The God Child Page 2

  He felt my forehead, then opened up his briefcase and took out a thermometer and put it under my armpit. I pressed my arm hard against its coldness to make it warm.

  ‘Normal,’ he said, taking it out and shaking it. He reached for some tablets from his bag and gave me one. ‘Take it,’ he said, ‘and go to bed early. No reading under the covers.’

  I held the tablet in my hand, where it would melt until I could flush it down the toilet. I stood there in the book-lined room. I later thought how like a church it was: my father priest-like in his preoccupation and distance; the tablet melting in my hand, the sacrament; the books he gave me sacred texts full of pointers, like how to dream within the dream.

  I tried again. ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Why does Mowgli have to leave his home and friends and family?’

  ‘Because…’ he rested his forehead against his fingertips ‘…he has to learn from the humans. Just like you have to learn from these people here.’

  I sat down. Was this it?

  ‘But he returns home. And you will too,’ he said quietly. ‘Hic sunt leones.’ He was looking again into the place that I was no part of.

  I waited, but he said nothing more. ‘What does it mean, Daddy?’

  He turned to look through me. I put my palm against the backs of the books to feel that I was real; I was.

  ‘It means that we are lions, you and I.’

  And it sounded like a promise.

  When they had gone to bed, I took my torch, and crept down to the cellar, holding my breath all the way in case something might hear.

  In my father’s Encyclopaedia Britannica, I found the phrase. Hic sunt leones: explorers used it to demarcate unknown territories, it said.

  I had thought the space he was caught in, where I had no place, was one that had been before I was born. We had been walking through the wheat fields bordered by the darkened factories with their impotent chimneys, when he told me how he, my mother, her brother, and others like them, were sent on scholarships to Germany, to England, to America, to Russia, to gather information and knowledge, so they could return, help build their new nation.

  ‘Then why are you still here?’ I asked, putting my hand into his.

  ‘It did not work the way they saw it,’ he said, not tightening his hand on mine. ‘At home, they used to say it was the king alone who dreamt dreams.’

  ‘Why just him?’ I asked, wondering who ‘they’ were, taking two steps for every one of his. I lengthened my stride.

  ‘Because he was one with the state, and even when his people dreamt, it was on his behalf. I did not believe them either,’ he said quietly, stopping. He was looking in the direction of the tall faded signs bearing the armament legends of Mannesmann and Krupp, even though they were too far off for him to make out.

  I pulled his hand, not wanting him to stay there looking at something he could not see. ‘I can see them, Daddy,’ I said.

  Hic sunt leones. It did not mean that he would, like a lion, return home in all his power, but that he was the unknown in an unknown land, that he was lost, and that I was lost with him.

  4

  I stood next to Andrea. Even though she was a teacher, she let us call her by her first name and laughed when something was funny, rather than smiling benignly like the other adults. She wore rectangular hiking boots and her hair was thick and stood out from her head like candyfloss. I looked down at my own shiny black shoes that squeezed my toes inwards and smoothed my hair that had been straightened, so it lay flat against my scalp. I wiped the Dax grease off on my dress. In my right hand I was carrying a paper sun-shaped lantern. It had a small bulb inside that I could turn on by pressing a button on the plastic stick to which it was attached. Some of the other children had made their own lanterns. They were blowing hard to see if they could still see their breath in the cold night air. They stamped their feet and rubbed their hands and I did not know how to be close to them. I put on my lantern.

  ‘You know, we eat goose on Saint Martin’s Day, because Martin ran away and hid in a goose-stall when they wanted to make him Bishop of Tours?’ Andrea was talking only to me, but she was talking loudly, in her tell-a-story, school-teacher voice, even though I had heard her speak in other voices. ‘He did not want to become a bishop. He wanted to stay a monk. He felt it was a very big role and that he was very small. But when the others came to look for him, the geese made so much noise that they found him. That’s how he became a bishop and then a martyr.’

  I waited for her to finish before looking around. All the mothers were there now, except for mine. She was always late. They shifted from foot to foot, shaking their heads, rolling their eyes. I could not hear what they were saying, but I could hear that disapproving de-de-de-de rhythm that Germans had in their voices when things did not go to plan.

  I felt my face suddenly hot in the cold night air and waited for the painful pinpricks of chilblain to spread to my cheeks, wishing they would, so that I would not have to feel the mothers’ eyes not looking at me. I stamped my feet and rubbed my hands like the others, telling them silently that that was why I was starting again at an English school the next day, because they were rude.

  She was coming, running, in a triangular trench coat with three enormous buttons. She was wearing her Diana Ross wig, with its bouffant and side-parting, and patent black shoes with a gold buckle that perfectly matched her bag. The other mothers stopped shifting. They were all wearing jeans and parkas. She was talking and laughing and waving her hands and everyone was looking at her as if she had taken the little bulbs from all the lanterns and put them inside of her, and I wished that sometimes she would just turn the light off.

  We started walking, our lanterns swinging in time with our singing. ‘Ich geh mit meiner Laterne und meine Laterne mit mir. Dort oben leuchten die Sterne und unten leuchten wir.’

