The Sleeping Baobab Tree (12 page)

“Run, run, then. Climb the tree. But I don’t know what you think you’re going to find. There’s nothing to see, only a fallen-down tree and a silly monument,” Nokokulu said.

We all looked at her. She can be very confusing.

“What about the dead ancestors?” I asked.

“What d’you think, boy, that they’ll be walking around here?”

She laughed. Loudly. Which was not necessary – we were right next to her.

“No,” I said. “I know where the things they dug up from here are, the bones and the jewels and everything. They’re in Livingstone, in the museum. I saw them there.”

“So, you know everything then. Why are you asking me questions?”

“Well, because you said there’s nothing to see,” I said, my brain hurting from the way the conversation was going round in circles.

“Nothing to see with our eyes, yes, but we don’t see everything with our eyes, do we, boy? We can see things with our brains and our hearts. But if you run around like crazy things you’ll see nothing. So, go and climb the tree, but no running, shouting or singing and maybe you’ll see something.”

The three of us started walking, very quietly, towards the tree, before she said something else.

As we walked the sky darkened again. The cloud was back.

“That was a powerful spell,” Bul-Boo said, laughing.

“Well, you can get temporary spells,” Madillo replied, “and the cloud is not as dark as it was. I think the storm has been averted.”

I didn’t say anything as the doom had returned, heavier than ever, and taken over my legs and made them so bendy that I started to feel a bit like a rubber man. Madillo told me once about a character in one of the anime things she watches who eats gum-gum fruit and turns into a rubber man. He’s called Monkey-something, and after he’s stretched he snaps back into shape just like a rubber band. That was me as I waited to be struck dead.

I was not sure I could make it all the way to the tree and started trying to think of other things that might make my legs return to normal. I stared at the ground and thought about the time we were in Kafue National Park and an elephant chased us because she had her calf with her. She came so close to the car her trunk hit the back window.

It seemed to be working. I was starting to feel less wobbly. I looked up and realized I was completely alone at the foot of the tree. Bul-Boo and Madillo had disappeared.

At that moment Rubber Man disappeared altogether and in his place stood Ice Man. Frozen. I couldn’t even turn my head to see whether Nokokulu had also gone. I felt as if it was just me, the tree and the wicked souls of Nokokulu’s long-lost ancestors.

Suddenly I heard a noise – a rough scraping against the bark above me.

“Fred, why are you just standing there? Come up!”

Bul-Boo. The voice of my dreams in the middle of a waking nightmare.

I looked up slowly, careful not to snap my frozen neck.

There they were. Sitting in a bend of the tree, grinning down at me.

“I’m standing here because I’m enjoying the view,” I said in my most casual voice.

“Of the ground?” asked Bul-Boo.

“Yes. There happens to be what looks like a rare praying mantis here. It’s got purple stripes on its body.”

Silence. For a few satisfying moments.

“Are you sure?” Bul-Boo again, her voice incredulous.

“I’m the one looking at it, aren’t I?” I said.

I was on a roll here. Ice Man and Rubber Man had left the building.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I’m coming down to look.”

Oh dear. The end of the roll.

“I don’t think you’ll see it. It’s started burrowing into a hole. I don’t want to stop it, because it would be terrified and might have a heart attack.”

Why didn’t I just say it had flown away? Because that’s what praying mantises do. They fly. They don’t burrow.

“Burrowing?” said Bul-Boo, looking not at me but at Madillo.

“It’s a new species,” Madillo explained. “Fred has made a major scientific discovery. He’ll be hailed the world over for discovering the Purple-striped Burrowing Praying Mantis.”

“Well?” Bul-Boo said, after a pause. “Are you coming up?”

I nodded. Not trusting my voice, which seemed to be busy betraying me.

“It’s great up here. You can see everything,” she told me.

“Except praying mantises,” added Madillo.

She never lets anything go.

You’d
never be able to climb a baobab if it hadn’t fallen over. Well, I wouldn’t anyway. The bark feels so smooth and the wrinkles are facing upwards, so you can’t put your feet onto anything. On this one the wrinkles were sideways and there were lots of knots. I saw someone once who put little pegs into a baobab so they could climb up it, but you wouldn’t need them for this one.

