The Devil that Danced on the Water Read online

  ‘B, five!’ I was astonished. I dropped the five back into the bag. No one believed I had actually drawn it. ‘I did, I did!’ I shouted and started to grow upset.

  I saw my father watching me. He was not sure what to believe. He smiled as if to say, ‘You don't have to do this, Am.’

  Outside the truck has arrived. The two men are shovelling stones into the back. Afterwards the driver takes some money out of his pocket, flicks off two notes and hands them to the man who lives in the panbody, who nods in return but doesn't smile. As the truck departs he leans on his shovel and watches.

  On the coffee table I lay the bingo cards alongside the matchsticks. Outside the window a movement makes me look up. Two men have come up the outside stairs and are standing on the veranda looking in at me. I go out to see what they want. They are standing directly beneath the fluorescent strip light with their backs against the growing darkness; the white light casts downwards, bouncing off their cheeks and their foreheads, turning their eyes into dark orbs. I have never seen either man before but I sense something indefinably familiar about them. They are both slim, sinewy with close-cropped hair and they wear short-sleeved safari suits. One of them has on a pair of fake crocodile-skin shoes, of a type sold in the market. The shoes are badly scuffed. Who are these men? Many years later I will discover they are called Prince Ba and Newlove, names as surreal as stage names – or aliases. Their faces are impassive; they impart an air of unutterable menace. One of them tells me they are here to speak to the doctor.

  My father appears directly and speaks to them for a few moments. My bingo set is beside me on the table ready for our game. He turns to me, sees that I am there and says: ‘I have to go with these two gentlemen now, Am.’

  He walks ahead of the two men through the door and out onto the veranda. I see them pass the window.

  ‘Daddy, when are you coming back?’ I am unsettled.

  My father half turns from me, seems to pass a hand across his eyes, takes a few more steps. Then he stops and faces me again. The two men wait and so do I. All my life my father has had a habit of chewing the ends of toothpicks. He always keeps a couple in his breast pocket. Now he says to me in a low voice: ‘Am, go and get me a couple of toothpicks.’

  So I run to the sideboard on the other side of the room and find the little plastic toothpick dispenser. I shake out three or four toothpicks and hurry back to him. My face still holds the question. ‘Tell Mum I'll be back later.’ These are the last words, the very last words he says to me. And he steps out into the rain.

  At the bedroom door I call to my stepmother that my father is gone. A moment later she runs past me with Morlai right behind her. They run silently, eyes fixed ahead, and disappear into the crystal darkness. Through the rain I hear the sound of the car engine starting; the tyres splashing through the puddles.

  The next morning we three children have our breakfast together, just the three of us. Outside the truck arrives and deposits another load of rocks. The rain is still coming down: it rains all through the day and the next night. It rains until October.

  2

  ‘Daddy's back!’ It was my brother. I had never seen him so excited, adult poise utterly cast aside. The early morning sun was bright and reflected in his face and eyes; his whole expression was radiant.

  Everyone was smiling hard at me, Yabome and my sister. The same excitement glowed in their faces, too. Obviously, I was the last to find out and I stared up at them warily, not wanting to believe.

  ‘It's a dream,’ I said at last.

  ‘No, it's not. He's really here.’

  ‘It's a dream,’ I insisted. ‘I've had them before.’

  Yabome put her arms across my shoulder and squeezed me. The others laughed; it was a beautiful, silver sound. ‘It's true. He's coming. Sheka and I are going to fetch him.’ And before I could shake the feeling of unreality that clung to me, they were gone.

  I sat down again. Breakfast was laid at the big, wooden table. Memuna stayed behind with me, but she seemed to be taking events in her stride, as ever. Her calm was a source of envy for me. I, who became so easily heated and could be wound into a frenzy by my family.

