The Butterfly Heart (5 page)

Fred lives next door to us. Apart from him, his family is not your average next-door type – you know, the kind who chat to you over the fence as they water their baby avocado trees, or who warn you about the puff adder in their garden that recently gave birth. (Given that puff adders can have eighty or more young ones and the babies come straight out of the mother ready for action, a warning would be neighbourly.)

Fred’s mother is called Sarah. She is from somewhere in England, I’m not sure where. She is very small and so shy that I have never once heard her speak. For all I know, she could have a big, deep voice inside her little body. Or no voice at all. Madillo and I sometimes try to get her to speak to us over the fence by waving, giving her frights or asking her how she is. But we’ve heard no sound yet: she just smiles at us. She has a nice smile. She is always in the garden, working away, and she wears a big straw hat, almost like a sombrero. We call her Fungi-san – not loud enough for her to hear – but she does look like a mushroom wandering around their garden, popping up silently in unexpected places. (In Japanese you add
san
onto a name to show respect.)

Fred’s dad, Meshack, is Zambian like our dad, but from a different part of the country. I would say he’s almost twice the size of his wife. In fact he is probably as wide as she is tall. He is more talkative than she is – not really hard, I suppose, to talk more than a silent person – and he always greets us. Because he’s so tall, he can spot us from anywhere in their garden and he shouts out, “Hey, twin. I can see you,” which can be a little unnerving, especially if you are at the top of the kapok tree. It is a very tall tree and very leafy. And I know that all trees have leaves, but this one seems to have more than most. If you wore green, there’s no way anyone could see you. Anyone but Fred’s dad, that is.

One day we were sitting right in the middle of the tree and Madillo said to me, “I bet you fifty kwacha that Meshack ‘extraterrestrial perception’ Mwamba will see us here. Watch him: he’ll stand in the middle of the garden with his eyes closed and still he’ll see us.”

I took the bet because Madillo always thinks that people have undisclosed powers. Unlike me, she doesn’t rate evidence very highly. What’s more, I have explained to her many times that there is no such thing as extraterrestrial perception – it is extra
sensory
(if it even exists) – but she won’t listen. And as Meshack always wears sunglasses, we wouldn’t be able to see whether his eyes were open or closed. As it happened, we had hardly shaken hands on the bet when we heard him: “Hey, twins, get out of that big tree, there could be a green mamba waiting for you.” Then he laughed. It was almost as if he had heard us talking about him.

We came down, and I lost fifty kwacha.

Between them, Meshack and Sarah have two children: Fred and Joseph. Both of them are boys, although Madillo thinks the youngest one, Joseph, is a hermaphrodite. She only thinks that because of an article she read in the
New Scientist
and because she likes the notion of hermaphrodites. As you may have guessed, I have explained to her that there is no such thing as a human hermaphrodite. Chimera, yes; hermaphrodite, no. If Joseph (Fred’s eight-year-old brother) was a worm, then she may have a point. But he isn’t.

Fred is where this all started. He’s the best person in the whole of Zambia – in fact, maybe in the whole of Africa. Madillo’s theory on this is that he is actually not Meshack and Sarah’s child. She didn’t go so far as to say he was a changeling, just that there could have been a mix-up in the hospital. It does happen, I know. And I kind of like the theory because he is so different from the whole lot of them. But it’s hard to get over the fact that Fred looks like someone who came out of a shake-up of his mum and his dad.

Then there is his great-granny, who I’ve mentioned already. Fred says that she lives with them because if she had stayed in the village, being a famous witch and all that, the other villagers might have killed her. Well, what he actually said was, “They would have torn her limb from limb and thrown her body to the lions.” I don’t know how he came up with that, but any time I see her, a ghastly image of her being torn limb from limb comes into my head. The thought of having a witch as our neighbour thrills Madillo, and if she ever sees her in the garden she lowers her head – “Respect for the witch,” she says. To me she is just a funny, very old lady.

When Fred came over this afternoon, we went down to our spot at the bottom of the garden. I had told Madillo it was only fair that I got to tell him the story, as it’s me Winifred sits next to – and anyway, I was the one who first noticed that something was wrong. My main reason for insisting on this was so I could get the right version through to Fred.

When I had finished telling him, he just sat there looking puzzled. When Fred looks puzzled, his whole face screws up.

“I thought you were going to tell me something exciting… This is nothing. Nothing has happened except that Winifred doesn’t put her hand up any more and she looks down at the ground when you speak to her.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s just that she’s changed, and so quickly that we think something is very wrong. She doesn’t even smile any more. There has to be something wrong with that, doesn’t there?”

Enter Madillo. “There does, and I think I know what it is. One of the things we’re thinking is that her body has been taken over by an evil spirit.”

We?

Fred’s eyes slowly started to open. “Ah,” he said, as if suddenly my boring story had become an interesting one.

Give Madillo an audience and there’s no stopping her. “Yes – she shows all the signs of it. Yesterday I saw her sitting at her desk and her head began to loll to one side. I didn’t see her face, but it was probably contorted—”

“Madillo! Don’t lie,” I protested.

“Calm down, Bul-Boo.”

Madillo knows there is nothing I hate more in the world than to be told to calm down. “You weren’t in the classroom at the time so you don’t know.”

She turned back to Fred. “I have sometimes seen Winifred walking and it looks like she has some kind of limp: she drags her left leg slightly, as if something is pulling on it. I was wondering if we should speak to your great-granny about it. Does she have exorcist powers? Because I’m not sure that all witches do.”

