Shamanka (3 page)

I
f you look through the keyhole into the attic you won't be able to see much. The skylight is so filthy, everything inside is thrown into silhouette: broken candelabra, limbless dolls, books, more books, and boxes full of – what?

Sam is curled up against a battered leather trunk with her head in her hands. She's crying. This is a rare event; she's not one for self-pity. There's a butterfly trapped in a cobweb in the window and she's sad that it died with only a thin sheet of glass between death and freedom.

She feels guilty. Last night, she dreamed about a butterfly trapped in an attic. Now she's punishing herself for ignoring her dream and failing to rescue it.

Sam is plagued by dreams that often turn out to be premonitions. They're most vivid when she's on the blurry edge of half-asleep, half-awake, just as she is now. Her sobs turn to shudders which slowly ebb away. Her eyelids flicker. She lays her head on her wrist and – though it may be just the rush of her own pulse – she's certain she can hear a primitive drum beat:

Bom
-bom bomba
,
bom
-bom bomba
,
bom
-bom bomba!

The drum beat is getting louder and louder. Bright pictures come into Sam's head – a fitful dream? A vision? Call it what you will, it's as real as anything. Beads of perspiration appear on her brow but she has no fever. The sun is steaming. There's an intoxicating smell of wild orchids.

She fans herself. Leaf-sweat drips off the sago palm trees and plops like musical notes into the green-blue water of the Sepik River. The raucous call of the Torresian crow announces the arrival of the witch doctor; he's beating a drum trimmed with fur.

The witch doctor's name is Yafer Tabuh. He's smaller than he looks, but his presence is huge. The bird of paradise feathers in his headdress are two metres high. He wears a necklace threaded with hornbill beaks the size of bananas. He has a pair of boar's tusks thrust through his nostrils and his copper-coloured skin is tattooed with crocodile scales.

Here he comes, leaning on a stick with a monkey-head handle; the one he inherited from his grandfather. He's not alone. A youth in a bush hat follows in his footsteps. It's the witch doctor's son, but you wouldn't guess to look at him.

The son is tall and slender. His skin is the colour of olives. His eyes are green, and although his hair is dark, it's sleek and straight and flows over his elegant shoulders like a mane. He has his mother's English nose and he is breathtakingly handsome. As far as the witch doctor is concerned though, his son's good looks count for nothing; he is not pleased with him.

Resting against the bank of the river among the mandrake roots is a dugout canoe – a mwa sawah. There's nothing to distinguish it from any other canoe apart from its familiar passenger; an orang-utan. It's Lola, only younger. Sam recognizes her immediately and waves excitedly in her sleep.

The witch doctor tells his son to get into the canoe but the boy is reluctant. His father speaks to him firmly in his tribal tongue, which is Motu. Sam has never heard the language before, but this is dreamtime and, somehow, she understands every word.

“You will always be my number one son, but you are
sceptical
!” groans the witch doctor. “Have you forgotten the day you came to me with your pet orang-utan dead in your arms and begged me to bring her back to life? Unless my memory fails me, I removed the poisoned dart from her chest, chanted my chant and resurrected her. Is she not sitting in that canoe, grinning away in a very lifelike manner or have I gone mad?”

The boy replies in excellent English, “She's alive and grinning, Father, and I'm sure you're not nearly as mad as you look.”

“But
still
you do not believe in my ancient magic!” The witch doctor sulks.

The lad folds his arms and tries to explain himself.

“It's not that I don't
believe
. It's just that my dear departed mother taught me to question everything in the western way. I can't help wondering if Lola wasn't quite as dead as I thought, and that her amazing recovery was brought about by an antidote which you cleverly mixed, rather than as a result of spells and chanting, that's all.”

Yafer Tabuh shakes his head so hard, the beaks on his hornbill necklace clack together like machine-gun fire.

“ALL?” he shrieks. “That's
ALL
? He who questions the witch doctor's magic has no faith! When I die, you will not be fit to step into my shoes!” The fact that he isn't wearing any shoes is neither here nor there. “I have no other child to instruct in the ancient magic,” he rants. “It will die with me; the villagers will die without me and so will this whole way of life. Do you want that on your conscience, number one son?”

