Ancestor Stones (14 page)

Later we pass a bus with a broken axle, sliding sideways like a crab caught on the edge of the surf. We leave it far behind as we roll
on past shanty towns of scrap metal and tin into the unknown. And there we arrive coated in dust, like we have been rolled in flour and readied for frying. And when I blow my nose the snot comes out red and thick.

At night the cockroaches drop from the ceiling of the rented room. And in the morning we find them lying upside down under the beds. And I sweep them out and wonder, do they fall from the ceiling already dead? Or do they faint trying to walk upside down and bash their brains out on the floor? Behind thin cotton curtains six other cots are partitioned off like separate states. They are empty. The town keeps nocturnal hours.

In the early hours of the morning the bursts of music, the shouts and the coarse laughter steal into my dreams. I lie wedged between my brother and my mother, our bodies stuck together with sweat.

By day Yaya and I stand on the town's main street and watch rickshaws and carts bumping along the road. A truck full of men — shirtless, carrying picks and shovels — roars past, nearly knocking us down. Once in a while a shiny car glides by, scraping its suspension on the rutted road. We run alongside and try to peer through the dark glass. Try to imagine who could possess a vehicle such as that.

Eventually we stop and stand still, dizzy at the sight of so much. The people hurry past us heaving bundles, sacks and crates. People here rarely smile or greet each other. After a while I begin to notice that most of the people here are men. We walk past queues of them, arms and legs covered in cracked red mud like elephants' skin, waiting outside the Syrian diamond traders' shops. We press our noses against the windows, see men hand over leather pouches, dealers weigh little pieces of grey grit on tiny brass scales.

The view from our window looks out over pits that line the river like sores on a leper's mouth. Men in loincloths wade up to their thighs through the rusty shallows, other men dig at the sticky mud with shovels, on the banks of the river more men sift the mud and water in round trays. A vaporous sunlight glazes their shiny black ant bodies and a sour wind drifts across the houses.

One carat equals ten pounds. Two carats equals twenty pounds. A full three carats equals one hundred and ten pounds. Enough to
buy a fleet of bicycles, marry, build a house of baked bricks with a zinc roof.

Our mother's bride price equalled the price of a one carat diamond. Cash only. On top of which she received a cow which was hers for the milking. Non-returnable. Two country cloths and four double lengths of waxed cotton, one dozen sticks of salt at two shillings each, cowries, rice, cocoa beans, gold and one umbrella, distributed to guests and family: all were listed by the court and added to the debt. To be repaid in full.

Our mother knew enough to know that the people who made money in the gold rush were not the miners, but the ones who sell buckets and spades. And so she buys a three-legged stand and sets herself up in business selling eggs on the roadside.

We buy our eggs for two pennies each, boil them and sell them for five pennies each. A perfect plan except that firewood is not free. Here the trees have all been pulled down to make way for the mines and railways. Firewood sells for fifteen pence a bundle in town, twelve pence a bundle on the road out of town. A dozen eggs equals twentyfour pence, plus fifteen pence firewood equals thirty-nine pence.

Twenty-one pence profit per dozen. And living costs and everything on top.

Not all the eggs are good. Some contain the pale foetuses of baby chicks, others are watery and grey. Each time this happens our profits are reduced. The eggs must be conserved. We do not eat them for lunch. We do not eat anything. We nibble kola nuts to ward off the hunger and thirst just like the men in the pits. And mother sends me on the long trek to buy firewood out of town.

And at the end of more long days than we can bear it is enough. And the end when it comes is marked only by an egg slipping through fumbling fingers and fracturing on the ground. I laugh, because for some reason I think it's funny. And because we have been fooling around Yaya laughs with me. And so I laugh all the harder to encourage him, and just because I want to. The giggles rise in my chest like bubbles of air under water. I don't notice the way Yaya's laugh hovers and bursts. Only vaguely do I hear the sound, like a whistling in the air.

My mother slaps me hard across the face.

I have forgotten what was so funny. It isn't funny any more. I bend down to try to scoop the egg up. It stares back up at me like a sorry eye, quivering with glutinous tears.

