A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars

by Yaba Badoe

  ‘Mamadou,’ I whisper. ‘Mamadou.’

  A hazy silhouette grazes the edge of my vision and flits away.

  I stand tall. Wasn’t named after a queen for nothing. ‘Mister,’ I say to the man with the mark of death on his face. ‘You’ve made the worst mistake of your life. I may be a plaything to you, a toy to be tossed around. I may not amount to much in your eyes, but this flute was given to me by a master musician from Mali, Mamadou.’

  The Captain snorts. Grey Eyes too. Miguel backs away.

  ‘Mamadou?’ he says. ‘Isaka’s brother?’

  I nod.

  Miguel drags the fingers of his left hand through his thick black quiff as uncertainty flickers on his face. ‘He was on that boat with Isaka? The boat that you … Papa?’

  The Captain jabs his cane into Miguel’s shoulder. Miguel winces, his shoulder still painful from the fight with Cat.

  ‘Yes, he was on that boat,’ I say.

  I’m about to spill a whole heap of beans and tell ’em what I think of their bullying ways, their horrible party, when I notice Cobra rubbing the right side of his nose.

  ‘Enough,’ he signals.

  And yet I feel it bristling in the air; a secret thickening, growing fat. A secret stifled by defiant glances from the Captain to Grey Eyes; that jab to silence Miguel, his look of consternation. I brace myself to do what I didn’t dare to earlier. Take a breath and delve into the cesspool that’s the Captain. Feel the pride in him; pride burnished with contempt. Rootle deeper, graze the wiliness of his power and see him for what he is: a seething, breathing glob of evil. Listen in, and it hits me. Wham! And I’m quivering, ’cause I glimpse what he doesn’t want me to see: a jigsaw of fire and stars as an iron monster tramples a trawler. It’s then that I know, as surely as the moon waxes and wanes in the night sky, that somehow or other the Captain is linked to the death of my parents.

  ‘Yes, Mamadou was on that boat,’ I tell ’em. ‘And when I play this flute, his music lives and so does he. You can try to hurt me as much as you want, mister. Fact is, no good comes to those who hurt me. And that’s a promise.’

  The Captain dismisses my threat by turning his back on me. Turns his back and the urge to punish him for breaking Mamadou’s gift and everything else brings bile to my mouth. Priss. If I had my way, I’d get Priss to pluck out his eyes and gobble them up. Rage boils inside me as I watch him reach for the door. Then, all of a sudden, he pauses. Faces me again, listening. He hears it. We all do.

  From a distance at first and then closer, a flute is playing. Pictures form in my mind as a song vibrant with colour – red, turquoise, purple – conjures new horizons. I see the flowing robes of men leading camels over a vast expanse of desert. A human caravan. Low notes tremble, high notes flutter and as the music soars, reverberating through our prison, the Captain looks at me and shudders.

  ‘Stop it,’ he cries. ‘Whatever you’re doing, whatever trick you’re playing, stop it this instant.’

  It’s hard for a man who’s used to obedience to appreciate that not everything is under his control. Says jump, people jump. Not this time. There’s a whole world in here that can’t be seen, that has rules of its own and is pursuing its own agenda. And it’s whirling around us painting pictures with music.

  ‘Stop it!’ the Captain thunders.

  I show him the broken flute. ‘It’s not me,’ I tell him. ‘I’m not doing anything.’

  ‘Me neither,’ says Cobra.

  ‘Then who?’ The question slips out of Grey Eyes’ mouth before he can stop himself.

  He’s rattled. They all are.

  ‘You did this,’ I say, jabbing a piece of bamboo at the Captain.

  He shakes his head, stamps his feet. ‘Stop it!’ he says. Flings his cane to the ground and covers his ears to block the tempest of sound raging around us. The more he protests, the louder the music roars. The naked light bulb above us swings, and in a corner of the room the cheval mirror creaks. I glance at it and catch a glimpse of what I think at first is my reflection. It shimmers, then darts away, as the face I saw earlier today tugs once again at my chest. My reflection moves, yet I’m standing still, fingers linked to Cobra. The bulb dims, then glows.

  Slowly, relentlessly, Mamadou’s music invades every nook and cranny of our jail. And with it comes a breathing, heaving sensation of tiny fluttering wings that mass and teem, until the prison cell throbs with a tornado of invisible insects about to lift off the roof. Then it stops, and the silence that ensues is every bit as unnerving as what came before.

