The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

My mother stared at the teacher’s comment.

  Then she stared at the ruled grey line underneath. She was trying to read the indentations, and she was also trying to think what on earth she could say to me about my weird poem.

  Underneath the teacher’s comment I had written:

  ‘I didn’t actually want a regular rhyme pattern FYI’ (which I’d discovered meant for your information). Then I’d rubbed it out because I knew that, though it was true, it was also a bit rude – and precocious.

  My mother went on straining her eyes to read underneath the rubbing out.

  ‘What did it say here?’ she said.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ I said.

  ‘It’s …’ said my mother, and she couldn’t think what to say.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to like it. I know it’s a bit strange.’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder what is going on in that little head of yours,’ said my mother.

  She did not frame my poem.

  Parfait

  My mother was called Aurore, which means dawn.

  And my motherland, still waiting for its dawn, is called Burundi.

  Burundi carries its poetry in the hummingbirds drinking from the purple throats of flowers, the leaves glistening green after a night of rain; in the cichlid fish which flash like jewels deep beneath the surface of Lake Tanganyika, where crocodiles slumber like logs, still and deceptive, and hippos paddle downriver, in a line.

  It carries its spirit in the dignified faces of all who are willing to forgive in the belief that Burundi will one day be beautiful again.

  Dignified faces like my father’s.

  I was his first son, and he prayed that by the time I was grown, we’d be living in peace.

  ‘You were born smiling,’ he told me. ‘And you were so perfect. Everything we’d ever dreamt of.’

  ‘So we called you Parfait,’ said my mother.

  ‘Parfait Nduwimana,’ said my father (which means I’m in God’s hands).

  ‘You were the most beautiful baby,’ said my mother ‘with those little dimples in your cheeks.’

  ‘Why would dimples be beautiful?’ I said.

  ‘Just because!’ she answered, hopping over to me on her wiry legs, and stroking my left-hand dimple with her right hand.

  She reminded me of a bird, my mother.

  I loved to spot birds when I was out and about: the hoopoe, or the Malachite kingfisher, or my favourite, the Fischer’s lovebird – a little rainbow-feathered parrot which used to bathe in the stream up above our homestead.

  ‘That bird is so …’ I said.

  And my father said, ‘Unnecessary.’

  Which I suppose is what beauty is.

  Yet later I found I couldn’t live without it.

  Then my father said, ‘Unnecessarily extravagant.’

  I said, ‘What’s extravagant?’

  He said, ‘This is,’ turning in a circle and pointing all around him, at the sky and the trees and the water running, clear, over the pebbles.

  My family went on washing in the stream, like the birds.

  There were nine of us in the beginning.

  The girl twins: Gloria and Douce, who liked to dress up in the shiny bridesmaid dresses brought down the hill by the Baptists in plastic sacks.

  The boy twins: Wilfred, named after an English missionary who lived (and died) on our colline, and Claude, named after a French one.

  Pierre was strong and stubborn, and you couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  Zion was the baby, and you could. Even from when he was tiny, he wore his heart on his sleeve, as they say in English.

  My father’s face always had a glow about it as if he had a candle inside him, shining light through his eyes. I see his smile, so wide it seemed to reach from one earlobe to the other, and I hear his laughter, bubbling up from some mysterious source inside him. I see his fingers sculpting a whistle from a stick, or fashioning a football for us out of coconut and twine.

  I feel my mother’s arms around me, the slight damp of her armpits on my shoulders, the warmth of my cheek against her soft chest and the deep shiver of belonging running down my spine to the soles of my feet.

  All of us would sit around the fire, the twin girls singing; the twin boys tied together at the ankle and refusing to separate; Pierre quiet and brooding; the baby in my mother’s arms, with something still of heaven about him.

  ‘We’ll call him Zion,’ said my father, as my mother pushed him out between her legs to the sound of gunfire in the homestead on the left.

  The women tied the umbilical cord into his navel.

