The Cellar (2 page)

This trouble had come upon them, Muna thought, because Mr Songoli had cancelled the car that had driven the boys to class each morning and brought them back each afternoon. He was angered at how spoilt they’d become and told them they must learn to want their education as strongly as the bush children in Africa. Now Olubayo told terrible lies about the happenings that morning, swearing hand on heart that he had walked Abiola to the school gates. Yet Muna knew this couldn’t be true. Olubayo had so much hatred for Abiola, and Abiola so much hatred for him, that they never did anything together.

Perhaps the white didn’t believe the story either for she asked Yetunde if she’d seen the boys leave. And of course Yetunde said she had. She would never admit to her husband that she’d been sitting before her mirror, massaging expensive bleaching cream into her skin. Such wasteful extravagance annoyed Ebuka.

‘I’d like to ask your daughter the same question, Mrs Songoli. Will you put it to her?’

Yetunde raised her voice. Look up, Muna. This woman is asking if you saw Olubayo and Abiola leave this morning. Nod your head and say something. She expects you to speak.

Muna did as she was asked. Yes, Princess. No, Princess. Is there something I can do for you, Princess? But even as she whispered in Hausa she longed for the courage to say the words she practised to herself each night.

‘Please help me. My name is Muna. Mr and Mrs Songoli stole me when I was eight years old. I would like to go home but I don’t know who my parents are or where I come from.’

Two

The only adults Muna could recall from her childhood were nuns and priests with shiny white skin. The years had blurred their features and muddled their names but she thought she’d been happy during the time she spent with them. She found it easier to remember the beaming black faces of the children. There was more to recognise in people she resembled. She dreamed sometimes of playing games in the dust of a sun-drenched schoolyard, full of colour and brightness, but where that was and why she had been there, she didn’t know.

The life she lived now had begun the day Yetunde came to claim her. The woman, tall and magnificently dressed in a bright blue kaba with a matching gele on her head and gold necklaces around her neck, had documents to prove her entitlement to the child. With a happy laugh, she had claimed Muna as her niece, hugging and kissing her and telling her how pretty she was, and Muna had smiled into the woman’s eyes as if she knew her. No priest would question the love he saw between them, particularly when Yetunde Songoli produced a legal writ giving her guardianship of her dead sister’s eight-year-old daughter.

Had Muna been suspicious? No. Her only feeling had been awe to discover she belonged to someone as rich and beautiful as Aunt Yetunde. If an explanation had been offered for why she had ever been placed in the care of nuns or why Yetunde Songoli had thought to look for her there, she didn’t remember. Her strongest recollection of the day was skipping through the schoolyard gates at her aunt’s side without a backward glance at the place she’d called home.

Now, all these years later –
five, six, seven?
– Muna wished her memories of it were stronger. Reason told her it must have been an orphanage and that her surname, if she’d ever had one, wasn’t known to the priest. Or perhaps he was as wicked as Yetunde Songoli? Perhaps he posed as a priest to make money from selling motherless girls to well-dressed women with documents? Muna didn’t want to believe that. She longed to think white people had more kindness than black ones, but in her heart she knew it wasn’t true. She had seen the cold and unfriendly way they passed each other in the street outside this house where she lived, not caring to exchange a greeting or even smile.

Her worst terrors came during the night. She could believe in herself in daylight, but alone in the pitch-blackness of the cellar she doubted her very existence. However hard she strained to see the walls and the floor, even her hand before her face, there was only darkness. And the darkness was more alive than she was.

Only pain told her she was real. When she touched the scars between her thighs where part of her had been cut away by a witch, her eyes shed tears of anguish. It will make you pure, the woman had said as Yetunde held her down and the knife sliced through those parts that were private to little Muna.

The word meant nothing to Muna for she couldn’t see that the agony she suffered each time Ebuka ripped new tears in her misshapen hole made her pure. She didn’t know why he did it and shook with dread each time the cellar door opened and his torch shone down the steps. She never saw his face. He became as invisible as she was once the light was quenched and he clamped his hand across her mouth to stifle her whimpers. She could only tell it was Ebuka from his smell and his pig-like grunts.

