Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [90]
Just outside the town we passed burning fields. The smoke blew straight through the open windows making my eyes smart, biting at the back of my throat, coating my tongue with a bitter taste. I thought of all that lay ahead of me. I had never been to the city on the coast. I cannot say I was afraid. No. The anger in the pit of my belly burned up all the fear. Whenever we hit a pothole, which was often, the bus bucked like a bull. The women around me squealed and covered their mouths with the backs of their hands. But I sat still, silent, thinking my own thoughts.
From time to time I gazed out of the window, saw the landscape shift from red to green, as trees and bushes grew up out of the earth. Great boulders sprang up. Once we passed a deserted quarry: black, silhouetted machines like giant insects. Ahead of us I could see hills, beyond which lay the city. Otherwise there was no traffic, just people carrying firewood, or making their way to the town. A line of ducks crossed the road in front of us, the driver braked suddenly to avoid bad luck. A man on the roof was nearly thrown off, his legs dangled next to the open window as his companions struggled to pull him back up. Oh, he was cursing and spitting. People called to him it was the ducks. Then he understood and began to laugh. Another time I might have laughed too.
The road was like a river, whose banks were lined with villages. At each stop buskers held their wares up to the windows of the bus: bananas, groundnuts boiled or roasted, jelly coconuts. I realised I was hungry already. ‘Half-half,’ I told the boy, who chose a coconut from the pile and sliced off the top with his machete, turning it into a scoop for me to use. I drank the milk, but the flesh was nothing more than a thin layer coating the inside of the shell. I paid the boy, subtracting half as a penalty. He fussed, but what could he do? The sound of the engine swallowed his protests and moments later we left him standing on the side of the road.
I kept my eyes fixed on the hills. But as the hours passed they only seemed to recede. Finally the bus began to wind uphill, the engine whining under the strain. The driver ordered all the cheap fare passengers off the roof and made them walk. At the brow of the first hill the rest of the passengers stood around, sucking oranges and spitting the pips into the long grass, waiting for them to catch up.
I crossed the road away from the others. Down below, here and there, single columns of smoke spiralled up above the trees. Beyond the forest I saw a river, grey and glittering, a viper winding across the plain. Further on and the viper transformed into the tree, whose branches reached upwards and outwards until they touched the sky and merged into it.
‘It’s so great even the birds cannot fly across it, or so they say. They drop out of the sky with exhaustion.’
It was the driver standing at my shoulder. He was gazing at the horizon.
‘What is?’ I asked. He looked at me, smiled and pointed at the sky, at the place where it turned from one kind of blue to another.
‘The sea,’ he replied. ‘Is this the first time you’re seeing it?’ I replied that it was. ‘Then you are very lucky to have done so,’ he said.
As we travelled across the tops of the hills, climbing and turning, I kept catching glimpses of it. Each time I turned my head, gazing at the view until it disappeared behind the next bend. I felt lightheaded, my heart lifted. For a moment I forgot my sorrows, the place I had come from. I had only one thought in my head. I had seen the sea.
When I was a little girl and I was unhappy, when my mother was angry with me or my brothers teased me, I used to hold my breath until I fainted. When