The Butterfly Heart (11 page)

In
many ways Madillo is some of the things I wish I could be. But in other ways she is not at all. I just hope I am not turning into her. I know that in some way, because we are identical twins, I am her and she is me, only not. I came out second, which is no bad thing: the Chinese say that the stronger one lets the weaker one out first. And I think that first bit of politeness has always stayed with me, sometimes I’m so polite that I don’t let my real thoughts out.

Madillo doesn’t have that problem. She thinks something and out it comes,
whoosh
. No matter what it is. I think a while before I speak, but usually I don’t let the thoughts take over my brain. The thoughts are taking over now, though. Take, for example, Fred’s great-granny, the witch. Here I am, terrified of being turned into a dung-beetle or a chameleon. (Mind you, dung-beetles were worshipped in Ancient Egypt, so their lives can’t be all bad.) But, to be changed from me, a human being, into a dung-beetle? In the real world? That’s what I mean: thoughts I should only be laughing at are taking over my mind.

I wrote in my notebook today:
Madillo is so free I wonder sometimes how she manages to stay on this earth. How does she not just float away? Not that I want her to, I just wonder about it.

A long time has already passed since Winifred told me about her fate. And Ifwafwa thinks everything is going to be OK if he just says so. But it doesn’t look that way to me.

The only solution is to let Winifred hide in our house until the old man gets bored or dies or finds another wife his own age. I think we could persuade Winifred to do that. The only issue would be Mum and Dad finding out. I decided to tell Madillo, because I couldn’t do it on my own and I certainly couldn’t hide Winifred from her as well as from Mum and Dad.

Before I could even get to telling her, she came out to me. I was thinking about the plan and I do my best thinking when I’m sitting on the step at the back door. It’s very shady there and the step cools me down because it’s polished and smooth.

Madillo knows she can always find me there.

“Bul-Boo, you remember I told you about my guardian spirit? Kasuba?”

“Of course I remember – you’ve told me about fifty times. And I hear you saying goodnight to him every night,” I added.

“Well, perhaps
you
need one? If you had one, you’d go to sleep at night instead of lying awake then waking me up and dragging me downstairs with you. I think your head is too full of things: a guardian spirit would help.”

“Help me stop thinking? No, thanks.” If I stopped thinking, then what would I do?

“Well, why don’t you just think about a guardian spirit and one may come to you?”

“Kasuba’s little brother?” I said, sounding meaner than I meant to.

Madillo really loves this little spirit so much I almost believe he’s real. She says I can’t see him because I don’t look hard enough. Apparently he’s so small she holds him in the palm of her hand, and he has golden brown skin and a pointy nose. She says that he sits on the end of her bed and glows and that helps her get to sleep. Her own little spirit night-light.
Kasuba
means “sunlight”, so I suppose that’s why he glows. It is a nice thought, a little glowing thing sending you to sleep.

She’d gone quiet and I hate it when that happens.

“I didn’t really mean that, Madillo. Sorry.”

She just nodded, which made me feel worse. And so I never got to tell her my plan to hide Winifred. But thinking about it, I may as well tell her and Fred together tomorrow, because he’ll find out from her anyway.

Fred’s quite good at hiding things. One of the first things he told me when we first got to know him was that hiding things was one of his special talents. I suppose it’s a handy talent to have, but I don’t know what job it would get you. And since Winifred is not a thing, it may not be helpful at all.

We waited for Fred after school. By then Madillo had forgiven me for being horrible; it never takes her long to forgive. We don’t often wait for Fred after school because he’s one of those people who does everything: soccer, piano, drama and I don’t know what else. Madillo and I don’t do any of the after-school things because we like going home and having time with nothing in it. That’s what’s best about
after
school – that we get to leave school behind us.

Winifred is still not at school and I miss her so much. I have never been to her house so I don’t even know how to speak to her about the plan. That means I’ll have to talk to Ifwafwa again and tell him her name and everything so that I can find out from him where she lives. I’ll tell him I have to take her homework to her and hope he doesn’t see through my lie.

Even though I’m sad that Winifred isn’t at school, it was lucky she wasn’t today because Sister Leonisa had one of her gory days. They seem to be becoming more and more frequent. We were doing geography, and this week we are on India. Sister Leonisa doesn’t follow the book (I don’t think she’s even read the book), so each week she decides on a country and tells us everything she knows about it. Most times this has nothing to do with land or mountains or sea or trees or weather, or any of the normal geographical things. So for India we learnt about bride-burning.

She stood in front of the chalkboard, her hand clutching a piece of bright pink chalk, and began.

“Now, I want you all to listen very, very carefully today. In India, every one hour and forty minutes a bride burns to death. As I speak these words, it is possible that some poor woman is going up in flames. How do you think this happens?”

Although Sister always asks us questions, it’s not because she wants answers. I have told Madillo that but she doesn’t listen.

“Sister, do they spontaneously combust?” she asked. “You know, when all of a sudden, with no matches in sight, a person just goes up in flames?”

“No, Madillo, that is not what happens. That doesn’t happen anywhere except in comics. These women are burned by their husbands and their mothers-in-law, who are greedy for a bigger dowry. Do you know what a dowry is?”

No pause here. This time she made sure not to get an answer.

