The Sleeping Baobab Tree (5 page)

“Chiti is coming with me for a little picnic on Saturday,” Nokokulu announced. If she ever, by mistake, calls me Fred, she certainly never does it in front of Mum. According to her it was all Mum’s fault that we got the names Fred and Joseph, and Dad was soft in the head to have allowed it. Joseph’s second name is Chola, but Nokokulu just calls him “boy”. (She calls me that sometimes as well.) None of his names suit him, she says. Imagine if we were all like her and called people whatever name we thought suited them? She’d be called a few things she wouldn’t like, I can tell you that.

“Did you ask Chiti?” Mum said.

“Ha! All this asking. He’s a small boy. He doesn’t get asked – he gets told.”

“You know, Nokokulu,” Mum said, almost whispering, “you shouldn’t be so bossy with the boys. If you were less bossy, maybe they’d like you a bit more.”

It was as if, after all these years, Mum still didn’t know who she was dealing with.

“Bossy? What kind of a word is that? We don’t have that word in ChiBemba, especially not for great-grandmothers talking to their great-grandchildren. Small children need to listen. If they don’t listen, they won’t learn. What is the use of me being on this earth for nearly one hundred years then not passing on what I have learnt to the ones that follow in my footsteps? Maybe where you come from things are different. Yes, they are of my blood, but this doesn’t mean I must spoil them. No, no, no. Not me. I’m different from you English.”

“We each have our own ways,” said Mum, in her giving-up voice.

“And our own ways are not always good. Look at my own precious girl: she thought she was too big to listen. Look what happened to her.”

Nokokulu was going on about my grandmother again. Although it’s funny to think of her as a grandmother when she was only sixteen when she died.

“I understand, Nokokulu.” Mum had not only given up but was now feeling sorry for her. “It’s very sad. You’re right.”

Right
, Mum? About what? About a woman who’s been dead for ever or about telling us what to do whether we like it or not?

Sometimes I despair of my mum.

“You have strong hands for the garden, Sarah,” said the witch, changing the subject very successfully. That was as close to a kind word as she was ever going to give my mother.

“Thank you,” said Mum.

“Maybe,” continued Nokokulu, never wanting to finish on a good note in case somebody might start thinking well of her, “maybe when you are older you will get sense and instead of planting useless bushes and flowers you will start growing vegetables.”

After
Sister had told us the story about Bukoko the Little Tick Child I looked up Ng’ombe Ilede. Sister was right about one thing: it is also called The Place of the Sleeping Cow or The Place of the Cow Who Lies Down, because of a baobab tree that fell over but carried on growing. In some ways it does look like a sleeping cow (no one has decided yet whether this is a normal cow or an elephant cow) but in other ways it looks like a strange human trying to do sit-ups.

I suppose Sister was also right about another thing: it is an ancient burial ground, so the pretend body of Bukoko the Little Tick Child
could
have been buried there, if she had ever existed. But I still think Sister made that part up for dramatic effect.

While I was looking it up, Madillo came in. Well, she didn’t just come in, she bounced in like a rubber ball.

“Fred just sent you a message,” she said, holding up my phone. Nokokulu is taking him, this Saturday, to Ng’ombe Ilede. Can you believe that? I sometimes wonder if she and Sister Leonisa are in cahoots, or maybe they exist on the same astral plane.”

She showed me the text, oblivious firstly to the fact that the phone is actually mine and she shouldn’t be reading my messages, and secondly to the fact that there is no such thing as an astral plane.

“Coincidence. That’s all. They happen all the time,” I said to her. “And he’s pretty lucky to be going to a place of such significant archaeological interest.” I had just read that on the Wikipedia page and it sounded pretty good. But Madillo didn’t seem too impressed.

“Coincidence? I don’t think so. On exactly the same day that Sister tells us that particular story, and Nokokulu hears us talking about her abducting people, she announces that she wants Fred to come with her on a little drive. To an ancient burial ground! That’s more than a coincidence, that’s creepy. Why would you take your great-grandson on a trip to visit graves? There’s something wrong with that.”

“People visit graves all over the world,” I argued. “It’s an interesting thing to see how old the people were who died, and when they died.” I was trying not to wonder about the coincidence.

