Pieces of Light Page 5

  ‘A galago,’ my father said, who spent as many hours as I did studying his animal books.

  ‘Galago senegalensis,’ I added.

  My mother giggled. The fact is, I had always wanted to see one. It was tiny, with huge eyes and hands like a very old man’s. There was another one, even tinier, clinging to its back. The bigger one was dead. It was the mother. The hunters had shot at it with their sharp little arrows. It had fallen, but the baby was living. This they regarded as a special event, and wished to take the baby back with them, to have its tiny head for the top of a fetish stick. I gripped my mother’s arm and pleaded with her not to let them do this.

  ‘I’ll look after it. Please give them dash!’

  There was a lot of bargaining, but the hunters wouldn’t budge. The tiny creature’s huge eyes met my own eyes and I felt that if I did not save it I would die as well. My father started to lead me back to the motorcycles, his arm on my shoulders. I broke away and ran back to the hunters, unstrapped my pack, and found the fetish packet.

  The skull amulet was in my hand before my parents could take me away again.

  Quiri muttered fiercely, ‘No, small-small. Hugh-boy, no!’

  The hunters looked at his face and then nodded at me and we swapped the bushbaby for the amulet. Quiri shook his head, frowning. Then he walked away, back to the cycles.

  ‘Hugh,’ said my mother, ‘that was a pretty carving. Quiri will be upset. It probably cost a lot of his savings.’

  The tiny creature lay in my palm, clutching my thumb. It wanted the fur and smell of its mother. Its miniature body trembled. The gods had made the eyes first, then forgotten about the body. When they remembered, the flesh had grown old and shrunk, like an old rind. But they used it anyway. That’s why the eyes looked so young and gleaming and big, while the rest was so small and shrivelled and old. All it needed was milk, my mother informed me. We said goodbye to the hunters and found some milk in the food box. We punctured the tin and poured a little into my palm. The bushbaby wouldn’t touch it, but trembled and clutched my thumb even tighter with its long fingers. I began to be worried about it.

  ‘It’s extraordinary,’ said my father. ‘Like a tiny homunculus, not like an animal at all.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Quiri,’ I said.

  Quiri couldn’t say what he really wanted to say, not in front of my parents, but his eyes told me clearly that I had done a dangerous thing, to cast away something so powerful on strangers. He was far more worried than hurt. So we were both worried.

  We reached the lake as twilight was spreading across it. It filled the crater to just short of the brim. The brim was hidden by a great thickness of forest. My father knew that the side where a small sandy beach had grown was free of bilharzia, but not the other side. We weren’t to swim beyond the centre. The path ended on the beach, and we propped our motorcycles up and collected kindling. I sat by the fire and stroked my tiny friend. (I knew it was a he, though my father wasn’t sure.) He looked about him with terrified eyes. The lake was mysterious, dark, and beautiful, and I showed it to him. It appeared all tiny in the two liquid globes of his eyes.

  My father was already swimming, setting out with strong strokes in his striped bathing suit. The light caught only his ripples, slowly widening in golden circles over the dark surface of the water. The forest rose straight from the lake all about, but there was nothing beyond the topmost tree but the evening sky, in which the first stars and the first fireflies were fighting each other. The moon had not yet risen. We were at the top of the world, it seemed. The lake was perfectly circular, but not at all like the pond in the Botanical Gardens in Victoria, or the little boating lake in Buea. My father had explained to me, on the path up, how the volcano had spat out fire and ash and roared and thundered long long before, before I was born, in the time of the dinosaurs, when Africa had been part of the Americas, and nothing even resembling a homunculus was walking the earth. Then it had died, the volcano, and slowly the rain, the incessant thundering rain, had filled its blasted hole inch by inch, and the forest had crawled back up and over its laval rim, until this perfect, lovely scene presented itself for our delectation and enjoyment. I nodded. My father didn’t often explain things in such an excited way. He was proud of this spot, I think: he said he was the first white man ever to have seen it, and that it was the jewel in his big tangled mop, which was bigger than Wales. He christened it, that night, Charlotte’s Lake.

