The Sleeping Baobab Tree (3 page)

“Email me the ten names tomorrow,” Dad said. “I’ll go through them myself. We’ll get to the bottom of it. It’ll be all right, you’ll see.”

“No, Sean, it won’t. It really won’t be all right.”

“Wait,” Dad said suddenly. “Did you say these were your first patients? Kiki was one of your first patients.”

“Yes,” Mum replied, so quietly I could hardly hear her. “Kiki had been coming into the clinic, you know that. She’d been helping me there. She wouldn’t stop coming without telling me.”

I crept away then.

When I got back into bed my head was reeling from what I’d just heard. Aunt Kiki disappeared? Why hadn’t Fred told us? Perhaps he didn’t know. I wrote in my black notebook: Aunt Kiki and nine other patients disappeared. Two of them dead. I didn’t know what else to write, so I just lay back thinking.

Madillo never lets me do that for long. “Hey, Bul-Boo, what are you doing just lying there?” she said.

“Thinking.”

Bad answer. I should have known better.

“About what?”

“Things.”

“Stop being irritating, Bul-Boo, just tell me. I won’t stop asking. You know that.”

I did know that.

“Ten of Mum’s patients have disappeared,” I explained. “She’s really upset about it. There must be something odd going on, because they’re the very first patients who started with her at the clinic – and two of them are dead. Fred’s Aunt Kiki is one of the ones who’s missing. They just stopped coming to the clinic and now even their families don’t know where they are.”

Madillo sat up. “Disappeared? Into thin air? That’s terrible. I bet it’s a wizard. A wizard who has been watching the clinic, looking for victims to experiment on.”

“Oh, Madillo,” I said, already regretting telling her. “Please.”

“We’ll have to do something,” she said, ignoring me. “He’s probably lining up his next victims, they could be anyone.” She paused for a moment, suddenly realizing what I’d said. “Did you say Aunt Kiki?”

“Yes.”

“Oh no, poor Fred. We have to find her quickly, before…”

“Before nothing,” I said firmly. “There is no wizard. All we need to do is apply logic to this situation.” I had clearly forgotten who I was talking to.

I turned on the laptop and shut the bedroom door. We have a stuffed sausage dog that we sometimes put across the bottom of the door to hide the light in case anyone checks, but I knew we wouldn’t need it tonight. Mum had other things on her mind.

I opened Gmail.

I knew Mum would email that list of names to Dad straight away. She would already have them in her head and wouldn’t need to wait until she was back in the office. I also knew that Dad wouldn’t look at them tonight, because he always works on the theory that if he seems calm it will make Mum calm as well. (He’s wrong about that, because she always knows when he’s pretending to be calm.) Dad uses the same password for everything and I happen to know what it is, so I went into his account and, sure enough, there was the email from Mum. I wrote down the list in my notebook and remembered to mark the email “unread” so he wouldn’t know I’d been in there. Easy.

Before going offline, I Googled each of the ten names. All that came up were a few Facebook accounts. Sonkwe Banda, who was now dead, was still up there. Madillo, looking over my shoulder, said, “Who’s he? He’s gorgeous.” It was true. He had a beautiful smile. Not the smile of a person who you could imagine being dead. When I told Madillo who he was she went back to bed and covered her head with her sheet.

Having got nowhere with the names, I had to think of something else I could search for to get the investigation started. Nobody else was going to take a sensible approach to this. Certainly not Madillo.

I typed in “abductees Lusaka”. Only articles about aliens and Somali pirates came up. So I tried “missing persons Zambia” and then “AIDS survivors Lusaka”. Dad’s agency and Mum’s clinic came up. Others too. Then something on the government’s AIDS programme. Plus lots of statistics on all the people in the world who are dying of the disease. And some good stuff on all the people who are actually alive and well with the disease.

But nothing that would help me.

Then, right at the very end of the second page of results there was a link that said:
Professor Ratsberg and Doctor Wrath promise hope.
I went to the site and saw two shiny smiling men in white coats welcoming me to what they called their Holistic Healing Hope site. They looked American, anyway: in most pictures of Americans, they’re smiling with their mouths wide open so you can see all their big white teeth. But maybe that’s just in the ads; they’re probably not all like that. There must be a few who have crooked teeth. Their tagline said,
Bringing hope and holistic healing to New York and the world
.