I love being at the top of a tree. And being at the top of a sideways baobab is the same as being at the top of a normal tree. From where we were we could see for ever – the Kariba Dam in the distance and the Zambezi and Lusitu rivers.

Fred came up after his excuse about watching the praying mantis. I didn’t tease him about it. He knows I know he made it up, so there would be no point.

“What’s Nokokulu doing?” I asked. We had a good view of her and she was walking around peering at things on the ground.

Fred shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s lost something.”

“She’s a witch,” Madillo said. “Witches don’t lose things.”

“Nokokulu’s not a witch,” I argued. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation again. There’s no such thing as witches. It’s just pure and undiluted rubbish.”

“There’s no such thing as pure rubbish. Rubbish can’t be pure – that’s contradictory,” Fred pointed out.

“Depends,” I said, not wanting to admit that he was right.

“Depends on nothing,” he said indignantly. “Rubbish can’t be pure.”

I looked away and muttered, “Maybe you’re right.”

Fred and Madillo didn’t say anything. It is rare, I know, for me to admit I’m wrong. That’s mainly because I look things up before I say anything, so usually I’m right. But not this time. I must remember to put that in my black notebook: I was wrong today and I admitted it.

“At least this tent zips all the way up, not like the old one we used when we went to Kundalila Falls,” I said to change the subject.

“That was terrible,” Madillo agreed. “I kept thinking a crocodile was going to come in through the gap at the front. At least with this one we’re safe from anything.”

“Plus we don’t have to share it with Nokokulu, which is the best part,” Fred said. “That would be pretty scary … and loud. Do you know, she says she has never slept in the same room as another human being and she never will?”

“And you believe her?” Madillo said.

“Well … when she was a baby I suppose she had to be in the room with her mother, but she says that from the moment she was born they knew she was special so they gave her her own room.”

“She must have shared a room at some point because she gave birth to your granny, who then gave birth to your dad and Aunt Kiki!” Madillo reminded him.

Kiki. Just the name brought it all back. I looked at Fred. He’s funny about things that really upset him. He tries very hard not to talk about them. He could talk all day and all night about things like predictions of doom, but when it’s something real like Aunt Kiki he just clams up. I saw him wince when Madillo said her name but then he just carried on as normal.

“I know, I know,” he said. “But I’ve never met my granny. I don’t even know if she existed. Maybe Nokokulu is one of those kind of adopted relatives. You know, the ones who come from nowhere.”

Madillo looked at me and then at Fred. “You mean like the Adopt a Zebra thing at Munda Wanga? We did that. Dad says we own one of the ears.”

Madillo and Fred could fill volumes of notebooks with the ridiculous conversations they have.

“I wonder if the story about Bukoko is true,” I said. “It’s funny that we’ve come here just after Sister told us about her.”

“We could probably see her grave from here if it was true,” Madillo said. “You see over there where those lines of stones are? I think that must have been the graveyard.”

Fred and I turned to see what she was pointing at, and there were very neat lines of stones down below in the grass. We had a good view from our high vantage point.

“But we wouldn’t find her actual grave, because surely it was dug up along with all the other graves?” I said. “And when they just found a stone in it they probably didn’t keep the grave marked.”

“Let’s take a photo of the stones anyway, to show Sister Leonisa,” Madillo suggested. “The actual graveyard where Bukoko might have been buried.”

Sometimes Madillo has really good ideas.

“Do you know,” said Fred, as we were starting to climb down the tree. “Because Bukoko was probably a Tonga, her spirit will be here even if her grave isn’t.”

“What do you mean?” asked Madillo.

Fred grinned. He loves it when he is the only one of us to know something.

“Well, a
muzimu
is a spirit that is left behind when someone dies. And that spirit is then inherited by someone else in the clan. It’s a different way of making sure that people live for ever and are never forgotten. So it doesn’t matter how many years ago Bukoko died, her spirit will have been inherited, and then when that person died, their spirit will also have been inherited.”

