The Bite of the Mango (11 page)

No one spoke for a minute. Sparks from the fire rose into the air.

Marie broke the silence. “Don’t look back, Mariatu. If you look back, you will live your life with regrets and what-could-have-beens. Always look forward.”

My family, along with Victor and some members of the theater troupe, gathered to see me off the morning I left for England. I missed Mariatu. She had moved to the United States shortly after our performance at the soccer stadium.

“Don’t forget about us,” said Victor when it was his turn to say farewell.

“How could I ever forget you?” I protested. And it was true.
I knew I would never forget him or anyone in the theater troupe. Memunatu and the others sang a goodbye song, and I danced along with them.

Mohamed was the first to come forward from my family.

“Goodbye, Mariatu,” he said, embracing me with his big, bulging-muscle arms.

I tried really hard not to cry as Abibatu pushed a covered tin plate of rice and sauce into my arms. “For the ferry,” she said tearfully. “You might get hungry.”

“Come, Mariatu,” Marie said, picking up my suitcase. Marie is even tinier than I am, and seeing her lugging my big suitcase made me laugh.

“Help her,” I shouted to Ibrahim and Mohamed.

“Ah, Mariatu,” Ibrahim exclaimed with a smile as he and Mohamed each took a side of the suitcase and lifted it onto their heads. “I sure won’t miss you bossing us around!”

I giggled, pushing my body into his in an attempt to knock him down. I gave up and kissed the boys on their cheeks instead.

Everyone accompanied me to the taxi-minibus waiting on the street. Yabom was already inside.

When my suitcase was safely stored in the trunk of the bus, and I was sitting in the front seat beside the driver, I leaned out and waved. My family and friends were smiling up at me.

I kept smiling even though I was shaking inside. I felt a great weight land on my shoulders. “Will I ever see any of you again?” I thought as the minibus pulled away. “Can I ever live up to what you want from me?”

I blinked back my tears. As we continued along the dusty road, I remembered Marie’s words: “Always look forward.”

“Another rainy day,” I growled as I rolled out of bed, rubbing my eyes.

From the kitchen window, I peered at the choppy Thames River below. “There’s more rain in London than I ever saw during the rainy season in Sierra Leone,” I said to Yabom, who was sipping a cup of coffee. “Do we have to go out today?”

“We should try to do something,” Yabom replied. A piece of paper taped to the refrigerator listed all the places David had recommended we visit. “Maybe the Natural History Museum?”

We’d been in London two weeks, and it had rained every day. We weren’t scheduled to be at the hospital yet, so David suggested we settle in by exploring the city. Also on his list were the Houses of Parliament, which included a big clock called Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Madame Tussauds.

“What is Madame Tussauds?” I asked Yabom.

“David says it features lifelike mannequins of all our favorite celebrities.”

“What’s a celebrity?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” replied Yabom, shaking her head.

The two-bedroom apartment where we were living belonged to Mariama, the Sierra Leonean woman who had helped David organize my trip. Yabom turned on the television for me, and I sat cross-legged watching a band called ’N Sync perform. I didn’t understand a word they were singing, though, and I couldn’t get into the rhythm.

“This Western music doesn’t have a real beat to it,” I called out to Yabom, who was washing our breakfast dishes. “Where are the drummers?”

I turned off the television as Mariama had shown me and joined Yabom in the kitchen. “I don’t like this country,” I said. “It’s always gray. In Sierra Leone everything is colorful: the clothes people wear, the trees, and the flowers.”

“You’ll get used to London,” she replied. “It will take a while to see how things work in England, and to appreciate the different colors here.”

“Gray is hard to appreciate,” I laughed.

Everyone on the London streets walked quickly, never seeming to look at each other or say hello. They’d push past without even a nod. Whenever we left Mariama’s apartment, we had to put on strange boots called Wellingtons and uncomfortable rubber coats.

Yabom coaxed me into an outing, and I wrapped my arms tightly around myself as my teeth began to chatter. London was not only rainy but chilly. “Yabom,” I said, “can we go inside somewhere?”

“Let’s go for a ride on the bus,” she said.

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “Can we sit on the top?”

The first time I’d laid eyes on the red double-decker buses, I told Yabom we had to go for a ride. The poda-podas in Sierra Leone seat maybe 15 people, with another 10 bodies sitting on the floor and hanging off the sides and back. I couldn’t even count the number of people these buses held.

Mariama had moved to England before the war, and she was very active in London’s Sierra Leonean community, organizing dinners and assisting new immigrants to find housing and jobs. She’d helped raise the money for my medical treatment mostly from other Sierra Leoneans living in the city.

“We started to read about the amputees in the newspaper,” Mariama told me, “and we just had to do something.”

