A shadow falls over us. A hand appears: palm stained red by the earth, knuckles callused and grey. Short fingernails, ridged and blackened. I watch the hand. It pours grey dust from a funnel of torn paper. A moment later another hand tosses in a handful of sand. In front of my eyes our mixture transforms into something tacky. The hands take two of our bricks, smear them with the mixture, slap one on top of the other.
‘Give it to me.’ Yaya reaches out.
I look up. A man is smiling down at me. He has lips curved like lily petals, a tiny pink patch right in the middle of his lower lip, shining eyes, white teeth, an erratic beard. The lips uncurl and reform into a new shape, a flower spreading its petals at dawn.
‘So, little brother, whose house are you building?’
‘It’s our house. Me and her. And our mother’s house,’ says Yaya, not looking up. In a small serious voice. A will-not-be-mocked voice.
But this man is not mocking us.
‘Maybe when you’re done there you can come and help us with this one. Eh?’ The man jerks a thumb in the direction of the unfinished house, the half-a-house. His thumb curls back on itself like a wood shaving. I try the gesture out myself, experimentally. ‘And what is your name, little brother?’
Yaya does not answer. He is laying bricks with a shuttered intensity.
The man watches and waits. Taking all the time in the world.
‘His name is Yaya,’ I say suddenly. I can’t bear the silence. And: ‘He’s my brother. I’m bigger. He’s smaller.’ Because I think this man is nice — for a grown-up.
‘And what about you, little sister?’
‘My name is Serah Kholifa.’
‘Well, Serah Kholifa. Yaya Kholifa. That’s a fine house you are building. I hope that one day you people will invite me inside there to eat with you.’
Now it is I who wonders if he isn’t mocking.
‘Yes,’ I reply. This time I use my polite voice for grown-ups.
The foreman is whistling. The man doesn’t say anything. Just smiles. The foreman shouts his name — what was it? — and begins to move in our direction, to see what is going on. The man turns away. He is smiling, jogging slowly backwards on the balls of his feet. ‘Don’t forget me now, Serah.’
He points a finger at me. I nod. Then shake my head. Then, confused, again I nod. Yes, I promise not to forget you.
We have to clear the bricks because my mother comes with a load of clothes to dry. Only the bricks have left dirt and dust all over the drying rock. So our mother sends me to fetch water from the jar by the door. She is not pleased. And she is angry because there is cement in my hair. My braids are cemented together. She plucks at my head with sharp fingers like a chicken looking for insects in the dirt. A little way off I can see the man. He is leaning against a longhandled shovel, watching us.
Late in the afternoon I follow my mother down to the river with a new load of washing. The colour of the sun has deepened and the red dust sparkles in the air, the day has turned a hazy amber, like a piece of coloured glass tumbled by the sea. The light settles gently on our skin, the soft glow outlines our features.
Down on the rocks I help scrub the clothes clean with black soap, and I hold one end and twist one way while my mother twists the other and together we wring the water out. And afterwards Yaya and me, we bathe in the stream and watch a single, stray, green-blue, glistening bubble hovering over the river. And we practise opening our eyes underwater. And make boats out of leaves and sail ant families across the water in them.
And then I see the man again. He is coming down the path behind our mother and he passes the boy, the one who can’t speak and never grew up. The man is wearing country clothes with a triangular pocket at the front of his smock. The boy is standing in the grass. And the man raises a hand and the boy raises one also. And they slap their hands together high in the air. The sound bounces off the water. And the boy laughs and the man carries on walking towards us, while the boy stands on one leg like a heron watching him.
That’s all I really remember about him. That day he sat next to my mother for a short while. He asked for a piece of our soap; I saw her stand up and go to the laundry basin, unwrap it and hand it to him. And then he slipped into the water and swam with us. He let us ride on his back, and we squirmed and slid off his skin, which was as smooth as a manatee’s. And then I laughed so much I took a big breath and forgot I was underwater; he held me up and squeezed me until I spewed reedy green river water back where it came from. And he said:
‘Sorry, Ma,’ as he handed me back to my mother. And she said:
‘Come on. Yaya. Serah. Enough.’ He waved at us as we walked away. And when I turned around at the last place where you could see the river, I saw him covered in lather, soaping himself with the slither of black soap.
For a long time I thought that was all it took: a shared ball of soap between a man and a woman.
But that was just the beginning. Not the whole of it. Not even the half of it.
He wasn’t the usual kind of grown-up. We would talk about him in the years to come. In hushed voices. Remember when? We had gathered together fragments of the story and tried to make them fit, wedging in a little detail, filling a space with a new revelation, a sudden realisation.
We called him the Cement Man.
The Cement Man. Our name for him. Not the name she refused to call when she faced the elders: the unspoken name that circled in the air like a fly. So why, asked the elders, not too unkindly because after all this was just woman palava, though more serious than most — also because they knew they had her — why did she now refuse to swear?
Sometimes when I look at the past I see a swamp: cloying, dark, impenetrable. Like the mud we swilled as children building our playhouse. Mud covering everything, smeared over the detail of recollections, submerging memories. Mud you wade about in trying to locate a lost image or event. Then, usually when you least expect it, the mud throws something up: perfectly preserved as a corpse in a peat bog.
Night-time. I tumble out of my dreams and into the silence of the bedroom.
I can hear my breathing. Scared breathing. Short, breathless breaths. My eyes are open wide letting in the darkness, watching the shadowy figures scuttle to the edges of the room where they slide along the walls and slip back into the place where the wall meets the floor. Banished by wakefulness, they promise to return as soon as I close my eyes again.
I can hear my brother breathing. Open-mouthed, snuffle-nosed breathing. Still holding on to life breathing. The breathing of babies and little children, as though they can’t ever get enough air.
My mother’s breathing: deep-sleep breathing. Long, slow breaths. Shimmering snores suspended in the air.
Three kinds of breathing.
In my bladder, an irresistible urgency. I lie on my back, wishing the feeling away. Then I reach over and rock my brother, vigorously. I’m afraid to go to the toilet in the dark. Yaya is ashamed he still wets the bed. This is our understanding. We go together at night to the toilets behind the houses. So I don’t have to cross my legs and pray until dawn. And he doesn’t dream of floating on warm water and wake up in a cold, sodden bed.
We bang the door and stamp our feet, announcing our presence for the benefit of the lizards and cockroaches who lurk in the dark places and cling underneath the overhang of the hole in the floor. The hole gives way to a bottomless pit and a nameless, simmering, steadily rising tide. I squat first: knees together, ankles splayed, thighs quivering, head bent watching the steaming trickle fall into the terrifying blackness.