by Yaba Badoe
‘Sante-girl,’ she says to me when I climb into the back. ‘Come here. Let me touch you again, make sure you’re OK.’
I’m no longer a toddler learning to fly with Priss, so I don’t normally like her to fuss over me. I may have tumbled over the rooftops of Cádiz, but I’ve no serious injuries to speak of. All the same, given the ache in my heart, I let her.
She smoothes the curve of my cheek, then sidles up to me and hugs me tight. So tight, the jagged edges of our conversation last night, and my frustration with Cobra, tip into tears. And instead of asking questions about who I am and where I come from, instead of demanding to know why she went to see the African and Grey Eyes without me, I curl up beside her and howl louder than a hyena at full moon. ‘I don’t think Cobra’s going to marry me any more, Mama Rose.’
She pats my head, holds me close, and rocks me in those big fleshy arms of hers. Laughs, then says, ‘Why do you think I asked you, in particular, if you wanted Scarlett to stay, Sante-girl?’
With my feelings as mangled as they are, I can’t find the words to answer.
‘Doing the right thing isn’t always easy,’ Mama Rose smiles. ‘Truth be told, I’m proud of you, Sante. You said what needed to be said back there. Not an easy task when Cobra and Cat are behaving like two polecats in heat. Is that it? Is that what’s bothering you?’
I sob. All I can think about is Cobra. Cobra and Scarlett. Should be focused on more urgent matters, but just thinking about them excites me. I lay my head on Mama Rose’s lap, and squeeze my eyes tight to shut out the world. Cobra especially.
‘Now, now, Sante,’ Mama Rose says. ‘You’ve got to learn to exercise patience with Cobra. A girl has to exercise patience with any human of the male persuasion. You set your heart on the boy when you were knee-high to a grasshopper, and from what I know about the two of you, there’s no one in the whole wide world but you crazy enough to have him.’
Her words, designed to soothe, don’t reassure me. In fact, now I’ve started, there’s no stopping my tears and the fury behind them. I’m too angry to talk, ask questions, make a plan. Seems all I can do is wail like a fool. Howl and hiss in a tantrum that starts Priss yelping as well.
Mama Rose cradles me in her arms. ‘I told you,’ she says to Redwood. ‘The child’s not ready yet. She’s too young to know. Too young to be making decisions on her own.’
Redwood leans forwards: ‘Tell her,’ he insists. ‘Ready or not, it’s time, Rosie. She deserves to know what you’ve done for her and what those men want. And there’s no better time than the present.’
I hate it when Old Ones talk over my head. Hate it so much that to stop my caterwauling and sober up quick, I bite my lip until I taste blood. Even so, takes some time for the sobbing to cease while Mama Rose hugs me tighter, cleaving to me. I reckon she doesn’t want me to grow up. Doesn’t want me to find my monsters and slay ’em.
I pull away from her and settle on a cushion. Wipe tears from my eyes and take her hand. ‘Tell me about the African and his friend, Mama Rose. Tell me what happened to my family. Why did they cast me into the sea? I want to know, ’cause I won’t be able to fly free like Priss till I do.’
Mama Rose sighs, a long, shuddering release of breath that signals the end of our old life and the start of something new. Then she tells me.
*
What she describes fits in with what Priss hinted at long ago and what Mama Rose mentioned in passing. I came from the sea, laden with treasure in a sea-chest. Mama Rose grabs hold of the old mahogany trunk, drags it between us, and pulls out a blue-and-green cloth made of strips of woven silk cotton. Strips sewn together with gold thread into what looks like an intricate puzzle blanket. Purple-and-gold between green-and-blue check; wedges of horizontal colour alongside diagonals.
‘You came covered in this,’ Mama Rose says. She strokes the blanket and then hands it over.
I raise it to my nose and smell the scent of a man in the soft fabric. Musk and cedarwood, a fragrance with a trace of ancient sweat. An image slowly surfaces in my mind and shimmers. As I strain to hold on to it, it fades. I relax and gradually it fills me, seeping into my pores as sensations lap at my feet.
A tall lion of a man, his hands swaddling me in cloth.