Dad has a thing about the word “holistic”. He says it’s used by people who don’t know what else to say, and that when you add the word “holistic” to the word “healing” it is pure gobbledygook. Things like this irritate him. Mum says the word just means that when someone’s sick you have to think about the whole body, not just one little bit of it. But Dad says that’s what medicine does anyway, so why do people have to put on such pious faces when they say the word. He has a point there.

Anyway, I was getting tired, so I saved Professor Ratsberg and Dr Wrath to my favourites and turned off the computer.

It was hard to sleep that night. All I could think of was how Sonkwe would never be able to smile again, and how we would have to think of a way to tell Fred that his Aunt Kiki had disappeared.

A
Fred-less school day is always more boring than a Fred-full one, even though it was only one day. It’s probably because of his jokes, even the really stupid ones.

At school it’s mainly me and Madillo, Fred and, most of the time, Winifred. Sometimes she spends time with other people, but the rest of us never do. Mum says it’s bad for us, because if Fred or Winifred left the school, then what would happen? But they won’t, so I’m not worried about that – and we are sort of friends with the others in our class, so I think it’s all right.

Madillo said to me on Sunday that she thinks Fred has a crush on me. She had a Madillo face on when she told me, a sort of half embarrassed, half laughing face. Then she yawned, trying to pretend that she was really just bored of the whole thing.

I don’t know if that’s true, maybe it is, but it’s weird to think about. It’s also funny, because sometimes Fred can’t tell the difference between us, so he must get a bit muddled if he has a crush only on me.

Madillo said that if he does
like
like me and if we start going out then we’re not allowed to break up, ever. She said if we did then none of us could be friends any more, because Fred and I would hate each other and it would be all my fault that she’d lost her best friend. I don’t think I could ever hate Fred and I have no intention of going out with anyone, so I told her not to worry.

We had decided to go and see him on the way home to tell him about Aunt Kiki. He only lives next door to us, on Twin Palms Road, so it was hardly out of our way.

“Fred will be very upset by the news about Aunt Kiki, so we need to be careful how we say it,” I warned Madillo.

“How do you say something like that carefully?” Madillo said.
“Don’t worry, Fred, but we think your aunt has been cursed by a wizard?”

“The way we say it carefully is that I say it, not you,” I said firmly.

Madillo went quiet for a while after that and I thought perhaps it was me who had silenced her. But in fact when I looked at her it was just that she had picked up a
tsongololo
and was stroking it. As if a creature with a hundred legs and a hard shiny body actually likes being stroked a few feet above its usual habitat.

Before we reached his gate Madillo warned me that Fred had pretended to be sick this morning so we should look really worried about him when we arrived. He had texted Madillo to tell her that his mum didn’t believe him, so we had to have our sad faces ready.

It would be quite hard to tell what his mum believes or doesn’t believe, because she says so little. The only time I really hear her talking is when she speaks to her plants. Perhaps she doesn’t have much left to say to humans.

Today she spoke to us because she had to.

“You’re looking for Fred?”

As if we would ever be looking for anyone else. Like Joseph, Fred’s strange little brother, or Nokokulu, his great-granny, who, according to Fred, is the most powerful witch in the whole of Zambia. Or his dad, who laughs so loudly it makes people and things jump.

“Yes, Mrs Mwamba,” I said politely. I knew she wouldn’t want a long conversation with me, so I kept my reply short.

“Fred’s in bed,” she told us, waving her hand up the stairs and turning to go outside. Fred says the only time she spends inside is when there is thunder and lightning or when she has to go to bed. Most of the time they even eat outside on a table his dad built in their courtyard. She’s very scared of lightning because she didn’t grow up here, she came from England and even though they have storms there they’re not like here.

When we got upstairs to his bedroom Fred was lying absolutely still with his pillow over his head.

“If you didn’t know I was here, would you be able to see me?” he said from under the pillow.

“Of course we would,” I said. “There’s a very long Fred shape under the sheet.”