I had my own bedroom in Mariama’s apartment, something I’d never had back home. The room was dark, though, since the window faced out onto another gray apartment building, and I didn’t like sleeping alone. The room felt big and hollow with just me inside it. I was used to sleeping with someone on both sides of me. At night, I’d felt safe listening to their breathing. In my London bedroom, all I could hear in the dead of night was the hum of the refrigerator and the electric wires.

Since we’d arrived in England, I’d started to have bad dreams about the rebels. I dreamt that they were chasing me. I dreamt that I was walking along the clay dirt road to Port Loko all over again. A hawk was calling out to me, telling me danger was on the horizon. When I looked over into the tall elephant grasses, I could see the main rebel man. He raised his hand and ordered the boys to attack, and that’s when I saw their faces again. Their eyes were wild, their cheeks were all puffed out, and they were covered in blood—my blood. The boys yelled as
they rushed out of the bush toward me. Before I knew it, they were on top of me, swinging their machetes.

I’d wake up from these nightmares screaming. Yabom would come running from the bedroom she shared with Mariama next door, her hair sticking up, her nightdress rumpled. She’d get under the covers beside me and stroke my hair the way Fatmata and Abibatu had when I was in the hospital. I’d fall back asleep only to have more dreams.

“Maybe you’re having these dreams now,” Yabom told me one night, “because you feel far away and safe from the rebels now. Maybe emotional things are coming up for you, memories that you need to talk about.”

“I’ve never really talked about the attack,” I said to her. “The only people I spoke to were the doctors and the journalists. All of them were so busy writing things down that they barely looked at me. Half the time, I didn’t even know if they were listening.”

“Why don’t you tell me, then?” Yabom said softly, rolling onto her side. I liked the way she smelled, like Ivory soap, and her body felt so warm beside me. She held me as I let my life story unravel. I told her about Magborou, and about how I had come to live with Marie and Alie. I shared what I remembered about the rebels, and about the man I met in the bush who helped me find the road to Port Loko. I even told her about Salieu, and about the guilt I felt that Adamsay wasn’t the one chosen to leave.

“She deserves it more than me,” I sighed. “She’s such a good person, and I’m rotten. I killed Abdul.”

Yabom listened as few people had ever listened to me before. When I paused, she told me things about her own life. Yabom was married and wanted to have children of her own, but not until the war ended. “When it’s safe, so my son or daughter has a chance,” she said. “Do you still want children one day?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I always wanted four children, and I think I still do.”

“You know, Abdul didn’t die because of you,” she said gently. “Lots of babies die in Sierra Leone from diseases and malnutrition. You were just a baby, and babies aren’t supposed to be having babies. Besides, it sounds like Abdul had lots of love from Marie, Abibatu, Fatmata, and Mabinty. Just like you when you came to live with Marie and Alie. Did you ever think for a moment it was because your mother didn’t love you?”

“No,” I said. I had never thought of it that way.

I was scared, I confided to Yabom. “My family wants me to go to school and get a good job, but how can I do that with no hands? I want so much for them to be proud of me. I want so much for Alie, Marie, and the others to go back to Magborou and their old lives. They can’t even pay for transportation to move there. I want to do well and raise the money to help them return. I just don’t know how I am going to do that.”

Yabom propped herself up on her elbow. “You have so much riding on your shoulders,” she said. “If you get your new hands, and eventually an education, you can get a job one day. Then your family won’t have to worry about feeding you or looking after you. That’s all you need to think about now—becoming independent. Don’t worry about the others yet.”

“All right,” I said, although I didn’t feel any better about the subject. “I will try.”

The electric alarm clock on my dresser said it was nearly four in the morning. We’d talked almost all night. “Let’s go buy some flowers today, and then you can start learning your ABCs,” Yabom suggested. “We’ll brighten up your room and your spirits.”

With those words, both of us drifted off to sleep.

Yabom had said it would take a while to get used to London, and David said the same thing about the prosthetic hand device. He was with Yabom, Mariama, and me in the doctor’s office the first time I struggled to put it on. The contraption, made of thick leather strips and shiny silver metal, had to be strapped on like a backpack. The device was bulky and very, very heavy. I had to strain every muscle in my back and arms to get into it.

The device was only temporary, the adults tried to reassure me. My
real
fake hands, the reason I’d come to London, would take another few weeks to be made. I’d been fitted for them by having my arms placed in all sorts of plastic, gooey moulds. The new hands, I was told, would be smaller and lighter and made of plastic. Until then, I had to make do with this horrible metal device.