I make out a deep rumble of approval. Murmurs of Sem! Amie! Yo!
Perhaps the blanket on my lap belonged to the tall man in my dream.
I hear a faint rustling in the shadows and sense a gathering of ghosts hovering close by. I turn. Heartbeat quickens. Blood tingles. Tears sting my eyes.
‘You came laden with treasure, Sante. More treasure than I’d ever seen, then or since: gold dust and diamonds. I even found this dagger hidden beneath your feet.’
A picture flickers in my mind and voices I’ve heard again and again in my dreams whisper to me. I block my ears with the palms of my hands. I don’t want to hear them. Don’t want my nightmare to be true, yet the voices murmur, resonating down the years:
‘Give her this. My dagger to help her in battle. May the child be a princess, a true warrior, valiant in the face of danger yet merciful to those she defeats.’
‘May your spear arm be strong, my daughter,’ the tall man adds. ‘Your legs swift as a gazelle and your heart the mighty heart of a lioness protecting her cubs.’
If he’s talking to his daughter, he must be my father.
Don’t want a father. Don’t need one, in any case. Tears trickle down my cheeks.
Mama Rose hands me the silver dagger – a sparkling serrated blade above a jewel-studded hilt. ‘Diamonds,’ she says, rubbing my fingers over them.
Jewels shift and glimmer through a kaleidoscope of tears. I marvel at the warm glow of baubles, touch the blade.
‘I used up all the gold dust you brought with you, Sante,’ says Mama Rose. ‘Used it on food and medicine. Bought our trucks with it as well. I managed to hold on to the diamonds, though. Kept every single one of those precious stones. Have you still got your tutu, child?’
‘Of course!’
For as long as I can remember, Mama Rose has always insisted that I look after the tutu well. Never wash it, but swab it clean with a cloth. And when I grow out of it, she makes me a new one. Unpicks the rhinestones from the old one, adds a few more, and then sews them on to a new tutu.
‘Give it to me,’ she says.
I climb up to my bunk and fetch my tutu, still crumpled from last night’s show.
‘There they are. The diamonds you arrived with.’
‘Diamonds?’
Mama Rose catches Redwood’s eye and grins at me. ‘There’s no better hiding place,’ she says, ‘than what the eye can see and dismiss in a blink as vulgar circus glitter. This is what’s left of your treasure, Sante. Along with the drum and the bamboo flute.’
Mama Rose folds the diamond-studded tutu, puts it on my lap and bites her lip. Chews on it, while she decides how best to say what else is on her mind: ‘From the cargo they bundled into this chest here, your people were rich, Sante,’ she says at last. ‘People from Africa. They must have wanted to start a new life over here. If times were bad then, they’re even worse now. Floods, famine, drought … every disaster you can think of, there’s worse to come.’
I anticipate the words in Mama Rose’s mouth before she says ’em. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: the story of How Things Came to Be This Bad and Can Only Get Worse. How the poor become poorer as money rises to the top. How everyone with any sense is moving north: on foot, on trains, boats and planes to find Greener Pastures. I know the story by heart and, truth be told, it makes me squirm, even though the way Redwood tells it, he should know. He used to make money; dung hills of money. Worked in Wall Street in the USA till he bailed out. Been moving ever since. That’s why we live in wild places, live off the grid, ’cause deep in their hearts the Old Ones believe that the way things are, we’re doomed. And when the end times come, only those of us who live off the grid will be left standing.
Cat
laughs at ’em behind their backs and I do too. We call ’em Doomsters. According to them, nothing’s ever going to get better. Cobra, as you’d expect, doesn’t dismiss them completely. Says all families are mostly crazy and ours is no different. Have to learn to take the rough with the smooth.
Used to laugh at ’em until they took us one summer to the Spanish beach where Mama Rose found me. There we saw brown bodies lying dead on the shore, women tanning themselves a stone’s throw away. Wiped the smiles clean off our faces that did.
So when Mama Rose says: ‘Strangers pitch up on our shores and we herd them into camps. They come in broken boats and we let them drown,’ this time her words become entwined with my nightmare of a baby thrown overboard as people thrash in the sea. Indeed, her words dwell in me with a ferocity they never have before. Because I’m there. And this is about me and people like me.
