Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [40]
‘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.
We march back past the banana groves. The night is cool. A huge moon dangles over the village, like an overripe fruit. The shadows are solid, sharp, small. A dog lifts its head. A nose swings our way like a weathervane, marks our progress for a while and then is tucked back beneath a tail. A lamp behind a window outlines a door and the lattice work of the shutters. Giant shapes move about inside.
We have been gone no time at all. No time at all. And yet in that time everything has changed. Something is happening in the village. Something mars the silence, rumbles beneath the stillness. It takes a moment to realise it.
Far away the sound of voices raised and bare feet pounding