ease it out from under me. I turned on to my back and lay there with my knees bent. The temperature inside the box was rising, it would soon be as hot as a furnace. I loosened my clothing as best I could. I pulled off my head-wrap, bunched it up and put it under my head as a makeshift pillow. The effort made me thirsty, but I had no water. I didn’t dare risk climbing back out, I would have to manage without.

After a bit I began to explore my surroundings. This had been my favourite hiding place when I was a child. I’d lie on top of my mother’s belongings, waiting for someone to come and find me, as scared of being discovered as of not being found at all. When the lid finally opened above me, I screamed and screamed. Still, I went back, over and over, to hide in the same place. I didn’t think anyone would imagine I would be so stupid as to choose such an obvious place. My double bluff never worked. I prayed it would work this time.

I ran my fingertips around the sides of the box. It was well made, solid and strong. We were more or less the same age, and yet I was the one who’d begun to sag and creak. The box on the other hand had only grown more handsome with the years: the richness of the patina, the worn-smooth surface. I had become so used to it over the years, I’d stopped seeing it, but it was a very elegant box.

I came across a knot in the wood and explored it with my fingers. It was grainy, at odds with the feel of the rest. I scratched it with my fingernail and felt it crumble. I reached up and took a pin from my hair and began to dig at the place. The knot wasn’t wood at all, but some sort of plaster, probably where the carpenter had plugged the place where a knot had fallen through. I scratched away like a mouse until I had made myself a spyhole. It was a little high, I had to push myself up on one elbow, but it was better than nothing.

There was more light now, a circular beam coming in through the spy hole. I followed the beam to the other side of the box where it revealed a series of markings: vertical cuts, where somebody had scored the wood with a knife. Two rows of ten, one above, one below. A carpenter’s trademark? Perhaps the box had been made using wood from something else. I ran my thumbnail across the rows, backwards and forwards, making a vibrating sound like a musical instrument.

Now I remembered. As a young girl, watching my mother. Every year, on the day we ate the first rice of the new harvest, going to her room where the great chest stood. With a sharp knife she would score the wood in the same place every year. Every year for ten years. Ten anniversaries. Ten birthdays. Asana and Alusani. Then Alusani died and stole her happiness to take with him back to the other world.

Rofathane. I had fought so hard to leave all that behind. And yet.

We had a herbalist, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a birth attendant and a boy who never grew old. Soothsayers prepared us for the unexpected. Teachers travelled to us, bringing the word from Futa Djallon. People who wanted to live in Rofathane had first to find a patron and then to ask permission to settle. There existed an order, an order in which everybody had their place. An imperfect order. An order we understood.

A lullaby came to me, one my mother used to sing:

Asana tey k’ kulo,

I thonto, thonto,

K’ m’ng dira.

Asana, don’t you cry,

I’ll rock you, rock you,

Until you sleep.

I hummed softly to myself, and as I did so I began to rock back and forth, growing sentimental, a wet-eyed, foolish old woman. I thought of my mother and father, sleeping safely in their graves. I thought of Osman, of Ngadie. I hoped Kadie and Ansuman were still in Guinea and that they would hear what was happening and not come back. I feared for Alpha.

Voices! Ugly, bold, challenging. They seemed to come from all directions. Voices and the sound of running feet. The feet were bare, I remember that because there was something oddly unthreatening in the way they patted the earth.

I put my eye to the spyhole, and looked left and right.

Two men and a woman came into view. Walking high on the balls of their feet. The woman and one of the men were carrying guns, resting them upright against their shoulders, fingers on the trigger. Just like they do in the cinema. The other man carried a machete and smoked a cigarette. They were looking this way and that, all around them, as they advanced.

Such strange garb, they were dressed like children who had found a dressing-up box. A pair of ladies’ sunglasses. Amilitary-style jacket with gold epaulettes. A red bra. Jeans. Camouflaged trousers. A T-shirt with the face of a dead American rapper. A necklace of bullets. Around their necks and wrists dangled charms on twisted strings. They were talking to others I couldn’t see, but their talk was unintelligible to me. I thought at first it was some strange tongue, the kind we made up as children. But every now and again a fragment of the exchange occurred in my own language. Gradually I realised that I was listening to several languages being spoken at once.

