Ancestor Stones (41 page)

He thought he would be working with child soldiers. Or at the very least the limbless, the lipless, the eyeless, the tongueless. Instead he got me. But he was a good man, and determined to make the best of it.

I asked what his own opinion was, since he was the Spiritual Advisor.

‘I'm really a counsellor, that's just a fancy title.' He smiled when he said that.

So I told him, no, I wasn't teasing.

March is the warmest month of the year, and this was the warmest March for many years to come.

We used to meet on Friday mornings, eleven o'clock. His office had bare walls and a concrete floor, a bare light bulb descended from the ceiling on a three-foot, brittle cord. Too low, so each time he passed it he was forced to duck slightly. A small pink burn showed on his forehead. A desk, five chairs, one of which was broken and pushed against the wall. One he sat on. The other three, of variable height, were placed in a row in front of his desk. The middle one was directly opposite him, soft but too low slung, it left you peering across the surface of the desk at him. Choosing either of the others meant you would be at eye level, but off-centre. I chose the one that was closest and sat down, looking at him sideways on.

He turned his chair to face me. My skin prickled under his gaze, so I stared straight ahead of me at the wall, or else out of the window. Sometimes he turned to see what I was looking at. But there was nothing to see. Just a badly built wall with dried concrete oozing out between the breeze blocks and a trail of withered bougainvillea.

He suffered in the heat, clawing at his collar; the back of his shirt was soaked with sweat and stuck to the plastic chair. Still, he refused to give in to it. Every day a tie, a long-sleeved shirt, and a jacket that hung uselessly over the back of his chair.

Our sessions ended when the day was at its hottest.

‘Quick! What's the first thing that comes into your mind.' As if we were playing a game. So I told him about my niece, whose child had died. He asked me how I felt about that. I told him I was sorry for my sister's daughter, she had wanted this child very much.

‘Some people believe these things are just God's will, Mariama.' Adrian said in his hushed voice.

I told him it was probably no such thing. It was the child's will.
She had changed her mind. For her one world was as good as the other. It is we who are so much attached to this one.

One morning, the sixth or seventh time we met, Mr Lockheart had another idea. He asked if he might visit my room, he had heard so much about it. I didn't like to let anybody inside, not even the houseboy who cleaned the bedrooms of the other staff. On Mondays I left my waste paper basket out for him. On Tuesdays he left a dustpan and brush leaning against my door. But he, Mr Lockheart, Adrian, was quite insistent. He said it would help him to understand me.

I pushed open the door of my room. I crossed in front of him towards the window, unhinged the shutters. A ray of sunlight lit up the opposite wall, bouncing off the shiny surface of the magazine pictures. I opened the window and pushed the shutters all the way back, until they hit the outside wall with a bang. The room glowed with light. I had never seen it like this, it pleased me. Sounds from outside entered the room, mingling with the dust that played in the air, and set the colours of the pictures shimmering. The images sparkled and came alive. A shark swam towards me with red, gaping jaws. A shoal of silver fish swam by. A red starfish flashed, on and off. A blue sea horse reared. A conger eel hid in the darkness of his cave. A sleepy eyed turtle with wrinkled features glided past. A setting sun glittered upon the waves. All around me the sound of water, crashing and foaming on to the shore, trickling back down the sand to the ocean. The sounds filled my ears, I shook my head.

Adrian stepped across the threshold, and stood with his back against the wall, slowly crossing his arms in front of him. He tilted his head upwards towards the painting on the ceiling. Kassila! Nacre teeth, glinting coral eyes, ears of fragile oyster shells, his great scaly tail coiled and flexed. He reached down to us with spiny fingers. Adrian swallowed. I saw his Adam's apple, hard and fragile, move up and down behind the translucent skin of his throat. The fingers of his right hand fluttered briefly against his arm.