He sat up. “That’s a pity. I was practising collapsing my skeleton. You know, like mice do. When I get it right I might even be able to slip under locked doors or between cracks in the floorboards. Then it will be my second gift.”

He frowned as he said that, as if he’d suddenly remembered why he was in bed in the first place.

“I don’t think it would be particularly fair if you ended up with two gifts and I still had none,” Madillo said. “And anyway, if you collapse your skeleton what are you going to do with your head?”

It’s often like this – the two of them talking about something that doesn’t even exist as if it does. I decided to intervene.

“If you were going to collapse your skeleton enough to be able to slip under doors, you’d have to be rolled over by a steamroller a few times, back and forwards, so everything was squashed. Then you wouldn’t be slipping under anything. You’d just be flat and dead.”

“Oh, I almost forgot,” said Madillo, on cue and about as carefully as an elephant in a vegetable garden. “We have news. We think Aunt Kiki has been abducted. Or worse. Most probably by a wizard.”

Fred’s face fell. We all knew how Aunt Kiki got very sick a few years ago. She had AIDS but she never told anyone, and because she doesn’t live in Lusaka, her brother (Fred’s dad) didn’t notice her getting thinner and thinner. Mum said that Aunt Kiki didn’t tell anyone because sometimes people are embarrassed and they think other people will look at them strangely.

That’s just horrible. If a person is sick, how could you even think of looking at them strangely? It’s just a disease, and now, because of all the medicine, people can live almost for ever with it if they get treated. Like they can with asthma or diabetes. No one looks strangely at someone with asthma.

Once Fred’s dad discovered how sick his sister was, he persuaded her to go to the clinic Mum works at. It only took a little while on the medication for her to start putting on weight and looking like herself again. Mum says she’s a real star, because now she’s better she helps in the clinic, telling the other patients why they shouldn’t feel shy.

I’d thought that from then on she was going to be just fine.

Until last night.

Now, too late, Madillo remembered we were supposed to be tactful. She thought she’d pretend she hadn’t said anything, so she returned to the skeleton-collapsing conversation as if she had been in it all along.

“Well, as Sister Leonisa says, anything is possible, so why not collapsing your skeleton? You just have to want it enough and it’ll happen.”

Fred just stared at her. “Aunt Kiki has disappeared?” he said very quietly. “She’s been abducted?”

Before Madillo could answer, I jumped in. “I heard Mum saying that some of her patients have stopped coming to the clinic and Aunt Kiki is one of them. Has she said anything about it?”

He screwed his face up. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for a while. Maybe she’s gone on holiday somewhere.”

Poor Fred, he looked so sad.

“So,” Madillo interrupted, “has anything bad happened yet? You know, with your doom thing?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Apart from this news, no. But it’s still early. And mum is sending Nokokulu up to give me one of her potions,” he added. “My own mum! She wouldn’t drink one herself, so I don’t see how she can let Nokokulu force one on me. I bet it’s what killed Hamster.”

I think he was happy the subject had been changed. He got off the bed and went down on his hands and knees to pull something out from under the bed. He held it up.

It was a poster with big black letters at the top saying: W
ANTED
– B
UT
N
OT
B
Y
M
E
. Just under that was a photograph of Nokokulu, and Fred had stuck a picture of a dead hamster on her head. Madillo started roaring with laughter and so did I. But Fred didn’t seem to find it funny.

“She killed Hamster – that’s why I made this. She cursed him. She told me that she’d never liked him because his eyes were too close together and that meant he couldn’t be trusted. I don’t understand what she was talking about. He had eyes on each side of his head – if they’d been any further apart, they’d have ended up on his ears. I’d like to see her standing up in court and saying,
‘
I killed him because he was not to be trusted.’
As if that’s any kind of defence.”

“I’ve never heard of a dishonest hamster,” Madillo agreed, “or any kind of dishonest animal in fact. Except a human.”

“You don’t have proof she killed him, Fred,” I said. “I thought he drowned?”

The real reason all Fred’s hamsters die is that he tries to teach them to swim. I have told him they’re not aquatic but he doesn’t listen. I hope his new goldfish survive a little longer.