The Sleeping Baobab Tree (17 page)

But then Mum decided to change the subject.

“Bul-Boo, sweetheart,” she said, “I’ve got something to tell you. You remember when you asked me about Ratbag the other day? You must have had some kind of sixth sense.”

Madillo looked even more crestfallen. She’s always the one trying for a sixth sense. I don’t even want one.

“Not a sixth sense, Mum,” I said. “Scientific research.”

“Whatever it was, you have no idea how important that one little question was. Ratsberg and his partner, both of whom call themselves scientists, have their own theories about AIDS. Well, one theory. They say it doesn’t exist. People think all sorts of funny things about this illness and mostly that’s OK. But not this. This can lead to murder. Years ago, in South Africa, these two men misinformed the government about this illness. They persuaded certain people they were right, that there was no such thing as HIV or AIDS. Then the government misinformed the people, and as a result no one got proper medicine when they were ill. The disease spread like wildfire. But that’s all in the past. South Africa has a new president and things have changed. Instead” – she looked at me and Madillo – “they moved to Zambia. These
hyenas
in their white coats came here to spread their lies and make money promising people health. But you, Bul-Boo, with that one question, helped us to stop that.”

I wanted to tell her I already knew that, but Mum was determined not to let me get a word in edgeways.

“So,” she continued, “I looked them up, and I found the place and went there yesterday. You don’t need to know the details, but let me tell you that I found Fred’s Aunt Kiki and seven other people there. All of them my patients. They had gone downhill very badly, and had all become very thin. Ratbag had them staying there, pumping them full of vitamins, hypnotizing them, getting them to do exercise. And he had them off all their prescribed medicines. He had their heads filled with the idea that he was going to cure them.”

“Mum, I also looked it up…” I interrupted.

She waved her hands to let me know that she hadn’t finished speaking. When she has something to say it’s hard to stop her.

“Can you believe that he had made them all sign ‘legal’ documents threatening to take them off the
wonderful
holistic cure programme if they came to tell me or their families where they were? I tore up the contracts in front of him.
Professor Ratbag
,” she said with vehemence, “Professor Nothing. He’s a murderer, plain and simple.”

It was hard to take all of this in. It was as I’d thought, sort of, but so much worse. All I could do was nod. I was just relieved that her patients were now safe. Aunt Kiki was back and things were going to be all right.

Madillo turned and whispered in my ear, “And it was you who started it, Bul-Boo.” Which was true, but it was nice to hear it from her.

“As of yesterday they’re all back on medication,” Mum said. “All but two,” she corrected herself quietly, looking down at her own shoes for a moment.

Like us, Mum couldn’t bear to think about Sonkwe and Thandiwe being dead.

“Will they make it? Will Aunt Kiki?” I asked her.

“They will,” Mum said. “I know they will.”

Mum never says things she doesn’t believe, so that was a relief.

Mum turned towards Dad. “We were just discussing it, your dad and I. I thought we were going to have to take legal action to get the clinic closed, but Dad has spoken to his cousin Sipho. You remember Sipho, girls? The Minister of Transport?”

We nodded.

“Well, he’s going to fast-track their expulsion from the country. No one wants them here. They’ll be sent packing with their shiny white teeth and bags of tricks.”

“The police have already been in contact with Ratsberg advising him of this,” Dad added, “and my bet would be that he and Dr Wrath are in the airport as we speak, demanding seats on the next flight out of here.”

Mum turned back to us. “So. That’s that. Sorry, Bul-Boo, you were saying you’d also looked it up?”

“I did. I found their website.”

She grinned. “I was going to say I’d leave it to you next time but hopefully there never will be a next time.” She got up and came to give us both a big hug. “I’m still cross though,” she whispered. “No more lies, right?”

We both nodded, which was a little difficult as she was holding us so tightly.

“And,” Dad added, “given that you were being driven by Nokokulu I’m mightily relieved you’re back in one piece.” He laughed. “All the way from here to Ng’ombe Ilede – that’s a lot of driving for one tiny witch.”

I decided that now would not be a good time to tell them about crashing into the gates at Munda Wanga gardens and just hoped Madillo felt the same. I looked sideways at her. She was smiling to herself.

