Ancestor Stones (18 page)

Ngadie was already in the ground, fleetingly mourned — a woman insufficiently loved as a daughter, unloved as a wife.

But loved as a mother. And loved still. There were Ngadie's son and daughter. Ngadie in the male. Ngadie in the female. The him and the her, the he and the she of the woman I had known. I watched them. So alike. The only difference was the way the lines
of their features had been drawn, finely traced in one, the other roughly sketched in charcoal.

On a stool at the back of the house I sat next to Ngadie's daughter, untied the corner of my
lappa
and took out a kola nut. I unwrapped the leaves, broke off a cotyledon — she accepted it in silence, turning the piece over and over in her hand. I glanced up at her, saw the teardrops gathering along the edge of her lower eyelid, waiting to fall.

‘Hush ya,'
was all I said. I laid my hand on her forearm.

I bit the kola nut and helped myself to a sip of water from the ladle at my side. The water tasted fresh and pure — it was the effect of the kola: even brackish water tasted as though it had sprung from a mountainside.

‘My mother once said something about you, about how you loved kola. She said that to you even bitter kola was sweet.'

The words made no sense. One time I had split kola with Ngadie. After we had become friends. Of course it hadn't been bitter kola. There was bitter kola in the calabash containing my bride gift. Kola for the good times. Bitter kola to mark the bad.

Some days later I went home. I never returned to that place. The years slid past. I watched Kadie grow alongside the next generation of coffee trees, and I grew too. In this way slowly I found myself again. Memories of Ngadie, of her daughter's words, fell out of my mind. Not for any reason. Only because they seemed to be words spoken at a time of grief, wrongly remembered. I did not believe they held any meaning for me.

One day, I found myself passing down a street in a part of the town I had never been to before. The houses had two storeys, the streets were narrow. Two women were leaning out of the shuttered windows above me, drawing their washing in from the line that hung from one window to the next. Wisps of conversation fluttered down. The women were careless, not worrying if they were overheard.

‘His tinder was wet.'

I heard the laughter that followed, coarse laughter. Shocking laughter. I walked on, the phrase wound itself after me, bringing
back those awful nights — those last nights I shared with my husband when I had failed to arouse him. I remembered the state to which he had reduced me — so nervous I burned the rice.

Ngadie had offered to cook.

Three nights in a row.

His tinder was wet.

To her even bitter kola is sweet.

You see, if I hadn't become lost, I never would have walked down that street. Nor heard a woman talk about her husband's performance in that vulgar way. That started me thinking. People believe that bitter kola has the power to wet a man's tinder. Did you know that? I thought about Ngadie, of how she had offered to cook for me on those three nights and I pondered the meaning of what she had said to her daughter.

Three nights in a row.

Maybe there was a reason things happened the way they did with Osman on those three nights.

In my seat in the
poda poda
I sat with my basket of shopping on my lap, crushed by other people's bodies, all the time turning the thoughts around and around in my head, the way I examine a pawpaw before I buy it in the market.

To her even bitter kola is sweet.

And I saw that it had been Ngadie's doing.

I laughed out loud: a laugh like the one I had just heard. I laughed until the tears poured down my cheeks. At first the people around me wondered what was my problem. But they saw my joy was real, I was no crazy person. My laughter even became infectious, people began to giggle and before long the whole bus was laughing without even knowing why.

And through the people's laughter I heard another sound that came from far away: the strains of a simple melody. It grew louder and louder, filling my head, pushing out all the bad feelings, the anger, the resentment that had been locked inside for so many years. I became quiet, I listened. Though I had never heard it before, there and then I recognised it. And it was beautiful. The sound of Ngadie laughing in her grave.

High on the hill, up above Old Railway Line on the road that winds down to the city. That's where I saw her. Walking with her hand on her hip. Sashaying. Like a woman who has just seen her lover coming down the street. Her felt hat was pushed back over her head, swinging by the cord around her neck. Her socks crumpled around her ankles. She placed one foot directly in front of the other. Like so. The hips swung, the hat bounced along behind her. It was her. I knew it at once. The jolt it gave me was like an electric shock, a flicker of heat across my skin that brought me out in a momentary sweat.