  ‘Yes, Zion!’ said my father. ‘And we’ll all keep dreaming of the city that is to come!’

  Augusta

  On the last day of 1999, the last day of the twentieth century, the last day of the old millennium, a day full of potential drama, there was a New Year’s Eve party at the Pattons’ house, number 13, the only detached house on the crescent, which was empty except for several towers of identical beige cardboard boxes in every room, each labelled in black marker pen with strange vowel-less codes on them like R1/shf or R3/cpd, which made you think that Mr Patton was a member of MI5.

  The point of the party, whilst allegedly to celebrate the new millennium, was in fact to have lots of musical performances by the Patton children, practically every five minutes. Cello, violin, clarinet and a recorder ensemble, and then the whole lot all over again, until the rest of us nearly died of boredom.

  Then it was 1 January 2000 – Julia and I were nine and a half years old, and the sci-fi millennium was here.

  It made me hopeful. As if something monumental was about to happen. As if a battalion of silver robots was about to walk around the crescent. But actually, the next day, 2 January, in the rain, a grand piano rolled down the pavement. Because the Pattons (who were, as you’ve seen, very musical) were moving out of Willow Crescent. We saw Tabitha Patton through the window in an entirely empty house practising her violin amongst the boxes. She was ten years old and doing Grade 8. She went to private school, where apparently everyone is a genius.

  Grade 8!

  ‘It’s cruel,’ said my mother.

  ‘Or brilliant,’ I said (to be oppositional because, to be honest, I couldn’t stand Tabitha Patton).

  ‘Do you always have to disagree with me?’ said my mother.

  Next thing we knew, a huge removal lorry arrived, with foreign words down its side, and the removal men started bringing out carved benches and jewelled cushions, antique bird cages and hat stands, and cardboard boxes in bright canary colours.

  But better than any of these things was the appearance of a dark-haired boy, who could carry four boxes at once, easy as anything.

  Julia and I went and hung around in our raincoats, pretending to have lost something on the roundabout, and we spied on him from behind the ragged branches of the willow tree, which were actually pathetic for spying because they were too thin and straggly, and only covered us down to our waists.

  We walked over and started looking for our lost thing on the wet pavement outside number 13, and we found out that the boy’s name was Diego, and then we completely forgot about our lost thing, and when Diego asked us the next day if we’d found it, we had no idea what he was talking about.

  Looking back, Diego was a chubby twelve-year-old, but he was three years older than us, and we thought he was the bee’s knees with his dark Spanish skin and his black eyes. His sister was called Paloma which means Dove, though she wasn’t at all bird-like, and this possibly wasn’t the right name for her.

  ‘Which animal does she remind you of?’ I said to Julia.

  ‘I’m not saying,’ she replied.

  But we burst out laughing anyway.

  Then we felt bad, and Julia said, ‘She has a lovely face,’ which is what people say about fat girls.

  My mother made a large dish of lasagne for the new arrivals, as was her custom. My father was the Neighbourhood Watch man, and she consi
dered this the least she could do. She handed it over at the front door, looking up the hall, hoping for an invitation.

  ‘It was quite bare inside,’ she said on her return, ‘from what I could see.’

  ‘They have only been there an hour,’ said my father. ‘Anyhow, they’ll have different customs.’

  ‘Yes, but I imagine they’ll have furniture,’ I said.

  A few days later, Diego’s foreign mother committed the error of not returning my mother’s lasagne dish, one she’d bought on holiday in Brittany in 1998, which said along the bottom, Quimper, Bretagne.

  ‘You don’t expect that of a new neighbour,’ said my mother, who didn’t have the necessary imagination to understand people.

  Julia went to number 13 for the missing lasagne dish, with her smile. On the way back, she put a little sprig of yellow wintersweet flowers from our garden in the dish for my mother, so that when she came through the door, the kitchen smelled of petals. She just had that way with her. I could have thought for a hundred years and I would never have thought of putting yellow flowers in my mother’s lasagne dish.

