The Butterfly Heart (16 page)

“You,” she said, “get out of the house! Get out and go back to your mother. You’re not supposed to be here. You should never have come in your brother’s place.” She heard her own voice, but it was as if someone else was speaking, someone far away from this room, speaking from the bright dawn sky.

“Go back now to your mother; show her what you look like. Maybe she will help you wash away the moving snake. Leave me here with my child. We have no need of you or your friend – you can take him with you. We do not want him.”

The uncle looked at her and he knew he would have to go. She wasn’t shouting but her words were strong. He didn’t need her to tell him; he was going away from this place where white snakes appeared from nowhere. If he was going to die, he would die among his people.

Winifred’s mother turned and walked towards Winifred and they held each other close. Winifred felt all the fear leave her body as she watched her uncle get unsteadily to his feet.

He looked at both of them, terror in his eyes, and still holding his arm away from him he shuffled towards the door. It was a long way back to his mother’s place, but that was where he would go. Maybe the people there would chase him away when they saw the pale snake on his arm, but his mother would not.

Winifred and her mother did not move, but as the door closed behind the uncle, Winifred felt her mother loosen her hold on her. Winifred led her to the chair and she sat down, breathing in and out heavily. They did not speak. Winifred went to the door and looked out. The uncle was walking strangely, as if one side of his body was heavier than the other. She watched as he made his way down the street, and in the distance she saw a bundle of a person lying absolutely still. As she watched she saw a slight stirring, a faint movement coming from the bundle. It was the old man. She knew she would never have to see him again.

She closed the door quickly and locked it, then went to the stove to light it for the start of the new day. It was going to be a good day. The old man would never come for her and her uncle was gone, he would never again shout in this house. The pale snake had silenced him. Now it was just her and her mother and the little ones. They would be safe and she would be Winifred, her own self.

It
is funny how things work out. Well, not funny really, because people being hurt is never funny. Although some people laugh when they hear about death. Mum tells me that that’s only because they’re scared at the thought of their own death and think that by laughing they might terrify death so it will never visit them. This may be true, or it could just be one of Mum’s theories. When she told me that, I wrote in my notebook:
I promise only to laugh at things that are funny, not at things that are scary. Like death.
I am very scared of death and don’t like to hear about people dying.

We heard the news from Fred, who’s always delighted when he gets to be the bearer of important information. He came through the hedge (I was watching and can verify that it did not part to let him through) and told us in his most serious voice, “Winifred has been saved.” As if he had done it, single-handedly.

“What do you mean?” asked Madillo.

“The old man is dead, struck to the ground by a pale snake that came from the sky in a flash of terror… He’s dead and won’t be anyone’s husband any more – unless she, too, is dead, then they would be together for ever in dead unholiness….”

He trailed off at that point, because he had, as usual, got carried away with himself.

Dead unholiness?

“And Winifred?” cried Madillo in horror.

“He just said she’s been saved, what’s the matter with both of you?” I said, even though I knew the answer to that: gory imaginations, that’s what. Fred was standing in front of us with his arms raised to the sky just to make sure we got the point about the snake coming from on high and I wasn’t sure whether to believe anything he said.

“What really happened?” I asked him.

“Exactly what I said. The old man was killed by a snake that appeared from nowhere. And the snake was white. That’s what my great-granny says, and she knows.”

“Anyone who knows anything about snakes knows there’s no such thing,” I said. “A white snake would shrivel up and die in the sun. Give it half an hour and it would be dead. It certainly wouldn’t go around killing anyone. I think she’s making it up.”

He shook his head. “You think what you want to think. I know what I know. The old man is dead and he wasn’t even sick. He was just walking home early this morning with Winifred’s uncle when this monster attacked him. Killed him stone dead in two seconds flat.”

“Who found his body?” I asked.

“Well…” he said in a slightly smaller voice.

“Well what?” Here we go, I thought, the admission of a lie.

“Well, no one found his body… So it seems like he died, then disappeared into thin air. Just like that.”

“Right. What did your great-granny say, exactly?”

“She said he’s gone.”

“If Madillo came to you and said, ‘Bul-Boo has gone,’ would you leap about the place telling everyone I was dead?”

“No,” he said defensively. “That would be stupid. But there was this snake…”

“So what happened to the uncle, then?”

Fred stepped closer to me. “He’s marked by the snake, all the way down his arm, like a tattoo. It won’t clean off. And Winifred’s mother has sent him away. He will not darken her doorway again.”

I may not have mentioned this, but Fred’s mother likes to watch old movies – she has a supply of them that she brought with her to Zambia many years ago. Fred watches them too and often sounds as if he’s in one. But the fact that he was sticking to his story was making me think there might be something a little true about it. (Except for the death part. I could tell that was definitely made up.)

“You’ll see,” he said. “Winifred will be back at school tomorrow as if nothing’s happened.”

Fred wouldn’t be saying that if he wasn’t sure – if only because he wouldn’t want to be proved wrong.

“And to think we did nothing,” I said. “All our plans. What if she had been killed?”

Madillo, who had gone quiet for a while, started tugging at my shoulder.

“I told you Ifwafwa would sort everything out. You didn’t believe him.”

“Ifwafwa? Because of the snake?” I said.