  Quiri paddled, and my mother bathed in the shallows, but I (like Quiri) could not swim, and I had my tiny homunculus to look after. The three of them made the lake dance with golden and blue light, but my monkey friend could only mourn his mother. I couldn’t do anything to comfort it: all its short life had been spent in a place of leaves, fur smells, and safety. I imagined its home as a hole in the tree’s trunk, grassed and comfortable, where it would curl with its mother and suckle. I talked softly above the splashes and shouts of the bathers. They were laughing together: Quiri was settled to his neck, splashing my mother, who squealed and splashed him back. My father was further out, kicking the water to a froth, and singing a silly ditty. Their voices echoed back off the crater’s brim, or lost themselves among the stars that thickened each time I looked up. I talked to my little forest child, offering a round pool of milk in my palm, or stroking its shivering back with the tip of my giant finger. It clutched my thumb so tightly I could draw its hands down to the milk; there was a moment when its tongue came out, and then it was drinking.

  I would have shouted out the news, if I had dared. But any movement, any sudden noise, made the little creature frown and look anxious. I wondered how anything so delicate could survive in this world, and then how anything so delicate and lovely could be made from forest and water and sky, which were such broad and deep and dangerous things. Did it have its own spirits, its own fetishes, its own holy wafers, its own prayers? Did Sir Steggie want to drag it off into the night? I thought of the hunters, but felt against them no real anger. This was because I had my own bamboo bow and arrows at home. I had already shot at cockroaches, spiders, rats, mice, and the plump frogs in the shallows of the river, pretending they were lions or rhinos or crocodiles or the Big Beef of legend that made the waves slap at the jetty and at the hulls of the canoes as it passed.

  The little galago had its hand on its mouth, its eyes wide above the long fingers, searching for something it might recognise. This is how Mosea was, I thought, after the missionaries had taken her in. This is how I might feel, if cannibals or a crazed leopard or a mad gorilla or some drunken ivory traders were to set upon us all, or if Sir Steggie were to drag me out from under my net one night, and I were to find myself quite alone in a world I didn’t know, still alive but in a living death of loneliness and fright.

  I looked out at the lake: it was darker now, quite inky-blue, the colour of my father’s ink with which he wrote his letters. The three I prayed for most each night were calm, enjoying the coolness of the water in the warm air. The stars were growing thicker, the last flush of sun quite green above the brim beyond my father’s pale form, as if the forest was leaking into the heavens. Perhaps the lake, in its depths, harboured a Big Beef, or crocodiles in the shallows, hidden in the darkness. We would have heard those by now, surely, coughing and roaring. My father had told me that there weren’t even fish in the lake: only waterborne insects, bilharzia snails by the far bank, some amphibious lizards, and a crowd of frogs with bright red cheeks. In the sand there were no tracks, except our own: I wondered why not, why no animals came to drink here. The galago was lapping at the milk again, one hand clutching a fold in my skin. Its body tickled my palm, as my mother’s finger used to tickle it when she went round and round the castle long ago. I kissed my new pet’s head. No ticks or fleas could live on such a tiny thing.

  ‘I’ll look after you for ever and ever,’ I murmured.

  That night we stayed up late, gazing into the fire, with the moon turning the water to milk where it lapped out of the brim’s shado
w. I thought of the gourd bowl left in each of the huts we’d stayed in, and its cool drink. Quiri had told me that in the beginning there was nothing but a round gourd. It filled the universe. Everything was held by it: all time and space. The bottom half of the gourd became earth and fire, the top became the sky and water. When the water trickled down the sides of the gourd to the earth, fire burst out, lightning crackled, and all living things grew. Our ancestors smiled in the light of their fires.