  When I was ten, after my father was taken away, I began to suffer migraines that remained undiagnosed for years. With the heels of my hands pressed against my temples I would run round the house making desperate circles, as though if I moved fast enough I might succeed in leaving the pain behind. Often there was nobody at home except for us three children, but if my stepmother or Santigi were in the house they'd take me to my bed, fetch me aspirins and try to subdue me, holding me by the shoulders and pushing me down against the pillows. It never worked: when they left I would cry and bang my head hard against the bare walls of the room.

  I poured a glass of orange juice and drank half of it. I found myself dithering, unable even to find a place to put the glass. The table was laden with food and with the debris of a half-eaten breakfast. The room was part of a stately home, heavily furnished, oak-panelled and cold. I didn't recognise the house, but it was familiar as the kind of old country house where I had gone to boarding school. Eventually others started to come down to breakfast: friends of mine, who joined us at the table. A red squirrel appeared at the window. It was large and had a strange, pointed face. To me it didn't look much like a squirrel at all: the nose was too long, like a mongoose I once owned as a child.

  When I heard my stepmother and brother come back, I started up from the table. The sound of their footsteps was on the stairs.

  ‘July the fourth,’ said Sheka. He was still breathless. ‘He's going to come on July the fourth now!’ What the reason was for the delay nobody suggested. I thought he would be here, with us that very day. But I didn't feel disappointed. Instead I felt this was how it should be: time to prepare after so many years. I left the dining room.

  The huge staircase dipped away below me and the carpeted stairs swung round in a lush sweep. I put a hand on the banister, feeling the cool, varnished wood, one foot out onto the first step, and I began to walk down the stairs. My family were crowded around behind me. I could hear the rustling and feel them jogging each other. What on earth were they all doing?

  As I turned the arc of the stairs I understood. The bearded figure standing in the hallway at the bottom wore a tan, short-sleeved suit, despite the cold. He had on polished brown shoes and a gold watch and although he was talking on the telephone with his back half turned towards me, I recognised him in that instant. I could still hear their voices behind me as I hurled myself down the stairs. He hadn't seen me yet and I felt like a child again, my legs moving in great, galloping strides as I threw myself towards him. In that moment he turned round, smiling with surprise, and caught me in his one free arm.

  ‘Hey, hey. What's all this?’ he said, as though I really was an overexcited ten-year-old. But I didn't care. I put my arms around him and hugged him. I could feel everyone gathered around behind me. My face was against his shoulder and I squeezed my eyes shut.

  When I opened them again the pale, grey London dawn had cast a triangle of light on the wooden floor. I could see the shadows of my clothes hanging from the pegs on the back of the half-open door. The blinds were still closed. On the chair by my bedside the faint glow of the alarm clock lit the shapes of a pencil, paper, a lip balm, a book and a wooden box. The sheet below me was wrinkled, cold with sweat.

  Once a year, twice at the very most, the dreams had grown fewer as the decades passed. Sometimes I dreamed he came back from living in a far away country, that he had been looking for us, but couldn't find us. Other times I dreamed that he had been in hiding and everyone around him sworn to secrecy. I'm sorry, Am, he'd say with a smile. We wanted to tell you sooner. Yes, the dreams came less frequently now, but despite the twenty-five years that had passed, they had never ceased entirely.

  3

  All my life I have harboured memories, tried to piece together scraps of truth and make sense of fragmented images. For as long as I ca
n remember my world was one of parallel realities. There were the official truths versus my private memories, the propaganda of history books against untold stories; there were judgements and then there were facts, adult stances and the clarity of the child's vision; their version, my version.

  There were times, a summer holiday or a few months, when I lived my childhood as a seamless dream where time ebbed like the tide and there was nothing to break the rhythm. But for the most part that was not so. Over and over the delicate membrane of my sphere would be broken and I tumbled out of my cocoon into the outside world.

  Afterwards no one explained. People imagined these were things children shouldn't know, or they did not think we had a right to know. We were encouraged to forget, dissuaded from asking. Gradually I learned to spy: I eavesdropped on adult conversations, rifled hidden papers, devised lines of questioning and I began to build onto my fragments layers of truth. And as I did so I discovered how deep the lies went.

