Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [140]
Sometimes the giant stumbles. You can feel it. He is weakening. Every time he stumbles the earth is shaken, it crumbles and cracks. The spirits in the darkness down below are woken.
‘What will happen then, Mary?’ Mr Lockheart liked to use my name a great deal, and to look me in the eye as he did so. I had expected this, I wasn’t offended by it. I quite liked him.
I replied: ‘If you would like to call me by my name, it is Mariama.’
‘I will, if that’s what you would like. I thought Mary was your Christian name. Why do you call yourself Mariama?’
Yes, Mary is my Christian name. That’s exactly what it is. That’s all it is.
Mariama was the name given to me. The nuns took it away and replaced it with something that sounded like my name, that I learned to answer to. It was easier to remember, they said. For whom? I might have asked. And why did I need a name that was easy to remember? Perhaps they thought we weren’t worth the effort. Or that it was presumptuous of a little pagan baby to walk through life trailing a name of four syllables, flagrantly, like an ermine cloak or a silk scarf, something that should only be worn by the most important people. But Mary wasn’t mine. It never had been. Mariama was the name my mother had chosen for me.
Some of this I said out loud. Some I kept to myself.
Mr Lockheart nodded: ‘I see. Mariama it is. And you must call me Adrian.’
He glanced down at the desk, I could see he wanted to pick up his pen and make some notes about me. He wasn’t sure. Now he was masking his hesitation by pretending to look like he was thinking about something. He was new, had only been here a few months. But he thought that if he was calling me by my first name, I should call him by his. They all did that, so they could feel they were treating us like equals.
As a matter of fact, if it were up to me I would tell him to call me Aunty Mariama. Because at his age he ought to show a little respect. That’s if it were up to me. But it isn’t.
I think of that giant turning slowly round. From east to west, from west to east. Endlessly revolving. I wonder if that is why our lives so often end up in the same place they began? Because life is not a straight line, just as the earth isn’t flat. You don’t walk and walk until you reach a place you know is the end. Like the Europeans once believed. They thought if they sailed their ships towards the horizon they would plummet off the end in a cascade of water. Then came Galileo. And after that they found us here, clinging on to the curve of the earth. What took them so long? I sometimes wonder. We knew the earth was round long before that.
No, life isn’t a straight line. It is a circle, whose slow and gentle bend we fail to spot, until we realise we are back where we started. I don’t know when I realised I knew this, but it was some time before I met Adrian Lockheart.
The next time, Adrian Lockheart asked: ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
‘You mean like the Holy Ghost.’
‘Are you teasing? It’s OK if you are. I don’t mind. And I take your point, Mary.’
‘Mariama.’
‘Mariama.’ A pause. ‘I mean ghosts, spirits, devils.’
He is trying to understand, and despite myself I would like to help him. He has read newspapers and scholarly reports about us. And he has been talking to the others who come here. He will have been out drinking with them, which I know is where he was last night. I saw him: leaning across the table, hovering above the pools of beer stretched out on the plastic. He is the new boy. The others enjoy the fact, they can pretend to be old Africa hands. Tales of cannibals and juju. If ever they see a shadow of scepticism on his face they shake their heads knowingly. ‘I’m telling you. Just like that. Dead. Convinced someone had placed a curse on him,