I looked at Adrian and I looked around me. Before we came here I thought I was going to feel ashamed, but I didn't. Instead I felt proud. This was the first time anybody had seen my room, with
my permission. A month before, the urgent matter of a bats' nest in the roof of the room next door had brought the caretaker over, he in turn called the matron, and she the principal. That's where this whole thing with Adrian Lockheart started, when the sessions began. They had not known quite what to do. It did not seem to occur to them just to leave me as I was.

He didn't speak for quite a long time, eventually he said: ‘What is it?'

‘It's my work,' I replied.

The pen Adrian Lockheart used to record our conversations was an old-fashioned fountain pen. A fine example, with a gold nib that made scratching sounds like the birds on the roof. One day, when he was called out of the room briefly, I picked it up and examined it. The shaft was made of marbled enamel, the nib engraved with the manufacturer's name. When he came back in he told me it had belonged to his grandfather, who had lived and worked in this country once. His grandfather's fondness for our country made Adrian want to see it for himself.

‘Lockheart?' I asked.

‘Silk. On my mother's side.'

The same name as the old District Commissioner. I replaced the pen on the table. I pretended the name meant nothing to me.

Adrian had something he wanted to talk about. He said we started but never did finish the discussion.

‘The giant shakes his head and frees the spirits from underneath the earth, isn't that what you told me?'

I nodded. That's what Pa Yamba Mela had told me. When I was a child, growing up. A lot of people thought Pa Yamba was a fool. That his magic was nothing but trickery, that his prophecies were cleverly worded so as to mean anything. He couldn't pull thunder out of the sky any more than you or I. He claimed to have magic powers just to make people afraid of him. And many were. In that way he became powerful. You could say that was a kind of magic.

‘The underworld will rise,' I replied.

‘And when will that happen?' Adrian shifted in his seat.

‘It already has.'

Once I lived among nuns. They told me stories of the lives of the saints, men and women who had visions, sometimes of God, Jesus or Mary. Other times these visions were premonitions.

Well, I had a vision of something that came to pass.

It was in the middle of the day, a market day. The sun was hot, bearing down on the top of my head. So bright it made me squint. The shadows were short and black, black, black. The air was heavy like glue, impossible to breathe, it wrapped itself around me. I made my way uphill, pushing against it all the time, my head bowed, my legs straining. Where the road was steep I stopped for a moment to catch my breath. I remember I looked up at the sky. Above me the sun and moon hovered on opposite sides of the blue, one indistinguishable from the other.

Suddenly I heard a great rush of wind, as though a whirlwind was racing towards me. I braced myself and waited. Nothing. The grass and trees stood straight. And yet the sound went on, becoming louder, filling my ears, rushing around my head. I felt myself becoming unsteady. I looked down at the ground and at my feet. I reached out for something to support myself, found a bollard and leaned against it.

There was a Creole graveyard below me, very old, at least one hundred years. I saw a crowd of mourners walking between the graves. They were carrying several coffins. It looked as though a whole family had died. But even though they were dressed as bereaved people, instead of weeping, the relatives appeared almost unconcerned. One or two were even laughing openly as they hoisted the boxes towards the waiting graves.

I looked and looked again. Something strange. I could see straight through the flimsy wood of the coffins. There were no bodies inside, only piles of sticks. The mourners were talking to each other, I could see their mouths opening and closing. I was too far off to hear what they were saying, though the calls of the market traders reached me. It was as though they were communicating
soundlessly, like animals. And I alone seemed to see them. The people in the market went about their business, bargaining and bantering with one another. Other strangers walked between the stalls. A young woman buying sweet potatoes stood right next to one of them, who stared lasciviously at her breasts. When she turned around she brushed past him, but never so much as glanced his way.

A fist of fear squeezed my belly. Trailed its fingertips slowly across my scalp. Sapped the strength from my muscles. I gasped, choking on my own breath. Drops of moisture rose on my forehead. I let go of my load. The plastic bags tumbled down the hill, tearing open, all of my oranges bouncing away. A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.