  I grew older, became a journalist and made a living using the skills I spent my childhood honing. All the time I hoarded my recollections, guarding them carefully against the lies: lies that hardened, spread and became ever more entrenched.

  Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?

  In the African oral tradition great events and insignificant moments, the ordinary and the extraordinary, are notches on the same wheel. They exist in relation to each other. The little occurrences are as important as the grand designs: the threads are the texture of truth that separate man-made myth from fact. They are the testimonies; the words of history's eyewitnesses.

  I remember cockroaches.

  The tiniest of tickles across my toes made me look down. Early morning and I stood alone, chin high to the bathroom sink, both taps running. The cockroach was standing next to me and his sweeping, chestnut antennae brushed my foot in a way that seemed remarkably intimate, as though he imagined we were friends. Glossy wings tucked flat across his back; legs angled outward below the armoured undercarriage; the jaws which dominated his minuscule head worked steadily like a toothless old man. I kept my foot still, one eye on my flat-backed companion, while I reached for the tooth mug. As fast as I could manage I up-ended the beaker, pulled my foot away and trapped the cockroach under the glass. It sat unperturbed, as at home as a fish in an aquarium.

  By the end of the day there were half a dozen inverted objects on the floor around the house: two china cups in the sitting room; a plastic toy cooking pot and a second glass in the hallway; and in the bathroom a toilet roll with a wad of paper wedged into the top. They were put there by the three of us: my sister, my brother and me, and we waited for our father to come in. This was our daily routine. When he arrived he went round the house picking up each object and dispatching the creature beneath, while we followed behind gazing at him with a mixture of disgust and admiration.

  You could hear the crack and crunch of the cockroach as its skeleton gave way underfoot, pale innards spurted out. We were in awe at the way this grotesque feature didn't seem to bother our father, who would squash a cockroach with his bare feet. If you caught him at a particular time, when he was still in his pyjamas in the morning, say, and asked him to kill a cockroach for you, he would go right ahead and stamp on it with his naked feet.

  My mother had a story about cockroaches that took place in the same house. We'd just moved up-country, where my parents planned to set up a clinic, the only one for hundreds of miles. For several months my father had scouted the regions looking for a suitable spot and finally settled on Koidu, three hundred miles to the east, right on the border with Guinea, in the heart of the diamond-mining region. He rented a rambling bungalow with several wings, set within its own compound, with the idea of turning one wing into a ward for in-patients and living in the others. My mother and we three children left our noisy, downtown flat in Freetown and flew to Koidu in a plane that bounced from town to town across the interior of the country, while my father drove up in our Austin with the dogs and the luggage.

  When we arrived it was late into the night. My parents stacked our belongings in the main room and my mother set up cots for us in one of the bedrooms, camp beds for my father and herself in another. In the early hours of the morning, when it was still black, she awoke to the sound of my cries. She rose and came to me, turning on the lights as she passed through the house. She soothed me and returned me to my cot. Just as she was back in her bed and falling asleep again she heard me crying. This happened three times.

  The fourth time she didn't bother to turn on the lights. She paused at the door to my room and as she looked around she saw that the walls seemed to be moving. My mother decided that she must be exhausted or else still dreaming and lingered a while in the dark at the bedroom door. Yet beneath her gaze the entire room seemed to have lost density: ceiling, floor, walls, even my cot heaved. Her baby was still shrieking. She flicked the light switch. Nothing. Turned it off and waited. Slowly the walls turned fluid again. She ran to fetch her husband, who was still sleeping deeply on his camp bed. As they stood at the door of my room, she showed him what she had seen, flipping the lights on and off.

  He saw it, too. He rubbed his face, yawning widely. ‘Cockroaches,’ he said, and he turned to go back to bed.