I tried to turn around to see her properly, but I was caught between the women on either side of me in the taxi. I felt a twinge in my neck. The pain pulled me back, as if to say — what foolishness is this?

Of course I knew it wasn't her. I never really thought it. Just the fleeting glimpse of a silhouette that reminded me of her. And as the taxi turned down King Harman Road I looked around, not to double-check exactly, but to see the disappearing figure just once more.

The other girls nicknamed her Marie Palaver. Over time a syllable slipped out unnoticed: Marie Plaba. She was troublesome. Cussed. She was my first friend. And I couldn't believe my own good fortune. To some people we were an odd couple. I could see as much reflected in Sister Anthony's smile, though she encouraged the friendship between us. She thought I was a good influence.

The mission was built on top of the old graveyard. Nobody really wanted the nuns here, or their school. But the
obai
was worried about giving offence, so he let them have a piece of land no one cared about. Outside the dormitory window you could see the outlines in the earth, like old flower beds. The trees with upturned candelabra blooms: there was only one place where they were planted in such abundance.

The new girls were always afraid. Afraid of what they had heard. Fearful of the nuns who were as pale as the dead. And had a way of looking at you, but not seeing you. Even when you were walking towards them, their eyes would just glide over you. Then at the last minute, just when you had convinced yourself you maybe didn't exist, they would greet you. For most of us it was the first time we had ever seen people like that, with eyes of coloured glass and hair like saffron threads. Well, it's true I had once seen the District Commissioner in the place where we lived. Still it was strange to be up so close to them. I didn't know how to behave exactly. When the Reverend Mother addressed me I drew my hand up to my forehead and saluted, as I had seen the Court Messengers do. Marie sniggered at that. It was the first time I noticed her.

In the dormitory where there was a shortage of beds — when they saw the world changing the local people changed too, and decided now they wanted to send their daughters to the nuns' school — some of the girls shared a single bunk lying top to toe. I lay in the crook of Marie's body, sharing a pillow, and listened to the ghost stories she made up late into the night.

Marie told me stories of women and their night-husbands; women lured away from the river bank when they went to fetch water; women who were visited by bush spirits and later gave birth to their children. Marie's mother had been a birth attendant. Once she had seen a spirit child for herself. It had two faces and four arms and legs. You could see it was part human. Born dead. It lay on the floor wrapped in an old cloth.

The school caretaker was a one-legged man. He was the only person I have ever seen like that who did not use crutches. He hopped everywhere, tall and straight, a human pogo stick. Sometimes
when the wind called and the building creaked there were strange bangs and thumps. Marie said it was One-Foot Jombee, hopping through the dark on his one good leg.

I was thrilled and yet I was afraid. Afraid of the stories. And as I lay there listening to her I was afraid too that the end was near and would take with it the sound of her voice.

I would go to sleep and dream strange dreams. A palm tree with leaves of human hair. A chair made of living flesh and bones and skin that was rooted to the ground. A snake wearing a red cloth embroidered with cowrie shells. The white nuns with skin like eels' beneath their habits and long flowing hair hidden under their wimples. I dreamed I hid behind a coconut tree and watched them cast off their clothes and slip into the sea like Mammy Wata.

These visions began to enter my thoughts even when I was wide awake. Not so I thought they were actually there before my eyes. No. More like a flashing picture that appeared and just as quickly disappeared. After it I felt weakened, and that made me know it must have been the work of some kind of devil. In morning Mass I prayed to God and to the Virgin Mary, in the hope that the dreams were messages from Heaven. The answer never came, but I noticed that when I was praying the visions stayed away.

A class in Idaho had raised the money for my baptism. They chose my new name and sent it in a letter to the bishop, who came up to the school and baptised all those girls who had new names. Mary. Not so different from Mariama. As thanks I sent them back a bouquet of prayers. Twenty Our Fathers, Thirty Holy Bes, a dozen Masses and Communions, and because they had given me her name — one hundred Hail Marys. At the bottom of the letter I signed my new name with rounded letters and a long looped ‘y' at the end.