  We hold our breath. Every single one of us clutches on to what we hold most dear. Cobra slides a hand around my waist. I gather his fingers in mine.

  Huddled like sailors on a storm-tossed sea, Grey Eyes and Miguel crouch beside the Captain. Miguel helps him up.

  ‘Father,’ he says, ‘Let’s go.’ He hands the Captain his cane.

  The old man stiffens. ‘I’ll deal with you tomorrow,’ he says to me. Then he mumbles, mostly to himself than to anyone else: ‘I saved Isaka. We saved him. You’d think that was enough. No, this is the gratitude I get. Give these people half a loaf and they want it all. What was I supposed to do? We couldn’t pull every single one of those damned illegals out of the sea. We couldn’t take any more. Give me your hand, Miguel.’

  Tenderly, Miguel offers his hand. The Captain clutches it. Back bent, eyes tiny pinpricks of fear, he mutters: ‘They’ve come to get me, my son. The angry spirits of the drowned.’

  Miguel leads the Captain away as Grey Eyes bolts the studio door.

  Now I’m convinced. The Captain was there. He was there when the trawler my parents were travelling in was mown down by bullets and destroyed. My parents were left to drown in the sea that saved me.

  17

  That night, before I fall asleep in Cobra’s arms, I know I’m going to dream that dream and it’s going to reveal my mother this time. I know, just as surely as Cobra knows that Cat’s on her way to us, and she’s bringing Scarlett with her.

  ‘What about the others?’ I ask him.

  His fingers garlanding my wrist, he lifts my hand in the air: a dark brown arm beside a wheat-coloured one. I twirl my thumb, rotate my wrist, and keep quiet as Cobra communes with Cat. From the way they’re able to talk to each other when they’re apart, I reckon they must have been holding hands in the womb, those two.

  ‘The others are coming too,’ Cobra says. ‘But Cat and Scarlett are on their own.’

  ‘Why?’ I sit up.

  Cobra pulls me down again, and turns me, so I’m facing him. His greens lick my face; his fingers stroke my thigh, and that rush of emotion that surfaced when he first kissed me flashes through me again. I smoulder and crackle as he says: ‘It’s not as if I’m on a phone to her, Sante. Can’t ask her questions or hear her voice. I feel her. Feel she’s eager to reach us. Anxious.’

  As anxious as my mother is, I suppose. Her presence has been lingering about us all day, interceding on our behalf and protecting me. I push her out of my mind, concentrate on Cat. ‘If she’s with Scarlett, where are the Old Ones?’

  ‘My guess is that they’re planning on getting help from the police.’

  ‘They can’t! Mama Rose and Redwood are missing, wanted for questioning. They’re outlaws! They can’t break their cover now.’

  ‘This is an emergency,’ Cobra reminds me. ‘Trouble doesn’t come much bigger than this.’

  We’re in trouble all right.

  I smooth down the spikes of Cobra’s black hair, kiss the lids of his greens to reassure myself he’s real. Stroke him, trace the sinews of his arms and thank my lucky stars that I’m not living this nightmare on my own.

  After Grey Eyes bolted the door and left us alone, Cobra placed a saucer of water in a corner. Teased Bella and Scales out of the inside pocket of his tuxedo and let them drink until, satisfied, the snakes slipped into my rucksack to sleep.

  ‘They’re worn out,’ Cobra said.

  ‘Me too.’

 
; Don’t know why, but that simple admission sparked an avalanche of laughter and we reeled with a step-away-from-cliff’s-edge hysteria. We laughed recalling the faces of those lizards and vultures in the snake-infested room. Finally, Cobra paused and broached the subject I was trying to forget: the ceremonial dagger, its levitation and whirling, the tumultuous roar of Mamadou’s music tonight.

  ‘What do you think’s going on, Sante? What are your spooks after?’

  I sit on our narrow bed, hands hugging my ribs to ease the pain of our outburst: ‘I can’t say, Cobra. The only thing in the whole wide world I’m sure of right now is you. I’m glad you’re with me, beside me. I’m glad you’re my friend and more.’

  ‘For sure.’

