The Sleeping Baobab Tree (16 page)

He stopped when he reached me.

“She will be well now,” he said, bending down so that Madillo’s head was next to mine. “She will be well.”

His voice sounded like the molasses they feed the cattle, thick and sweet. It made me feel as if I was about to fall asleep standing there in front of him. I could do nothing, only nod my head.

Madillo was fast asleep, in the deepest sleep I had ever seen. Even her eyelids were still.

I looked at her and found my voice again. “But she doesn’t sleep like that. She wakes up so quickly if there’s noise. Why isn’t she waking up?”

“She is the same like you, I know that. Same face, same thinking. I know you are scared, but you mustn’t be. She needs to sleep now. You must be patient.”

He stood up and smiled. “Patience, that is all.”

I nodded.

“So,” Nokokulu muttered, “you don’t even know his name and you nod your head like a small wagtail bird. But me you don’t believe. Me, who has known you since you were the size of baby warthogs. Ha!” She pointed to the tall man. “You,” she said, “come with us to the car and put the child inside. We are leaving.”

The man didn’t seem to mind how she spoke to him. He just bowed his head and began walking towards the car. He looked as though he was moving very slowly, but his footsteps were so big that we had to run to keep up with him. He was taller than anyone I had ever met and his neck was as long and thin as a piece of bamboo. I don’t know how it held his head up. He was wearing loose baggy shorts, and around each ankle were bracelets that looked like they were made of copper, glinting in the moonlight.

I grabbed onto the back of his shirt as he walked, to make sure he didn’t disappear with Madillo. Fred sprinted ahead of us to unlock the car door. The tall man leant down and gently laid Madillo on the back seat. I jumped in afterwards and curled up next to her holding her hands, which felt very cold.

I looked up at the man. “When will she wake up?” I asked. “Her hands are so cold. Is she all right? Are you sure she’s all right?” I had started crying again. She looked so small and weak and she wasn’t moving.

The man gave me a gentle smile. “She’s very tired, so she’ll sleep for a long time, but it will be all right. In the morning she will wake up.” He looked at me. “She will wake up, I promise you.”

I believed him.

Nokokulu
had got into the car and she started the engine while I was still standing there, so I jumped into the passenger seat, and without another word to the tall man she drove off.

I looked out of my window and saw him running back into the bush. I don’t know if it was because of his long neck, but he ran like a giraffe. You never notice how fast giraffes run as they take such long steps. I didn’t know why the tall man was running, but I didn’t feel like asking Nokokulu when she was driving. She’d turn to look at me when she answered and forget to look at the road.

Suddenly something bumped into my side of the car and I heard a soft thud, as if we’d gone into a sandbank or something. Or hit an animal. Or maybe a human. I was in the car with Mum one day when a dog ran into the road and we knocked into him. It felt like that.

“Aiyeee!” Nokokulu yelled as she slammed on the brakes. (That was the second time she’d said that tonight. I honestly preferred “Ha!” – her “Aiyeee” is high-pitched and goes right through your head.)

I looked into the back seat and saw that now Bul-Boo was fast asleep too. She and Madillo were lying almost in a heap on top of one another, a tangle of twins.

“I’ll go and look, Nokokulu,” I said, “but keep the lights on.”

I didn’t especially feel like getting out of the car but thought I’d try to be the brave one.

“You stay in the car,” she instructed. “It doesn’t matter what it is. The car’s all right – we can carry on driving.”

I don’t know anyone else on this earth who would say something like that. There could be a person lying half dead in the road and Nokokulu was happy to leave them there as long as her car was OK.

“But…”

“How many times must I tell you, I don’t want to hear you say ‘but’? It’s the most foolish word in the dictionary. If I was in charge I would take the word out of every dictionary and hang it up in the street so people could laugh at it.”

She started the car and began to move off.

I turned round and stretched up to look out of the back window.

