Outside the pounding had ceased. I heard footsteps: the click of heels on concrete. I spun around. I could hear Hannah’s footfall along the exterior wall of the house. Suddenly I was unprepared. I didn’t want her to see me when she passed the window. I moved and stood beside the door, where I would be ready to greet her when she came in. In my haste I brushed against an umbrella standing there, flustered now I reached out and caught it before it hit the floor. I stood with my back to the wall holding the umbrella in front of me. Outside I could hear Hannah rummaging in her bag for the keys. I tried to prop the umbrella in its place and as I did I glanced down at it.
James Smith & Sons. On New Oxford Street. I still remember the look in Ambrose’s eyes when I gave it to him on his first day at the Inns of Court. He had opened it in the living room and twirled it around and around, even though I warned him it was bad luck. It was raining the morning he set off, a soft drizzle. He had clicked his heels and sung a chorus from ‘Singin’ in the Rain’; it was so unlike him, so endearing, I laughed and embraced him. He kissed me in return and promised to cherish it always.
The door opened.
Am I proud of what I did? At the time, no. I was angry. I wasn’t proud of myself, I was miserable. Only later I became defiant. Am I proud now? Well, now you’re asking. Now I’m thinking back on it. Yes, actually. I believe I am.
I hit her. Again and again. Oh, what a noise she made as she went down. She begged me to stop. But I didn’t stop. I beat her the way you beat a snake, to make sure it’s dead. And maybe I would have killed her if the houseboy hadn’t heard the palava and come running. He caught my raised hand. ‘Stop, Ma. I beg.’ So softly, it brought me to my senses. And ever so gently he removed the umbrella from my hand.
I had spent my whole life trying not to be like my mother. I had taken the opposite path and hurried along it, all the time looking over my shoulder instead of ahead, so that I failed to see how the path curved back again in the same direction.
When a woman is thrown out by her husband, there aren’t many places for her to go. Ambrose said I had humiliated him, by playing into the hands of the gossips. That might come as a surprise to your way of thinking, but it’s true. In the city appearances were the thing that mattered most. I had caused us to lose face; next to that Ambrose’s fidelity was unimportant. Of the two of us, it seemed, I was the one who was in the wrong.
So there. No home. No husband. No job. The first person I went to was my sister Mary. And she was there for me, just as I had been there for her once, she made space for me and my sons in her tiny room at the Catholic Mission School for the Blind, but it was clear we couldn’t stay there long. What I’ve learned, though, is that luck likes to stay out of sight until she’s needed. Ya Memso had not seen my mother for many years, since before I left to go to England. From the time I married up until that day she had held on to my mother’s share of my bride price. Well, the marriage was over, so she gave it to me to rent a place until I found a job. My qualifications were good, it didn’t take me long. And with the rest of the money Ambrose had given me I paid for driving lessons and in time bought a small car of my own.
So you see, in this way my poor mother, bound to my father by her own bride price, unexpectedly gave me the keys to my freedom.
And do you know what else I think? I think Ambrose was bluffing when he ordered me to leave our house, imagining I would soon beg him to take me back. He didn’t know I was my mother’s daughter. He didn’t know I preferred to make my way alone than live with unhappiness. Yes, Ambrose was wrong about that, just as he was wrong about many things.
There was one thing he was right about, though.
A single issue of Janneh’s newspaper appeared on the streets. The next day the police rounded up all the newspaper vendors and put them in prison. As for Janneh, he simply vanished. His empty car, the headlights dying, was found at a crossroads one morning. Other people disappeared, too. A nursery school teacher here. A city councillor there. A poet ordered down from his crate in the marketplace. One by one, like lights going off all across the city. People talked about a labour camp in another country where the President was a friend of our President. But it was only a rumour. Nobody had ever come back to say whether it was true or not.
As for me, the gossip-mongers soon found new victims to torture with their tongues. Tongues like leather cords, tying a woman down, cutting into her every time she tried to break free. They laughed, not knowing that the last laugh belonged to none of us. Ambrose spent his days at the Attorney-General’s office drafting new laws to take away our freedom little by little. And they never even noticed, they were too busy tittle-tattling. But one day they would find out what some of us already knew. That the reality was not so brightly coloured as the dream. That the dream no longer existed, maybe had never existed. It was all just a rainbow-coloured hallucination.
And when you reached out to touch it, your hand went straight through to the other side.
13 Asana, 1985: Mambore
When I was a child Karabom warned me of the dangers of breaking the rules. I must be careful not to trespass in the sacred forest, she said, or the men who belonged to the secret society would snatch me and take me away and I would not see my mother for a long, long time. This was what happened to children who played truant, or who went wandering alone in forbidden places.
I heard these warnings all my life. Sometimes they came to town, the members of this fearsome order — to stir our terror in case, untended, it congealed into something resilient. Women and children ran away to hide, we were not even allowed to gaze upon them. Such was the power of the society, even the chiefs obeyed them for in times of peril it was the society we looked to for protection. For centuries people feared them even more than they came to fear the army.
Another day Karabom had warned me against keeping bad company. Two girls were walking home, she told me. One a girl of noble birth. The other a girl from a disreputable family, the kind of people who move from village to village like nomads. She had grown up doing as she pleased, disregarded her chores and never learned to cook. On their way they passed a place where the society men were busy in the forest. They could tell this by the tools left lying at the side of the path, among them the tortoiseshell drum they beat to warn people of their approach. The errant girl picked it up and, despite the protests of her friend, banged on it loudly, laughing wildly as she did so. Within moments they were surrounded by masked men, who carried them away deep into the forest. They were not seen for a year or more. Even the wealthy father, with all his connections, could not find his daughter or free her from the men of the secret society.
‘What happened to them?’ I wanted to know.
‘Who?’ said my grandmother, knowing perfectly well. It meant she was finished with talking.
‘The girls.’
‘I don’t know,’ said my grandmother. ‘It’s not important. They came back, but their chances were ruined. What man would want to marry girls like that?’
The question itched me like an insect bite for a few weeks, and then I forgot it. I was a child after all. Such was the awe in which the society was held that it was forbidden to speak of their doings, but still, there were whispers. I can tell you now the girls were not ravished, nothing like that. The society was an ancient and honourable one. But one that guarded its secrets and demanded respect. Those for whom awe proved insufficient were bound instead by its oaths of allegiance.