The boy bows his head. “No, Father. I'll be the next witch doctor if you insist, and I'd have every faith in your power if you could answer me one tiny little question.”

Yafer Tabuh throws his hands in the air.

“Always questions! What
now
?”

His son looks him straight in the eye.

“If you truly brought Lola back to life with your ancient magic, why couldn't you do the same for Mother?”

There's an awkward silence. The witch doctor twiddles the boar's tusks in his nose, until his nostrils flare so wide you could stuff an orange up each one. He snorts as he paces up and down, muttering to himself in Motu.

“My own son suspects I allowed his mother to die because my
magic
was weak? Yet I loved his mother more than he loves himself … this just won't do! For all our sakes, I must send him to the four corners of the Earth and work Big Magic on him.” He unties the goat skin pouch from around his waist and throws it into the canoe. “My son, in answer to your question, it is pointless asking
me
any questions, because you do not trust my answers. Get into the mwa sawah!”

The boy wants to refuse; he likes living here. It's a pleasant life, pottering round the rainforest. There are no man-eating tigers. Although the rain gets a bit boring and a holiday abroad would be nice, he suspects this isn't what his daddy has in mind.

He dare not disobey him. Although he doubts his father's ability to raise the dead, he's seen him flatten enemy crops with a wave of his hand. He's seen him raise a storm on a sunny day and, once, he saw him kill a crocodile by fixing it with a nasty glare. The witch doctor isn't to be messed with, so the son climbs into the canoe next to Lola and awaits instructions.

“Because you are so very fond of questions, you are to go on a quest,” announces the witch doctor. “Inside this goatskin pouch you will find, among other things, a notebook. In the notebook is a list of Very Important People I want you to meet.”

“Friends of yours?” asks the son.

“Some are scholars, some are scientists, some are magicians; but none are who they seem. Ask them what you like, but be sure to find the answers to these three questions: What is magic? What is illusion? What is real?”

The son is puzzled; why those particular questions?

Yafer Tabuh rolls his eyes. “If you find the answers to them, you will no longer question my power. You will have absolute faith in me and return home bearing the greatest gift you could ever give your father.”

“A new set of drums?” queries the boy.

“No.”

“Some strappy sandals?”

“No!”

The boy stops being flippant and tries again. “A wise and wonderful young candidate to replace your good self?”

The witch doctor grins broadly, exposing his teeth which have been filed into points. “Ha! You have knocked the coconut right on the head.”

His son sighs deeply. He doesn't want to be a witch doctor when he grows up. The hours are too long, the training's too hard and he doesn't like the uniform. He's always dreamed of being an anthropologist like his mother. Or a crab fisherman. Or a poet. Yet here he is, at the tender age of eighteen, being told that he must be the next witch doctor or else.

He has one last attempt at getting out of it.

“You won't need me to replace you, Father,” he says. “When you die, you can bring yourself back to life, surely? Do I have to go right now? You're not
that
old!”

The witch doctor stamps his foot. “I am getting older by the second. Hurry up and leave!”

The boy is just about to pull on the oar when he thinks of yet another question to trouble his father with.

“What if I
fail
to find the answers to the three questions?”

“You can never come home.”

Never coming home seems rather melodramatic, even by his father's standards. Number one son laughs uproariously, but he soon shuts up when he realizes the witch doctor isn't joking. His face falls and although his upper lip is stiff and British, his bottom lip quivers slightly.

“What,
never
? But where will I live? What will I do?”

“That is for you to find out. Now, I don't want to hear another word. Off you go. Keep paddling. That's the way…”

As the boat bearing the witch doctor's son drifts down the Sepik River past the Spirit House decorated with the skulls of tribal ancestors and begins its journey into the unknown, Sam opens her eyes. She's almost awake, the images are fading but she can still hear the splash of the canoe paddle – or is it just the sound of the water tank suspended on the attic wall?