By the light of the moon I could see a large shape, almost as big as a lion, lying on the road. As I stared at it I swear I saw it lift its head weakly and stare back at me with small shining eyes. Then it flopped down again as if it was dead.

I sat back down quickly in my seat and turned to Nokokulu. She was looking straight ahead as if nothing had happened.

“There was something on the road, Nokokulu,” I said.

“What kind of something?”

“I don’t know, but I think it was alive. It was looking at me.”

“Ha! An alive something looking at you. Chiti, one day you will make up a story that someone will believe and then you’ll be in real trouble. Find the map so we can get home.”

Home was the only place I wanted to be right now, and as far away as I could ever get from the creature lying on the ground behind us, so I took out the map and started reading.

For once in her life Nokokulu followed my instructions and we went straight home, no detours or stops or anything. There was not a single sound from the back seat the whole way. Both Madillo and Bul-Boo slept even when the sun started to rise. Nokokulu didn’t have much to say either, so the only voice in the car was mine telling her when to turn and when to go straight on.

As we came nearer to Lusaka I turned to her and asked, “Nokokulu, what are you going to tell Mum and Dad?”

I think it was the wrong thing to say.

“What?”

That was not the Kind Voice.

“Well … we’re arriving back so early and the twins are sleeping and…” I suddenly remembered. “They don’t even know we have the twins with us.”

“So?” she said.

“So what will you tell them?”

“I don’t have to tell them anything, boy. You tell them the truth. The truth is sometimes a good thing.”

That would have been fine if it was a normal adult saying it, but in Nokokulu’s case I don’t think she’d know the truth if it walked up to her on a sunny day and said, “Pleased to meet you. Call me Truth.”

So I asked her, “What truth?”

“That we went on a nice holiday to Ng’ombe Ilede, and we set up our tents by the side of the great tree, we spoke to my ancestors and I told you nice stories. We decided to come back early because we were hungry. That truth. You have another truth you want to tell them, boy?”

Another one? “No, Nokokulu, that truth is OK.”

“And the
mpundu
– we send them home before your mum and dad wake up and everything will be all right.”

So she said.

We
were approaching Lusaka when I woke. I could see the orange glow of the city ahead of us. I looked down at Madillo. She was still fast asleep. But now it looked like a more normal sleep. I moved her along the seat so she was more comfortable.

I sat back and closed my eyes. The events of the night didn’t seem real. A picture of the tall man who had carried Madillo came into my mind, the way he’d loped across the land and then disappeared from view. I could remember his face so clearly. But perhaps none of it was real. Perhaps Nokokulu had created a shared illusion, a small spell that had caught the three of us in its tentacles. No. Now I was sounding like Madillo – an illusion with tentacles?

I wouldn’t think about it. I needed to put the night out of my mind. There were other things I had to be doing. I’d go back to the investigation into Aunt Kiki’s disappearance and start by looking at the Holistic Healing Hope website I’d saved to my favourites. It loaded quickly on my phone this time. I followed the
HOPE IN AFRICA!
link. And there it was. A picture of a bright modern building. The caption beneath it said:
Holistic Healing for Zambia
. Ratsberg and Wrath were photographed at the door. Beneath the picture the text said:

I stared at the page. Everything was there: the address, the phone numbers, even a picture of the clinic. These two “doctors” must have kept Mum’s patients there, pretending they were able to cure them. Even I know there is no cure for AIDS yet. It doesn’t mean people have to die. There’s no cure for diabetes, either, but there is treatment. AIDS is the same.

I looked back in my black notebook. I remembered Dad telling me about people like this, people who pretend they can cure you by staring into your eyes or giving you little drops of medicine that has nothing in it, only water. He has a name for people like that. There it was, a few pages back in my own handwriting: Snake oil salesmen and charlatans – Dad’s description of people who sell cures that don’t work.