  The crater lake was the bottom half of the gourd. All things had started here, obviously. Quiri sang soft songs he knew from his village. He called them thinking songs. He also sang a few hymns. My mother sang some jazz songs that I already knew from our wind-up gramophone, jigging about as she did so; my father made us laugh with his music-hall ditties, and made my mother cry with his songs from the war. My little bushbaby looked about him for a while, then fell asleep against my chest, against my heartbeat.

  Far out on the lake’s water, I thought I saw tiny white splashes, as if someone was lifting a handkerchief to wave goodbye, over and over.

  When I woke in the morning, with the sun just winking over the brim, I found myself in the camp bed, under the net. The bushbaby lay on my chest, under my hand. I smiled and stroked it. But its fur didn’t quiver any more. Its body was cold. Its eyes had dried up. It had somehow trembled and shivered its tiny heart to pieces while I was dreaming.

  I’d dreamed that I was swimming without any problem across the wide waters. The starlight and fireflies were scattered around me like grain for the hens, and there was nothing under my body but a big gloom, and silence.

  My mother played the station’s gramophone records on Hargreaves’s machine – which had Northcott’s initials carved on the side. She had some of her own records, too: hissy jazz tunes that made her jerk about instead of taking an afternoon nap. She would always play them on her own, in the main room, with the shutters closed. When I got up once and peeped on her through the door, she was quite cross. In the villages, everyone danced together, in a line. When I told her I wanted to learn her dances, she said they were ‘private’. On my sixth birthday, however, she taught me the ‘Shimmy’, the ‘Missouri Walk’ and the ‘Twinkle’ as a present. We would then, every so often after supper, dance together as the warped records bumped and shouted. She called it our ‘revel’, and it left her looking as if she had stood out in a rainstorm.

  Oddly enough, it was those jazz tunes that echoed in my head for months after my arrival in England, rather than the forest noises they somewhat resembled.

  Did my mother tell me, clearly, what was to happen?

  Two months before my seventh birthday, my mind still ringing with the pleasure of the trip to the crater lake, I found my mother ‘sorting out’ my room. She had two large trunks, and was filling them with my clothes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  She looked up. ‘You know we’re going to England, Hugh.’

  I did know, but the trip existed beyond the wall I had put up between the fact of being six and the fact of being seven. I had never trusted it. I thought it was a yarn spun to hide the awful truth. The gods wanted me, as they wanted all children – only to return them with a different name, and the marks on the cheeks smoothed off. They wanted me just as one of them – the Father, the Chief – had wanted Jesus back. My parents were powerless against the demands of the gods, as a person is powerless against the daimon that possesses him, and makes his face white with spittle (I had seen this in one of the villages, on our trip, during a ritual dance), until someone hits him with a palm branch.

  My big mistake was to have given the skull carving away: Quiri told me that it could suck in evil, that it could be held against bad situations to come as a hen’s cut throat is held against a snake-bite, absorbing the poison. He had discovered (I think through Mosea) that I was to leave the station before my health was broken further. He had told this to the mask carver – an old and very powerful man – and the mask carver had made that fetish after a day and a night’s reflection, in semi-trance. My mother was right: it had cost Quiri quite a bit of his savings. The fetish was not only to protect me from further malarial attacks, but also to prevent the bad situation from taking place.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ I asked, when I had found my mother packing my clothes.

  Quiri shrugged. It seemed I only had to carry it about, for the mask carver had told it what to do, holding it against his lips and murmuring.

  I wondered about finding the hunters again, but it was at least four days’ travel by motorcycle along complicated paths, once the ‘road’ was left. I had secretly brought the bushbaby’s tiny corpse back with me, and buried it under a brick near where my mother was trying to grow some pretty shrubs against the house. I asked Quiri if the bushbaby’s spirit might have entered my heart, against which the animal had died. Quiri nodded.

  ‘Possible,’ he said, in his own language. ‘Now you can think on the animal, and make yourself a home for its spirit, to put in your pocket. Then it won’t get angry inside your heart, and tear it, for taking away its mother.’