  My father's feet had strong, yellowish soles. He told us that he didn't own a pair of shoes until he went away to secondary school, and up until that time he had to walk five miles to classes and back again. This deeply impressed us, at the first telling. I disliked wearing shoes and at first I assumed the story's purpose was to let us know that shoes didn't matter. After all, my father managed without. Both of us had the same broad, long, flat feet: African feet. While I was growing my feet shot out first, ahead of the rest of my body. By the time I was eleven they were size seven and I barely cleared five foot. I was an L-shaped child.

  In fact, our father's story was a multipurpose parable with ever-extending dimensions of meaning. At its very simplest it was a warning against the dangers of catching hookworm by wandering outside without shoes on. I learned that one the hard way. They burrowed through the skin on the soles of my feet and made a home in my bowels.

  Then the story was an inducement to be grateful for what you had. My father grew up in the villages, where life was very harsh indeed. There were no hospitals and very few schools. When Ndora, my grandmother, was sick the family had to take her all the way to Rotifunk, on the other side of the country, where there was a mission hospital. In Freetown there were several hospitals to serve the British administrators and their Creole civil servants, but these were not open to people from the country. They walked most of the way, carrying pots of food and sleeping mats on their heads. When they got to the hospital, amenities there were so basic that the doctors could not come up with a diagnosis. So they shrugged and sent her away, telling the relatives to bring her back if she got any worse. As if that were possible.

  Five months later she died, leaving a six-month-old baby girl and her two beloved boys. Our father was five years old then. That evening as he was sitting among the men at the back of one of the houses he heard a high-pitched, rhythmic wail coming from the street. It was a Bondu elder, speaker for the secret society of women, and she was holding a broom up to the sky. That was the sign that one of the village women had died. A fragment of her song came across: ‘. . . the one from Rothomgbai’ – my grandmother's village. Then he knew Ndora was gone.

  Soon afterwards, our father ended up being the only person in his entire family to go to school just because his mother had died. The missionaries had opened a school nearby in Mamunta. The days passed and nobody came to enrol their children in the new school, so the missionaries approached the chief, who listened to what they had to say and then passed an edict: each household from the villages neighbouring Mamunta would volunteer one child to the new school. None of the women wanted her son to be chosen. People were very suspicious of education back then; they said that people who went to sc
hool never came back. With no mother to defend his interests my father was elected to go. Fourteen years later, when he left for Britain to become a doctor, he thanked them and they were pleased they were right. See, they said, he's leaving for ever, as we knew he would. This was the final meaning of my father's story: it was about the value of education and not shoes at all. Do well in school and thank God you had an education, because lots of people don't even know its value.

  In fact the new school was closed within the year after the head teacher was caught having an affair with one of the paramount chief's wives. The headmaster was fined, which was the correct punishment. But the cuckolded chief wasn't satisfied and he closed the school down as well, saying that there would be no more white man's education in Mamunta. Privately Chief Masamunta, who was also my father's uncle, arranged for his own two sons and his nephew to be transferred to another mission school in Makeni some miles away.

  My mother didn't have African feet like ours. She had European feet. They were similar in the sense that they were quite big, but the arches were high and the soles smooth and thin and pale as paper. I had my father's feet but, on the matter of cockroaches, my mother's western sensibilities.

  Gradually the cockroaches moved on as we swept the house out, washed cupboards down and covered the thick green and blue gloss on the walls with white emulsion. We hired a local man to help us with the work, and under our mother's instruction he cut down branches from the trees and pushed them into the earth around the edges of the compound to protect the house from the churning dust of the road. When the rains came the branches flourished miraculously and our house was enclosed in an elegant screen of trees; we were all astonished and delighted, my mother as much as the rest of us.

  My father bought iron beds and mattresses for the maternity ward and my mother donated my cot for the newborn babies. Within a very short time word got around that the clinic had opened and new patients began to arrive; every day the line of people trailed out of the waiting area and onto our veranda.