‘What we’re doing is unforgiveable. It breaks every law the human heart tries to live by. That’s why I adopted you and the twins. Illegally, of course, but there’s not much you can’t do if you set your mind to it. That’s how come you kids are with me, Sante. For better, for worse, I did what was right.’
That rustling again. The soft shuffle of footsteps inching closer. I turn and the thickening shadows murmur grunts of approval in that strange language: Amie! Yo! Amie!
I don’t understand it. Don’t want to. But there’s something else. Something I can’t put my finger on that doesn’t chime with what I’m hearing.
I stare at Mama Rose. Unable to meet my gaze, she looks down at her hands and says: ‘You finally appreciate what I’ve been telling you, Sante?’
I can’t talk ’cause of the tears flowing out of me. I hang my head, confused at that part of me that feels guilty for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Mama Rose places a hand on my knee. Still won’t meet my eyes, though. Lashes fluttering, she peers at me and says: ‘We’ll soon be done, Sante.’ She pauses, then removes a sheet of paper from inside the trunk, and gives it to me.
Thin and fragile as the skeleton of a leaf dried by wind, the paper’s faded with age. I sniff it warily. Smell the same fragrance of musk with a whiff of cinnamon and mangoes. Rotting mangoes. On the paper is a scrawl of round, homely writing similar to my own:
This is my beloved child, Asantewaa, daughter oG Amma Serwah and Kofi Prempeh of the Ashanti people of Ghana. I beg you, look after our child and bring her up as your own. Use her treasure wisely, for the riches of Africa are vested in the person of my little princess.
Signed,
Amma Serwah
Is this writing really that of my mother? Are these words the last she wrote before she was mown down by gunfire? Or did she die in the blaze? Or drown in the sea that saved me? I can scarcely believe that the script in front of me, so like my own, was written by the woman who gave birth to me. I try to retrieve the outline of her face, the smile in eyes unfamiliar to me, but cannot. She’s always a blur in my dream, lost in a jumble of anxious faces. Even so, her voice returns. A voice shrill with terror:
‘My baby! My baby! Save my baby!’
My stomach clenches.
Don’t know what I’m supposed to do, what I’m supposed to think. Can’t think, not while my mother’s panic overwhelms me. I don’t want her inside me, but before I can block her, I realise she’s always been there. Only now the weight of her emotions crushes my heart, as feelings churn within me: curiosity, horror and then sadness so deep, I could a cry a river and still have tears to weep.
Before she engulfs me, I decide I don’t need any more mothers, not with Priss and Mama Rose in my life. And yet, as I read the letter again to get to grips with it, more questions than answers clamour in my mind and curiosity, a hunch-backed cat, slinks between my legs, waiting to be fed.
Hands shaking, body shivering, I ask: ‘Who are the Ashanti people, Mama Rose? And how come the riches of Africa are vested in me?’
I look into her eyes and flinch. There’s more to be said; something she’s holding back that concerns the two of us, and our future.
‘Are Ashantis bad, Mama Rose? People we shouldn’t associate with, ’cause they behave outside the bounds of the human heart?’
Redwood takes my hand. ‘The woman you’re named after, Yaa Asantewaa, was an Ashanti queen, Sante. A warrior woman who led her men against the British a long time ago.’
‘A warrior?’ I say. ‘A woman?’
He can see I want to know more, for he moves closer, long arms straddling his thighs: ‘I’ll tell you all that I know about Yaa Asantewaa and her people in due course. Right now there’s something else you should think about.’
Mama Rose blanches. ‘Leave it, Redwood!’
‘No chance of that now, Rosie.’ Impatience adds an edge of urgency to Redwood’s baritone and I begin to quake. ‘Sante,’ Redwood says, ‘those men we met in town this morning are part of the same racket that got your folks killed. According to them, what went into your cradle is their property and they want it back. Everything. And if they don’t get what they want by tomorrow, they’re coming after us.’
Mama Rose smiles and then says with a sigh: ‘It’s time to move on again, Sante-girl. We’re leaving tonight.’