I had left the back door to my house open. This was how I could see what was going on. I expected my neighbours had bolted theirs before they fled, and sure enough a moment later I heard the sound of wood splintering, of a door being broken from its hinges.

Beneath the cooking pot in the yard the embers of the fire throbbed faintly. One of the intruders raised the lid of the cooking pot. Good, I had wanted them to find the food. I saw him dip his fingers into the sauce, he made a joke to the others.

I pulled my eye back from the spy hole. The other man was wandering dangerously close to the house. I listened to his steps as he approached the door, heard him carefully cross the threshold, the click of his weapon. My heart thudded, my breaths came short and fast. Surely he could hear me, I thought. I cowered inside the box, waiting for the lid to open. They would kill me straight away, of that I was certain. An old, crippled woman, there was not much sport to be had with me. Softly, the footsteps came closer, inches now from my head. I held my breath.

He stopped, swivelled, turned. He had spotted the jewellery on the table. The chink of metal as he turned over the pieces and began pocketing them. The sounds must have alerted the others, I heard them coming to see what he was doing. I listened in the dark as they began to squabble over my possessions.

Somewhere in the distance a voice shouted orders. The three looters snatched up the remainder of the jewellery and began to move off. I put my eye to the spyhole, watched their backs as they disappeared. I lay back and breathed out.

I slept. I woke. I slept again. A serpentine dream wove its way through my mind. Dreams of discovery. Dreams of death. I slipped in and out of consciousness and woke struggling for air. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. For a moment I had forgotten where I was. My body was damp, pools of sweat had gathered on the floor of the box. Something had woken me. I could hear scattered gunfire. From outside came the smell of burning straw. I peeped out of my spyhole. Against the darkness, a halo of flickering light: fire from flaming houses

In the yard a stone ricocheted. A figure appeared carrying a burning brand. It lit up his features, turning his nostrils into black holes, his eyes into dark hollows. With silent steps he crossed the yard, making for my neighbour’s house.

The hours passed. I must have lost track of time. The next I knew the three from before were back. I listened as they slit the throats of my chickens and roasted them over the fire. The contents of my cooking pots were passed around. More people came, bringing loot from the surrounding houses. Evidently they had broken into the bottle store. There was music and much rough laughter. Different smells drifted into the box: the sour smell of unwashed bodies, rum fumes and the scented smoke of marijuana.

Hamdillah, how I prayed. I don’t deny it. Not at all. To the gods of Islam and Christianity, to every god in the skies plus any others I might not have thought of. Would they set fire to my house when they had taken what they wanted? Would I die of thirst trapped in my hiding place? Somewhere my fate was already cast in stones.

Have you ever wondered what it is that makes people do terrible things? I have. Since that day, I have set my mind to it many times. All the stories of supernatural beings and yet those men and women out there were not so different from me, only that something inside them had been unleashed. So, where does it come from, the fury? A thousand indignities, a thousand wrongs, like tiny knife wounds, shredding a person’s humanity. In time only the tattered remnants are left. And in the end they ask themselves — what good is this to me? And they throw the last of it away.

At dawn, finally, they slept. I listened to the sound of their snoring. I didn’t dare let myself fall asleep again in case I snored too, or cried out in my dreams. The sun was halfway up the sky and the temperature inside the box was rising rapidly by the time they had woken up. Through my circular window I watched them rouse themselves, collect up their weapons and as much of their stolen booty as they could carry, and stumble away like sleepwalkers.

I waited two hours more, then I opened the lid of the box and climbed out. I plunged my arm into the water jar and retrieved the bundle. I allowed myself a few sips of water before I picked my way across the yard, through the banana grove and into the trees. I kept on walking. I left the path. I crossed the boundary into the sacred forest. It was a forbidden place, but what did that matter now? Things had changed, perhaps for ever. The old order had gone, those rules no longer applied. I had to find Adama, to help bring her baby into this world.

With me I carried my gifts for the baby. But what would I say to her? How would I explain that her great-grandmother, who had lived for longer than eighty years, had learned nothing at all, had no knowledge to give? That she had arrived in a world where suddenly we were all lost, as helpless as newborns.

