The Butterfly Heart (12 page)

I’d thought I would be a teacher when I grew up. Not a mad one like her, but a teacher who’d make the children want to come to school. My desk would be tidy and I would teach them everything they needed to know in this life. The pupils would call me Miss Winifred. I’d dress like a teacher should dress and my classroom would be a quiet one. There would be pictures on the wall of all the different places in the world, all the different animals. I would see if Ifwafwa could come in and tell the children all about snakes. The people I taught would grow up to be anything they wanted to be: doctors, builders, nurses, pilots on Zambian Airways, anything at all. Maybe some of them would want to be teachers like me.

Now I won’t do that. I won’t do anything any more, only be a wife to an ugly old man. I don’t want to become like my mother, scared to say anything: she doesn’t even laugh any more. I don’t want to sweep the yard all day long and cook food to fill his belly. I don’t want my whole life to be like that. Perhaps my friends will help; they say they will, but I don’t know what they can do.

Ma will not speak to me about this any more. If I try to talk to her when Uncle is out, she tells me not to worry, it will all be fine – I am big now. But I am not. I don’t feel big enough for this. And I know that she doesn’t believe what she is saying. I’ve heard her crying about it. I don’t know why she’s so scared. I never want to be that afraid of anybody. It’s not too late for me to escape – if I had somewhere to escape to.

I
like the idea of Winifred staying with us, but I don’t think she’ll come. She keeps things about herself very private. Even before all this we didn’t know a lot about her. All we knew was what we saw in class: clever Winifred, tidy Winifred and smiley Winifred. We didn’t even know that her dad had died until Sister Leonisa told the class. Winifred had been sitting at her desk like it was a normal day, answering questions and writing everything down as if it really mattered. Nothing would matter to me any more if Dad died. I wouldn’t even come to school or talk to anyone, and I certainly wouldn’t answer any stupid questions that Sister asked me. But Winifred has always pretended everything is OK. Until now. Now she can’t pretend.

I wish it had been something else, something like having to move house, or her mother having another baby with the awful uncle. But not this. I also wish I didn’t know this thing, it makes me feel ill. If we bring Winifred to our house, at least no one will know where to look. Her mother will feel sad, but it’s her mother’s fault that this is happening.

If I ever have a child – and I don’t think I will – I will never let her be given to an old man as his wife. There’s no excuse for that. Mum would never let it happen to us. I think Winifred’s mother is being weak and useless. Even to let the uncle come in and suddenly become her husband. Just like that. No going out, no asking, no nothing. Just a “here I am” and “I’m your new husband, whether you like it or not”. Sickening. What’s the matter with her?

Fred says I am too intolerant, but that’s just Fred. He also thinks Madillo is. He can’t give me any good reason why I should be tolerant, though. If you look up the word there are a whole lot of meanings for it, but one of them is “the capacity to endure hardship or pain”. Which is all very well if you’re a plant. But I’m not, and if someone does something that causes me pain or hardship, am I supposed to just be quiet and smile about it? I don’t think so.

Take the martyrs, Sister Leonisa’s favourite subject. From what she says, a lot of them could be described as having had a capacity to endure pain and hardship. In fact some of them seemed to enjoy it. She told us one story of a young girl who was martyred and had all sorts of perfectly gruesome things done to her and, to quote, “She kept a cheerful and joyful countenance throughout.”

According to Wikipedia there were some people who quite literally looked for it. They went to the emperor and said, “We are Christians. Please kill us.” Which he did, until he got bored or tired because there were so many of them. Then he told them, “Why don’t you go to the cliffs and kill yourselves, if you’re so keen?” He had a point.

What I don’t understand is why, if all they were killing you for was believing in something different from them, they didn’t just lie and say they didn’t believe in it any more? If I was told I’d be killed unless I believed in a great god who had no eyebrows and was made of spinach, I’d say, “But of course I believe in him, he is the one and only.” What’s the harm in that?

Sister Leonisa said that she thinks our society is slowly rotting away because there are no longer people who will die for their faith. Then she did some of her drawings on the board to show the ways in which the martyrs were killed. Saint Sebastian was one of them. Every little part of his body had an arrow sticking out of it, and – so she tells us – the arrows didn’t kill him. Because all her drawings are of stick people, you could hardly see which lines were arrows and which were Sebastian’s arms or legs. Her follow-up drawing was of him being hit over the head with some kind of blunt instrument, which is what did kill him. And he was made a saint for that. That makes no sense to me.