She nodded.

I felt cold suddenly, as if I was back at the fridge door. Could Ifwafwa have set a deadly snake on the old man? Kind, clever Ifwafwa with his tales and his smile that made you feel that the sun would always shine? Ifwafwa who would not even harm a snake? I didn’t want to think about it at all. I couldn’t believe he would do something like that. I just wanted Winifred to be OK, I didn’t want to hear stories of awful things. If Winifred is back at school tomorrow acting as if nothing has happened, then that will mean nothing has. Except for the old man and the uncle going away for ever – that would be perfect.

Winifred
was back at school this morning – just as Fred had said she would be – her uniform all neat and tidy, her hair braided tight and her smile big. It made me feel even worse to think that we had failed her. But at least she was back, next to me, and I was longing to feel that everything was all right again. Back to normal. Except I found it hard to feel that. I didn’t want to think that the old man had died – no matter how awful he was. And if it was Ifwafwa who had something to do with it, as Madillo insists, that made it even more unbearable. I don’t even like to think about a moth dying, or a locust or a dung-beetle – especially a dung-beetle. When Billy our dog died, it was sadder than anything. When we heard about Winifred’s dad dying, it was horrible. I think that maybe the old man got hurt but then walked away. If he’d died, then they would have found him. No one can just disappear into thin air like that, can they? I’m sure that’s just Fred’s story – and it’s not a very good one.

Fred was wrong on this one, I know he was. Winifred wouldn’t have looked so happy if the old man had died – no one would, because you would feel like it was your fault. She was happy because she didn’t have to marry him and she could just be herself. (That’s the best reason to be happy.) If I was her, I’d probably never marry anyone in my whole life after such an escape. I’m going to try and be normal about it; I’m not going to let Fred and Madillo bring it up ever again, even if I have to bribe them. I know Winifred won’t talk about it, why would she?

One day I’ll ask Ifwafwa about it, when there’s no one else there. He’ll tell me the truth.

As for Sister Leonisa, she behaved today as if Winifred had never left. As if none of this had ever happened. So did everyone else in the class, which isn’t so bad because they didn’t know anything. Except, that is, Fred, who looked at Winifred sideways as if she was about to explode. I’m going to speak to him about that – he’s such a goon sometimes.

It’s funny, because when I saw Sister Leonisa behaving like that, it was almost as though nothing
had
happened. As if I’d woken up after a dream I wished I’d never had.

But I don’t think so.

In fact I know for sure, because of the story Sister Leonisa told us earlier today, which can’t have been a coincidence. It all started because Madillo’s shoes were dirty. Sister made her take them off and bring them up to her desk so everyone could see them.

“All of you, take a good look at these dirty, muddy, smelly shoes on my desk,” she said. Which was very unfair, as they weren’t smelly, they just had a bit of mud on them.

“Now, I want you all to close your eyes, keep the picture of the dirty shoes in your head and listen. There was once a girl who never cleaned her shoes. If the shoes had met a tin of polish walking towards them they would have said, ‘What is this strange thing we see in front of us?’”

I was watching Madillo as the story unfolded and would have felt her anger even if I’d not seen her foot tapping. (Sister Leonisa told us in class once, “I happily jump in where angels and devils fear to tread.” Never was this truer than now.)

“Each night, this girl – we will call her Mad the Bad – would place her dirty shoes carefully next to her bed, mud and all. Well, one night a puff adder wandered into her bedroom—”

“Snakes don’t
wander
, Sister, that’s just silly. Only things with feet or hooves can wander,” Madillo muttered, just loud enough for Sister Leonisa to hear.

“Don’t interrupt, please.
This
snake wandered. If I may carry on, this particular snake was pregnant, and very hungry, and she thought she smelt a rat. But it wasn’t a rat, it was Mad the Bad’s shoes. So the snake – we’ll call her Puffy – sniffed around them a bit but they confused her: they smelt like the earth outside but they were inside this house. All of a sudden Puffy felt an urge to give birth to her babies. She would not normally do this on the smooth floor of a house, but here she was, desperate to pop them all out, and luckily there was the perfect spot for her, inside the muddy shoes. So, while Mad the Bad slept peacefully, Puffy calmly gave birth to thirty-five little puff adders.”

Throughout this story Madillo herself had been huffing and puffing, but Sister had ignored her. Finally, unable to contain herself, Madillo blurted out, “Thirty-five? In one pair of shoes? It’s just a lie.”

“Madillo, keep quiet,” Sister Leonisa snapped. “The shoes were big – they had stretched from never being cleaned.”

Sister Leonisa stretches the truth beyond anything if she wants to make a point. In fact, I’m not sure she even knows what the truth is.

“So,” she continued, “poor little Mad the Bad woke up in the morning, and when she looked down at her shoes all she could see was a writhing, demented mass of puff adder. Nothing else. She screamed at the top of her voice for her mother, who came running into the room and rescued her little girl. And I can tell you that from that day onwards Mad the Bad had the cleanest, shiniest shoes in the school. Never again would her shoes become the puff adder labour ward.”

Sister Leonisa turned to look at Madillo. “Perhaps, young lady, you will think twice before you come into my classroom with muddy shoes again.”