Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [44]
I travelled away, in a direction I didn’t want to go, backwards in time. For a long while the memory was gone. Only the feeling was left.
Back then we travelled east with a hot-metal smell in our nostrils, crouched on the floor of a mammy wagon, playing with tiny metal ball bearings, racing them up and down the floor. Yaya and I, we want to stand up and feel the hot, gummy wind in our faces, sit on the sides of the lorries like the young lorry boys lizardeyed in sunglasses, who perch with their backs to the cab, and sometimes crane over to talk to the driver through the open window. And never fall or have to steady themselves with undignified abruptness. Even when the truck drives over a pothole. Or lurches to a stop and the women all clutch at their leaping bosoms, and at the same time check the damp wads of cash strapped below their breasts. I want to stand up and reach up to catch the passing branches who nod their approval as we speed by.
I have never even seen a truck before, but I am fearless. In a very short time we two newly superior beings snigger at the foot travellers who drop their loads and flee into the bush at the approach of her stampeding wheels and roaring engine.
At the roadside a man is selling watermelons. The truck stops and people climb down. Some of the young men light cigarettes. The woman next to us asks me to mind her bundles and trots off into the bush, hitching up her skirt as she goes. The men wander beside the road, turn their backs, as though moved to contemplate the way we have just come. I walk over to look at the fruit stacked in a pyramid taller than I am. My mother comes up behind me and buys a melon from the vendor who breaks it open for us, pushing the point of his knife into the skin and forcing the flesh apart. And we eat slices of it with our faces turned to the wind, the pale pink juice drying sticky on our chins. And save the smooth black seeds and flick them out of the moving truck one by one.
Later we pass a bus with a broken axle, sliding sideways like a crab caught on the edge of the surf. We leave it far behind as we roll on past shanty towns of scrap metal and tin into the unknown. And there we arrive coated in dust, like we have been rolled in flour and readied for frying. And when I blow my nose the snot comes out red and thick.
At night the cockroaches drop from the ceiling of the rented room. And in the morning we find them lying upside down under the beds. And I sweep them out and wonder, do they fall from the ceiling already dead? Or do they faint trying to walk upside down and bash their brains out on the floor? Behind thin cotton curtains six other cots are partitioned off like separate states. They are empty. The town keeps nocturnal hours.
In the early hours of the morning the bursts of music, the shouts and the coarse laughter steal into my dreams. I lie wedged between my brother and my mother, our bodies stuck together with sweat.
By day Yaya and I stand on the town’s main street and watch rickshaws and carts bumping along the road. A truck full of men — shirtless, carrying picks and shovels — roars past, nearly knocking us down. Once in a while a shiny car glides by, scraping its suspension on the rutted road. We run alongside and try to peer through the dark glass. Try to imagine who could possess a vehicle such as that.
Eventually we stop and stand still, dizzy at the sight of so much. The people hurry past us heaving bundles, sacks and crates. People here rarely smile or greet each other. After a while I begin to notice that most of the people here are men. We walk past queues of them, arms and legs covered in cracked red mud like elephants’ skin, waiting outside the Syrian diamond traders’ shops. We press our noses against the windows, see men hand over leather pouches, dealers weigh little pieces of grey grit on tiny brass scales.
The view from our window looks out over pits that line the river like sores on a leper’s mouth. Men in loincloths wade up to their thighs through the rusty shallows, other men dig at the sticky mud with shovels,