  My mother was still talking and all the other mothers were laughing as if she was the funniest person in the world. All I knew was that she was the loudest.

  I looked up at the stars. They were there and we were down here, shining in mirror image. My neck was hurting. I closed my eyes, holding on to my mother’s hand, my face towards the sky. I could still feel the stars inside my eyelids even though I could not see them. I walked with my eyes closed, at first afraid of bumping into street lamps, walls, other children, but I kept going, and as I did, the space in front of me began to feel empty. Even the stars had moved from within my eyelids and it was as if they were not there at all. ‘Where are you?’ I asked. ‘Do you know me?’

  ‘Oh-ho, Maya, adɛn?’

  Her voice was as far away as the other children had been, and I did not want to open my eyes, did not want to stop the stars from answering.

  ‘Nkwaseasem nko ara na wo nim.’ She was pulling my hand.

  I opened my eyes. She was looking down at me, smiling, shaking her head. She only spoke Twi to me when she was throwing insults, and I wondered whether some languages were more projectile than others, in the same way that some had more compound nouns. The man riding on horseback at the front of the procession had stopped by the fields not far from our house. There was a large bonfire and the other teachers were already standing by it. He wore a white sheet wrapped like a toga and over that a red cloak, which he was now cutting in half. He gave the half he had cut to another man in a vest and jeans, who wrapped it around himself.

  Andrea came to stand next to my mother. ‘This is just like the rituals you have in your country. Our people used to sing and dance too, but probably not as well as yours.’ She smiled. ‘They used to carry the lanterns to drive away the winter demons—’

  ‘I am a Christian,’ my mother said and turned away from her.

  I looked at Andrea and saw her stand against the blizzard of my mother’s back, blinking, not knowing what to say.

  As we walked away, I turned, wanting to tell Andrea that she did not have to speak English, in a voice that she thought would make my mother feel at h
ome, because my mother already knew what home felt like.

  I tried to bring back the empty space behind my eyelids, but it was already filled with my mother’s words.

  Would the stupid German woman have stood next to any of the other mothers and talked that non-sense about demons? And she was supposed to stand and listen to such non-sense from a woman who did not wear proper shoes and had never taken a comb to her hair. Non-sense.

  We were walking on the main road by the fields. I could see the industrial signs that my father had not seen, the M of Mannesmann now flickering on and off.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ Andrea had said.

  My parents had not even told them I was leaving.

  5

  Miss Prest had a voice that originated neither from her nose nor her throat, but somewhere in between. She stood next to me at the front of the class, introducing me in long sentences like a Japanese translator I had seen on television, whose streams of words relayed a simple yes or no. She was not saying, ‘This is Maya,’ but speaking quickly, with her mouth moving hardly at all. I wanted, but did not know how, to tell her about the pressure in my bladder. Did I say ‘pardon me’ or ‘please’? Did I hardly move my mouth like she did or speak properly? I did my ‘pipi’ dance, which she did not know how to recognise, though my mother did. I squeezed my legs together, moving my hips slightly from side to side, and stared out into the distance, concentrating on not letting the liquid pass. She said something and looked down at me and smiled. What did she want? I smiled back and in that moment my muscles relaxed. All I had held in came rushing down at full speed, washing the itch from my new thick grey woollen tights, filling the non-place between my feet and shoes, stopping at the sanitised-smelling dirty-looking linoleum floor.

  In the tea break, after I had changed into clothes from the lost and found, I sat with the teachers, their talk a grey-noise chorus in the background.

  I dipped my digestive biscuit into my milk, sucked it soggy, and wondered where the other children were, whether they would like me, or whether I would be different here too.

  When I was finished, I was allowed outside. Only one or two of the others’ faces were in focus.

  Robert McNally had dark orange hair that held gold in it like my mother’s skin, though his skin was transparent and covered in orange felt-tip-like marks.

  Tom Anderson, who had laughed louder than anyone else in class that morning, had short bristly hair and soft-looking margarine hands. He was shouting now: ‘On your marks, go!’

  Everyone ran wildly to the edges of the playground, and back and across, bumping into each other, screaming. I ran too, in lost property’s mismatched clothes. I turned. No one was behind me.

  I looked for Robert’s orange hair. He was chasing a girl. Her hair was long and shiny and light. It swung from side to side in one movement as she ran, squealing. Tom Anderson was chasing her too and so was everyone in the world.

  Someone bumped into me. I started running again, squealing like the girl. I wanted to turn and look at her. Instead I ran, pretending that I was laughing, though inside the face I was making was one I later recognised when I saw Munch’s Scream. Everyone stopped. Robert McNally had caught her.

  I watched her now. How her shiny hair fell onto her notebook as she wrote. How her clothes were more at ease with themselves even though they were not as elaborate as mine. How her nose went slightly upwards and her skin was always the colour of holidays. In our music lesson, I sat next to her and watched how she mouthed the words to the song. I did so too, and she saw and smiled.

  Soon we had paired our little ponies and were combing their fluorescent pink and purple hair on the school playground, holding the glow of buttercups’ reflection against each other’s skin and sending one another notes in class saying ‘You are my best friend’ and ‘You are my best friend too’.

