Ancestor Stones (28 page)

I stared at the terrible images of rescuers picking over debris. In my dreams I saw fizzing, flashing pictures like the images on the television. I saw planes bellyflop out of the sky, smash nose first into mountainsides. I wondered if the people on the ground could hear the screams of the passengers. Or even if they screamed at all. Or just said ‘Oh!' And were gone.

Emma whooped with joy when a black man punched a white man so hard in a boxing match he knocked him out. In South Carolina black children were driven to school in buses with armed guards. I saw the expressions on the faces of the crowds at the boxing ring. And I saw the looks upon the faces of the white people as they threw stones at a bus-load of small children. And I saw how similar they were.

Somewhere along the line I started to become confused. Missionaries had brought me here. Given me a scholarship so at last I could qualify as a teacher. I must be grateful. Of course, I was grateful. Emma, on the other hand, didn't seem grateful at all. If anything she seemed to be angry a great deal of the time. Though once, when she was short-changed by a stall holder over a bag of plums, she laughed like it was a huge joke.

‘What would my mother say?' she asked me, holding the coins up under my nose on the flat of her palm. ‘She thinks an English man's word is his honour.' And when she saw my nonplussed face she laughed all the more until the tears welled in her eyes. ‘Oh, Mary!' Shook her head and put her arm around my shoulders.

Later, how I wished I had asked her all the things I wanted to know. At the time all I cared was that she wouldn't think me stupid. I didn't even know what the questions were, the answers to which I needed so much. Just ask, people would say. But how do you know what it is you don't know? When I needed someone to tell me, Emma was gone. Back to Ghana. At the end of her sabbatical she stopped by to wish me farewell.

‘Take care. Don't think you can go behaving the way the girls here do. One of our sisters was murdered like that, out alone at night. They found her body, but they never found who did it to her.' She kissed my cheek and squeezed my arm and was gone.

Alone I walked to the teacher training college. I dared not deviate from the route Emma had taught me. After classes I hurried home, nervous of the dimming light. I worked hard. I copied the words of my teachers down on to my exercise book and spent my evenings memorising them line by line. Still, in my first oral test I scored poorly. It was difficult for me. People pushed words through closed lips, made lots of ‘zh, zh' sounds. I couldn't understand. I watched the television. I went out and bought a dictionary, set about learning twenty new words every day.

Other times I watched the birds squabbling on the window sill, gorging on pieces of the town's rubbish. On the other side of the thick glass I was only inches away from them. I could see how they tottered on deformed, toeless feet — useless for roosting on the
branches of trees. Only good for balancing on concrete ledges and hobbling along the pavements.

At night, when the heating went off, I pulled my overcoat on to my bed and told myself how lucky I was. Outside the silent rain drifted above the houses. Half-asleep, half-awake fragments of dreams drifted through my mind: bathing among the drifting weeds; running through the rooms of Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay's house and finding each one empty; riding in a bus that veered from one side of the road to another, the passengers screaming, the bus hurtling off the road and down the side of the hill.

Mornings I woke early, watched my breath escape from me in thick plumes taking the memory of the dreams along with it. The dampness in the air reminded me of home, but that was all. I set my feet down on the freezing lino, in the tiled chill of the bathroom I waited for the water heater to produce a thin stream of hot water. Outside the sun shone brightly, invigorating me with hope. But by the time I stepped into the street the sky was suffocated by clouds and the sun was gone, like a promise broken every day.

Evening time I sat alone in the big refectory on the ground floor of the hostel. One day the cooks served roast chicken for supper. The flesh was pale, flaccid. Kept lukewarm under bright lights. The chickens here were so much bigger than at home, but tasted less good. How I yearned for a bowl of pepper soup, prepared the way my mother used to make it when I was ill with a fever: a little lime squeezed into the broth.

