The Sleeping Baobab Tree (2 page)

“Bukoko shook her head. ‘No, Mama, I’m not coming down. I like it here. Up here nobody calls me a tick or laughs at me, they all think I’m just a perfect girl. I think this is where I’ll stay for ever.’

“And, just like that,
whoosh
, she disappeared. Never to be seen again.

“Her mother fell to the ground and writhed around in anguish. ‘Gone, gone for ever, my little girl.’

“As the mother lay there, clouds of dust rising all around her, she started to wonder how she would explain this to the rest of the village. She felt shame creep over her. How could she tell the others that her daughter had left her, of her own free will? That wouldn’t do at all.

“So what do you think she did, girls and boys?”

I spoke up. “She shouldn’t be worrying about how she was going to explain it – she should still be upset. How could she be thinking about anything else apart from her daughter stuck up on a cloud?” I said. “And anyway, nobody could sit on a cloud, because a cloud is just millions and billions of water droplets – it’s like saying she was sitting on a cloud of flour, which is impossible.”

“Well, I never said she was going to win Mother of the Year, did I, Bul-Boo?” Sister replied. “And, as I’ve said to you many times before, you can’t explain everything with science and droplets of water and flour. There are other things in this world that you and I can’t see. Magical things. I tell you now, Mrs Scientifically Proven, anything is possible if you just believe it.”

She then carried on as if I’d said nothing.

“The mother’s clever plan was to pretend that a two-legged hyena had come into the forest and bitten Bukoko’s head off so that all that was left of her was her small dead body. So she hurried home and wrapped some of her daughter’s clothes around a medium-sized rock and placed this rock in a wooden casket on a bed of grass. She then called all the neighbours and told them her sad tale. Through her tears she explained that they could view the body but the head was gone, into the belly of the hyena. The funeral was held and Bukoko the Rock was buried. There she lay, silently, until one day when the Archaeologists came and dug her up.”

Sister said “Archaeologists” as if it was a swear word. In her list of Evil People in the World, archaeologists are right up there near the top.

“So, from the stone in a grave they learnt the whole story?” I asked.

I already knew that trying to debate logically with Sister was futile. But today I couldn’t help it.

“On her deathbed the mother confessed to her wicked lie, Bul-Boo, as people do. Her words were repeated and the story was passed down through many centuries until it arrived here today. Now I am passing it on to you and you can pass it on to your children. One day perhaps they will go on a school trip to Ng’ombe Ilede and see the ghost of little Bukoko wandering around happily near the tree called the Sleeping Cow.”

The bell rang for break time and she clapped her hands. “Now, no more questions. Enough is enough.”

As we were getting up to go I saw Madillo grabbing her skirt pocket. She always forgets to switch off her phone. The problem with that is that even if it’s on silent Sister says she can hear a vibrating phone from a mile away. And she can. Luckily this time she didn’t because there was such a racket going on around her.

Madillo read her message once we were safely out of Sister’s sight. It was from Fred.

“I am having a DOOM day,” it said.

I knew straight away why he had sent this to Madillo instead of me. Even though recently Fred has grown taller and deeper-voiced and all that, he still thinks silly things. They never sound silly to Madillo though. She takes all this stuff seriously.

Fred is now convinced that he has gifts. Magical powers inherited from Nokokulu, his great-granny. “Nokokulu” doesn’t actually mean “great-granny”, it means “granny’, but everyone calls her that anyway. I’m not sure why. Even my family does, and she’s not related to us. Anyway, I don’t believe there are such things as magical powers and I certainly don’t believe Fred has them. One of his gifts, he says, is that he can see into the future – but only the bad future. So when he says DOOM we are all supposed to know that he has had one of his tragic prophecies. He never sees good things. In fact he doesn’t see anything in any detail – he gets this big gloom cloud that hangs over his head, and then he knows that sometime in the future something awful is going to befall him. Which is not much of a gift, in my opinion, because we all pretty much know that at some stage in our lives something awful might happen. Well, definitely
will
happen. All his gift is, as I’ve told him, is that sometimes he imagines the worst, then the worst comes true.

