Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [61]
Pagan babies. That’s what we were. We knew our baptisms were paid for through something called the Pagan-Baby Project, only somehow we never realised we were those babies.
We were two. Marie and Mary. Mary and Marie.
In the walled gardens on the other side of the road that we tended before morning Mass and after vespers grew every kind of vegetable. We were almost entirely self-sufficient, with the exception of rice, meat, fish and palm oil which two of us were sent to the market to buy in the mornings. The school was on an island. It was quite a large island, with a small town: Tihun. And several fishing villages, a church and a boys’ school. The town was a long walk, and so we went to the market in Baiama on the big island on the other side of the inlet, crossing the water in the launch along with fishwives and petty traders. At those times I would lift my chin into the wind and taste the salt. Or else I looked down at the dark shapes: the rocks, the shoals of fish, the shadow of the boat. And I would dream of Kassila, the sea god, swimming in the depths.
There were nights the sea howled like an animal in agony and the palm trees danced themselves into a frenzy. The fishermen hauled their canoes up on to the shore. And in the morning, before they set out again, muttered prayers and platitudes to Kassila, so he might make the seas still and keep them safe.
At mealtimes we ate from tin plates and drank from empty Peak milk tins. At one time we received a consignment of cutlery from a church group in America. The first day I tried to make the grains of rice stay on my fork, to cut the meat from the oxtail and winkle out the marrow. Everybody was struggling. How hungry we were when we left the dining room. So much food gone to waste on the floor. A rota was put up on the board. Every week six girls were invited to sit at Sister Monica’s table. I was one of the first. Watch and copy. That was the way we learned. I held my fork upside down and piled food on the top, while all around me girls rolled tasty balls of rice and plasass with the tips of fingers, and popped them into their mouths.
It was the first time I saw how Europeans often liked to do things the most difficult way. The nuns preferred to carry piles of books in their arms instead of on the top of their heads, so that we were always having to run ahead to open doors for them. And once in the town I saw a white woman pushing a baby along in a pram. She was sweating and puffing, the wheels kept getting caught in the ruts and the potholes. Eventually two men ran to her assistance, hoisted the pram on their shoulders and carried it all the way back to her front door. The mother ran after them, hopping and calling, like a hen whose chick has been carried away by a hawk. And the women with their children on their backs stopped to stare at her.
I saw that woman again. Walking on the beach, all by herself, eyes streaming. Maybe it was the wind. Still, it was a strange thing to do, walk about for the sake of it. And alone, too.
Sister Eadie said that when babies are carried on their mothers’ backs it makes them grow up with bow legs. But I did not think this could be true as my legs are straight.
Every day we queued for lunch, holding our plates out to the serving women who stood behind great tureens of rice and potato leaves. At that time Marie had a feud with one of the cooks, a woman with a short neck and a sly look whom everybody knew stole the food meant for the girls. Ma Cook we called her. In the morning the girls took turns helping to wash and chop the leaves. We were supposed to be assisting the kitchen