As I was reading this I realized that we were pulling into Fred’s driveway. Nokokulu slammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt, making the car skid into his mum’s prize rose bushes. I looked up to see what had happened. There, standing on the driveway waving at us, was Aunt Kiki. She was thinner and paler than the last time we’d seen her, but it was definitely her, and she was smiling.

Nokokulu stared. Almost as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.

Fred turned round to me. “It’s Aunt Kiki,” he whispered. “She’s come back.”

“I know,” I whispered back. I didn’t know what else to say. It was like something out of a dream.

Nokokulu reversed the car out of the flower bed and finally spoke, her voice quieter than usual.

“Chiti, go and say hello to your aunt,” she said.

He didn’t need a second invitation: he jumped out of the car and ran towards Aunt Kiki. I saw tears in her eyes as she leant down to give him a hug.

“You two,” Nokokulu said. “Time to go home now.”

Just then Madillo woke up, as if she’d only been having a quick car sleep. “We’re back already? That was quick,” she said, sitting up.

“Yes,” said Nokokulu, opening her door. “It was very quick.” She got out of the car and for the first time ever I saw her give someone a hug. She just put her arms around her granddaughter and held onto her tight.

“It’s Aunt Kiki,” Madillo said, looking at me. “She hasn’t disappeared after all. She’s here, right here in Fred’s garden.”

I nodded. It was all too strange. Aunt Kiki appearing out of nowhere, Madillo awake and talking. I needed to get home fast.

Fred
stared at Madillo as we got out of the car.

“You’re awake,” he said. One of Fred’s special skills is stating the obvious.

“Of course I’m awake,” Madillo said, laughing. “I’m standing outside the car. You’re awake too!”

“We’ll see you later, Fred. We’ll be back,” I said, before the conversation disintegrated any further. “Come, Madillo, let’s go.” I was impatient to tell Mum and Dad about my discovery and about Aunt Kiki being back.

We crawled through the hedge and came in through the back door. Mum and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table. They both turned to look at us when we came in, and for the first time I understood what people mean when they say “the silence was deafening”. Neither of them spoke. They just stared at us. Mum with a reproachful look in her eyes and Dad with his deciding-whether-to-be-angry look. Mum’s was worse.

Madillo was the first to speak.

“Hi, we’re back,” she said in a pretending-to-be-chirpy voice.

They both nodded, then looked at one another. Mum tipped her head towards Dad. “You go first.”

“OK,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Don’t ever,
ever
do that again. Never. You want to go somewhere with Fred or with anyone, just ask us. That’s all. It’s not hard. You both know how to speak. We might say yes, we might say no – but ask us. Instead you lied. Not once, but twice. We don’t do that to you. We don’t expect it from you. OK? Anything could have happened and we wouldn’t have known where you were.”

I felt my face burning. Madillo moved closer to me. Neither of us could even look at Mum and Dad.

“And,” Mum added, “if it hadn’t been for Nokokulu we still wouldn’t know.”

“Nokokulu?” we both said, surprised.

“Yes, we spoke to her when you were still at Ng’ombe Ilede,” Dad explained. “I went next door yesterday evening because Fred’s dad had been fishing and he called me over to give me some tilapia. Naturally I asked where you all were as Mum said she’d spoken to you earlier and you were staying another night. Lie number two. He told me that Fred had gone away with Nokokulu and you had come home yesterday morning.”

“So we called Nokokulu,” Mum said.

At that we both looked up.

“What?” I said.

“We called her, on her mobile. She told us that you were both with them and she would bring you all back this morning. Although we didn’t expect you this early.”

Nokokulu on a mobile phone was hard to imagine. And why hadn’t we heard it ring?

“Why didn’t you phone
me
?” I asked.

“Bul-Boo,” Mum said, “your phone was off. And if I were you I wouldn’t be asking questions at all right now. I’d be looking down at my feet and saying sorry and promising to never, ever do anything like this again.”

Mum in indignant mode is not good; I’m sure she could see we were sorry. Madillo looked as if all she wanted to do was curl up in a ball on the floor and howl.