*
It takes all the strength in me to defy ’em, but I do. I see the gleam in Priss’s eyes, remember the sweep and spread of her wings this morning, and know for a fact that to fly I’ve got to stop running and face my enemies. I take a deep breath, muster my strength, and say clear as a bell: ‘You can leave if you want, but I’m staying.’
Redwood’s persuasive, Mama Rose too. But this time, the combined weight of their powerful reasoning barely shifts me. I’ve dug a hole in the ground and I’m burrowing.
They pile on pressure, the way Old Ones do. ‘This isn’t just about you,’ they say. They ask me to think about them, all of ’em, Scarlett as well.
Then they remind me – as if I need reminding – of the tremendous pain people-smugglers, crooked policemen, lowlifers in general, can inflict on a teenager.
I burrow deeper, so deep, they can’t reach me with their talking. Truly, the more they talk, the firmer I hunker down. And the deeper I hunker down, the more ferociously I say: ‘Trust me. I’ll be OK. Priss will look after me.’
Each time I mention Priss, they almost weep. That’s how foolish they think I am!
Perhaps it’s those African spirits around me: their sighs and groans, cries and whispers. Could be that letter my mother wrote for me, or the power of that warrior queen beefing me up. Don’t know what it is; even if the ground fractures and crusts over me, I have to find out more. And that means talking to the African.
I may be younger than her but sometimes I can be just as stubborn as Cat and every bit as fierce. Now that my mind is set, Mama Rose realises that nothing she says is going to change it. Realises that only Cobra can get to me. Mama Rose and Redwood aren’t the brains of our outfit for nothing. They know how to play on our weaknesses for the greater good. They yell for Cobra to plead their case, see if he can sway me.
Cobra comes in, one of his snakes around his neck. Been trying to impress Scarlett with his special talent, no doubt. He strokes the snake as he hears us out. Takes the measure of me, then glances at Priss sitting proud on her perch. Sees the same iron gleam in Priss’s eyes as in mine, the same blaze of determination on my face, and knows straightaway that I’ve dug too deep for him to haul me out. No way am I going to compromise, so Cobra says: ‘If we want to leave this town with Sante, we’re going to have to wait a day or two.’
‘We have to move tonight,’ says Redwood.
Mama Rose takes the pin out of her topknot, shakes her straggly hair loose and says: ‘If I know anything about villains, and I’ve met quite a few in my time, Miguel will try and get Scarlett back. And those men we met in town say they want everything Sante’s got. We leave tonight.’
Cobra looks at me and I reckon he’s thinking what I’m thinking. We haven’t said a word
about Cat stabbing Miguel, yet the Old Ones seem to know the sort of scoundrels we’re dealing with. If they’re scared, perhaps we should be too.
The snake at Cobra’s neck wriggles down his arm, then twists around it like a writhing, shining bangle. I scowl at him as he asks Mama Rose: ‘Where are we going this time?’
Turns out Midget Man’s got friends in Granada, Romany friends who’ll let us stay with ’em till our trouble blows over.
Cobra pats the head of his living ornament and smiles as a green tongue darts out. Pats the snake a second time and says: ‘I’ll stay here with Sante if you want, meet those men in town tomorrow and when we’re done, we’ll catch up with you. Should be easy to find you, if you lend us your motorbike, Redwood.’
Redwood raises an eyebrow. Coughs, glances at Mama Rose, then they both heave mighty sighs, as if the world’s going to end much sooner than we think. They confer with Midget Man and Mimi, Bizzie Lizzie too. Argue. Um and ah some more, until finally they give in.
I reckon they wouldn’t be so worried if they were leaving Cobra and I alone in the wilderness. Most times nature’s easier to deal with than city folk. But as things stand, there’s not much they can do.
Mama Rose slips off the kimono, pulls on her overalls and from a right-hand pocket, brings out the note that the African and Grey Eyes gave to Redwood to give to me. Hands it over.
The paper’s thick and velvety, with an address in sloping black letters scribbled over it. I read it and my heart lurches. I pass the note to Cobra. His cheeks pale, he opens his mouth, appalled. I touch the middle of my forehead to signal that I’m staying no matter what and Cobra groans.