  She was my best friend, even though the world did not refract for her. I wanted this simplicity, just like I wanted to reach in through the translucent clarity of Robert McNally’s skin and find myself reflected there.

  When Christine invited me to her house to play after school, my dreams were taken over with sequences of us running and laughing, little ponies in hand. When the teachers reprimanded me in class for dreaming, I looked over at her and we held our hands over our mouths, heads bent, bodies shaking, cheekbones high.

  We got off the school bus; her mother was waiting for us outside the house. It was white and stand-alone. Her mother had the same hair Christine did, but cut shorter and with strands of grey in the blonde. Their house was larger than mine and had pictures of Christine and her brothers all over the walls. There was nothing on the kitchen counters. Dried flowers were arranged into wreaths and in slim vases that stood on the windowsills and hung on the doors. Christine’s mother gave us sparkling apple juice and sandwiches with sliced-thin pepper-edged salami. We went up to her room to play shop-person with her giant supermarket, and girlfriend-boyfriend with her Barbies and Kens. We lay back on the floor and looked up at her ceiling, which was covered in stars and moons.

  ‘Tell me a story,’ she said.

  I thought for a while and then started, ‘When my mother was little, she lived in a palace, because her father was a king. She had lots and lots of brothers and sisters and, when it was time to eat, her father shut the palace gates and they all came together and ate out of one giant bowl—’

  She sat up. ‘That’s a stupid story.’

  I sat up also. ‘But it’s true.’

  She looked angry now. ‘Liar,’ she said, ‘liar.’

  ‘I am not. I am not a liar. It’s true.’

  She had got up and was heading for the door. ‘Stop saying your grandfather was a king. He was not. Say it now.’

  I looked at her. ‘It is true, he was,’ I said finally.

  She opened the door, closing it hard as she went.

  I sat in the middle of the room. Naked, neutered Barbies and Kens, small plastic apples and shopping carts, were lying all around me, discarded. I picked up a Barbie, looked at it and put it back down. I went and stood at the window and looked out over her back garden, bordered off from the others by large trees. The door opened, I turned around. It was Christine’s mother.

  She was looking at me with something bordering on suspicion. ‘Dinner’s ready.’

  At table, Christine and I did not speak to each other. I sat next to her father, who asked me questions about why my family had come here and what my father did and what it was like back home.

  I found it hard to eat most things most of the time, but now the roast beef was like flesh. I ate little bits and Christine’s mother complimented me on my manners.

  ‘Would you like to watch a film after dinner?’ she asked.

  ‘I think I should go home. They’ll be worried.’ I did not look at Christine. We barely said goodbye.

  I could only nod and shake my head at her mother’s questions in the car.

  I thought of the stories my mother told me of my grandfather. Of the boy, his kra, his soul, who always went before him and lifted my grandfather’s hand heavy with the jewels of state when visitors came to shake it, deflecting and warding off bad spirits.

  Of how she was younger than I was now when she saw my grandfather’s body laid out on a wooden bed in the palace courtyard, surrounded by braziers of fire and trees like the forest from which our people came.

  Of the luminescent gold in his bracelets and anklets, in the kente wrapped around his body, in the long pipe they had laid by his mouth, in the swords by his arms, the sandals on his feet; in his skin, and in his bones.

  It was the middle of the night when they woke her. My grandmother had told my mother that he could turn himself into a cat at night, and so hear the secrets people whispered within their walls and in their beds; that he could change into the leopard that had given him his name and wander far across the forests and savannahs, taking note of all that happened through the land, and so retain its harmony.

  No
w, my mother thought, they had finally come to witness his transformation.

  She had not understood. Even when she passed the Divine Drummer, drumming out his lone message of loss on the talking drums.

  She had not understood. Even when she saw all hundred and three of her siblings standing around him in silence.

  Only when the wives came in, all forty-three of them, wreathed in odum leaves, the green tears of state, their heads already shaved, clutching their stomachs, a syncopation of pain and screams, did she understand.

  She felt the bones in her legs lose hold of each other, but she did not fall. The wives sang and danced their grief. She joined them although no one had taught her to sing the lamentations: ‘Father, take me with you where you are going. Father, do not leave me alone.’ But he had gone, and left her, and with him taken the umbrella that had protected not just her, but the whole state from being scorched to death.

  My mother stood in the doorway, waving at Christine’s mother, who did not leave the car.

  ‘How was it?’ my mother asked.

  I went past her on the way to my room and shrugged. ‘OK.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’ She was trying to look into my face.

  ‘We ate,’ I said and ran up the stairs to the bathroom.

  I took a towel down from the rail, put it over my head, and started running on the spot in front of the mirror, watching the towel swing from side to side as I ran.

  When it fell off, I kept running, imagining shiny, straight hair swinging down my back, imagining Robert McNally running after me.

  My mother tried to open the door. ‘Maya, what happened? Are you all right?’

  I stopped and tried to not sound out of breath. ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  I looked in the mirror, breathing in and out, trying to calm the painful air rushing in and out of my heart, wondering when I would ever know what stories it would be all right to tell and when.