  The back of his hand grazed my cheek and then brushed the lobe of my ear as my eyes embraced his. ‘I appreciate it must be hard to make sense of what’s going on,’ he said. ‘But after everything that’s happened today, you must have an inkling of what they want, Sante.’

  His fingers squeezed mine, urging me to talk.

  I didn’t know how to put words to the feelings and thoughts jumbled up inside me. I still don’t. Don’t know how to separate what’s happening within me from the turbulence around me. Priss. Priss would help. I felt the urge to go walkabout with her to tease out my confusion. Just thinking of Priss brought tears to my eyes.

  I gulped ’em down: ‘Priss has got my tongue, Cobra, and what’s in my mouth is tied. I can’t seem to find the words to place on it to make sense of anything. This is too deep for me, too complicated.’

  ‘Try, Sante. Try your best,’ he replied, quoting Redwood.

  All he had to do was quote him and in a blink of an eye, I could hear Redwood talking to me as if he was standing beside me: ‘Whatever you do, kid, always do your best, always give your best.’

  I closed my eyes, heaved a sigh, and did what Redwood advises we do in a Tight Situation Without an Easy Way Out. When a predicament confuses me; when I’m spitting with rage and can’t see what’s in front of me, Redwood tells me to calm down, breathe slowly, and then say whatever comes into my head. ’Cause more often than not, the body has answers the mind can’t fathom.

  ‘Trust your instincts, kid,’ I heard him saying. ‘You may not realise it yet, but deep inside, you know the answer to every problem life will fling at you. The trick is to let it out.’

  I stilled my mind, then uttered the first thought that came: ‘Everything connects to my dream and the boat I was in. The dream tells me, and Isaka confirms that the boat, a boat full of migrants and refugees, was rammed. All of ’em drowned except for Isaka and me. I was put in a chest…’

  I got up and started to walk around the room.

  Up and down, round and about. Touched the walls, the door frame. Trailed my fingers along the dents and curves of our studio cell by doing the closest thing to hunting down my thoughts I could think of – pacing. Truth is, without Priss – her certainty, the spark of her fierce eyes – I felt hopeless, empty. A total waste of space. I gathered my wits, pushed the thought of Priss aside, and as my body relaxed and I exhaled, with my very next breath my tongue untied, and it came to me:

  ‘The sea-chest. As soon as Mama Rose opened that chest and gave me the rest of the gifts those people entrusted me with, everything changed.’

  I remembered that hunch-backed cat of curiosity and felt it slinking between my legs again, almost tripping me up.

  Cobra’s greens pleaded with me to dig deeper. It might as well have been Redwood standing in his shoes, Redwood who turned around. But it wasn’t Redwood. It was Cobra, his face brightening as he said: ‘And?’

  ‘Everything’s changed ’cause I want to know more. I want to find out exactly what happened. I have to know, ’cause I feel ’em around me.

  ‘Like me and Cat?’

  ‘I guess. Can’t talk to them as such, but I know they’re there. I hear ’em, Cobra. See ’em flitting around at the back of my eye. In that mirror, the uneven corners of this room. Hiding behind dark edges. I think they want me to help them. Don’t know how exactly…’

  My nose twitched. I eased the itch to hide my uncertainty. ‘Sounds weird I know, but…’

  ‘Go on…’

  ‘I think they want justice, a day of reckoning.’

  Cobra took off his tux. Hung it up. Then, with his knack of putting into words what I can’t quite grasp but is clamped deep inside and terrifies me, he said: ‘Are you sure they’re not out for revenge, Sante-girl? Are you sure they’re not using you?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Remember that time Mama Rose took us to the beach where she found me?’

  ‘Won’t forget that in a hurry. A trip to the seaside and what do we see?’

  ‘Dead bodies. Remember those women sunbathing next to ’em? Remember?’

  Cobra winced in an effort to erase the image from his mind and sat down on the bed.

  I settled beside him. ‘I reckon those spooks want the same sort of things we do, Cobra. They want their lives to matter. They saved me, I think, so that at least one person in the whole wide world would remember ’em. And I do. The dreams make sure of that.’

  The scene on the beach seared within us, Cobra’s fingers trembled. He leaned over, picked up fragments of flute from the end of the bed, and slotted ’em together. ‘I can mend this if you want, Sante,’ he said. ‘Make it good as new for you and Mamadou.’

