Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [79]
From then on we wore our shoes to rehearse. At the next dance we rhumba’d like professionals. And for the first time I danced with somebody other than my brother.
Janneh was five years older than me. A student at the university in the South. He had a voice the colour of deep water, tapered fingers, long legs with high calves and two scoops of muscle and flesh for his buttocks. He owned a motorbike. A motorbike! In those days few people even had bicycles, though you could hire one outside the petrol station. You couldn’t actually ride away on it, though. You sat on the back and they pedalled you to your destination.
The Honda’s engine was as loud as the roar of a forest beast, it drowned out my screams. My skirt was bunched up between my legs, I pressed my knees together and held on to the padded seat between us. I couldn’t bring myself to touch him, to actually put my arms around his waist. Going up a hill I felt myself sliding dangerously backwards. At the last moment I reached out and grabbed Janneh’s shirt, slid my arms around him. Down the other side my body was pushed against his. I felt my stomach flip. Just for a moment I pressed my nose against his shirt and breathed in. A warm, pungent smell, cloudy and pure at the same time. Like the smell of crumbled chocolate. Or new puppies.
My legs were trembling as I let myself into the house. From gripping with my thighs on to the motorbike, I told myself. Only once I was in bed did I remember Yaya, who walked all the way home alone. My brother did not dance with me for days.
The first elections were held four years before we were supposed to become independent. So the people could practise voting, I suppose. We were allowed to choose our own Prime Minister and some members of the cabinet, although the British would still tell them what to do. That way the Prime Minister could practise his new job without the burden of actually having to make any real decisions. They gave us the cow but kept hold of the tether.
The second time, though, it was for real. Janneh told me he had written a paper about the ways our constitution needed to be changed; it had been published in a newspaper. The motorbike belonged to the People’s Progress Party. Janneh travelled with a cardboard box of fliers and posters strapped to the pillion seat. The posters bore a picture of the PPP’s candidate, a man with a parting cut like a railway track into his hair and small, pursed lips. A week after I met Janneh, I stopped to look at one of the posters on a pillar box at the post office.
‘Mouth like a goat’s anus,’ said the man behind me to the albino boy shining his shoes. ‘Doesn’t stand a chance. Tell me why they even bother coming to stand here, eh?’
The albino was silent. He flexed the shoeshine cloth and pulled it back and forward across the toe of the man’s right foot. When he spoke his voice was high and light as the sound of a bamboo flute: ‘They say they have candidates all over the country. Every constituency. One people. One country.’
‘Parah!’ replied the first man. ‘Let them take this one back to where he came from. Give us our own sons first.’
The wind whipped our faces like a damp cloth, we flew through clouds of dust. At the sides of roads upon which no other vehicle travelled, we stopped to picnic. From high on an escarpment we watched a tornado spin across the plain below, watched people trying to outrun the gathering storm as it rumbled across the landscape, bearing down upon them like a snorting bull. Behind it the sky shone blue. And on the horizon a rainbow arced across the sky. On our way back down the dirt track crumbled