Still, I was hungry. The meat slipped down my throat. Afterwards I picked up the bone in my fingers and began to chew the ends. I cracked the shaft between my molars and licked out the marrow, careful to spit out the shards, making a pile of them on the side of my plate. A girl with pale hair and skin so thin you could see the blue veins in her neck came and set her plate down opposite me. For a moment she glanced at me and just as quickly looked away. Then she slid her tray off the table and moved to another place. Afterwards I noticed the way she kept glancing across at me. As though she had seen something dreadful, that never the less compelled her gaze.

That night I gazed into the mirror in my room. So many mirrors in this country. So much glass. In shops, on the sides of cars, on the outside of buildings. Everywhere I went I saw my image reflected back at me. Everywhere except in the eyes of the people. Nobody looked me in the eye. I saw how they watched the ground as I passed, only to feel their eyes boring into my back. Except, like the girl that evening, when they didn't think I was looking. Caught out, they closed their faces and shifted their gaze as if, all the time, they had been looking at something else.

As I examined my reflection I wondered what it was she had seen. At home people did not look at my sliding face as if it was so strange. Then I remembered the time after my mother went away, and the people in the village, my father's wives — how they fell silent when they had been speaking and saw me there. And how their eyes had begun to glide over me, as if I was invisible. And here was a girl who looked at me with a scared look, so scared she could not bring herself to sit near me, but moved away.

Dear Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay
,

I have arrived in England. I have my own bed and even my own room. How happy I am to be here and for this most wonderful opportunity to expand my knowledge and to advance myself. There are so many things to learn. I am endeavouring to study hard so that you and all of my family will be proud of me
.

It has been easy to settle in. I feel at home here already. The people are very friendly. Already I have made two new friends with whom I explore the town in my time away from my studies
.

Please send my regards to my father, my mothers, my brothers and sisters
.

Your respectful daughter
,

Mary

I enclosed a portion of my scholarship money. Enough to buy two sacks of rice, plus a little left over to pay for the letter-writer to read them my words. I also sent a photograph of myself, taken soon after
I arrived. The image was badly underexposed, my face a mass of shadows. At the last minute I picked up a pebble from the side of the road and pushed it into the envelope.

I went to live among strangers. Something happened. I have never told anybody, and nobody ever asked me, except you. It was nothing like what happened to the girl Emma told me about. The truth is, I can't remember so much about it. I have some memories, a few. But when I look back to that time everything I see is like the photograph of me, a cluster of shadows. I have some memories, a very few — but they exist without clues.

Emma had left. I was alone. I moved through time, passing from day to night to day. I don't know how many weeks or months went by. The days merged into each other, except for one day. One day was different.

I went for a walk. I had been feeding the pigeons on my window sill — pieces of dried up mashed potato. Increasingly I had taken to carrying my meals up to my room. In a strange way I had become quite fond of those ugly birds. They were not at all timid. I watched them land and take off, carrying pieces of potato in their beaks and I had the sudden urge to escape from my room for a few hours. I put on my duffel coat, pulled the hood up over my head and pushed my hands in my pockets. Outside the hostel I turned right, away from the college. The pavement followed the curve of the hill. I passed a shop selling newspapers and sweets. The road was lined with plane trees, their height and great leaves reminded me a little of home. At the bottom of the hill I found myself at a place where several roads met. In the middle was a small green, a duck pond, a parade of shops: Dewhurst Butchers, a bakery, a shop selling dressmaking fabric. In the window was a dummy draped in fabric fashioned into a flowing dress. I thought perhaps of buying cloth to send home; I didn't dare go inside.

On and on. Here the houses were fewer, mostly bungalows with gardens all the way around, some with garages. In front of one house plastic toy windmills stuck into the grass turned in the wind. The whirring sound they made was the same as the call of a little
black and yellow bird at home. I walked on, passing rows of mismatched allotments until there were no more houses. By now the rain was coming down. The path narrowed, my shoes slipped in the mud. Empty fields on either side, no crops but hillocks of rough grass. I pushed back my hood and felt the rain on my face, numbing my lips and my nose. I lifted my head to the sky.