  ‘He doesn’t need a flute to play with now. Doesn’t need it as much as I do.’

  Cobra put the bamboo pieces in my rucksack, then reassured me that if the Old Ones involve the police in our trouble all will be well.

  ‘But what if the police are already involved?’ What if…’

  The endless possibilities and permutations of a connection between the Captain, Miguel, Grey Eyes and the local police propel me off the bed.

  They’re all connected. Must be. I recall those faces leering at us in candlelight and I cringe, then shiver in fury: ‘Betcha the police are in on it. Betcha they get a cut of whatever the Captain and his crew make.’

  Cobra sighs and beckons me back. As he rubs my nose with his, I gather him in my arms and bring out the full radiance of his smile with a promise: ‘We’re going to get out of this mess,’ I assure him. ‘Somehow or other I’m going to dream our way out of here tonight.’

  He laughs, holds me tight. ‘You’re my girl, Sante,’ he whispers. ‘For ever and always, my very best girl.’

  I don’t say a word. All I can to do is smile, ’cause I’m half-asleep already.

  18

  When the dream comes I’m less than a speck on Priss’s back. My face pressed into her neck, my hands stretched over her wings, we’re carried by trade winds across the Straits of Gibraltar to Africa. Priss soars and glides, swept by currents over mountain ranges, then purple valleys seeded with date palms, grapes and guava.

  We cross a long, winding river and I cling on, telling Priss how much I’ve missed her, how she’d better come and rescue me soon, ’cause I’m losing my mind without her. I talk to my bird, and as I do so, her pulse beats in time with mine, and we merge. Her gold-brown feathers swaddle my skin, her beak seals my mouth, and before I have time to blink and take stock, I’m seeing the world as Priss does.

  Below us, as far as the eye can see, rolling hills of shifting sand.

  Above, a mottled morning sky with a hint of rain to come.

  We fly south across a vast expanse of desert. Dry riverbeds etched in the landscape peter into trails strewn with empty water bottles made of plastic and hide. Beside them, the remains of travellers picked clean by vultures: a skull, a leg bone, a decomposed arm, its right hand stretched in a final prayer to the sun. A convoy of lorries and cars pass by. A caravan of camels led by a man swathed in black. He stops, gazes at the golden bird darting through a cloud, then continues on the trail.

  I am Priss and Priss is me and we’re flying free!

  We press on,
undaunted by the desert terrain. Then, out of nowhere, a sheet of lightning illuminates the sky. A clap of thunder sounds, and below us a whirlwind sucks in a huge mound of sand and spits it out. The wind dances and spins round and round, churns hidden pebbles, stones and long-forgotten bones. Stirs ’em up and flings ’em at us.

  A feeling of dread creeps into my being. Priss climbs higher, but the wind chases us, a dark, roiling curtain of sand. Her feathers bristle, she picks up speed, and terror paralyses me as the stench of death freezes my blood. It’s them. I know it’s them pursuing me.

  In the swirl I detect the evil eye of the storm. I see it, and straightaway two faces emerge sculpted by wind and dust. Grey Eyes. And beside him, the Captain, cast in rubble and sand.

  I’m dreaming, I tell myself. Only dreaming.

  Wake up, Sante! Wake up! I try to open my eyes, but the dream has me firmly in its paws. My grip on Priss tightens, but my enemies are so close that evil fills my nostrils. Head tingles as they laugh at me. And yet the more they cackle, the more I taste the truth of what I saw in the Captain last night: malicious contempt. If he can’t use me, he’d rather see me dead at the bottom of the sea.

  A blink of an eye feels like an hour in dreamtime. Contorted images merge. The trick is to tease ’em out, decipher ’em, catch ’em. I remember my gift, squeeze my eyes tight, and Priss plummets, then surges forwards below the debris and dust of the sand storm. Closes her eyes and I can’t see a thing. Heartbeat slows and gradually, as the storm subsides, the icy chill of death leaves my blood.

  We journey over savannah: grassland and stubble, hobbled acacia trees. Baobabs, giant scarecrows, dangle bulbous fruit on their arms.

  We veer west and parched savannah turns into tropical forest: silk cotton trees, mahogany, ebony, teak. And in-between forest spaces, adobe thatched villages give way to zinc-roofed towns and sprawling cities with buildings that scrape the afternoon sky.