“It is a sum of money that the parents of a bride have to pay to the new husband’s parents: a price for taking their daughter off their hands. Ridiculous! And not just money: they give them televisions, motorbikes, fridges, jewellery, animals… If the new mother-in-law doesn’t think it’s enough, she asks for more. And if no more comes – or if her son thinks a new wife would be a good idea anyway – they grab the bride in the kitchen, pour oil over her and light a match.
Poof!
there she goes. One young girl was set alight because the mother-in-law demanded a colour television instead of a black-and-white one. Can you imagine that? Burned to death because of a TV?”

Madillo interrupted.“But that doesn’t happen all the time, Sister, otherwise there’d be no mothers-in-law left; they would have been burned too… In fact, there’d be no anyone because all the women would be gone,
whoosh!
”

Sister looked at her. “Did you hear me say ‘all women’ or ‘all the time’? No? Then just listen, if you can. There are hundreds of millions of people in India: wonderful, beautiful, clever people. People who listen. But sometimes this thing happens. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Is that why you became a nun, Sister, so you wouldn’t have a mother-in-law?” Fred asked.

I could see her actually thinking about this before she answered him.

“No. I became a nun because I thought it would be nice to teach young children. I was wrong, but it’s too late to change now.

“It’s not just the burning that goes on because of this dowry thing,” she continued. “Parents who are very poor – and even those who aren’t – don’t want to have girl children because when the girls grow up the families will have to pay dowries. So they make sure they aren’t born, and in India now there are more boys than girls. I think I would rather not be born than have oil poured over me and be burnt up.”

That was Sister Leonisa getting all confused again about what she thinks and what she is supposed to think, being a nun and all that. And there aren’t many people anyway who could tell her what to think, as she doesn’t like being ordered about. I have learned a lot from her, although Mum says that some of the “facts” that come out of her mouth are dodgy. It’s a good thing Mum didn’t hear the tapeworm story.

“The lucky ones die when they’re burned; the ones that survive live in agony for the rest of their lives and have to go back and be a slave to the old hag and her son who tried to kill them. If that was me I think I would burn
them
before they had a chance to try again. Or just run away – that might be the more Christian thing to do,” Sister Leonisa said, turning her back to us to face the board.

The only time she uses chalk is when she does her wild drawings on the board. This one was of a stick figure running at high speed from a small house that had gone up in flames. I presume that this meant she had decided to take both options: burn the hag and her son and then run away.

I was thinking about it while we were waiting for Fred, and I know I’d run away before I had the chance to become anyone’s bride.

I spoke to Fred and Madillo on the walk home. They both agreed with the plan to hide Winifred in our house, but Fred had one problem with it: the great-granny. I can’t help it, but every time I hear about her it feels as though a battalion of ants is crawling up my back.

“If Winifred is that close, right next door, my great-granny will sense it. She will. She knows when things change. She knew my guinea pig had died before I did, and I was in the same room as it.”

“That’s not sensing something, that’s murder,” said Madillo.

Fred didn’t seem put out by that. “No, I don’t think so. He was upside down in his water bowl. If she had killed him, it would have been with a curse and he would have just been dead on the floor of the cage.”

“Curses aren’t always straightforward, that’s ridiculous,” said Madillo. “Most curses cause peculiar, horrible deaths. She could have said, “Guinea pig, guinea pig, in water you’ll end. Guinea pig, guinea pig, you won’t … mend?”

A ready-made curse? You’d think she had a store cupboard full of them.

“No,” said Fred. “I had been trying to teach him to swim, so I think he was practising but forgot what he was supposed to do when he was halfway across. Anyway, all I’m saying is that she can see things from far away, so if she asks me I’ll just say Winifred is visiting.”

We didn’t get as far as working out the actual plan, because we’d reached Fred’s gate by then and I didn’t want to wait around for the great-granny to appear. I wished Winifred was with us – she’s the best one for making plans. But she wasn’t.

We told Fred we’d work it out and then call on him if we needed help. He might be a help because I think Winifred likes him. She gets a bit silly when he is around.

A
gift that you have not earned is a precious thing. It is not to be played with or broken or ignored. I have tried to use my gift wisely in my life; I have not put it on show. I use it to help humans quieten their fears of these animals. To show that killing them is not always the answer. Snakes fear us even more than we fear them, but they will strike us if they need to.

I use this gift to take the snakes from the places that humans have decided to make their own and I return them to the places that we have left wild, where they can live in peace.

I think I may lose this gift if I use it against humans. But I must, because I cannot find another way. Time is running out. Yesterday I saw the uncle. He sat outside the house on a small box in the sunlight while the mother cooked. He has a voice that frightens even the cockroaches. He shouts at the woman when he wants something, and she brings him food with her head bowed low. He stole this woman from a dead man and now wants to give her child away. He is a man without truth in his body.

I
miss school but I can’t go back there because some of them know what my life is to become. They know I’ll soon be shut up in a house with this old man to see to his needs. I cannot do spelling tests now because there is no point. Bul-Boo and her sister are OK, they’ll not look at me funny. I don’t know what Fred thinks – he avoids my eyes when he speaks to me. Sister Leonisa knows and she has stopped asking me questions.