  As I write my story here in La Higuera in the south of Spain, though Hedley Green is over two thousand kilometres away, I can smell the wintersweet flowers in the front garden of number 1, to the left of the front door, and I can smell Julia’s soft fair hair, washed with Timotei shampoo, still wet, over her pale pink dressing gown, waiting to be dried. We’d sit, legs apart, us two, and sometimes Angela Dunnett from the crescent, and Julia’s slightly dizzy school-friend, Amy Atkins, drying and plaiting and crimping, and taking turns to be the person at the back of the line who had nobody to play with her hair.

  ‘If Angela Dunnett wanted to frizz her hair, she would need quimpers,’ I said, looking at the lasagne dish from Quimper.

  ‘She can’t help having a speech impediment,’ said my mother. ‘So don’t be a clever clogs.’

  I felt ashamed – but I also found it a bit funny that Angela Dunnett, who was so full of herself, couldn’t say her rs. She was only two years older than us, but she acted like she knew everything there was to know about the world.

  Julia said that Diego’s mother was called Lola Alvárez, trying to make the Spanish sounds come out just right. The name made the most gorgeous sounds I’d ever heard. Also, Julia added, she thought Lola Alvárez would end up being a very good neighbour; she had a lovely smile.

  But three months later, Julia’s prediction had not come true on account of the fact that there were weeds growing all over the front garden of number 13, which quite ruined the appearance of the crescent, and my mother felt that, if the Neighbourhood Watch man couldn’t say this to Lola Alvárez, who could?

  My father was dispatched, but when he came back, he said it hadn’t quite come out how he meant it to.

  ‘Did you say anything at all?’ said my mother.

  ‘I said that an English man’s home is his castle,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s a start,’ my mother said.

  ‘I wondered if perhaps they don’t know the difference between weeds and flowers,’ said my father. ‘It’s probably different over there.’

  He pointed towards the level crossing, as if Spain was behind the railway line.

  ‘Then I shall tell them the difference, Stanley,’ said my mother.

  I was there, cringing, at her side, when she did so, patting her curly hair and going pink on her cheeks even though she had paley-cream make-up on.

  ‘Your weeds are my flowers,’ Diego’s mother said to my mother, winking, with her hands in the pockets of her baggy dungarees, smiling in the way she had that made her eyes wrinkle up at the edges.

  My mother never learnt to wink. Nor did she wish to. Neither did she have any understanding of dungarees for adults.

  The weeds went on growing – white, blue, yellow and red – in the garden of number 13, and I loved the look of them.

  Your weeds are my flowers – I am still thinking it years after.

  I knew I was going to love Diego’s mother from the word go. Diego’s father, Fermín, was large and dark, a top scientist, who had come over to run the huge science laboratory out in the Tattershall Industrial Park. His mother had found a job teaching Spanish in the Sixth Form College in Hinton, and she wore her hair in plaits, with a rose fixed to each elastic. Fermín would pull her face towards him by holding her two plaits, and give her mouth-to-mouth kisses in the kitchen. I found this completely transfixing.

  Parfait

  My mother used to lean back against the big wall of my father’s dark chest, and he’d put his arms around her, clasped together like a belt at the front. I knew that nothing bad could ever happen to us because he was here, and he would save us, whatever happened.

  ‘We all need a Saviour,’ he used to say, smiling at us.

  ‘No we don’t,’ Pierre would answer, and this pained my father, the way he loved to say no to everything.

  But now a saviour was coming.

  Not down to earth from heaven.

  But over the border from Rwanda.

  With the name, Melchior, like my father, like one of the three wise kings.

  He was a Hutu, like us.

  And this Hutu was going to be president of Burundi.

  Although Hutu people weren’t presidents, not ordinarily, not ever so far.

  I’ll never forget the day that Melchior Ndadaye took power. The hope we felt in our new Hutu president, a hope that blew in the smoke of a thousand fires cooking a thousand celebration chickens, rising above the conical roofs of our huts on the collines above Bujumbura.

