Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [142]
I looked at Adrian and I looked around me. Before we came here I thought I was going to feel ashamed, but I didn’t. Instead I felt proud. This was the first time anybody had seen my room, with my permission. A month before, the urgent matter of a bats’ nest in the roof of the room next door had brought the caretaker over, he in turn called the matron, and she the principal. That’s where this whole thing with Adrian Lockheart started, when the sessions began. They had not known quite what to do. It did not seem to occur to them just to leave me as I was.
He didn’t speak for quite a long time, eventually he said: ‘What is it?’
‘It’s my work,’ I replied.
The pen Adrian Lockheart used to record our conversations was an old-fashioned fountain pen. A fine example, with a gold nib that made scratching sounds like the birds on the roof. One day, when he was called out of the room briefly, I picked it up and examined it. The shaft was made of marbled enamel, the nib engraved with the manufacturer’s name. When he came back in he told me it had belonged to his grandfather, who had lived and worked in this country once. His grandfather’s fondness for our country made Adrian want to see it for himself.
‘Lockheart?’ I asked.
‘Silk. On my mother’s side.’
The same name as the old District Commissioner. I replaced the pen on the table. I pretended the name meant nothing to me.
Adrian had something he wanted to talk about. He said we started but never did finish the discussion.
‘The giant shakes his head and frees the spirits from underneath the earth, isn’t that what you told me?’
I nodded. That’s what Pa Yamba Mela had told me. When I was a child, growing up. A lot of people thought Pa Yamba was a fool. That his magic was nothing but trickery, that his prophecies were cleverly worded so as to mean anything. He couldn’t pull thunder out of the sky any more than you or I. He claimed to have magic powers just to make people afraid of him. And many were. In that way he became powerful. You could say that was a kind of magic.
‘The underworld will rise,’ I replied.
‘And when will that happen?’ Adrian shifted in his seat.
‘It already has.’
Once I lived among nuns. They told me stories of the lives of the saints, men and women who had visions, sometimes of God, Jesus or Mary. Other times these visions were premonitions.
Well, I had a vision of something that came to pass.
It was in the middle of the day, a market day. The sun was hot, bearing down on the top of my head. So bright it made me squint. The shadows were short and black, black, black. The air was heavy like glue, impossible to breathe, it wrapped itself around me. I made my way uphill, pushing against it all the time, my head bowed, my legs straining. Where the road was steep I stopped for a moment to catch my breath. I remember I looked up at the sky. Above me the sun and moon hovered on opposite sides of the blue, one indistinguishable from the other.
Suddenly I heard a great rush of wind, as though a whirlwind was racing towards me. I braced myself and waited. Nothing. The grass and trees stood straight. And yet the sound went on, becoming louder, filling my ears, rushing around my head. I felt myself becoming unsteady. I looked down at the ground and at my feet. I reached out for something to support myself, found a bollard and leaned against it.
There was a Creole graveyard below me, very old, at least one hundred years. I saw a crowd of mourners walking between the graves. They were carrying several coffins. It looked as though a whole family had died. But even though they were dressed as bereaved people, instead of weeping, the relatives appeared almost unconcerned. One