She's disorientated. She sits up. The movement causes the catch on the trunk to flick up and the lid flies open.

What's inside? A goatskin pouch with a crocodile-claw clasp. It's just like the one the witch doctor gave to his son. Dare she touch it? What if the pouch is like Aladdin's lamp or Pandora's box? What genie, what dark force, might lurk within?

The lure is too great. As Sam snaps open the pouch, it exhales like a lung and the attic fills with the sun-baked dream-smell of the banks of the Sepik River. Its contents spill out onto her lap – a shard of human bone, an oyster shell containing three pearls, and a tortoiseshell locket.

Inside the locket is a faded photograph of a white woman in sensible shorts. She has a baby boy sitting on her hip, wearing a big smile and an even bigger bush hat. Who are they? Relatives of Aunt Candy's perhaps?

In the bottom of the pouch is an ancient, tattered notebook bound with snakeskin. The pages are made of the crudest hand-pulped, sundried paper sewn together with sinew. Sam flicks through them with her thumb, revealing an animated whirr of notes, spells and diagrams, all rendered with a quill in fading berry juice.

The book falls open near the middle, marked with a piece of card. This is modern card, strictly out of place in this antique volume. Sam turns it over. It is a black and white photograph of a handsome man in a magician's outfit pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It's signed with a flourish: The Dark Prince of Tabuh.

Sam's heart thumps. The second she sees him, she
knows
who he is; he's the witch doctor's son. He has the same eyes, the same English nose and now that he has no hat on, she can see that he has a curious blond streak in his dark hair – just like hers.

Could he possibly be her long-lost father? The more Sam stares at his face, the more she's convinced. Aunt Candy lied! Her father isn't Bingo Hall. He isn't a backstreet bungler; he's the Dark Prince! But how did his photo end up in this notebook, in this attic?

Is he dead or alive? Where and why and who is the Dark Prince of Tabuh?

She gazes at the open pages of the notebook. There is an incantation; it's written in blood because this is a resurrection chant. It's in Motu and, although Sam is awake and this isn't a dream, she understands every word.

She reads the chant aloud and as she does so, she hears the faraway voice of the witch doctor joining in, as if they're singing a solemn duet. She stands up and, taking the shard of yellow bone in her hand, she continues to chant. As she chants, she points the bone at the skylight.
Flick, flick, flick
. The butterfly flutters. Shocked, Sam drops the bone. Has the chant worked? She examines its wings. It's still again now. Was it just the breeze through the gap in the glass that made it seem alive just then? Maybe it was never dead, just dying. Maybe it still has a little life left in it.

She rescues the butterfly from the tatty web and cradles it in her hand. Still not certain if it's dead or alive, she stands on a pile of books and, taking the goatskin pouch and its contents with her, climbs out of the skylight onto the roof. She opens her fingers and a gust of wind carries the butterfly away. Did it fly or did it fall? How can we ever know? Sam sits down, her head full of questions:

1. Is the Dark Prince of Tabuh really my father?

2. Is my grandfather really a witch doctor?

3. How do I get down from this roof?

She needn't worry about the last question. If you look at the chimney pot to your left, you will see a furry face sticking out, covered in soot; it's Lola. She's climbed up the inside of the chimney to rescue Sam. There is mutual hugging and smacking of lips, then Sam grabs the notebook and the goatskin pouch and slides down the drainpipe on Lola's back.

They climb back into the flat through the bathroom window and go to bed. Sam lies down on her thin mattress on the floor of the poky boxroom. She can't sleep; she's too excited. She rewinds the dream she had in the attic, replaying it over and over in her head. She sighs and puts her arm around Lola, who is dozing on the sooty pillow.

“I wish you could speak, Lola. Then you could tell me if you really did belong to the son of a witch doctor. In which case, how come you're here with me in London? As for being resurrected, I'm sure
that
can't be true.”

Even so, she can't help parting the fur on Lola's chest to see if there might just be a scar left by a poisoned dart… There
is
a scar! But it could be an old fleabite. Sam pulls the blankets over them both.