The Sleeping Baobab Tree (7 page)

Dad shook his head. “So what are you going to do at Fred’s?”

This time she couldn’t keep silent as it was a direct question.

“Nothing much. Usual stuff,” she replied.

Dad is very easily satisfied by answers that aren’t answers, so he just said, “Oh,” and left the room. Probably to hunt down Mum so he could carry on the argument.

Mum always tells him that he should listen to us with more than half an ear, which is an expression I still cannot quite picture. But in this case she was right.

If it had been Mum asking the question she would have wanted to know what “nothing much” meant and what kind of “usual stuff”. But, luckily for us, not only was she embarrassed by her witch comment, but her mind was also on other things. Sad things.

On
the way to school today we stopped to wait for Fred at his gate and Nokokulu was in the garden. She didn’t say anything, just waved at us with a maniacal grin on her face. I first discovered the word “maniacal” when I was trying to describe Sister Leonisa and Dad suggested it. I suppose it’s not really fair but it does describe Sister better than any other word does.

Madillo grabbed my arm. “She knows. She knows what we’re planning – you can see it.”

“She always looks like that,” I said. “How could she possibly know?”

“She has ways and means,” Madillo said quietly, still holding onto my arm.

At that point Nokokulu said, “Ha!”

Just that, nothing more. Madillo may well have been right. Nokokulu’s voice had a triumphant sound to it.

Fred came running down the driveway, his shoes in one hand and his lunch in the other. He is always late.

“Sorry, sorry, I’m ready now,” he said as he waved goodbye to Nokokulu with the hand holding the shoes.

We started walking, and Madillo said, “Fred, I think she knows our plan.”

“No, she doesn’t,” he said confidently. “If she did she would have said something. She’s no good at keeping her mouth shut, you know that. Do you think she would have stayed silent when she saw you if she knew the plan? Never.”

“But if she does discover it, then what?”

Fred paused. “Then I’m doomed. Totally, infinitely, inextricably and horrendously doomed.”

Fred likes long words. He says they’re his indelible trademark. (See what I mean?) I think that of the three of us he is probably the most dramatic. Nothing is ever just ordinary with Fred – it’s always either the very, very best or the very, very worst.

“That would be your second doom prophecy day in a row,” Madillo said, with a suitably stricken face.

“No, that can only happen once the doom of the first one has been fulfilled. That’s how it works. Doom prophecy – doom fulfilment,” Fred said.

The King and Queen of Exaggeration, that’s who they are.

As an example. If there was a green mamba in the mango tree in our back garden, I would say, “There’s a green mamba in the garden, we need to find Ifwafwa, the snake man, to take it away.”

Madillo would say, “You will never believe what just happened. The biggest green mamba ever seen in this road, probably in this city, is in the mango tree out the back. No one knows how it came to be here, but it’s very strange that it chose our back garden and our mango tree. We’ll have to see whether we can track down Ifwafwa to help us solve the mystery.”

And Fred would say, “A cataclysmic event has just taken place. We are all lucky to have survived it. An evil spirit, clothed in the sinuous body of a green mamba, has taken up residence in the twins’ mango tree. If Ifwafwa is still alive we will summon him. If he isn’t, we are all condemned to a miserable and slow death.”

Yes. I am surrounded by them.

Madillo looked at Fred. “Well, if she doesn’t know we’ll just have to make sure it carries on that way, won’t we?”

I was starting to get a small niggle of regret in the back of my mind about this plan. Here we were, about to smuggle ourselves into the boot of an ancient yellow car being driven by an even older, slightly mad person who had, let’s not forget, recently become a kidnapping and murder suspect. Not to mention the rumour of a Man-Beast on the loose.

Mum and Dad would have no idea at all where we were, and I would be losing a full day in my investigation (which in my black notebook I was now calling An Enquiry into Unusual Disappearances).

Mum once took us to watch this movie called
127 Hours
about a guy who got trapped in a canyon for 127 hours and had to cut his own arm off to escape. The main point of the movie, as far as I could see, was that you should always tell people where you’re going so that if you disappear they know where to look for you. This guy didn’t tell anyone, and every hour that passed while he was helplessly trapped by this rock he regretted it.

I didn’t want to end up with a movie being made about us called
The Mystery of the Disappearing Twins.
Imagine if Mum and Dad had to appear on ZTV crying and saying, “They never told us where they were going. All they said was that they were sleeping over at Fred’s house next door. Please bring our daughters back safely.”

Maybe the newspapers would accuse them of being careless parents, which would be awful. And even more awful would be the fact that we would have just disappeared off the face of the earth, two lying ungrateful children.

On the plus side, Dad gave us mini smart phones for our last birthday, despite Mum objecting to it, because they have GPS in them and he said it meant we could always be found. I’m not sure if that works when the battery is flat though, and Madillo’s is always flat. I’ll just have to make sure mine is charged.

We walked into the classroom and Sister’s face twisted itself into the almost-kind look. “Ah, Fred, you’re back. Are you better?”

He nodded. He’s not that delighted about being Sister’s favourite, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

On Sister’s desk there was a pile of books and pictures about Egypt. I love it when we do Egypt, but that’s normally in History. Sister had never done it with us in Religious Studies before.

“Sit down, sit down,” she said. “Wait quietly for the others, then we’ll begin. We’re going back to Ng’ombe Ilede today.”

I saw Madillo looking sideways at Fred. He went a little pale I think.

As soon as everyone else was in, Sister started. She wrote
A R C H A E O L O G I S T S
in big uneven letters on the blackboard, and next to them she drew a skull and crossbones. Like this:

“So,” she said. “Archaeologists. The scourge of the living and the dead. Men and their shovels, digging up people and things that have no wish whatsoever to be dug up. If I ever hear of one of you becoming an archaeologist I will tell the world that I had nothing to do with it.”

