The Sleeping Baobab Tree (6 page)

Nokokulu has this bright yellow car that looks about as old as she is. Fred says it’s lucky it’s bright yellow because at least other drivers can see her coming and get off the road fast. She has a pile of cushions on the driver’s seat so she can see over the steering wheel, and on the dashboard she has a stuffed rat. A real one – she says it’s to make sure thieves don’t steal the car. Its mouth is wide open so you can see all of its small pointy teeth. Fred says she stuffed it herself after cursing it to death. He’s just relieved it isn’t a hamster.

Fred looked as if he was deciding whether to defend her or not. She is his great-grandmother, after all, and you are kind of obliged to defend your family, even when you don’t always feel like it – and even if they could very well be a homicidal maniac.

“Well, Dad says she’s not that bad,” he said at last. “She just drives very slowly. And she’s never had an accident, apart from that one man on his bicycle who got in her way. He was all right afterwards, just a few bruises. His bicycle was a bit mangled but Dad bought him a new one. And that was before she got the cushions, so she couldn’t see the road properly – or cyclists.”

“Well,” Madillo said, “I still don’t think Mum and Dad will let us go, and if Nokokulu doesn’t want us … we’ll just have to sneak into the car.”

“How?” I asked. “How does anyone sneak past Nokokulu? Or Mum for that matter?” I excluded Dad because we all know how to sneak past him.

“We’ll tell them we’re going for a sleepover at Fred’s and then just before you leave we’ll get into the boot,” Madillo said, as if she’d done this a hundred times before. “And we’ll be back in the afternoon anyway, so they won’t even know we’ve left.”

“I suppose
technically
we’ll be telling the truth,” I said, “because we will be staying at your house for the night. We just won’t tell them the other bit. And we will be back in the afternoon, won’t we, Fred?”

“We should be,” said Fred. “Ng’ombe Ilede is only about two hours’ drive away, just past Siavonga.”

“We’ll have to tell your mum and dad that we’ll be going back home before you leave,” I said quietly. “Otherwise they’ll wonder where we are. Will they be up to help you get ready in the morning?”

Fred shook his head mournfully. He does mournful better than anyone I know. Sometimes he imagines that his parents neglect him terribly. Which they don’t.

“OK, so we’ll say goodbye as if we’re going home early in the morning, then we’ll sneak into the car and you’ll have to close the boot before she sees,” Madillo said. “We’ll have to bring a knife or something in case she doesn’t open the boot when you get there. Then we can release ourselves to stop us suffocating or dying of overheating. I’d hate to die of overheating.”

When Madillo plans things she always takes into account every eventuality. I was waiting for the rest of the list. Sure enough…

“We’ll put water bottles into the boot and food supplies – chocolate probably, like the mountaineers. Or is that only so the St Bernards can find them?”

“Chocolate has nothing to do with dogs, Madillo,” I said. “In fact if you feed a dog chocolate it can die. St Bernards carry brandy to lost mountaineers to warm them up, they don’t sniff out chocolate bars. Plus we can scrap the knife. Nothing could suffocate in Nokokulu’s car – have you seen how many holes there are in the bodywork?”

“Anyway, we should probably also put pillows in the boot so we don’t bump our heads and get concussion,” Madillo said, ignoring me.

At this rate we were setting ourselves up for a few months in the boot of the car.

“Are you sure?” Fred said.

We both looked at him. Sometimes we forget that someone else is there, even when that person is the main subject of the conversation. Mum says it’s because we hear each other more easily than we hear anyone else.

“Are we sure about what?” we said in unison.

“About coming with me?”

I thought for a minute. If we went with him it would mean having to lie about where we were, and I hate doing that to Mum and Dad because they don’t do that to us.

Madillo and Fred were looking at me. Fred for his own reasons, which I don’t always want to think about, and Madillo because she was waiting for me to say, “Yes, we’re sure.”

There are things that are important in life, and one is that you should always look after your friends. Fred is more than our best friend, he is the one person we know almost as well as we know each other. We couldn’t let him go on his own, however many lies we would have to tell.