17 Mariama, 1999: Twelfth Night

Kuru Massaba made the world and placed it upon the head of a great giant. This is what Pa Yamba told me once. Every day the giant turned himself slowly from east to west and then slowly turned himself back again. People lived on the earth and should have been happy, for everything they needed was there. But they fought among themselves and their anger caused pain to the giant in the form of terrible headaches. He shook his head to free himself of the torment and brought down great storms that only tormented him more. In time the pain became unbearable. The giant lay down, grew sick and died, the world became dark.

This is what we know happened to the world. I told Mr Lockheart this story. And this is the story I will tell you, the last one.

‘Go on, Mary,’ he said.

Kuru was angry. So angry he turned his face away. But when he heard the distress of the dying people on the darkened earth, his heart softened. He forgave them, he placed the world upon the head of another giant who turned from east to west every day. He pushed all the bad spirits into the underworld, and gave the rest of the world to human beings, because he loved them. But Kuru is disappointed again, because we will not love him the way he wishes to be loved.

Sometimes the giant stumbles. You can feel it. He is weakening. Every time he stumbles the earth is shaken, it crumbles and cracks. The spirits in the darkness down below are woken.

‘What will happen then, Mary?’ Mr Lockheart liked to use my name a great deal, and to look me in the eye as he did so. I had expected this, I wasn’t offended by it. I quite liked him.

I replied: ‘If you would like to call me by my name, it is Mariama.’

‘I will, if that’s what you would like. I thought Mary was your Christian name. Why do you call yourself Mariama?’

Yes, Mary is my Christian name. That’s exactly what it is. That’s all it is.

Mariama was the name given to me. The nuns took it away and replaced it with something that sounded like my name, that I learned to answer to. It was easier to remember, they said. For whom? I might have asked. And why did I need a name that was easy to remember? Perhaps they thought we weren’t worth the effort. Or that it was presumptuous of a little pagan baby to walk through life trailing a name of four syllables, flagrantly, like an ermine cloak or a silk scarf, something that should only be worn by the most important people. But Mary wasn’t mine. It never had been. Mariama was the name my mother had chosen for me.

Some of this I said out loud. Some I kept to myself.

Mr Lockheart nodded: ‘I see. Mariama it is. And you must call me Adrian.’

He glanced down at the desk, I could see he wanted to pick up his pen and make some notes about me. He wasn’t sure. Now he was masking his hesitation by pretending to look like he was thinking about something. He was new, had only been here a few months. But he thought that if he was calling me by my first name, I should call him by his. They all did that, so they could feel they were treating us like equals.

As a matter of fact, if it were up to me I would tell him to call me Aunty Mariama. Because at his age he ought to show a little respect. That’s if it were up to me. But it isn’t.

I think of that giant turning slowly round. From east to west, from west to east. Endlessly revolving. I wonder if that is why our lives so often end up in the same place they began? Because life is not a straight line, just as the earth isn’t flat. You don’t walk and walk until you reach a place you know is the end. Like the Europeans once believed. They thought if they sailed their ships towards the horizon they would plummet off the end in a cascade of water. Then came Galileo. And after that they found us here, clinging on to the curve of the earth. What took them so long? I sometimes wonder. We knew the earth was round long before that.

No, life isn’t a straight line. It is a circle, whose slow and gentle bend we fail to spot, until we realise we are back where we started. I don’t know when I realised I knew this, but it was some time before I met Adrian Lockheart.

The next time, Adrian Lockheart asked: ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

‘You mean like the Holy Ghost.’

‘Are you teasing? It’s OK if you are. I don’t mind. And I take your point, Mary.’

‘Mariama.’

‘Mariama.’ A pause. ‘I mean ghosts, spirits, devils.’

He is trying to understand, and despite myself I would like to help him. He has read newspapers and scholarly reports about us. And he has been talking to the others who come here. He will have been out drinking with them, which I know is where he was last night. I saw him: leaning across the table, hovering above the pools of beer stretched out on the plastic. He is the new boy. The others enjoy the fact, they can pretend to be old Africa hands. Tales of cannibals and juju. If ever they see a shadow of scepticism on his face they shake their heads knowingly. ‘I’m telling you. Just like that. Dead. Convinced someone had placed a curse on him, doesn’t matter how educated. I’ve seen it before. Rwanda. The Congo.’

