Dancing Towards the Blade and Other Stories (2 page)

Vincent blinked and saw his brother’s face, the skin taken off his cheek and one eye swollen shut. He saw his mother’s face as she stood at the window all the next afternoon, staring out across the dual carriageway towards the lorry park and the floodlights beyond. He saw her face when she turned finally, and spoke.

‘We’re moving,’ she’d said.

One more blink and he saw the resignation that had returned to her face after a day doing the maths; scanning newspapers, and estate agents’ details from Greenwich and Blackheath. As the idea of moving
anywhere
was quickly forgotten.

‘I’ve already told you,’ the boy with the bottle said. ‘If you’re so desperate, just go round.’

Vincent saw the face of his father then. As it had been that day when his brother had come home bleeding, and then, as he imagined it to have been twenty-five years before. In a country Vincent had only ever seen pictures of.

The boy sat at the back of the house, beneath the striped awning that his father had put above his bedroom window. Rose rubbed ointment on to his blisters. They stared across the valley at the sun dropping down behind the mountain, the slopes cobalt blue beneath a darkening sky.

He knew that they should not have been sitting together, that his uncles would not have approved. Contact with young women was frowned upon in the week leading up to the ritual. He would regret it, his uncles would have said, in the days afterwards, in the healing time after the ceremony. ‘Talk to young women,’ Joseph had told him, ‘let them smile at you now, and shake their hips, and you will
pay
.’

He didn’t care. He had known Rose since before he could walk and besides, Joseph, Francis and the others would be insensible by now. They had sat down around the pot as soon as they had finished eating supper. Talking about the day, filling in the elders on how ‘the boy’ was doing, and getting slowly drunker. Sucking up powerful mouthfuls of home-brew from the pot through long, bamboo straws.

The boy had watched them for a while, no longer jealous, as he would have been before. Once it was all over, he would have earned the right to sit down and join them.

‘Fine, but not yet you haven’t,’ Rose had said when he’d mentioned it to her.

It had been a hard day and the boy was utterly exhausted. He reckoned they had danced twenty miles or more, visited a dozen villages, and he had sung his heart and his throat out every step of the way. He was proud of his song, had been since he’d written it months before. Even Rose had been forced to concede that it was pretty good. He’d practiced it every day, knowing there was prestige and status attached to the best song, the best performance. He’d given that performance a hundred times in the last week and now his voice was as ragged as the soles of his feet.

It had been a successful day too. Uncle Philip had not announced the final tally, but it had certainly been a decent haul. Relatives close and distant in each homestead had come forward dutifully with gifts: earthenware dishes piled high with cash; chickens or a goat from cousins; cattle from those of real importance. Philip had made a careful note of who’d given what, in the book that was carried with them as they criss-crossed the district, each village ready to welcome them, each able to hear them coming from a mile or more away.

Everyone had been more than generous. By sundown the following day, the boy would be a rich man.

‘Are you scared?’ Rose asked.

He winced as she dropped his foot to the floor. ‘No,’ he said.

The boy wasn’t sure why he lied. Being frightened was fine, it was
showing
the fear that was unacceptable, that would cost you. He remembered the things that had scared him the most that day, scared him far more than what was to come the following afternoon. He had been sitting with the elders in the village where his father had been born. Squatting in the shade, stuffed full of roasted goat and green bananas, with barely the energy to nod as each piece of advice was given, each simple lesson handed out.

‘You will not fear death.’

‘You will defend your village against thieves.’

Then he’d been handed the baby.

‘There are times when your wife will be sick, and you must look after yourself and your children.’

‘You will learn to cook.’

‘You will learn to keep a fire burning all day.’

They roared as the baby began to piss on his lap, told him it was good luck. They were still laughing as the boy danced his way out of the village. All he could think about, as he began his song again, was how being unafraid of death and of thieves sounded easy compared with taking care of children.