“Yes. We’re sure. We’ll do it,” I said. “If you promise it’s only a day trip and that when we get there you’ll let us out. We couldn’t let you go by yourself – that’d be awful.”

Fred actually blushed when I said that and then I felt funny. I was waiting for Madillo to say something, but she didn’t. Thank goodness.

But I am starting to think she’s right about Fred having a crush on me.

Sister Leonisa says that the “sickness of love” turns clever people into marshmallows, but that luckily she’s never been affected by it. It would be hard to think of Sister in love. I can’t imagine her looking at someone adoringly. Sister has only a few looks: a glare, a withering look, a pitying stare, an almost-kind look (that’s reserved for Fred the Favourite), a “prove that I’m wrong” look and an “end of conversation, raised eyebrows” look. None of those, apart from the almost-kind one, would go down too well with someone she was supposed to be in love with. And the almost-kind one is a bit strange because she twists her face to get to it, as if the kind muscles are not used to moving. Which I suppose they aren’t.

“Fred, you have to come in now,” Joseph called from the back door.

Madillo always used to think that Fred’s little brother, Joseph, was a hermaphrodite. But she doesn’t any more; she told me the other day that she only thought that because she believed that a hermaphrodite was the same as an amoeba, where one cell splits into two. She couldn’t believe he was Fred’s brother because they are so different, so she thought he had created himself. I did explain to her that if that was the case there would be two identical Josephs and at any moment they might split into more, then there would be hundreds of them before your very eyes. I explained how it’s called binary fission, but she said that didn’t sound as nice as hermaphrodite. Imagine if science was about what sounded nice!

When Fred didn’t answer, Joseph ran up to the hedge. “Mum says you have to come and wash the dishes because you’re better now, and the next-door twins have to go home.”

He didn’t look at us when he said this. He never does. Maybe he’s scared of us.

“OK,” Fred said, resigned. “So I’ll see you in the morning on the way to school and I’ll tell Mum you’re coming to stay over tomorrow night?”

“OK,” I said.

“We didn’t even discuss what will happen when Nokokulu discovers us,” Madillo said after Fred had gone. “That’s going to be terrible.”

“Let’s talk about that tomorrow,” I said.“And anyway, what can she do to us?”

I paused as the question left my lips. “On second thoughts, don’t answer that.”

The last thing I wanted was a list of the ways a witch can kill her victims. It would be a very
long
one.

When
Mum and Dad arrive back from work in the afternoons it isn’t always the best time to ask them anything, but today we had no option. Anyway it wasn’t asking them a big thing, we often go to sleep over at Fred’s.

They get really tired at work, Mum especially. Dad seems to be able to put things out of his mind but Mum can’t. I could see Mum had been crying when she came in this evening. I hate seeing that. If Madillo ever sees her crying she thinks it’s because they’re going to get divorced – but it’s not. It’s always work things. Mum told me once that if she’d known how much sadness there was going to be in medicine she might have become a beautician. At least then all her customers would have been happy when they left her. But I know she doesn’t think that all the time. Anyway she’s a bit clumsy so she’d smudge the faces of her customers if she was a beautician and they wouldn’t be too happy about that.

When she’s been crying it’s most often about children whose parents have died.

There are a million AIDS orphans in our country. One million. I don’t really like the way they are called AIDS orphans. You never hear about cancer orphans or heart-attack orphans or even malaria orphans. It makes them sound as though they are more than just orphans, as if that’s not bad enough on its own. Dad says it’s because people need to know how terrible this disease is. But how could anyone not know that?

It’s seeing those children that upsets Mum the most – when little babies are brought into the clinic by their older brothers and sisters who have to grow up very fast and become mini parents. I heard her speaking to Dad about it once, when I was supposed to be asleep. I suppose a lot of what I learn about Mum and Dad is when I’m supposed to be asleep. This time it was a pretty serious thing.

She said she wanted to adopt another child.

Another child? Just like that. As if we’re not enough for her. As if we don’t need to be asked.