Madillo looked at the computer screen. “And, you see: Ng’ombe Ilede. Right there. On the computer. How weird is that?”

“Not one bit weird. I looked it up, as I always do when Sister tells us a new story. Mainly to find out how much of it is true.”

Madillo shook her head. “No. If you add in the fact that Fred had one of his premonitions this morning, this is not looking good, Bul-Boo, not good at all.”

My phone beeped and Madillo looked at the message.

“Fred wants us to come to the hedge to talk about it,” she said. “Let’s go.”

When Madillo is a little bit scared about something she gets excited at the same time. Maybe both those things happen in the same part of the brain. Dad showed me these pictures in
New Scientist
once where they took scans of the brains of people eating chocolate. When they ate the first bits of chocolate the happiness part of the brain lit up on the scans. Which makes sense. But as they ate more and more, other parts lit up, the parts that were trying to tell them to stop. Which also makes sense. I suppose you can get sick of too much chocolate, although in our house we never get the opportunity to try that theory out.

I must remember to put into my black notebook this fact: The happiness part of Madillo’s brain lights up just a little bit when she’s scared.

When
we got down to the gap in the hedge between our houses Fred was waiting for us.

“Now do you believe me when I tell you about my premonitions?” he asked me.

I didn’t answer, mainly because I didn’t want to upset him by saying no.

“I don’t want to go with her on my own. We’re leaving on Saturday morning at eight o’clock and she’s planning to go for the whole day,” he said, looking worried. When Fred looks worried you feel really sorry for him. It’s something about the way he wrinkles up his forehead.

“Can’t you tell your mum and dad that?” Madillo asked.

“I did, but Dad said it would be interesting and that it’s always good to know where you come from, even though I don’t come from there.”

“Don’t your dad and Nokokulu come from the Northern Province, when Ng’ombe Ilede is in the Southern?” I said.

“Yes, but try telling Nokokulu that. She just rubs her hands together and tells me that her ancestors roamed all over the country. She says she wants me to become a proper member of this ‘great family’. Whatever that means.”

“A proper member? Does she mean traditionally or what?” Madillo said.

“It could mean anything, but I don’t want to be part of some kind of ceremony,” Fred added with a shudder.

I like the word “shudder”. It sounds like the thing it’s describing.

“Ceremony? Like a sacrifice?” Madillo said, jumping over every possible reasonable explanation straight to the worst one.

“Nokokulu is not about to sacrifice anything,” I said, “least of all her favourite great-grandson. Maybe she just wants to teach Fred some manners. She’s always going on about manners.”

“You’re forgetting the main thing, Bul-Boo,” Madillo said. “You always forget the main thing. She’s a witch. And witches sacrifice things to appease the gods. You name any country in the world and you’ll find human sacrifice. Look at the Germans, and the Tibetans and the Celts and the Aztecs and—”

“Do the Germans sacrifice people?” Fred asked, temporarily distracted from his own fate.

“Well, not so much today, but they did. Don’t you remember Sister Leonisa telling us about the Windeby Boy? He was German and the same age as you, Fred—”

“Fred wasn’t there for the Human Sacrifice lessons,” I interrupted her. “It was when you went with your mum to England, Fred, and missed two weeks of school. The Windeby Boy was one of the ones they found in a bog in Germany.”

“And he had a headband on and long blond hair. Not like yours, Fred,” Madillo added, to try to make up for telling Fred that the boy had been the same age as him.

“Madillo,” I said, before she could continue, “Nokokulu is
not
going to sacrifice Fred. That’s just ridiculous.” I was glad that Fred had missed those lessons. They had been very gruesome and he’d have felt even worse now if he’d sat through them.

“Well, what if she wants to experiment on him with her curses and spells? What if she decides to change him into a chameleon just because she can?” Madillo said.

“I’ve never seen her change a human into anything,” Fred said, shaking his head. “I know she’s a witch and everything, but she wouldn’t do that.”

At last one of them was seeing just a little sense.

“I don’t know if I should tell you this,” he continued, his expression changing, “but she was also talking about something she called the Man-Beast, some terrible creature with a bad memory. She was speaking almost as if we’re going there to hunt him down.”