Perhaps purity came from the searing pain of passing water or the fear she felt of the mysterious blood that had begun to leak from her once a month. Now Ebuka only visited her when she bled as if what leaked from him could be cleansed by what leaked from Muna.

Yetunde asked her often if she had begun to bleed between her legs but she always said no. She felt it was a secret she should keep though she didn’t know why. She had little knowledge of anything except cooking and cleaning, and she’d learned those skills through being beaten with a rod when she made a mistake. There was so much that was unexplained in her life. Who she was. Where she had come from. How old she was. What place she was in and how she had got there.

She remembered climbing into a silver car outside the schoolyard gates and being driven through streets teeming with people and markets, and she remembered Aunt Yetunde smiling as she popped a coconut sweet between her lips. After that, Muna’s memories were confused and random. She could recall the witch with the knife because the pain had caused her to wake and cry out, but most of the time she thought she’d been asleep.

Certain images kept recurring in her mind. Yetunde pushing coconut sweets between her lips. The feel of a man’s beard against her cheek as he carried her in his arms through a large hall. The sound of Yetunde saying the child was his daughter. The roar of engines. People sitting in rows. A sense of lifting from the ground. Being carried through another hall. Rain on her face. Waking here in the darkness of this cellar and never tasting coconut again.

Muna thought the bearded man must have been Ebuka, but she had no explanation for why he had once pretended to be her father. She guessed the other memories were about a journey. The place she had left had been full of sunshine and colour but the only brightness here was in the greenness of the grass and the leaves on the trees. She wished she had made a mark each time they turned to golden brown for it meant another year had passed, but her child’s mind had been too intent on counting each hour of the day to think about the future.

Through the bedroom windows upstairs, she could see over the high brick wall that surrounded the house. Away in the distance were tall buildings that reached towards the sky, but close to were houses like this one, hidden behind walls and obscured by trees. She saw more through the metal gates at the end of the short driveway when she was dusting the downstairs rooms than she ever saw upstairs. People walking. People in cars. It’s how she knew she was in a world of whites. She came to recognise those who passed the gates each day but they never glanced in Muna’s direction.

If they had she’d have jumped behind the curtains out of fear. She wasn’t allowed to raise her eyes to anyone. She whispered words at night to remind herself she had a voice, but her dread of being heard was terrible. Yetunde had said Muna had demons inside her when she begged to go back to the schoolyard she knew, and had poured burning oil on the child’s bare foot to teach her that demons spoke words of ingratitude.

Are you not happy to serve your aunt? Yetunde had asked. Yes, Princess, Muna had answered.

Muna was very afraid the white in trousers could see through her skull and into her brain. She could feel the sharpness of the clever blue eyes boring into her head. Had her ears told her that Muna had used the same phrases twice? A knot of sickening fear tightened in Muna’s belly. Yetunde would wield the rod with even more cruelty if she could blame little Muna for the police not believing her.

‘Did you look to see if Abiola entered the gates after you?’ the white asked Olubayo.

‘No. I ran to join my own friends.’ Olubayo gave a sudden wail as if he knew he should show grief.

‘Do you blame my son for this?’ Ebuka Songoli demanded angrily.

‘Of course not, sir, but we’ll require the names of everyone he remembers at the gates when he arrived. We have a team searching the school premises in case Abiola met with an accident, but if he never went in, a parent or child may have seen what happened to him.’ She paused. ‘We need to establish if he left on his own or in the company of someone else.’

‘A stranger has taken him. This is a terrible country. Such things would never happen in ours.’

‘It’s more likely to be someone he knew, Mr Songoli. The area was too crowded and too well covered by CCTV for a stranger abduction. One of my team is going through this morning’s footage with the caretaker but any names Olubayo can give me will help. Tomorrow’s Friday. It gives us little time to find witnesses before the students leave for the weekend.’

Muna sensed Olubayo’s nervousness on the seat beside her as he stammered out those he remembered. She thought him foolish to do it. Did he think no one would have noticed that he arrived alone? On each of the four days since the car had been cancelled, he had taken to his heels as soon as he and Abiola were hidden from Yetunde’s view by the wall surrounding the garden. Muna, whose first job every morning was to tidy the boys’ attic bedrooms, had watched it happen. While Olubayo ran away laughing, his fat brother waddled and wept in a furious rage behind him.