When
I was a small boy and had a pain in my stomach, my mother would take me to the bush with the healing leaves. She would place a small cloth around my eyes and lead me right up to the bush and I would eat slowly, leaf by leaf, until the pains were cured. As I stood there in the silence with my eyes blind to the world, my mother would pray to Lesa through our ancestors. My stomach pains always went away. The leaves are strong medicine, I know that, but it was Lesa who brought me comfort through the prayers of my mother.

I need his help now, but he does not interfere. He will not do anything to take this man away from the child. But he will know what I do and why I must do it. He is my parent far away and will watch over me when I need him.

When I am finished with this task, I will go to my home place and find the bones of my mother and grandmother. Then I will bring them back to the earth in the proper way. In this world there are the dead and the living, and we are all one. The dead go into the earth to become part of what makes us live. That is what I want, to bring my mother and grandmother some peace and to clear my head of the bad memories. Then their spirits can join those of our ancestors and bring goodness to this life. I do not want to think of them wandering, lost, without a home.

I
asked Sister Leonisa today if she had heard from Winifred; if she knew why she wasn’t coming to school any more. All I got was a narrowing of her eyes and a strange high-pitched sound from her mouth, which I think meant either “No” or “Don’t ask me”. Sister Leonisa is one of those teachers who starts off the year by telling you that you can ask her anything at all, then when you do, she doesn’t answer. I suppose it makes sense – she never said she would answer.

I shouldn’t have made that my first question – I wanted to try and find out if she had Winifred’s address, but I realized she’d never give it to me then. At break I asked Fred if he’d find out for me. Sister Leonisa likes him because he always puts on this really innocent face when he speaks to her, puppy-dog eyes all over the place.

“Sister, we’ve collected money to buy Winifred a little present,” he said, “but we don’t know where to take it. Would you be able to let us have her address?”

“What a lovely thought, Fred – there’s a place in heaven waiting for you, dear boy. Of course I will. You come up here and I’ll give it to you.”

OK, so he got the address, but I don’t know why she thinks that booking his place in heaven would make him happy. He’s got years and years to go. Anyway, there it was in Sister Leonisa’s neat handwriting:
Winifred, 10 B32/54 Alick Nkhata Road, Kalingalinga
.

That, I suppose, was the easy part.

But as I thought about it, I realized that if we were going to go to Kalingalinga to find Winifred, we’d have to tell Mum and Dad. There was no way round it. To get there we’d have to cross a field and then a road and then another field. And then find the actual road. Kalingalinga is not small. And there are so many houses there that it would be hard. It’d be OK if it was just number ten, but when you got to number ten you’d then have to look for a whole lot of other numbers.

We decided to tell Dad that we wanted to invite Winifred over on Saturday and then ask him if we could fetch her. He’d have to come, obviously, because he’d be driving, but that would be fine. He agreed. Saturday seems a long way away, but we still have time.

Madillo and I sleep in a bunk bed – no prizes for guessing who gets the top bunk. She tells me it’s because of her numbers on the ceiling: she’d not be able to sleep if she didn’t have the numbers up there. And there’s Kasuba, of course, who apparently doesn’t like the bottom bunk.

We have a cupboard in our room that’s built into the wall. On the one side there is a big empty space for shoes. We don’t wear shoes unless we have to, so that’s why it’s empty. (Well, we wear them for school, and if we have to go out we put on flip-flops – but those don’t take up much room.)

So that’s where I’m going to make the bed for Winifred: the shoe cupboard. It sounds horrible, making a bed in a cupboard, but she’s quite small and I’m going to make it really comfortable with cushions and duvets. It will be warm, that’s the only problem, but at night we can leave all the windows open as well as the cupboard door, and she should be fine. If I were her I don’t think I’d mind where I slept as long as it was away from the old man. It’s the best hiding place in our room, anyway, because even if Mum comes in she doesn’t look in there. (Mainly because she says she cannot bear the sight. Winifred probably won’t be able to bear the sight either, as she’s so neat.)

I don’t know if this is going to work, but if I wait for Ifwafwa we’ll be too late. And the great-granny isn’t an option because she’s just plain scary.

I
do not have much time left to prepare for this. I do not want to leave it until the last minute, as anything could go wrong. And they might decide to make the wedding earlier. I cannot take any chances with this thing.