Now I could see his worry turning into real fear.

“She’s mad,” I said. “Man-Beast? There’s no such thing.”

“She thinks he’s the one who took away my granny. She says he appears every forty years and now he’s come to Ng’ombe Ilede.”

“That’s it!” Madillo said, bowing her head in the same way she does to Nokokulu. “It’s him – the Man-Beast.
He’s
the one taking all Mum’s patients. He’s the one who has Aunt Kiki. I was wrong. It’s not Nokokulu; it’s him. The Man-Beast has returned and is rampaging about the land stealing people. Who knows who’ll be next?” She peered round the hedge as she spoke, as if to make sure he wasn’t standing there listening while he decided which one of us to take.

Way to go, Madillo. Why don’t you make things ten times as bad?

Madillo leant forward and grabbed hold of Fred’s hand. “We won’t abandon you, Fred. We won’t let the Man-Beast claim you as his next victim.”

“Stop it!” I said. “Stop it now! There’s no such thing. Nokokulu is the biggest liar I’ve ever met. She’s just trying to frighten you, Fred. And you, Madillo, think for a minute. Have you ever seen a Man-Beast, whatever on earth that might be?”

Madillo looked a little deflated but it wasn’t enough to stop her.

“Just because you haven’t seen something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” she said. “And, if you remember, Bukoko’s mother said Bukoko was killed by a
two-legged
hyena in exactly the same place.”

Fred nodded. “True,” he said. “Very true. And that explains how my granny disappeared.”

Suddenly everyone believed Sister Leonisa’s story because it suited their argument, even Fred, in spite of the fact that he hadn’t been there to hear it!

“You’re both forgetting the main point,” I said. “This is real life. Aunt Kiki and seven other people, who all go to Mum’s clinic, have disappeared. They can’t have been eaten by a monster otherwise the two who have already died would have had bite marks on them. And, if you remember, Bukoko’s mother made up the story about the two-legged hyena because she was embarrassed.
And
” – it had to be said – “we have yet to eliminate your great-granny from our enquiries, Fred.”

I didn’t mention that she was only on the list in pencil and as an initial. I just wanted to get their attention.

“Yes, of course,” said Madillo, pleased I was even considering Nokokulu as a suspect.

Fred was silent. He looked down at the ground, which is what he does when he doesn’t want to answer a question. I’ve never understood that, as if the ground will somehow save him.

“Two died?” he said finally, in a small voice. “I didn’t know that. I saw Aunt Kiki a few weeks ago. They would have told me if something had happened to her.”

I was almost as bad as Madillo, blurting out hurtful things without thinking.

“Sorry, Fred, I forgot we hadn’t told you everything. We don’t have a lot of facts, but I overheard Mum telling Dad that your Aunt Kiki and seven others who used to come to the clinic have all disappeared. Perhaps,” I said, “Nokokulu hasn’t been told yet. Maybe she didn’t hear the news?”

“Oh, she heard. Definitely. 20/20, you know,” said Fred.

“That’s it then,” said Madillo. “She probably has them all locked away somewhere. She’s probably sacrificing them to the ancestors one by one in order to get her daughter back, the one she’s always talking about.”

“Including her granddaughter Kiki?” I said, trying to sound rational. “Come on now. What do you think, Fred?”

“I don’t know,” said Fred. “I asked her about Aunt Kiki. I asked when she was coming to visit.”

Fred is a master of letting information out in dribs and drabs.

“And?” I said, trying not to sound impatient.

“She shouted at me and then stomped out of the room. She didn’t answer my question, she just looked really, really angry.”

I looked at Madillo. She raised her eyebrows. “What did I tell you?” was all she said.

“Do you want us to come with you to Ng’ombe Ilede?” I asked Fred, a part of me hoping that he’d say no.

“Yes,” he said gratefully. “Yes, yes, yes.”

My hope faded as quickly as it had arrived. But he said, “Nokokulu specifically said you can’t come.”

“Both of us?” Madillo asked.

Fred nodded.

I carried on regardless. “We’ll have to persuade Mum and Dad – they’ve warned us never to get into the car with her. Nothing to do with her being a murderous witch: Dad says she’s just not to be trusted on the road.”