The scent of rotting fruit: a plum tree had scattered its fruit across the path. I sheltered beneath it for a while. I was hungry, I picked up a plum and bit into it. The fruit was acidic and fizzed faintly on my tongue. Still it tasted good. I gathered several more, searching for the ones that hadn't been attacked by the birds. For a while I ate greedily, then I collected up more of the fruit and pushed it into my pockets to feed to the pigeons on my window sill.

More time passed, how much I don't know. I wiped my chin on my sleeve. I was cold, I decided to start back, to get back into the warm. The rain had eased off a little. On the way I passed the house with the windmills. I stopped to watch them, their red and yellow sails rotating, picking up speed as sluggish gusts of wind blew through them. I stared at the turning wheels, felt them sucking the thoughts out of my mind. One by one, the thoughts whirled away from me until they were caught by the rotating blades and spun out in all directions, across the garden and up into the air. At first I tried to catch them, but changed my mind and flew after them instead. Then I was floating up in the sky, side by side with the birds, gazing down at the shrinking dot of the town, heading far out to sea.

A child's face. At the window, framed by curtains, a child was watching me, unblinking black eyes. For several seconds I stared back. The child didn't move and neither did I. Just gazed into each other's eyes. I felt peaceful. For a moment I caught a glimpse of my own face among the reflections in the glass, my head superimposed upon the child's shoulders. The image wavered. I saw the child's eyes grow wider and its mouth open, though the sound was drowned out by the rain and the flapping of wet wings. A woman appeared behind the child. I saw her look up and take a step towards the window, pushing out her chin and drawing it back with a jolt, something like shock.

I turned away, pulled my hood back over my head. I walked fast, until I broke into a run. My heart was beating. I began to feel afraid. I worried the woman might leave her house, come after me, demand to know what I was doing. Suddenly the fear reared up, like great shadows behind me, chasing me. Faster and faster, I ran all the way to the hostel.

The next day it was cold, too cold to get out of bed. I lay there, pulling the cover over my head to block out the slow light that burned through the window. I dozed and dreamed. And in my dreams I saw sometimes the child, and sometimes the face of Bobbio my childhood friend. Another time I was snatched up by a great, black bird, carried through the air and dropped into a nest, where I lay on soft feathers, surrounded by jostling chicks. I woke up to the sound of tapping, saw a pigeon's red and yellow eye staring at me as its beak struck the glass.

The room grew dark and light again. How many times I don't know. Once somebody knocked on the door of my room. I didn't answer, I waited until they went away. It was quiet again, I was pleased at that. Silence, except for the sounds of the pigeons on my window sill, but they were my friends. Another time, another knock. Still I didn't reply; the person came in anyway. She looked a bit like one of the nuns from the boarding home, so I let her urge me out of bed and slip my duffel coat over my shoulders. I put my hands into my pockets and felt the slimy mush that lined the bottom. I wondered what it was.

Next I was in a car. The driver kept turning around to look at me, asking me questions I couldn't hear so instead I looked out of the window. A stone horse reared up from a plinth. The rider, halfrisen in the saddle, stared straight at me. A man leaning out of an advertising billboard, proffering a cigarette, fixed me with his gaze. A woman beckoned me with a sideways look, raised a steaming mug of drinking chocolate. A dog's bulging, brown eyes followed my progress from the kerb.

A man asked my name. ‘Mariama,' I replied. I don't know why I said that. I had been Mary for a long time. We were out of the car now and in a new place. More questions followed. I couldn't find
the English words so I answered him in my own language. He spoke to the woman who had brought me. Meanwhile I sat in my chair and looked at him. There was something strange about him. I stopped listening and watched him closely; still it took me a while to put my finger on it. Then I saw: he had no teeth! No gums, no tongue. Just a black hole behind his barely moving lips.

It was dark again when I woke up. A soft bed. A hard, square patch of white light fell on to the floor like a trapdoor. Behind the glass murmuring voices, careful footsteps. I sat up and twisted my body round so I could see out of the window behind me. It must have been the early hours of the morning. The street was empty, save for a lone figure who waited at the side of the street for a bus or a taxi. I was on the second, maybe third floor of a house. I looked up and down the street, at the puddles of light below the street lamps.