“You called her a witch, Dad!” she said suddenly.

He winked at her. “A slip of the tongue.”

That seemed like a good time to leave, while they were both in such a good mood.

“We’ll go over to Fred’s to tell him what’s happened,” I said to them.

“Aunt Kiki has probably told them already,” Mum said. “But go across. You can take this to Nokokulu to thank her for bringing you back safely.” She handed me a beautiful orange and green
chitenge
cloth. “She can add it to her collection.”

Given the choice I might have avoided talking to Nokokulu, but this gave us no option. I suspect that was Mum’s plan.

No one
seemed to want to explain anything to me. As if I was just a boy with no brains in my head. And on top of that I had hardly got through the door when Dad started bellowing at me about the twins and their parents, and about me giving Nokokulu a headache. If I gave her a headache, I don’t know why she didn’t just cast a spell and make it go away again. Surely that would be a pretty simple spell.

After he’d finished telling me off he sent me into the kitchen to join Aunt Kiki and Nokokulu, who were eating breakfast. I didn’t feel like eating, mainly because Nokokulu was sitting there with the whole pot of meat in front of her and a giant pile of
nshima
next to it. Great lumps of it were disappearing into her mouth one after the other. I don’t know how they all fitted into her small body. Dad walked past the door and when he looked in he roared with laughter. “It’s like watching a snake swallowing rats, isn’t it, boy?” Then he went off without waiting for my reply.

At that moment Bul-Boo and Madillo arrived.

“Ha!” Nokokulu said, in between mouthfuls. “
Mpundu
!
Come, come inside. You told your parents where you were?”

They just stood there nodding.

“Or did
they
tell
you
where you were?” she said, grinning in that way she does when she thinks she’s being especially clever.

They nodded again, staring at her as she went back to devouring her food.

Nokokulu paused in her eating for a moment and looked at Aunt Kiki, who was sitting on the couch, exhausted. “Kiki, my child, do you see these three children in front of me, looking at me like they never saw a hungry person eating before?”

Aunt Kiki said, “Yes, Granny,” and gave me a wink.

“Have you ever seen the like before? Answer me that. Three people standing there looking like sheep awaiting slaughter.”

Aunt Kiki just laughed.

Nokokulu wiped her fingers and looked at all of us. At Aunt Kiki sitting on the couch, the twins standing in the doorway looking as though they were getting ready to run, and at me sitting right opposite her at the table.

“I’m going to tell you all something,” she said. “I am going to say it to you once and then I never want you to talk to anyone about it again. Especially not to me.”

I shook my head. “Never, Nokokulu. We’ll never speak of it again.”

She ignored me and carried on. “I had a child once – Maluba. She was my only daughter. She is still my only child. I know that wherever she is, she still lives in the half-and-half life between now and for ever. She was mother to you, Kiki, and mother to your father, Chiti.”

The room had suddenly gone very quiet.

“She was named Maluba for the flower. It was because of her that my grandson married this woman from England who only cares about flowers. Everywhere as far as you can look in her garden there are flowers.”

Nokokulu nodded outside to Mum who was trimming a bougainvillea on the front porch.

“You, Chiti boy, you are part of this story. You must learn not to be nosy. If you ask me something, I will tell you. Don’t go snooping around in my suitcase like that ever again. You want to know what was inside it? I’ll tell you now,” she said, and a big fat tear rolled down her cheek. “It was my Maluba’s dress. The dress she wore when she was sixteen – a pretty blue dress with small yellow flowers on it. That’s all that was in there. I wanted her with me when I went to seek the Man-Beast.”

She looked at me. “Because it was he who took my child. Forty years ago, when your Aunt Kiki and her noisy twin brother were only small babies. Forty years ago, he took her. I had to stop him from doing it again. I had to stop him.”

No one said anything.

She wiped the tear away from her cheek. “And now he has been stopped. For ever.”

She shook her head. “You can go in a minute, but before you do, let me tell you, Kiki, while you sit there staring at an old woman trying to get a little morsel of food inside her – let me tell you that these three children aren’t all bad. These girls were loyal to Chiti and they came with him and me to help rescue you. They will always be welcome in my house.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Kiki, giving me a small smile.