  I did as he suggested: I sat by the river with a lump of red, rather smelly mud and squeezed most of its moisture out. Then I fashioned what was in my head. It was perfect clay – the natives used it for their pots and platters – and it moved easily under my fingers. I pinched out a nose and a great mouth, and jabbed in some eyes with my thumb. It looked more and more ferocious. A tongue came out; it was rude. Its mouth was wide open, drawn right back to meet the ears. I laughed, and imitated what was staring at me from my hands. If a crocodile had emerged at that moment, I might have frightened it off.

  I left the head to dry, in the shade of the house. It was too big for my pocket.

  ‘That’s an ugly thing,’ said my mother, when she saw it.

  ‘It’s screaming,’ I said.

  Quiri said that it wasn’t enough.

  The next day, he beckoned me into the chop-shed. He had some white paste in a gourd, and he made me strip off my shirt and marked my skin in thick lines of white with the heel of his hand. He laughed: one could hardly see it against my white flesh. On a grieving family in one of the villages, it had looked as if their bones were showing on their skin. Still, it would make my sorrow bearable, he said. Then he brought out a sharp knife and some ash from the stove in a tin and made me bend my head over.

  There was a crackling noise on the nape of my neck, and small hairs sprinkled on to my shoes. I felt a sharp, cold pain, and flinched.

  ‘Stay still,’ Quiri ordered.

  Blood dripped down my neck and hit the soft earth floor of the chop-shed. I knew what he was doing. I was happy with it, but I started to cry, silently; this must have been the kaolin paste bringing out my grief. I felt the ash being rubbed in as one feels an ointment being applied; it stung, and I had to bite my lip. My chief worry was my parents: but Quiri hid the wound with my hair, which was rather urchin-like at the time.

  Because I couldn’t see it, even in the mirror, he drew it for me: it was a cross in a circle, the four points meeting the rim. He explained that this was the symbol of Yolobolo, the powerful creature in the forest that no one had ever seen, but was very like the little man-thing I had found.

  Part of Yolobolo’s power was that he held a great secret. One day, Yolobolo might tell it to me.

  The dull ache of the cut mark kept me awake through siesta time, and my mother wondered why I had a stiff neck. But I shied away from her nurse’s enquiring hand. In any case, they couldn’t do anything about it, now: even if they washed out the ash (I had to avoid any rain, Quiri said) there would be something, however faint, left.

  That night, I insisted on washing myself; my mother took it as a healthy sign of maturity. I closed the bathroom door and stripped off. The kaolin stripes had rubbed mostly away from contact with sweaty clothes. I made splashing noises with my hand in the tin hip bath, washed my feet, and donned my nightshirt without touching the kaolin
marks or the wound. My neck throbbed. The ash seemed to be burning into my throat and ears. I knew all about the dangers of infection. I had broken one of the Do Nots – although ash was, I seemed to remember my mother telling her patients, as good as boric acid.

  But, whatever might occur to me after my seventh birthday, I was now prepared.

  I didn’t refer to the coming trip, as a result. Anyway, my mother became cloudy and anxious in the fortnight before my seventh birthday. I slept in an oddly bare room; she had started packing too early. The rains also started too early, in the second week of April. A storm cracked the sky and the resultant downpour continued for three days. My father reckoned that it would beat a fellow to the ground, if he didn’t keep running.

  Gloom settled in the rooms, barely lifting from morning till night. Ironshod horses cantered over the roofs, and the evenings were thick with flies and mosquitoes, apparently sheltering. The river swelled and tugged at the lower branches. A huge tree came down on the opposite bank. It was eventually swept away along with the thick detritus of leaves and logs and putrid matter pulled from up-river. I looked out for jewels; either there were none, or the view was too blurred and mist-laden to see them. The distinction between air and rain was lost, as was the distinction between water and ground in the compound.