Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [67]
Ma Cook’s spirit continued to flit in and out of the corners of rooms like a bat. Sometimes she brushed my face or played with my hair and that made me cross. I would put my hands on my hips and shout at her, daring her to come out. But of course she never did.
At my First Communion ten months later I drank the blood of Christ. And ate his flesh. The class in Idaho had sent me a box in the post. Inside was a framed print of the Virgin. Also a second-hand white dress with a label inside which read: ‘Ages 8–9’. And although I was much older than this it fitted me anyway. I wore white shoes and white nylon stockings that twisted and stuck to my thighs in the heat. The last item in the box was a gilt St Christopher medal on a chain, which I slipped over my head and wore under my dress. After the ceremony all of us who had taken our First Communion drank orange squash and ate rice bread together with Father Bernard and the nuns.
You loved that St Christopher medal when you were a baby. You used to play with it. The way it glistened and twinkled when you held it up, rotating backwards and forwards on the chain. Once you broke the chain, but we managed to fix it. I wore it for many years before and after that. The patron saint of storms, of lightning, of mariners and travellers. I thought he would easily be a match for Kassila. Then one day the Pope decided St Christopher wasn’t a saint any more. Just like that. Now suddenly nobody knew for sure whether he had waded across the river carrying the Christ child upon his shoulders. Or if he had existed at all. It was just a legend, they said. And they stopped believing in him.
But what is a legend if not a story so great it has survived the retelling of countless generations?
I was on the ferry crossing from the peninsula to the city. By that time I could have afforded the first-class lounge easily, but the soft drinks were warm and the stink of the latrines filtered in through the air-conditioning system. So instead I stood on the lower deck and leaned over the barrier. The surface of the water was dark and greasy. I stared past the floating slick and my own reflection, deep down into what was below. And as I did so my medal fell out of the neck of my dress and dangled over the railing where its reflection caught in the water, flashing like a beacon.
And there, suddenly. There he was. Kassila! Rushing up out of the darkness. His hand was outstretched, great talons reaching for me. He wore a suit of tarpon scales, a crown of spines, coils of hair like jellyfish tentacles and a beard of bubbles. I knew what he had come for.
I slipped the St Christopher medal from my neck and threw it over the railing. It hung for a moment in the air before it hit the waves and began to spin slowly through the water. For a few seconds more I followed the shape, distorted now, as it drifted downwards. I imagined myself falling in after it, head first, plummeting down into the green. Sinking into the billowing darkness. The cool waters closing above me, shutting out all the heat and light and noise.
Then I saw Kassila seize the flimsy chain in his huge hand. He twisted his great body and spiralled back down below.
And only the tip of his tail cut through the surface of the water.
8
Hawa, 1955
Josephine Baker
They wanted water. So much water! The headwoman organised us to fetch it from the stream and we carried it up in buckets on our heads. They were using up all the