She stood there looking accusingly at each of us in turn. If any of us did happen to become an archaeologist, I can’t think that the first question we’d be asked would be “Did Sister Leonisa put you up to this?”

In my mind I was ticking the new column in the little red book:
STORIES THAT HAVE DEATH IN THEM.

“There they are, the thousand-year-old people, sleeping away peacefully in their graves, and what happens? A nosy little man comes knocking on their coffin walls, ‘Let me in, let me in, I want to take you to pieces and inspect your bones.’

“But, what you need to remember is that these nosy archaeologists have the most dangerous job in the world. Why? Because, naturally enough, the thousand-year-old people don’t want to be disturbed, so they breathe their Dead Breath all over the prying men, and one by one they all die in horrible deathly ways. Which serves them right.”

I do sometimes wonder whether Sister just dresses up as a nun. I don’t think nuns are supposed to say things like “serves them right” when people die. And since when has a death been anything other than deathly?

“Does every archaeologist in the whole world die like that?” Fred asked. He’s allowed to ask and answer questions to his heart’s content.

“Yes, Fred, every last miserable one of them. So, for your own good, don’t even think of that as a job,” Sister said.

“In Egypt,” she continued, “which is the favourite hunting ground of the archaeologists, this has a name: the Curse of the Pharaohs. Anyone looking for scientific proof” – she didn’t even need to look at me – “can find it there. Off they went, a merry band of prying men, and they dug up the tomb of a boy king Tutankhamun. One of them, Howard Carter, walked into the tomb, and the minute he did so his pet canary, who had stayed at home, was killed by a cobra. Instant yellow-bird death.”

I wondered if she thought the canary deserved it too.

“That exact minute, boys and girls, that he dared enter the tomb of the famous Tutankhamun. Now,” she picked up one of her pictures, “tell me what you see.”

She held up a picture of a pharaoh with a big black arrow pointing to a golden cobra on his crown. Just in case there was any doubt she’d written
Golden Cobra
next to the arrow. I sometimes wonder what she thinks of us.

“An arrow pointing to a golden cobra,” Madillo said, trying to keep her laughter in.

“Never mind about arrows. Yes, the golden cobra, who was warning the archaeologists not to enter the tomb. But did they listen? No. Do they ever listen? No. All for the sake of digging up a few jewels and messing around with the bones of dead people.”

“But, Sister—” I began.

“Ah! When will I get through one day in peace without hearing from the Twin Who Likes to Say But?” she said, raising her eyes to the ceiling as if she was in agony.

I wasn’t about to be put off.

“My mum says that Mr Carter died when he was an old man.”

“So now your mother knows everything about medicine and archaeologists?” she asked. “I suppose she knows everything about nuns as well, does she, Bul-Boo? I think if you ask her you’ll find she has an archaeologist in the family so she’s biased.”

In fact, my uncle, Mum’s brother, is an archaeologist, but I didn’t feel like admitting that to Sister.

“She might have one,” I said. “Or she might not. Anyway, did Mr Carter die when he came out of the tomb? Straight away?”

“I wasn’t there, thank God in the wild heavens above,” Sister Leonisa replied. (I’ll have to remember that she mentioned God today and write it down. It’s very rare.) “But one of the archaeologists died, and at the exact moment that he collapsed in writhing agony, his dog howled to the heavens and it died too. They tried to say that this man died from a mosquito bite. Can you believe that, girls and boys, a silly little mosquito bite?”

“He probably got malaria,” I couldn’t resist saying. I don’t know why but sometimes I seem unable to stop an argument with Sister even though I know it’s pointless. Sister will never, ever admit that the other person is right. Mum said the other day that Sister is so disagreeable she wonders if she ever even manages to agree with herself.

Sister’s face took on a smug look – the one I dread, that tells me she actually knows something I don’t.

“You see, too-clever-for-anything Bul-Boo, this was an
Egyptian
mosquito, not a Zambian one. And the Egyptian mosquitoes don’t give you malaria. Go and ask Doctor Lula about that. I know all about this, because I come from Caernarfon in Wales and it so happens that this man, cursed to his death, was called Lord Carnarvon.”

That was the first time any of us had heard she was from Wales. I’d always thought she was from Zambia, and Madillo and Fred say she’s not from anywhere real. Madillo says she was made in a nun factory but that something went just a little bit wrong with the batch, which would explain why she is like she is. And then the school got her for a special discount. Fred says he’s pleased it wasn’t a Buy One, Get One Free offer, otherwise there’d be two of them and he’d be the favourite of both.

“Anyway,” Sister continued, “these same archaeologists, the ones that didn’t die, came to Zambia. Not satisfied with digging up Egypt, they came to make a mess of this country. The first place they headed for was Ng’ombe Ilede. The home of poor little Bukoko the Tick. And there they found two graveyards – one for all the rich people and one for all the poor people. It was easy to see why all the rich people had died. They were so weighed down by all their jewellery that they couldn’t stand up any longer. So they fell to the ground in a heap of jewels and died. Which they deserved because they were so greedy. Death by jewellery – be careful of that, boys and girls, it’s a nasty one.

“Then there was the other graveyard, for poor people. They had no jewellery at all. They died because they were so exhausted from having to bury all the heavy rich people. Those people I feel sorry for. They didn’t deserve it.”

She looked around the classroom. “So, what have you learnt today? Fred?”

He stood up to answer, and counted on his fingers. “Don’t become an archaeologist, don’t wear jewellery, and if rich people die, don’t dig deep graves for them otherwise you’ll get exhausted and die yourself.”

Sister clapped her hands. “Very good, Fred. You’ll go a long way. One day your daddy is going to come to me and say, ‘Thank you, Sister, you saved my boy’s life.’”