Pagan babies. That's what we were. We knew our baptisms were paid for through something called the Pagan-Baby Project, only somehow we never realised we were those babies.

We were two. Marie and Mary. Mary and Marie.

In the walled gardens on the other side of the road that we tended before morning Mass and after vespers grew every kind of
vegetable. We were almost entirely self-sufficient, with the exception of rice, meat, fish and palm oil which two of us were sent to the market to buy in the mornings. The school was on an island. It was quite a large island, with a small town: Tihun. And several fishing villages, a church and a boys' school. The town was a long walk, and so we went to the market in Baiama on the big island on the other side of the inlet, crossing the water in the launch along with fishwives and petty traders. At those times I would lift my chin into the wind and taste the salt. Or else I looked down at the dark shapes: the rocks, the shoals of fish, the shadow of the boat. And I would dream of Kassila, the sea god, swimming in the depths.

There were nights the sea howled like an animal in agony and the palm trees danced themselves into a frenzy. The fishermen hauled their canoes up on to the shore. And in the morning, before they set out again, muttered prayers and platitudes to Kassila, so he might make the seas still and keep them safe.

At mealtimes we ate from tin plates and drank from empty Peak milk tins. At one time we received a consignment of cutlery from a church group in America. The first day I tried to make the grains of rice stay on my fork, to cut the meat from the oxtail and winkle out the marrow. Everybody was struggling. How hungry we were when we left the dining room. So much food gone to waste on the floor. A rota was put up on the board. Every week six girls were invited to sit at Sister Monica's table. I was one of the first. Watch and copy. That was the way we learned. I held my fork upside down and piled food on the top, while all around me girls rolled tasty balls of rice and
plasass
with the tips of fingers, and popped them into their mouths.

It was the first time I saw how Europeans often liked to do things the most difficult way. The nuns preferred to carry piles of books in their arms instead of on the top of their heads, so that we were always having to run ahead to open doors for them. And once in the town I saw a white woman pushing a baby along in a pram. She was sweating and puffing, the wheels kept getting caught in the ruts and the potholes. Eventually two men ran to her assistance, hoisted the pram on their shoulders and carried it all the way back to her
front door. The mother ran after them, hopping and calling, like a hen whose chick has been carried away by a hawk. And the women with their children on their backs stopped to stare at her.

I saw that woman again. Walking on the beach, all by herself, eyes streaming. Maybe it was the wind. Still, it was a strange thing to do, walk about for the sake of it. And alone, too.

Sister Eadie said that when babies are carried on their mothers' backs it makes them grow up with bow legs. But I did not think this could be true as my legs are straight.

Every day we queued for lunch, holding our plates out to the serving women who stood behind great tureens of rice and potato leaves. At that time Marie had a feud with one of the cooks, a woman with a short neck and a sly look whom everybody knew stole the food meant for the girls. Ma Cook we called her. In the morning the girls took turns helping to wash and chop the leaves. We were supposed to be assisting the kitchen staff, but this woman sat back and made us do everything. We washed and chopped furiously, even so we were almost always late for our first class.

Once Marie and I were on kitchen detail together. I tried to move a vat of palm oil from the fire by myself. The pot was too heavy and I staggered under the weight of it. Hot oil splashed on to my arms. Marie poured cool water from a jug on to my scalded skin. Ma Cook came into the room just then and accused us of wasting time. Marie told her what had happened, but Ma Cook's response was sour:
‘Een mamy go born orda one'
Her mother can have another one.

It's a coarse retort. I'd heard it before. But somehow it angered Marie greatly. She gave the woman a great shove. In turn Ma Cook slapped her around the face. A moment later the fracas brought Sister Agnes to the kitchen door, and without any questions she took Ma Cook's side. That was the way it was in those days. You couldn't answer back, you had to do as you were told. If somebody was older than you they were always right. And besides, everyone knew Marie Plaba was trouble.