I saw them returning at night, moving between the headstones and the mausoleums, indistinguishable from the shadows, from the dark shapes of the statues. Great slabs of stone and marble were heaved aside, coffin lids swung open. I saw the graves open up, the spirits of the dead walk away from their resting place.

Then just as suddenly the vision disappeared. It was market day again. A little boy, naked but for a pair of shorts, was standing next to me holding my shopping bags. Another boy had climbed up the hill and was holding out the last of the runaway oranges. They were both smiling up at me, thinking of the coin I would give them, ignorant of everything I had just witnessed.

When I had finished speaking Adrian waited, as though I would go on. As though there was more. There was, but for the time being I was finished. I folded my hands in my lap. He was staring out of the window, flexing his long fingers. He didn't turn to me when he spoke, and when he did his words came quiet and slow:

‘That was how they got into the city, wasn't it? The rebel army. They hid their weapons and their men in the graveyards. Collected them at night.'

Yes, I told him. That was how it happened. Nobody realised it until later. We awoke the next day to find them in our midst.

We were silent together for a while. Then he pushed back his
chair and left the room. When he returned he was carrying a tray, upon which some tea things slid dangerously about. He set them down, stirred the tea to hasten the brew, poured two cups. Halfway to the top, the way Europeans do. He added milk to both cups, and pushed the sugar bowl towards me; the loose grains stuck to the underside of the bowl scratched the surface of the table.

‘The starlight was blue. There was a patch of the night sky where the stars crowded together — astronomers call it a “butterfly cluster” — and in the middle a single pale, yellow star brighter than all the rest. I used to like to tell my class about the stars. For some reason they can imagine it, the night sky. Even the ones who were born blind. We would go outside and they would turn their faces upwards, like flowers to the sun. Somehow they could sense the vastness above.' I stopped. The sky had never looked so beautiful as it did that night.

‘The next day was Twelfth Night. Did you know that? They came on the feast of the Epiphany.'

A fly had become trapped behind the window. The angry buzzing invaded the room, and an insistent tapping. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. As the fly hit the windowpane. The tapping punctuated our conversation.

‘Do you still believe in God, Mariama?'

‘I believe he exists.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘Just that. I believe he exists. I don't believe
in
him.'

Adrian folded his hands in front of him.

‘Like you here,' I said. ‘I believe you are sitting there. I can put out my hand and touch you. You exist, but that's all I know about you. I don't know whether you are good or bad. Whether I can trust you, or whether I would be a fool to do so.'

‘You can trust me, Mariama.'

A pause. Tap, tap. Of course, we were talking about God.

‘So what do you think about, when you think about God?'

‘I think he doesn't like black people very much.'

* * *

Something happened here. A change. Stealthy, creeping, slow. Like the way the desert is gradually covering the plain, one grain of sand at a time. It took place without us even noticing, so that the moment when we might have resisted passed unremarked. Suddenly it was irreversible. The evil had been let loose. But it was no longer among us, it was within. Everybody became part of it.

In the city the animals grew fat while the humans starved. The dogs were sleek and fit, their coats glossy. Vultures gorged until they could barely take to the air. The abundance of food gave the dogs a new confidence, the only ones with the freedom of the city. Under the bridge the fish nibbled at the jetsam of human corpses jamming the bay where every night suspected insurgents were shot by the dozen, their bodies tossed over the railings.

From the East, which had fallen into the hands of the rebels, a cloud of smoke drifted across the river to the West, bringing with it the scent of blood and fear. And every night the stars formed the shape of a beautiful butterfly hovering over the city. We hid and waited for them to arrive. And waited, until in the end we were forced out by our hunger.

I was standing at a checkpoint, behind a queue of people. The checkpoint was manned by black soldiers from another country, sent by their government to fight our war. They were poor; they were afraid for their lives; they had no choice; they hated us for it. Nobody spoke. You could smell the perspiration on the people as they waited silently for their papers to be checked.

Then, suddenly, from behind me — a woman's voice, shrill and steely.