Madillo believes in his gifts and is very jealous of them. She has always wanted magical powers.

His text explained why he wasn’t at school today. When he has these doom-filled predictions he doesn’t even get out of bed in case he falls down the stairs and is left permanently brain-damaged.

I have to say I was feeling pretty doom laden myself. But for different reasons.

The
minute I woke up this morning I knew that everything was going to go wrong. Not just ever-so-slightly wrong but mind-bendingly, end-of-the-world kind of wrong.

How did I know this?

My curse of a gift.

Prediction. Premonition. Foretelling Doom.

To be precise, I can predict
when
things are going to go wrong. It’s a sixth or seventh or perhaps ninth sense. The only problem is, it is never
exact
. If it was, I could prevent anything bad ever happening around me. But somehow, when this gift was passed onto me from my wretched great-grandmother, one small bit was left out. The bit that gives the detail.

All I get is the general gloom.

Which is why, so far, I have spent quite a lot of my life in a state of peculiar, all-consuming dread. Predicting awfulness, that’s my speciality.

This gift, you see, never forewarns me that everything is going to go absolutely
right
: that all will be well in the world; that (one of) the girls next door will fall hopelessly in love with me, despite the fact that they only think of me as the boy next door; that my marks in school will miraculously improve or that my parents will transform into normal friendly human beings. No. I’m never forewarned of that. Instead I wake up, as I did this morning, with a large dark cloud hovering over me and a sinking feeling of Unstoppable Wrongness crowding my brain.

I lay there for a while, thinking that I must be mistaken. The sun was shining outside my window, the birds were squawking and the sky was blue. I pulled my sheet up over my eyes and waited. After a very long wait I threw back the sheet with my eyes still closed and jumped out of bed in one movement. When I opened my eyes, there I was with my head in the gloomy cloud. Yup, it was still there. If I was able to stand on my head for longer than a few seconds the cloud would shift position and gather round me on the floor. No escaping this one.

So, here I am. Fred, the boy next door.

There will never be a Fred Junior or Fred II or anything like that. The name Fred started with me and so shall it end. If I have to hear another person telling me all the words Fred rhymes with, I may just whack them. They’ll be the unlucky one among a thousand wisecracking jerks who have felt the need to tell me that Fred rhymes with bed, head and dead.

Hi, I’m Fred.

Oh, poor old Fred, he went to bed and woke up dead with a worm in his head.

It’s beside the point that if he woke up he wasn’t dead anyway.

My second name is Chiti. I won’t even talk about what that rhymes with. But it does mean that I was named after the greatest chief that ever lived in Zambia – Chief Chitimukulu, Chiti the Great. I think that was to make up for my first name. I am one hundred per cent certain there were no great chiefs called Fred. Even the two words together sound stupid. Chief Fred. I can’t imagine people bowing down before a name like that, unless they were trying to hide the fact that they were laughing.

What I do when I’m surrounded by impending doom clouds is try to imagine what the worst thing is that can happen. Today my imaginings were pretty standard:

I could be swallowed whole by a python after it had slowly and methodically crushed me.

I could be savaged by a pack of hyenas that had run out of things to scavenge.

Worse still, the ancient bone-crushing hyena, with a head bigger than a lion, could come back from extinction with a special mission to hunt me down.

Or I could accidentally sit on a scorpion and die an agonizing, paralysing death. One of those deaths where your tongue sticks out and your face goes purple.

Maybe the worst possibility is what could happen at school. Sister Leonisa is one of our teachers – for the second year in a row – and with her anything can happen.

I reckoned that apart from the scorpion and maybe the python I could avoid all of them by just staying home. The scorpion would be easily avoided by keeping my shoes on all day and never sitting down. The python – well, the python I’d just have to hope would be small enough for me to be able to grab the back of its neck with one hand and the end of its tail with the other. It’s been done before. Not by me, but by someone, I’m sure.

Sister Leonisa I would avoid by not going to school.

Now all I had to do was to persuade Mum and Dad that I had to stay home at all costs. Neither of them believed in my gift, so I would have to lie to them.