He thought he would be working with child soldiers. Or at the very least the limbless, the lipless, the eyeless, the tongueless. Instead he got me. But he was a good man, and determined to make the best of it.

I asked what his own opinion was, since he was the Spiritual Advisor.

‘I’m really a counsellor, that’s just a fancy title.’ He smiled when he said that.

So I told him, no, I wasn’t teasing.

March is the warmest month of the year, and this was the warmest March for many years to come.

We used to meet on Friday mornings, eleven o’clock. His office had bare walls and a concrete floor, a bare light bulb descended from the ceiling on a three-foot, brittle cord. Too low, so each time he passed it he was forced to duck slightly. A small pink burn showed on his forehead. A desk, five chairs, one of which was broken and pushed against the wall. One he sat on. The other three, of variable height, were placed in a row in front of his desk. The middle one was directly opposite him, soft but too low slung, it left you peering across the surface of the desk at him. Choosing either of the others meant you would be at eye level, but off-centre. I chose the one that was closest and sat down, looking at him sideways on.

He turned his chair to face me. My skin prickled under his gaze, so I stared straight ahead of me at the wall, or else out of the window. Sometimes he turned to see what I was looking at. But there was nothing to see. Just a badly built wall with dried concrete oozing out between the breeze blocks and a trail of withered bougainvillea.

He suffered in the heat, clawing at his collar; the back of his shirt was soaked with sweat and stuck to the plastic chair. Still, he refused to give in to it. Every day a tie, a long-sleeved shirt, and a jacket that hung uselessly over the back of his chair.

Our sessions ended when the day was at its hottest.

‘Quick! What’s the first thing that comes into your mind.’ As if we were playing a game. So I told him about my niece, whose child had died. He asked me how I felt about that. I told him I was sorry for my sister’s daughter, she had wanted this child very much.

‘Some people believe these things are just God’s will, Mariama.’ Adrian said in his hushed voice.

I told him it was probably no such thing. It was the child’s will. She had changed her mind. For her one world was as good as the other. It is we who are so much attached to this one.

One morning, the sixth or seventh time we met, Mr Lockheart had another idea. He asked if he might visit my room, he had heard so much about it. I didn’t like to let anybody inside, not even the houseboy who cleaned the bedrooms of the other staff. On Mondays I left my waste paper basket out for him. On Tuesdays he left a dustpan and brush leaning against my door. But he, Mr Lockheart, Adrian, was quite insistent. He said it would help him to understand me.

I pushed open the door of my room. I crossed in front of him towards the window, unhinged the shutters. A ray of sunlight lit up the opposite wall, bouncing off the shiny surface of the magazine pictures. I opened the window and pushed the shutters all the way back, until they hit the outside wall with a bang. The room glowed with light. I had never seen it like this, it pleased me. Sounds from outside entered the room, mingling with the dust that played in the air, and set the colours of the pictures shimmering. The images sparkled and came alive. A shark swam towards me with red, gaping jaws. A shoal of silver fish swam by. A red starfish flashed, on and off. A blue sea horse reared. A conger eel hid in the darkness of his cave. A sleepy eyed turtle with wrinkled features glided past. A setting sun glittered upon the waves. All around me the sound of water, crashing and foaming on to the shore, trickling back down the sand to the ocean. The sounds filled my ears, I shook my head.

Adrian stepped across the threshold, and stood with his back against the wall, slowly crossing his arms in front of him. He tilted his head upwards towards the painting on the ceiling. Kassila! Nacre teeth, glinting coral eyes, ears of fragile oyster shells, his great scaly tail coiled and flexed. He reached down to us with spiny fingers. Adrian swallowed. I saw his Adam’s apple, hard and fragile, move up and down behind the translucent skin of his throat. The fingers of his right hand fluttered briefly against his arm.