He thought about telling Rose this, but instead told her about what had happened in the first village they’d visited that day. Something funny and shocking. A distant cousin of his father’s had been discovered hiding in the fields on the outskirts of the village. Trying to dodge the handover of a gift was a serious matter and not only had the offering been taken from him by force, but he had brought shame upon himself and the rest of his family.

‘Can you believe it?’ the boy said. ‘That man was Grade A! Cowering in the tall grass like a woman, to avoid handing over a bowl. A
bowl
for heaven’s sake.’

Rose pushed her shoulder against his. ‘So, you think
you’re
going to be Grade A? Grade B maybe? What d’you think, boy?’

He shrugged. He knew what he was hoping for. All he could be certain about was that this was the last time anybody would call him ‘boy’.

The one with the bottle stood a foot or so forward from his two friends. He reached over his shoulder for the lit cigarette that he knew would be there, took three quick drags and handed it back. ‘What team do you support anyway?’

‘Fucking Man U, I bet.’

For a moment, Vincent thought about lying. Giving them their own team’s name. He knew that he’d be caught out in a second. ‘I don’t follow a team.’

‘Right. Not an
English
team.’

‘Not any team,’ Vincent said.

‘Some African team, yeah? Kicking a fucking coconut around.’

‘Bongo Bongo United FC!’

‘ “Kicking a coconut”, that’s classic.’

‘Headers must be a nightmare, yeah?’

The skinny one and the one with the shaved head began to laugh. They pursed their lips and stuck out their bum-fluffy chins. They pretended to scratch their armpits.

‘You know what FC stands for don’t you? Fucking coon.’

Vincent looked away from them. He heard the monkey noises begin softly, then start to get louder.

‘Look at him,’ the one in the cap said. ‘He’s shitting himself.’ He said something else after that, but Vincent didn’t hear it.

Dawn, at the river, on the final morning.

Dotted for a mile or more along the flat, brown riverbank were the other groups. Some were smaller than his own, while others must have numbered a hundred, but at the centre of each stood one of the boy’s age-mates. Each ready to connect with the past, to embrace the future. Each asking for the strength to endure what lay ahead of him.

The boy was called forward by an elder. As he took his first steps, he glanced sideways, saw his age-mates along the riverbank moving in a line together towards the water.

This was the preparation.

In the seconds he spent held beneath the water, he wondered whether a cry would be heard if he were to let one out. He imagined it rising up to the surface, the bubbles bursting in a series of tiny screams, each costing him grades.

He emerged from the river purified and ready to be painted with death.

The sun was just up but already fierce, and the white mud was baked hard within a minute or two of being smeared across his face and chest and belly. The mist was being burned away and looking along the bank, the boy saw a row of pale statues. A long line of ghosts in the buttery sunlight.

He watched an old man approach each figure, as one now approached him. The elder took a mouthful of beer from a pumpkin gourd and spat, spraying it across the boy’s chest. The beer ran in rivulets down the shell of dried mud, as prayers were said and his uncles stepped towards him.

The group that had been nearest to him jogged past, already finished, and he looked at his age-mate, caked in white mud as he was. The boy had known him, as he’d known most of them, for all of their sixteen years, but his friend was suddenly unrecognisable. It was not the mask of mud. It was the eyes that stared out from behind it. It was the eyes that were suddenly different.

The boy was nudged forward, was handed his knife, and the group began loping away in the same direction as his friend. Drumming again now, and singing, heading for the marketplace. All of them, all the ghost-boys, moving towards the moment when they would die and come back to life.

‘Shut up!’ Vincent shouted.

After a moment or two, the skinny one and the one with the shaved head stopped making their monkey noises, but only after a half-glance in their direction from the one in the cap.

‘Turn your pockets out,’ he said.

Vincent’s hands were pressed hard against his legs to keep them still. He slowly brought each of them up to his pockets, slipped them inside.

‘Maybe we’ll let you
pay
to go home. Let me see what you’ve got.’

Vincent’s left hand came out empty. His right emerged clutching the change from his train ticket. He opened his hand and the one in the cap leaned forward to take a look.