I didn’t know what to say. It was almost easier to deal with nasty Nokokulu, so I just sat there. I watched as Madillo hesitated for a moment and then went over to Nokokulu and put her arms around her neck saying, “And you, Great-grandmother Witch, you are welcome in my house any day too.”

Nokokulu coughed loudly then said, “Good child, good child,” before shoving in another mouthful.

“And this is for you,” Bul-Boo added, handing over the
chitenge
she’d been holding. “From Mum, to say thank you for bringing us home safely.”

“Ha!” said Nokokulu, which I suppose could be interpreted as a thank you. “Now, off you go, children. Go and play those silly computer games that shrivel up your brains.” But there was definitely a glimmer of a smile in her eyes as she said it.

As we all headed off, she called me back, saying to the twins, “You,
mpundu
, you go upstairs. I need to tell Chiti one more thing.”

When they had gone she beckoned me to her and whispered, “The little one, Mad Girl, she will not remember anything that happened. She has been given the Sleep of Forgetting. I don’t want you telling her anything. You hear me? Nothing.”

She then shooed me out of the kitchen.

I ran upstairs to join the twins and when I got into the room I shut the door carefully behind me.

“What did she want?” Bul-Boo asked.

“Just to tell me that I’m still her favourite great-grandson,” I said.

“She could have said that in front of us. Everyone knows that,” Madillo said. “What did she really say?”

“Exactly that. ‘Fred, you’re my favourite great-grandson.’ ”

I wondered how long I would have to keep this up.

“So, she called you Fred?” Bul-Boo asked suspiciously.

“When she’s in a good mood she does.” OK, time to change the subject now. “But that doesn’t matter anyway. Did you hear what she said about my grandmother, that she was taken by the Man-Beast? As if that wasn’t bad enough, when she thought the Man-Beast was returning, forty years later, she took us with her to find him, endangering our lives and our souls.”

“Well, we’re all right now,” Madillo said. “So nothing was really endangered, and I liked being there. Plus she brought great food.”

Bul-Boo and I looked at her. This wasn’t like Madillo at all. Surely she’d want to talk about the Man-Beast.

“Do you remember anything about what happened when you went to cover up the hyena footprints?” Bul-Boo asked, before I could stop her.

A grin appeared on Madillo’s face. “The only reason I went to wipe them away was so I could leave the two of you alone for a bit…”

For that she got a sharp whack across the arm from Bul-Boo.

I didn’t know where to look.

“OK, OK, that wasn’t really the reason,” Madillo said, laughing. “I went to wipe the paw prints away and for some reason I felt really, really tired, so I lay down just for a bit and must have fallen asleep.”

She frowned. “I did fall asleep, now I remember: I had weird dreams about the two-legged hyena. It must have been because we’d been talking about it. There was someone else who came into the dream too. A really tall man who looked like one of those beautiful carvings. You know, the ones that are just skinny the whole way up and down and have beads on their necks and legs and everywhere?”

We both nodded.

It was true what Nokokulu had said – Madillo really didn’t know that this had actually happened.

“The man in my dream looked like that. Anyway, then I woke up back in the car.” She looked surprised at this, as if it had only just occurred to her how odd this was. “Who put me in there?” She wrinkled her nose. “I hope you didn’t carry me, Fred?”

I couldn’t see why that thought would cause anyone to wrinkle their nose up.

“No,” Bul-Boo said. “It was a man who looked like that, like the man you’re describing. Somehow Nokokulu knows him. She went out to look for you because we couldn’t find you, and when she came back he was with her, carrying you.”

Madillo stared at us. “Stop it, Bul-Boo! How could a man who appeared in my dreams pick me up without me waking?”

I didn’t know how to make Bul-Boo stop talking so I went behind Madillo’s back and tried to signal to her to keep quiet. The only problem was that Madillo saw my reflection in the window and turned round.

“What’s the matter with the two of you?” she shouted, sounding on the verge of tears. “Just tell me! What’s going on?”