I looked at Adrian and I looked around me. Before we came here I thought I was going to feel ashamed, but I didn’t. Instead I felt proud. This was the first time anybody had seen my room, with my permission. A month before, the urgent matter of a bats’ nest in the roof of the room next door had brought the caretaker over, he in turn called the matron, and she the principal. That’s where this whole thing with Adrian Lockheart started, when the sessions began. They had not known quite what to do. It did not seem to occur to them just to leave me as I was.

He didn’t speak for quite a long time, eventually he said: ‘What is it?’

‘It’s my work,’ I replied.

The pen Adrian Lockheart used to record our conversations was an old-fashioned fountain pen. A fine example, with a gold nib that made scratching sounds like the birds on the roof. One day, when he was called out of the room briefly, I picked it up and examined it. The shaft was made of marbled enamel, the nib engraved with the manufacturer’s name. When he came back in he told me it had belonged to his grandfather, who had lived and worked in this country once. His grandfather’s fondness for our country made Adrian want to see it for himself.

‘Lockheart?’ I asked.

‘Silk. On my mother’s side.’

The same name as the old District Commissioner. I replaced the pen on the table. I pretended the name meant nothing to me.

Adrian had something he wanted to talk about. He said we started but never did finish the discussion.

‘The giant shakes his head and frees the spirits from underneath the earth, isn’t that what you told me?’

I nodded. That’s what Pa Yamba Mela had told me. When I was a child, growing up. A lot of people thought Pa Yamba was a fool. That his magic was nothing but trickery, that his prophecies were cleverly worded so as to mean anything. He couldn’t pull thunder out of the sky any more than you or I. He claimed to have magic powers just to make people afraid of him. And many were. In that way he became powerful. You could say that was a kind of magic.

‘The underworld will rise,’ I replied.

‘And when will that happen?’ Adrian shifted in his seat.

‘It already has.’

Once I lived among nuns. They told me stories of the lives of the saints, men and women who had visions, sometimes of God, Jesus or Mary. Other times these visions were premonitions.

Well, I had a vision of something that came to pass.

It was in the middle of the day, a market day. The sun was hot, bearing down on the top of my head. So bright it made me squint. The shadows were short and black, black, black. The air was heavy like glue, impossible to breathe, it wrapped itself around me. I made my way uphill, pushing against it all the time, my head bowed, my legs straining. Where the road was steep I stopped for a moment to catch my breath. I remember I looked up at the sky. Above me the sun and moon hovered on opposite sides of the blue, one indistinguishable from the other.

Suddenly I heard a great rush of wind, as though a whirlwind was racing towards me. I braced myself and waited. Nothing. The grass and trees stood straight. And yet the sound went on, becoming louder, filling my ears, rushing around my head. I felt myself becoming unsteady. I looked down at the ground and at my feet. I reached out for something to support myself, found a bollard and leaned against it.

There was a Creole graveyard below me, very old, at least one hundred years. I saw a crowd of mourners walking between the graves. They were carrying several coffins. It looked as though a whole family had died. But even though they were dressed as bereaved people, instead of weeping, the relatives appeared almost unconcerned. One or two were even laughing openly as they hoisted the boxes towards the waiting graves.

I looked and looked again. Something strange. I could see straight through the flimsy wood of the coffins. There were no bodies inside, only piles of sticks. The mourners were talking to each other, I could see their mouths opening and closing. I was too far off to hear what they were saying, though the calls of the market traders reached me. It was as though they were communicating soundlessly, like animals. And I alone seemed to see them. The people in the market went about their business, bargaining and bantering with one another. Other strangers walked between the stalls. A young woman buying sweet potatoes stood right next to one of them, who stared lasciviously at her breasts. When she turned around she brushed past him, but never so much as glanced his way.

A fist of fear squeezed my belly. Trailed its fingertips slowly across my scalp. Sapped the strength from my muscles. I gasped, choking on my own breath. Drops of moisture rose on my forehead. I let go of my load. The plastic bags tumbled down the hill, tearing open, all of my oranges bouncing away. A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.

I saw them returning at night, moving between the headstones and the mausoleums, indistinguishable from the shadows, from the dark shapes of the statues. Great slabs of stone and marble were heaved aside, coffin lids swung open. I saw the graves open up, the spirits of the dead walk away from their resting place.