‘Leave it.'

‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' I say as many times and as quickly as I can. And again: ‘I'm sorry.' Because I am: deeply, desperately, suddenly. Frightened faces, Yaya's and mine. No pride, no urge to sulk or seek refuge in swaggers.

‘And you think that's enough,' my mother says, ‘just like that? You say you're sorry?'

‘But I am sorry.' My mother looks at me. Her face is empty.

‘Well Serah, sometimes sorry isn't enough.'

A gecko, hanging in the crevice between the ceiling and the wall, turns its head and blinks as if in disbelief.

The next morning a line of ants trails across the floor, up the legs of the bed, across the mattress, up the wall and through the window, carrying away grains of sleep and dead skin.

My mother, curled up on her rented cot, weeps. I clutch her and cry too. I hurt her hurt. I grieve her grief. Yaya sits on the end of the bed, leans over and places his head on her legs, curls up there awkwardly grasping her calves. And the bad feeling settles itself over us like a blanket.

Hours later I sit up straight and watch my mother as she sleeps. She sleeps on her side with one arm bent beneath her head, the other stiff and straight, trapped under her body. Thinner now, the bones have crept to the surface. A web of cracks in her heels, outlined with dirt. In the dark cups beneath her eyes, a sheen of sweat and oil.

Behind her shoulder is a tiny, keloid scar with points like a star. I reach out and touch it, feel the slipperiness with my forefinger. When I was very little I used to like to stroke it while I sucked my thumb, when it was still my turn to be carried on her back. Once she told me a shooting star had fallen out of the sky and landed there. Another time she said a firefly had settled on her and forgotten to put itself out first. The last time I had asked her, a
few days before, she told me it was nothing: just a spark from a lively fire.

Jagged silvery lines glimmer in the thickening gloom, across her hip bone and in the curve of her that dips from the peak of her hip down and out again towards her stomach. Some years after my brother was born she became pregnant again. She was asleep in the house; I heard the sound of her calling and ran inside. Water! Soaking the sheets, leaking through the straw mattress, dripping on to the floor where it formed tributaries and ran across the uneven floor into the corner of the room. And my mother clutching her stomach with one hand and waving at me with the other. I lurched forward, but she wasn't beckoning. She was waving me away.

‘Out! Out!' And Ya Memso running in behind me. My mother's closest friend among the wives. A tiny woman, so short I once asked my mother if she had grown up yet. Ya Memso went to her, as I backed out of the door.

No more children, then. Just us two. And only many years later, when I was sitting in front of my own husband, on the far side of a table and a silence that neither of us could cross, I sat and stared into the corner of the room at the fluff, the angled shadows, the dark seam where the floor met the walls. Fatigue made my skin hurt, my teeth ache. For a few moments I gazed into that corner, forgot he was there. And the memory came back to me then. Not in a flash. Rather it fluttered down like a feather.

I stay awake and watch her until gradually the outline of her body withdraws into the darkness.

Orange robes. Bright against her skin. I notice my mother is beautiful. This is the first time I have seen her since we came back. I don't know how many months ago that was. It is harvest time. Out past the fields the rice is hanging in bundles on frames to dry. In the plantation the red coffee beans in their new red skins shimmy and shine. It makes your eyes ache to look at them for too long.

I had almost forgotten the village existed, and yet in no time I have assumed old habits, returned to the places I consider my own.
The water has closed over those weeks. Memories of our time away slipping down the sand, red mud and threadbare curtains and lizard eyes being washed away. The tide of the present rushes in to fill the space.

One difference. Our mother has no longer been with us. She left us. She didn't stay. And in that time everything has changed.

Now, from where I stand blocking the light from the door, I watch her. She looks different and the same. Oddly familiar. Like a feeling of
déjà vu
. We have embraced. A spontaneous rush forward transformed into an awkward clutching. And now we face each other from opposite sides of the room.

Not so Yaya, who sits by her feet, refuses to leave her surrounds like a dog by the warmth of a fire.