Both of us stared at him.

“So,” Madillo said slowly, “her spirit could be inside someone who lives in Pambazana, for example, just down the road?”

“Exactly,” Fred said.

“And how do you know this, Fred?” I asked him.

“Dad told me about it when I was asking him about reincarnation and Hinduism. He said that although this is different, it’s the same idea.”

“That means that when I die my
muzimu
will live for ever,” Madillo said excitedly, “until there are no more people left on this earth. It’s a brilliant idea.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to think about it as I find it hard to believe in spirits, but I have to admit that the thought of a little part of me travelling through time is quite nice.

“The downside is that you have no choice in the matter,” Fred said. “Your
muzimu
could end up being inherited by anyone. And then you’re trapped inside them, being them.”

We carried on climbing down the tree, probably all thinking of the person we would least like to end up inside. Then we went over to the stones and spent a long time taking photographs of them. We even moved some of them around to make them look like a little child’s grave, which, if I think about it, was a bit morbid. We must have caught that from Sister Leonisa.

By now we had almost forgotten that Nokokulu was somewhere near by and that both Madillo and Fred were feeling doom laden.

Nokokulu reminded us. With a loud blast of her car horn.

“When I grow up I want to be like Nokokulu,” Madillo said. “I’ll wear whatever I want, and shout if I feel like it, do spells all over the place and be rude to other people’s children.”

“And drive all over the road?” I asked.

“That too. Did you see how everyone stays out of her way?” Fred said.

“No, Fred,” I said. “If you remember we were trapped in the boot.”

The blasts of Nokokulu’s horn were getting more and more impatient. We couldn’t ignore her.

Fred started running towards the car.

“Last one there has to sit in the front seat on the way home!” he shouted. “And it’s not going to be me.”

As
I ran towards the car I felt the ground rumbling underneath my feet. Like when you’re hungry and your stomach grumbles, only much bigger. The kind of feeling that goes right through your feet to your brain.

“They’ve opened the Kariba Dam!” I shouted back at Bul-Boo, who was still quite a way behind me.

“What?” Bul-Boo said, slowing down. “Wait – tell me.”

I stopped running and waited for her. Forgetting for a minute who I was dealing with – she knows a whole lot more than me about dam walls and the shaking of the earth.

As she reached me she sped up again and ran right past.

“Sorry, Fred,” she called over her shoulder, laughing. “I just don’t want to be map reader on the way home.”

She reached the car before me but not by much, and she must have forgotten for a moment that Nokokulu was still in it, because as she reached it she banged both her hands on the bonnet and let out a yell. “Back seat for me!”

Not a good move.

“Hey! What did I tell you about noise here? Strange things will happen if you don’t listen to your elders, believe me.”

My stomach lurched. In my experience my great-granny doesn’t make idle threats. When Mum says that she’s never cooking us another meal because we just gobble our food and leave, we shake our fingers at her (in a more jokey kind of way than Nokokulu does) and say, “Idle threats!” It makes her mad.

But whatever kind of threat Nokokulu was making, it was a believable one. For me, anyway. Madillo stopped laughing too. Bul-Boo was trying to look as though she had suddenly come upon us entirely by accident and could not believe her bad luck.

“You,” Nokokulu said, pointing at her. “Boo! What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I’m doing nothing,” Bul-Boo said.

“Well, the storm has gone away and Mad Girl and Silly Boy aren’t going to be any use” – I could tell she had put capital letters in the names by the way she said them – “so you can help me build the fire. You other two, go and play.”

As if we were three years old.

“What if the storm comes back?” I asked.

“What if there’s a warthog who comes here to eat us all? What if there’s a giant snake curled up in the tree and it slithers down in the night? What if the rivers run up the hill and drown us all?” Nokokulu said.

She thinks she’s so clever. It’s not how ancient people should behave. And I wouldn’t mind about the warthog, as I don’t think there’s a single case in human history of a warthog eating people, but did she have to put the snake in there? Along with the word “slither”?