The Lubetkin Legacy

Violet: Flamboyant

Violet awakes to absolute darkness and a smell of something cool and antiseptic close to her face. Then she moves her head and a streak of light shows at the bottom of her vision. If she tilts her chin up she can see a low section of her surroundings. She realises the darkness is only from a bandage around her forehead which partly covers her eyes. One hand is immobile, encased in plaster and fixed across her chest with a strap. With the other hand, she gingerly adjusts the bandage a centimetre upwards, giving herself another metre of perspective. She is lying under a white sheet in a small white room. A bright patch of sunlight falls on the floor at the foot of the bed. She tries to remember … she remembers the three men, the sack over her head, the square window, the narrow room, the buckets, the pain, the thud of the chair falling over. Then … it’s as though her memory is on a loop that repeats those same images again and again but will not wind forward however hard she tries.

The sound of a door opening behind her makes her tense up. Are they coming back for her? Without moving her head, she watches two white shoes advance into the room. Two small white shoes on skinny brown legs, carrying with them a familiar voice.

‘Mpenzi, my baby, who done this to you? I thought I would never see you again! I going crazy with worry.’ Her grandmother’s voice is strident with relief.

Behind the bandage she feels tears water her eyes and prick the back of her nose. She wants to surrender to the storm building up inside her, to be comforted in her grandmother’s arms, but the bandages immobilise her.

‘I’m all right, Nyanya. Shush. I’m all right now.’

The door creaks again, and this time a pair of pretty red high-heeled sandals trip across the floor to her bedside. Lynette sits on the edge of the bed, takes her good hand and gives it a squeeze.

‘Thank God, Violet. Thank God we got you out. I warned you to be careful.’

‘Thank God I called you for your lunch,’ Njoki adds. ‘When I heard you cry out, I phoned the police straight away. Then I phoned Lynette. Oh, mpenzi, I thought you was murdered!’

‘Ssh. Not so loud.’ A soft woman’s voice she doesn’t recognise, maybe the nurse. ‘She had a shock. She only just woken up. She need to stay calm.’

‘It was nothing to do with the police,’ Lynette says. ‘They said you was probably with your boyfriend and they couldn’t do nothing. Wait another day, they said.’

‘Another day and you been dead,’ adds Njoki in a dramatic voice.

‘On Monday morning after Njoki phoned me, I called up the anti-corruption bureau and I told them about those papers you showed me.’

‘You told me to be careful, Lynette.’

‘I was careful. I gave them a false name. At first they weren’t interested. The man I talked to said they investigated Nzangu before and he was clean. I wasn’t surprised they said that, but now they knew we were on his trail. So I put the phone down.’

‘Then …?’ She tries to raise her head, sending a shooting pain through her shoulder and arm.

‘Then someone else rang me back from the bureau. They must have traced my number. He said I must come to the bureau right away, they just got some fax from England that confirmed the same things I told them. They arrested Nzangu. They wanted to know where your papers were so you could help them with their inquiry.’

‘But weren’t you scared it was a trick?’ She remembers Queenie’s strange phone call. Did they get her too?

‘I was scared like a sungura, but Archie took me over there and he waited outside. I said you was British citizen kidnapped, and if you disappear questions will be asked in English Parliament. That put fear into them.’

‘How did you find me?’ She remembers the sack over her head, the long bumpy ride on the floor of the taxi-van, the echoing room full of buckets. ‘I thought no one would ever rescue me and I would die in that place.’

‘When they caught him, Nzangu talk-talk non-stop like a kasuku. He told them he got this warehouse full of gear out near Mlolongo where they could have took you. Maybe he got scared they killed you and he be done for murdering a British citizen.’

‘Oh! How I started to cry when they told me they found you! Lying on the floor tied to the chair like a chicken, all covered in blood!’ Njoki lets out a wail. ‘My little girl! I thought I lost you same like I lost Jo.’

The nurse intervenes. ‘Sshh. Quiet. Let her rest.’

‘I’m her grandmother, you know!’ Njoki retorts. ‘I lost my dear husband to this same mfisadi. They left him by the road for dead. Now they try to steal my grandchild away!’

‘It’s okay, Nyanya Njoki. I’m still alive.’ She grits her teeth and heaves herself up until she is sitting with her back against the iron frame of the bed. There is something she needs to ask. ‘That fax from England, Lynette — did it have a name on it?’

‘I can’t remember. Gideon? Giles? Gilbert? I think it began with G.’

‘Gillian?’

‘Could be. Does it matter now we found you?’ Lynette can’t stop dimpling her shiny round cheeks.

Njoki’s voice is shrill and querulous. ‘Main thing is to catch the mfisadi over here. The ones that got Jo, and now they nearly got you! Oh God, when I saw you lying like dead and covered in blood —’

‘You better go now,’ the nurse interrupts. Njoki is holding her so tight she has to be prised away. ‘You making her stressed. We need to change the dressings, then she can sleep.’

The nurse offers her two tablets with a glass of water and unwinds the bandage from her head. ‘It’s looking better. Nothing too serious. Just a big bruise on the temple. You’ll be black and blue for a few days. The arm is broken in three places. That will take a bit longer. How does it feel?’

‘Mmm. It hurts, but it’s more the shock.’ Every bone in her body jangles with pain when she moves, but beyond the pain she feels contentment that glows in her like sunlight. She’s still alive, and she’s done something that needed to be done, her aching body tells her. ‘I feared I was going to die in there. They’d dump my body by the roadside, and nobody would find those papers.’

‘Try to get some sleep now,’ says the nurse. ‘You want me to draw the curtains?’

‘No. No, leave them open.’

She slides back down on the pillows and gazes out of the window. Her eyelids are drowsy. The nurse must have given her a sedative. Through the square of glass she can see the tops of the trees in the hospital garden. Close by the window, the gracious arch of a Nandi Flame tree heavy with blossom burns bright against the sky. A fat grey njiwa flutters its wings and settles among the flowers, cooing its heart out. It reminds her of … something … what does it remind her of?

Njoki and Lynette kiss her and leave arm in arm, small white shoes, pretty red sandals, tap-tapping together across the polished floor.