Dad said that it would make no difference as there are millions of children all over the world who need a home, and we couldn’t adopt all of them. I didn’t listen to any more because once I’d got over the shock of it, all I could hear were the words “another child”. So, were we the first adopted children? It’s not that I’d have minded if we were, because then we’d have two family histories. (I like family histories, I’ve traced ours back to my great-great-great-grandmother.) But I wished they’d told us. Luckily I knew I was related to Madillo at least.

The next day, I asked Mum and she just laughed and put a mirror in front of me and said, “Who do you look like?”

I gave her the obvious answer: Madillo. But I don’t think that was what she was looking for.

“Yes, Bul-Boo, we all know that. But both of you look like half me and half Dad, so you can’t be adopted. Although we have been thinking about adopting a child. How would you feel about that?”

Mum often asks us how we’d feel about something but normally it’s after she’s already decided that’s what she’s going to do. She’s what Dad calls a benign dictator. She rules us with a smile on her face and mostly makes the right decisions.

“We’d feel OK, I think. I’ll ask Madillo. Maybe adopt someone the same age as Joseph so he has a friend? How does Dad feel about it?”

It’s always a bit harder for her to be the benign dictator with Dad. She has to use more persuasion on him.

“He’ll be fine,” she said, “but we haven’t decided.” Translated that meant Dad was not too sure about the whole thing.

I’d like to have an extra brother or sister, I think. Or both, especially if I knew that their parents had died and they were alone in this world. When I told Madillo about it she got a glazed look on her face and said, “That means we’d be their saviours.” Which was a bit extreme.

But that was quite a long time ago and we’ve heard nothing since then, so I suppose Mum’s still trying to persuade Dad.

Anyway, I knew the reason for her tears today, and it had nothing to do with orphans.

This problem of the disappeared patients was one that I knew I could do something about. I wasn’t blowing my own trumpet, as Dad would say, but I
was
the only person in this house with decent detecting skills. Seeing Mum upset just made me more certain that I had to follow the one slim lead I had to go on. We had no choice. We would have to go on this trip and study every move of Suspect Number 1. The one who shall be known as “N”.

I couldn’t help rushing my words a little when I told Mum and Dad that we were planning a sleepover at Fred’s on Friday. Even though it was technically the truth, I still felt bad.

“And Fred’s mum is OK with it?” Mum asked.

“She’s fine,” I said. “She doesn’t really notice us much.” Which is true.

Madillo, in the meantime, was just sitting at the kitchen table eating toast covered with something unidentifiable, as if she had nothing to do with any of us. She’s good at that, being the invisible, innocent, toast-eating twin. That way she never has to tell a lie. But I have told her it makes no difference because she is aiding and abetting me, which just makes her a silent guilty party.

“And the witch?” Mum said.

I probably forgot to mention that Mum also thinks that Nokokulu is a witch. Mum who is a doctor – who spent years studying science to become a doctor. She thinks our neighbour Fred’s great-granny is a witch. Sort of.

Dad is on my side in the Witch versus Science debate.

He didn’t say anything this time, just clutched his head as if he was in agony.

Mum looked embarrassed, like Madillo does when she’s said something ridiculous. I think sometimes she lets things like that out before thinking about them.

“I was only joking,” she added quickly.

She should have just kept quiet and let the whole thing pass with a mere head clutch.

“No you weren’t,” Dad said. “You actually think that here, on Twin Palms Road in twenty-first century Zambia, we live next door to a witch. Which part of our medical degree was taught under the heading Witches and Other Magical Things? I must have been asleep that day.”

“I just think there are some things that science can’t explain, that’s all. It’s not a sin,” Mum said, leaving the room. A good way to end an argument, I suppose, leaving the other person with no one to argue with any more.

Dad looked at Madillo still munching away. “This is all your fault, you know,” he said, grinning. “My wife, your dear mother, never thought anything like this till the day you came home from Fred’s and announced that we now live next door to a witch. It was the day Nokokulu came to live with them, do you remember?”

Madillo nodded.

If Madillo is involved in a less than truthful occasion she just nods or mumbles. I can tell immediately. All she wanted right then was for Dad to leave the room in case he went back to the subject of us going over to Fred’s. She wasn’t even defending her witch theory.