Before Fred could answer, I stood up, tired of listening to all this. “Do I need to remind you that this is one of our best friends you’re talking about? I wish I’d not told either of you. Winifred is upset about something and all you care about is proving some crazy evil-spirit thing. I don’t want you to speak to anyone about it. I’m going to find out what’s wrong and then decide what to do. You can help then if you want to. You should care about her, Fred, as she has half your name.” (Stupid thing to say, I know, but I was mad.)

Fred laughed. “You get so cross, Boo. You should do what my mum does: breathe in deep, then hold your breath, then breathe out. I’m sorry, anyway. I’ll listen now.”

I tried hard to imagine Fred’s silent mum breathing in deeply. I could almost imagine that, but not her getting angry in the first place. What would she do? Stare angrily at the person? Have a big, silent tantrum? Then breathe deeply?

“I won’t get angry if we can have a proper conversation that doesn’t involve non-existent things. And her head did
not
loll, Madillo – that’s just you.” I found it hard to stay cross with either of them, so the fight didn’t last long. But it did make them stop with the possession talk.

At the end of it all we decided that I should try and speak to Winifred again the next day, and the next, and even the next, until she eventually answered my question. If that didn’t work then we’d make another plan.

After that discussion I wrote a small but very useful observation in my notebook:
When Madillo lies, she talks a little louder and scratches the back of her neck. If she thinks you really, really know she is lying, she will eventually just stop arguing about it.

This
is what I wrote in my notebook today:
There are some things that are so awful you wish you had not heard them. Ever. What Winifred told me today is one of those things.

I was not prepared in any which way for what Winifred told me. And she could see that when she said the words. I did not know what to say or where to look. That made it worse for her, I know that, but I couldn’t help myself. It is too awful. I don’t know what I was prepared for, but I think even the evil-spirit explanation might have been easier to accept.

It was my third day of trying to get her to talk to me. I think she just gave in because I kept pestering her and following her around. Eventually she turned to me and I could see she was crying. Big, slow tears were running from her eyes. “Bul-Boo,” she said, “I will tell you. But there’s nothing we can do about it.”

She turned away and I followed her. She walked towards the corner of the playground. No one else was there. Then she crouched on the ground and began to speak, keeping her voice low and quiet. I had to crouch next to her to make sure I heard properly.

“My father died – you know that, Bul-Boo – he died last year. My father loved me,” she added, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt. “Nothing has ever been the same since then, and each day it gets worse. It is my uncle’s fault. My uncle, who forced my mother… It’s tradition, she tells me: the brother takes what has been left behind… But it’s not tradition for him to carry on staying after that first night.”

It was difficult to follow what she was saying, but I didn’t want to interrupt.

“My uncle says that now his brother – my father – is dead, he’s my mother’s husband. So he came to her on the night of the burial and has never left. But I don’t think she loves him, Bul-Boo; she’s scared of him. And he drinks all the time.”

Winifred looked at me as if I should say something, but I couldn’t. My mind was too full.

“Last month my mother said to me that now I’m becoming a woman, it is time to start thinking about marriage.”

“What?”
I said disbelievingly. “Marriage? You?”

She hung her head low, unable to look at me, and I immediately regretted my words. Her voice came out in a whisper. “Yes, Bul-Boo… Now, very soon. I heard my mother telling my uncle that it isn’t right: we’re in the town now, we have left all that behind. But he said no, we will never leave it behind. The way of the village. It is him making all this happen, he’s forcing my mother. She repeats his words to me but her eyes show me she doesn’t believe them. She looks like someone who’s lying.”

I didn’t reply. I couldn’t.

“The other day,” Winifred continued, “my uncle’s friend came to the house – the old man with the large stomach who I’ve told you about before. He goes to the tavern with my uncle and they drink together. I always hide away when they come back. This day he walked straight into the room where I was and looked at me. He rubbed his hands together slowly, like this, and he said, ‘Soon you will be coming with me.’ I ran out of the room, Bul-Boo, to my mother in the kitchen—”

She stopped suddenly as the bell rang and stood up. “We must go now. I’ll talk to you later.” Then she turned and left.

I watched Winifred go. She’s like me, not even tall for her age. Maybe she was confused; had it all wrong. It could be that she only
thought
that’s what he’d said. Maybe her mother was just giving her “the talk” that we all dreaded.

Mum tried that with us but it didn’t work. One day she said, “Girls,” (she only says that when she is about to tell us something we don’t want to hear) “there are a few things we should really talk about.” I didn’t even have to answer, because Madillo just looked at her and said, “Not today, Mum. Not even tomorrow or the next day. If it’s what I think it is. We know everything already.”

That was definitely an exaggeration but I think Mum didn’t really know what to say to it, so she let it pass. (She doesn’t usually give up too easily, so she’ll be back.) Maybe that’s what Winifred’s mother was trying to talk to her about and Winifred didn’t hear her properly.

I walked slowly back to class through the playground, not knowing how to face Winifred after what she had told me. This was much, much worse than I’d thought. This wasn’t just Winifred being a bit upset. I would talk to her again on the way back from school.

She didn’t say anything to me during class, or to anyone. Sister didn’t even try to ask her a question, it was as if she had given up on her. After school I waited while she packed her bag. She always takes longer than anyone else because she is so tidy.

“Is this all true, Winifred?” I said.

She stopped packing her books for a minute and looked at me. “It’s true. I’m promised to that old man. I’m going to be his wife and live with him in his house – his mother’s house – far from here, out of town somewhere. My uncle will have his way: I’ll be gone from his house. And no more school.” I saw her hands were shaking.

“Winifred, we have to stop this. It can’t happen. We’ll do something.”