Then just as suddenly the vision disappeared. It was market day again. A little boy, naked but for a pair of shorts, was standing next to me holding my shopping bags. Another boy had climbed up the hill and was holding out the last of the runaway oranges. They were both smiling up at me, thinking of the coin I would give them, ignorant of everything I had just witnessed.

When I had finished speaking Adrian waited, as though I would go on. As though there was more. There was, but for the time being I was finished. I folded my hands in my lap. He was staring out of the window, flexing his long fingers. He didn’t turn to me when he spoke, and when he did his words came quiet and slow:

‘That was how they got into the city, wasn’t it? The rebel army. They hid their weapons and their men in the graveyards. Collected them at night.’

Yes, I told him. That was how it happened. Nobody realised it until later. We awoke the next day to find them in our midst.

We were silent together for a while. Then he pushed back his chair and left the room. When he returned he was carrying a tray, upon which some tea things slid dangerously about. He set them down, stirred the tea to hasten the brew, poured two cups. Halfway to the top, the way Europeans do. He added milk to both cups, and pushed the sugar bowl towards me; the loose grains stuck to the underside of the bowl scratched the surface of the table.

‘The starlight was blue. There was a patch of the night sky where the stars crowded together — astronomers call it a “butterfly cluster” — and in the middle a single pale, yellow star brighter than all the rest. I used to like to tell my class about the stars. For some reason they can imagine it, the night sky. Even the ones who were born blind. We would go outside and they would turn their faces upwards, like flowers to the sun. Somehow they could sense the vastness above.’ I stopped. The sky had never looked so beautiful as it did that night.

‘The next day was Twelfth Night. Did you know that? They came on the feast of the Epiphany.’

A fly had become trapped behind the window. The angry buzzing invaded the room, and an insistent tapping. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. As the fly hit the windowpane. The tapping punctuated our conversation.

‘Do you still believe in God, Mariama?’

‘I believe he exists.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Just that. I believe he exists. I don’t believe in him.’

Adrian folded his hands in front of him.

‘Like you here,’ I said. ‘I believe you are sitting there. I can put out my hand and touch you. You exist, but that’s all I know about you. I don’t know whether you are good or bad. Whether I can trust you, or whether I would be a fool to do so.’

‘You can trust me, Mariama.’

A pause. Tap, tap. Of course, we were talking about God.

‘So what do you think about, when you think about God?’

‘I think he doesn’t like black people very much.’

* * *

Something happened here. A change. Stealthy, creeping, slow. Like the way the desert is gradually covering the plain, one grain of sand at a time. It took place without us even noticing, so that the moment when we might have resisted passed unremarked. Suddenly it was irreversible. The evil had been let loose. But it was no longer among us, it was within. Everybody became part of it.

In the city the animals grew fat while the humans starved. The dogs were sleek and fit, their coats glossy. Vultures gorged until they could barely take to the air. The abundance of food gave the dogs a new confidence, the only ones with the freedom of the city. Under the bridge the fish nibbled at the jetsam of human corpses jamming the bay where every night suspected insurgents were shot by the dozen, their bodies tossed over the railings.

From the East, which had fallen into the hands of the rebels, a cloud of smoke drifted across the river to the West, bringing with it the scent of blood and fear. And every night the stars formed the shape of a beautiful butterfly hovering over the city. We hid and waited for them to arrive. And waited, until in the end we were forced out by our hunger.

I was standing at a checkpoint, behind a queue of people. The checkpoint was manned by black soldiers from another country, sent by their government to fight our war. They were poor; they were afraid for their lives; they had no choice; they hated us for it. Nobody spoke. You could smell the perspiration on the people as they waited silently for their papers to be checked.

Then, suddenly, from behind me — a woman’s voice, shrill and steely.

‘Rebel!’

Again. ‘Rebel!’

The soldiers’ heads snapped up. One of them handed back the identity card he was holding, tightened his grip on his gun. Two of them began to move down the queue, towards the source of the outburst. I dared not look around. None of us did. The soldiers were heading straight towards me. Weapons at the ready, their faces arranged into expressions of hostility to cover the fear. Only when they had passed me did I dare turn around.