My two best friends, Bul-Boo and Madillo, live next door to me. They’re identical twins, but they’re not identical in their ways, only what they look like. The three of us have come up with four categories of lies. I think everyone should know them:

Necessary Lies.

Half Lies.

Kind Lies.

Wrong Lies.

The first three categories are allowed. It’s only the last one that you should avoid.

So, out of necessity (i.e. to avoid a tragic, painful death) I would have to pretend to be sick.

I’m pretty good at being sick on demand. When I try really hard I’m even able to make myself look pale and ghostly. So when Mum said to me, “Yes, sweetie, go back up to bed, you’re looking quite washed out,” I knew I’d succeeded, and I stumbled – in a diseased, pasty kind of way – back to bed.

To wait.

And imagine.

The
reason why today was not a good day for stories about death, or for anything much else for that matter, was the conversation I accidentally overheard last night.

I wasn’t really eavesdropping. I was sitting on the stairs writing in my little black notebook, the book I don’t share with Madillo and Fred, before going to bed. It was very hot in the bedroom and Madillo was humming an irritating tune, so I had decided to wait on the stairs till Mum came to say goodnight. It was then that I heard them.

“It’s happening again,” she said.

“What is, Lula?” Dad asked.

“Last week it was Thandiwe’s death notice in the paper. Today, Sonkwe’s family came to tell me he was dead too.” Her voice sounded ghost-like. “They wanted to know why. Sonkwe had told them that Doctor Lula was going to make sure he had a long life. Because that
is
what I had promised him.”

I remembered that voice from before, from the time when Mum’s patients were dying one after the other. I thought that had all been fixed. Mum talks to us a lot about her work, more than Dad does, so we know when things are going well. Since she has started receiving a steady supply of medicines, things have been good. She says that as long as she has a year’s supply in the clinic, she can keep ahead of herself and her patients will live.

She still worries. She worries about people who can’t get to the clinic, people who don’t know about the medicines they need, people who won’t get an AIDS test. But she doesn’t worry as much as she did then, because she says that things are improving all the time.

“If patients decide to stop taking their medication there’s nothing you can do,” Dad said gently. “It’s their decision.”

“No, you don’t get it,” she said. “Sonkwe and Thandiwe would never have done that. I know them. They could see that the medication was working. They wouldn’t just stop without talking to me. And don’t tell me it’s a coincidence,” she added, “that they both disappeared from the clinic three months ago.”

“They did? Stopped coming entirely?” Dad had already forgotten that he was supposed to be consoling her. “Why didn’t you follow it up?”

Dad doesn’t work in the same HIV/AIDS clinic as Mum any more. He works in an office and is in charge of several clinics. Sometimes I think he forgets that Mum is not his employee.

“I asked the nurses to do it,” she said quietly. “I should have done it myself and now it’s too late.”

“Sorry, Lula,” Dad said. “Of course I know you would have had someone follow up. But tell me, has anyone else stopped coming for their check-ups?”

It was a while before Mum answered. Finally she said, “I’ve looked back and there are eight others who stopped attending at almost exactly the same time. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed before.”

“There we are,” Dad said. “That’s not so bad. Only eight out of – how many? You have over a thousand regulars. Eight not showing up is not unusual. People move jobs. Family circumstances change. They could have been going to clinics in other areas.”

“You still don’t get it,” Mum said. “These are ten of our very first patients. That’s how I know them all. And Sonkwe’s family didn’t know he’d stopped attending the clinic, he never told them. Then I made contact with Thandiwe’s people and it’s the same story. They thought she was still living in town and coming here for her treatment. Plus, we haven’t managed to contact any of the other eight. I’m sure there’s something really wrong.”

“Don’t worry. There’ll be a logical explanation.”

“
Logical
?
Like the time when that so-called ‘doctor’ came here peddling the pool cleaner Tetrasil as a cure? The same thing happened then. What’s worse is, when the other patients hear of them dying, they’ll think there’s no point taking their own medication and stop. Then we’ll be right back to the worst days of the catastrophe.”