‘Fuck that, mate. Where’s the notes?’

Vincent shook his head. ‘This is all I’ve got.’

‘You’re a liar. Where’s your wallet?’

Vincent said nothing. He closed his hand around the coins and thrust his fist back into his trouser pocket.

The one in the cap took a step towards him. He was no more than a couple of feet away. ‘Don’t piss me about. I don’t like it, yeah?’

He could easily turn and go round…

‘Where’s his phone?’ the skinny one said.

‘Get his fucking phone, man. They always have wicked phones.’

The one in the cap held out his hand. ‘Let’s have it.’

It suddenly seemed to Vincent that the phone might be the way out of it, his way past them. Handing it over, giving them something and then trying to get past was probably a good idea.

The mobile was snatched from his grasp the second he’d produced it. The one in the cap turned and swaggered back towards his friends. They cheered as he held it up for them to look at.

The three gathered around to examine the booty and Vincent saw a gap open up between the far right bollard and the wall. He thought about making a run for it. If he could stay ahead of them for just a minute, half a minute maybe, he would be virtually home. He reckoned he could outrun the two bigger ones anyway. Perhaps his mother or father, one of his brothers might see him coming.

He took a tentative step forward.

The one in the cap wheeled round suddenly, clutching the phone. ‘Piece of cheap shit.’ His arm snapped back, then forward and Vincent watched the phone explode against the wall, shattering into pieces of multi-coloured plastic.

The crack of the phone against the bricks changed something.

By the time Vincent looked again the gap had been filled. The three stood square on to him, their bodies stiff with energy despite their efforts to appear relaxed.

The space between them all was suddenly charged.

Vincent had no idea how he looked to them, what his face said about how he felt at that moment. He looked at
their
faces and saw hatred and excitement and expectation. He also saw fear.

‘Last chance,’ the one in the cap said.

The boy was stunned by the size of the crowd, though it was nothing unusual. He could remember, when he’d been one of the onlookers himself as a child, thinking that there couldn’t possibly be this many people in the whole world. Today, as at the same moment every year, those that could not get a clear view were standing on tables and other makeshift platforms. They were perched on roofs and clustered together in the treetops.

He and his age-mates were paraded together, one final time, carried aloft like kings. His eyes locked for a few seconds with a friend as they passed each other.

Their Adam’s apples were like wild things in their throats.

While the boy moved on shoulders above the teeming mass of bodies, the dancing and the drumming grew more frenzied. Exhausted, he summoned the strength to sing one final time, while below him the basket was passed around and each relative given a last chance to hand over more money or pledge another gift.

Now, it was only the fizzing in the boy’s blood that was keeping him upright. There were moments – a sickening wave of exhaustion, a clouding of his vision as he reached for a high note – when he was sure he was about to pass out, to topple down and be lost or trampled to death. He was tempted to close his eyes and let it happen.

At the moment when the noise and the heat and the
passion
of the crowd was at its height, the boy suddenly found himself alone with Joseph and Francis at the edge of the marketplace. There was space around him as he was led along a track towards a row of undecorated huts.

‘Are you a woman?’ Joseph asked.

‘No,’ the boy said.

The boy wondered if thinking about his mother and father made him one. He knew that they would be waiting, huddled together among the coffee plants, listening for the signal that it was over. Did wishing that he was with them, even for the few moments it would take to shake his father’s hand and smell his mother’s neck, make him less than Grade A?

‘Are you a woman?’ Francis repeated.

‘No!’ the boy shouted.

His uncles stepped in front of him and pushed open a door to one of the peat latrines.

‘This will be your last chance,’ Joseph said.

The boy moved inside quickly, dropped his shorts and squatted above the hole formed by the square of logs. He looked up at the grass roof, then across at his uncles who had followed him inside. He knew that they had sworn to stay with him until the final moment, but honestly, what did they think he was going to do? Did they think he would try to kill himself by diving head first into the latrine?