A woman was pointing at a younger woman further back in the queue. She stood with her legs apart, one hand on her hip, glaring fiercely. With her other hand she jabbed the air, shrieking the word repeatedly. ‘Rebel! Rebel!’

Up until that moment the woman she had been pointing at had stood quite still, as though none of this had anything to do with her. The instant the soldiers seized her and pulled her out of the line of people, however, she came alive — struggling, begging and screaming. Her accuser, who was relentless, now released a torrent of accusations. She had seen the young woman with a pistol, had seen her in the east end of the city earlier in the month. A man, clearly the young woman’s husband, came forward from the back of the line to his wife’s defence. He approached the soldiers hesitantly, holding his hands out in front of him, the palms turned up. It was all a misunderstanding, he pleaded. But the soldiers didn’t seem to want to listen. One of them slapped the man’s wife, slapped her repeatedly, asking questions, demanding answers. Then they began to hit him, too. Both of them. He shielded himself by bending over double, but she had her arms pinned behind her back and took the full force of each blow. Their pleas, the sound of their voices, were lost in the flood of accusations.

And people knew the killers came in all guises: as men, as women, even in the form of sweet-faced children.

The officer in charge ordered them to be executed. There and then, in front of us. The soldiers stripped them, forced them to kneel. They shot her first. Then him. She was a pretty girl, flawless skin and angled cheekbones, I remember because I wondered, in that moment, if the soldiers who were away from home, away from their loved ones in this desperate, dark and ugly land were not somehow outraged by the way she looked. It made them want to kill her.

The bodies lay in the dirt. The rest of us shuffled through the checkpoint. On the other side a man in front of me told us that he knew her, the dead woman. Her accuser was a neighbour of his who had once lost a lover to her. Naasu. That was the murdered woman’s name. He had only just realised who she was, now he was certain of it.

Soldiers loaded Naasu’s body, and that of her husband, into the back of a lorry to be thrown over the bridge and into the bay. Much later, when it was dark, the people who lived among the rocks next to the water went out in their canoes, collected the corpses and buried them. The killers, the innocent, and those whose beauty offended, side by side in the same grave.

This was the story I told Adrian Lockheart. By the end he was leaning forward, his eyes glistening, the picture of professional caring. Not that he didn’t care. He just wanted me to be in no doubt about it. But I could read Adrian Lockheart’s mind. I could see the thoughts running behind his eyes. Beneath the still waters of sympathy was a great, heaving tide of relief. His mind was on his wife and his child in the place where he had left them, safe on another continent.

And this is what he was thinking. He was thanking God, thanking him over and over in all his merciful glory, that this would never be them. That he would never be me.

That was the last time I saw him. He wrote a report for my employers. In his opinion I was suffering from post-traumatic stress as a result of the war, the most notable manifestation of which appeared to be the habit of decorating my room in a manner that, while a little bizarre, was completely harmless. There was no reason I should not continue my work as a teacher.

The great Kuru Masaba, of course, the most powerful of them all. Creator of the earth, the skies, the rivers, the forests, the seas and every living creature. Kumba, the rain god who brings the rice harvest. Yaro, Anayaroli, whom they call Mammy Wata, goddess of wealth. Aronson, the hunter. Kassila, the sea god. Those are the only names that survive. The others are lost for ever. Don’t you see? We have forgotten them.

Sometimes I still dream of them, like I used to. Adrian Lockheart taught me how to stop them from taking over my mind, to imagine a row of boxes and to put the things that disturbed me inside and close the lid. But they won’t be contained.

Always it is Kassila who breaks out first and frees the others. Once I dreamed I saw them, strolling between the stars, surrounded by flashes of lightning and the roll of thunder. Cowrie shells and glass beads decorated their hair, gold rings and bracelets adorned their arms, they were wrapped in garments woven from rainbows and embroidered with sunbeams. They had their backs to us, they were walking away, headed to some other dimension.

Free from us, free from our foolishness, our fickleness and petty betrayals. They were arm in arm, laughing out loud. Without a care in the universe.