Yaya remembers nothing of the journey home. We wrapped him in all the clothes we possessed. He was shivering, his insides pouring out like brown tea and the colour leaching from his face as though his spirit were draining out. And the other passengers in the mammy wagon complained, but then said sorry. Again. Sorry, Ma. When they saw how ill the woman's son was. And might die. That would bring them bad luck, without a doubt. So they became solicitous and offered us the food they had wrapped in cloths and banana leaves, pieces of sticky sweet rice bread and pepper chicken. It was the first real food I had had in days; I crammed it into my mouth. Afterwards I felt nauseous and had to hold on to the sides of the truck. One lady who knew about herbs made the driver stop by a guava tree. She picked the leaves and made some tea for Yaya. We were let down at the footpath to the village. And somehow we stumbled the last miles home.

Tiny Ya Memso is asking far too many questions. The words jostle and barge each other on their way out of her mouth. She moves around the room, flapping her hands like a pea-hen trying to get off the ground.

Brought back, we were, as though we had been accidentally taken in the first place. Goods discovered in the bottom of the basket at home. Shoved there by a gluttonous toddler or a batty
grandmother who keeps pinching things. So sorry, a mistake. Here you are. Won't happen again. Sorry, sorry.

And by now we call him the Cement Man, because we have worked out a thing or two. And so have all the other children.

They sing a song. The last line goes like this:

Bo, hide them, hide them all, O Chief,

For he is coming, the Wife Thief!

Shame bubbles up and pricks at the underneath of my skin. And the tune hangs around like the smell of smoked fish. At night I can't sleep, I hit my head to try to knock the melody out.

Patterned cloths of green and blue, waxed and beaten. The palms of her hands are stained green and blue, and the edges of her cuticles, too. Blue-green crescent moons. Now she is a business-woman, with a business making
gara
cloths. Ya Memso, as excited as a child, has already hidden hers in the bottom of the trunk where she hoards things for the day the
sabu
comes to ask about her daughters. My own is lying a thousand miles away on the other side of the room on my mother's lap.

I watch her and wish she would just go away.

In time my wish came true. This time she headed to the South. We saw her again, from time to time. Always when my father was away. She never did pay him back. She was in debt to him for the rest of her life, like the men whose lives he owned, unable to marry again until such a time as she repaid her bride price.

As for me, I no longer wanted her for my mother. I could not bear to be reminded of that awful time, I just wanted everything back the way it was before. Ya Memso treated us well. She even started a marriage box for me, with the cloth my mother brought. And gradually she added things she made herself and things she bought.

In the beginning Yaya talked about her a lot, wanting to know whether I remembered this or that. Like the way she could fold her tongue in two. The way he could and I couldn't. Once he asked me to sing a song, a lullaby. I told him he was far too old for such
things. Next he wanted us to go out to the main road and find a lorry to take us south. It was foolishness.

People change as time goes by. As you change yourself. I wish she were here, so I could tell her the things I understand now that I didn't then. You look a bit like her, around the eyes. Maybe the shape of the face. Yes, an oval face — your father's. People sometimes thought she came from somewhere else.

For a long time I would not let myself think about her. The years passed. A question sat itself down on the edges of my mind. Just beyond my subconscious. Like a patient pet waiting to be noticed and allowed inside. And the question was this. Why did she refuse to swear? Why did she turn away and refuse to swear her innocence?

Well, did they or didn't they? The Tenth Wife and the Cement Man?

‘Guilty,' cried the elders one, two and three. Obvious to anyone but a fool. But a time came when that wasn't enough for me. She insisted my father had threatened her. I thought about it for a long time.

She could have worn the clothes of the victim. She could have pleaded and begged. But she refused. When the moment came she saw her choices, she could not betray herself, seeing what her life would become. She told the elders she was faithful. But when the people from his village brought the
sassa
forward and demanded she vow on her own life that there was nothing, in that moment she saw the starkness of her choice.

In the game of
warn
an opponent faced with losing must sometimes sacrifice in order to win.