There was nothing I could do to make those metal hands go the way I wanted them to. Two or three times a week, the therapists at the hospital tried teaching me to pick up big plastic rings or fist-sized balls with the long, curving metal fingers. When the therapist with the straight blonde hair guided my arms, I could push a coin with the fingers from one side of a cardboard box to the other. But left on my own, I couldn’t get
them to go anywhere near the coin. Eventually, the weight of the fake hands would topple the box and I’d sigh with defeat and embarrassment.

“It’s all right,” the therapist always said in her British accent. But I could tell that even she was getting frustrated. Her creamy skin became splotchy as she tightened her fists, cheering me on like she said soccer fans do for their favorite players. I was sure the fans cheered even when they knew their favorite players weren’t going to score.

David and Mariama wanted me to wear the device every day to practice. My first job in the morning, after getting changed into a pair of Father Maurizio’s jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, was to put the device on by myself. I’d sit on the floor, set the device up on my bed, and slide into it that way. If it fell down, as it often did, I’d have to start all over. I tried placing it on a chair and then crawling backwards into it, but I knocked the chair over.

Yabom was sympathetic. She’d come into my room after Mariama had left for the day and help me. The first time I ate breakfast with the device on, I managed to skewer a piece of buttered toast on one of the long fingers. Yabom encouraged me to eat the toast right there and then, like meat on a stick, but I just scowled. This wasn’t how I wanted to feed myself. In fact, I had become quite proficient without the device, using a spoon or a fork attached to my forearms with Velcro. I could eat anything with these utensils, from rice to teensy-weensy peas. I didn’t need those fake fingers.

After the toast incident, I refused to eat breakfast. I’d come out of my bedroom with the contraption on my back and
salivate just looking at the cereal boxes, cartons of milk and cream, bananas, and bread. But I’d say I wasn’t hungry. I’d go back to my room and sit there moping until Yabom came and got me.

On our days off, Yabom and I explored the city. But now I hated walking in London even more. During my first weeks there, people had rushed past me; now they slowed their pace to stare at me and my metal hands. Mariama and Yabom had bought me a thick blue wool coat, two sizes too big to accommodate the metal device. My silver hands stuck out, and people would poke their faces out from under their umbrellas to see the spectacle: a tiny African girl in an oversized coat with a foot-long metal contraption poking out from each sleeve.

Before that, going to the flower shop around the corner had been my favorite pastime in London. I could spend hours smelling the pink, yellow, and red roses and white lilies and admiring the bouquets the shopkeeper made. I’d often buy gardenias with the money Mariama and David had given me for touristy things, arranging them in a glass vase on the dresser in my bedroom. Now, though, the nice saleslady with the red hair would follow me around the store in case I knocked a vase over. I had done that one day, shattering a bouquet of white roses.

As I had learned to do in Freetown while begging, I kept my eyes pointed down. But I still saw the glances from strangers. I still saw, too, the homeless people, dirty and disheveled, who used tin cans instead of black plastic shopping bags to collect donations from passersby. There was one young man who was always outside the entrance to the London Underground station near our apartment. He was maybe 20,
and his blond hair was dirty and matted. He wore a torn overcoat, a knitted brown hat, and ripped, stained jeans. His hands were covered in dirt and he had yellow fingers, likely from cigarette smoking, Yabom told me. Sometimes the man would just sit on the cold cement. Sometimes he played the guitar. Once I saw him playing an African drum. He wasn’t very good, not like the boys back home, whose drumming was fast and deep. But he tried.

I’d elbow Yabom as softly as I could with the contraption to indicate she should give him some money. She’d protest. “We can’t be tossing our money away.”

“Please, Yabom. This boy is like me back at the amputee camp,” I’d plead.

Yabom would drop a few coins into the boy’s guitar case. I would smile, trying to catch the boy’s attention. But he too had learned not to look up.

“Why are there young people in London who have to beg?” I asked Mariama and David one night over a dinner of rice and lamb. “I thought this was a rich country, where everyone drove around in Mercedes.”

“It’s true England is better off than Sierra Leone,” David responded. “But there are still poor people here. There are poor people everywhere in the world. In fact, more people are poor than rich.”

My heart sank. If I didn’t get an education soon and I remained in England, I would become a street person, having to beg like in Sierra Leone, but with one big difference: I’d be out in the cold and the rain.

Right after dinner that night, I asked Yabom to take the colored magnetic letters off the fridge. So far, I hadn’t tried very hard to learn the alphabet, because I hated pushing the letters around with my fake metal fingers. As David and Mariama cleared the table, I whispered for Yabom to bring the letters to my room. I asked her to help me take the contraption off. Then we sat cross-legged on the floor as I arranged the letters with my arms on the floor. It took me about an hour and a half, with several mistakes that Yabom had to correct, but I finally got the letters A to Z in the right order.

Yabom was very pleased. “Tomorrow we’ll start to spell some English words,” she said.