  ‘We have a choice to love the Tutsi even if they’ve killed half the people we loved,’ my father told us. ‘We have a choice to love our neighbour.’

  We nodded because we hated to disappoint our father.

  ‘And who is your neighbour?’ said our father.

  ‘Anyone God made,’ we said, all together, as we’d been taught. ‘Hutu, Tutsi or Twa.’

  ‘Hurray for the new president!’ said my father.

  ‘Hurray for the new president!’ we all echoed.

  Little did we know that one hundred and two days later, men from the army – the president’s army – would come to kill their president. Little did we know that his thirty-eight palace guards would make no attempt to defend him.

  In revenge, the Hutu massacred the Tutsi. Which, my father said, the president would not have wanted. The conflict cost three hundred thousand lives in the end, and one of those three hundred thousand was my father, who chose to turn the other cheek because, as he’d often told us, someone has to break the chain.

  I was eight years old at the time.

  I watched the fruit bats flying north in a big black cloud, and I knew I couldn’t bear to be here on the colline without him. Perhaps the bats would fly all the way up the continent of Africa to Europe – and perhaps I could go there too one day.

  The countries of Europe were joining together to make one big happy continent. That’s what the Baptists said – and they should have known, being from England and France, themselves. Through the years that followed, in addition to clothes, they brought us second-hand paperback books and atlases and foreign-language dictionaries and old magazines, and I stayed up at night reading about this other world, extending my French vocabulary, learning English and the capitals of European countries.

  I read about a pop band called the Spice Girls and a nun called Mother Teresa and a beautiful princess who died in a tunnel in Paris and a woman who spent eighty-one days rowing alone across the Atlantic Ocean.

  So it obviously was possible, getting away to somewhere else, if you were brave enough.

  I could take my whole family somewhere better. We could leave the colline, catch a boat up the lake, walk through Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo, up through the Central African Republic into Chad, through Niger to Algeria, and then we’d reach Morocco, and I’d seen on the map that there was a tiny strip of sea, thin as a river. W
e could cross it by boat and go and live in the south of Spain.

  Perhaps we would find a new life.

  But the years passed, and we didn’t find a new life. Everything went on just the same.

  Except something was about to change.

  The one thousands were coming to an end.

  We sat, all of us, on 31 December 1999, crouched on our haunches, our bare brown feet caked in red mud, looking expectantly over Lake Tanganyika, whose waters flowed over our borders and out beyond, imagining that something extraordinary might happen as we crossed over at midnight to the new millennium.

  ‘It’s the longest lake in the world,’ I said to my brothers and sisters, trying to copy my father’s jolly tone of voice, though the exact timbre of it was fading away from me, six years from his death. I found it hard to conjure it at night inside my head but I could still see his big wide smile and his twinkling eyes.

  ‘It’s the second deepest and the second largest, after Lake Baikal in Siberia,’ I said. ‘It holds 18 per cent of the world’s fresh water – and the fish in the lake are so special and so colourful that they are sold all around the world to rich men who like to keep them in glass boxes in their dining rooms.’

  ‘Do soldiers break in and smash the glass boxes?’ said Zion.

  ‘They don’t need soldiers in those countries,’ I said, authoritatively – I was fourteen years old now, my voice had broken and I was growing body hair. ‘No, these rich men live in peace.’

  ‘Peace?’ said Zion, creasing his brow.

  And he and I walked across the hillside, looking up at the sky.

  ‘Let’s imagine that the clouds are boats,’ I said, crouching down and putting my arm around Zion’s shoulder, just as my father did with me when I was a little boy. ‘And let’s imagine that they’ll dip down to earth, Little Bro, and we’ll climb in, you and I. And, you know what? We’ll float right across the border of Burundi and way over the whole continent of Africa to the sea.’

  ‘Will we really?’ said Zion.

  ‘Really really,’ I said, and I wished it was true. I wished I could make things not as they were. I wished I could save Zion from the place where he’d been born.