It hadn’t occurred to her to speak of it to Yetunde for Olubayo would have kicked her and slapped her if she had. Nor did she want to be beaten with the rod for pausing in her duties to tell Princess things she didn’t want to hear. Muna’s task was to wash Abiola’s sheets, not care if he was abandoned in the road. She had no liking for him. He was a lazy, dirty boy who soiled his bed because Muna was there to clean it for him. Sometimes he smeared faeces on the linen to make the task of bleaching it harder.

Laziness had made him stupid and for that Muna could thank him. He had found it so hard to learn English that Mr Songoli had paid for him to be taught in the house. Since Yetunde wasn’t interested in listening, the lessons had taken place in the dining room; and since Muna wasn’t allowed to be seen by strangers, she was ordered to stay in the kitchen while the teacher was there. She had often wondered why Yetunde hadn’t realised she would be able to hear what was said through the hatchway that linked the two rooms.

Perhaps Yetunde believed what she always said, that Muna was too feeble-minded to make her own way in the world. Be grateful for my protection, she would say as she struck with the rod whenever Muna displeased her. Without a place in the Songoli home, you would be nothing.

Muna was forbidden to watch television or listen to a radio, but even squatting in her place in the corner of the kitchen, she could hear what the family heard because they turned the volume so high. At first, she had only understood the language of Olubayo and Abiola’s children’s programmes, but as the years passed she absorbed the vocabulary of the daytime chat shows that Yetunde loved. And when Ebuka came home in the evening, she listened to the language of current affairs as she prepared the evening meals.

War … murder … rape … violence … hatred … intolerance … cruelty …

Muna could speak whole sentences in her head but she struggled to make her mouth say them. And more often than not she wondered if it was worth trying. From everything she heard, the world outside was as terrible and frightening as Yetunde and Ebuka Songoli described it.

Three

A week passed. Abiola’s face kept appearing on television, and Mr Songoli raged about journalists and cameramen camped at his gate, pointing their lenses at his windows. The fingerprints of everyone in the house were taken, while others were lifted from the furniture in Abiola’s bedroom. Olubayo was exposed as a liar when the CCTV footage showed that he arrived at school alone, and, worse, that Abiola never arrived at all. A woman in a neighbouring street said she’d seen a black boy being lifted into a car of the same make and colour as Mr Songoli’s.

The house was searched a second time, far more thoroughly, and Ebuka and Yetunde were taken away for several hours to be questioned elsewhere. While they were gone, the white brought a Hausa speaker to question Muna. She was a woman of Yetunde’s age who spoke impatiently and stared hard at the girl as she translated the white’s words, adding phrases of her own.

This officer’s name is Inspector Jordan, she said. Look up when you speak to her. Answer freely. You’ve no need to be nervous. There’s nothing to fear if you tell the truth.

Muna doubted that. She had seen how viciously Ebuka had beaten Olubayo for bringing dishonour on the family with his lies. What if this Hausa speaker was a friend of Yetunde’s and refused to repeat what Muna said about the Songolis stealing her from an orphanage? The white – Inspector Jordan – would learn nothing and this woman would tell Yetunde of Muna’s ingratitude afterwards. And Muna dreaded to think of the punishment she would receive.

Life was better as the Songolis’ disabled daughter. With a police liaison officer in the house, Muna no longer had to clean and cook from morning to night, sleep in the dark cellar or dress in a servant’s clothes. Instead she was allowed to wear the same sort of pretty dresses that Yetunde wore, go to bed in a room with windows and electric light and sit with the family each evening, watching and listening as the search for Abiola continued.

Some of Inspector Jordan’s questions were easy, needing simple yes or no answers. Do you love Abiola?
Yes
. Did you see him leave for school that morning?
Yes
. Did he come back after Olubayo abandoned him?
No
. Do you think Olubayo would have harmed his brother?
No
. Do you think your father might have harmed him?
No
.