Wolf Light

by Yaba Badoe

  Bracken rubs her chin on my fingers, and follows as I run to the Linet Lake.

  Nana Merrimore once told me that because of the work we do, the lake, an oasis of clean water for wildlife in a swathe of moorland, hasn’t changed for hundreds of years. After what I saw in star time yesterday, I wonder how much longer we have before the damage filters through to here.

  My daily task is to be a companion to the lake and honour it, while Nana receives visitors who consult her on herb lore and infertility, divination with cards as well. Mainly, she delivers babies. Delivers them in pools of water as she did me; then treats them if there’s a need. A baby doesn’t feed and fails to thrive? Parents bring her to Nana. She knows how to entice them to eat, how to identify minerals they have a craving for. Nana massages and manipulates their limbs. Stretches and flexes them to help them grow. First she deals with the babies, then she sets to work on their parents.

  Whatever she does, it didn’t work with my mother. Even so, Mama returned home to give birth to me. A week later, she dipped me in the lake’s water and bathed me. According to Nana, I yelled. So much so, that Mama dipped her finger in the lake, and when my mouth was wide open, wet my tongue to give me my first taste of water.

  This morning a light breeze ruffles the lake’s surface. It whispers in reply and the dead bird, nestled on a dock leaf at the water’s edge, drifts from the shore. The lake beckons, and hands raised, I acknowledge my namesake:

  ‘Linet-pool, Linet-pool, cool as morning dew,

  Your Linet-girl is here to play with you!’

  The water’s cold today, the air above sharp and fresh.

  I gauge the lake’s mood through sight, sound, touch and smell. As a sweet scent of mulch settles in my nostrils, I take a first step to retrieve the floating linnet. All I have to do is grab it, then I’ll bury it before Nana has time to cook breakfast.

  A flurry of water curls around my ankles and the dock leaf drifts beyond my reach. It slips away as an insistent tug draws me in, until my shins are covered, the hem of my nightdress wet. The lake anoints me and stirs with birdsong. A faraway curlew calls, a sedge warbler chuckles, while choruses of blackbirds and thrushes fling reels of laughter in the air. I wade in.

  The deeper I go, the further the lake nudges the dock leaf and its cargo. It’s pulled to the middle of the lake, close to the circular whirl where women used to be drowned. It’s the most menacing part, a roiling, dark place with an eddy so strong it sucks everything in.

  Nana’s told my sisters and I that even though at times our work can be perilous, while we’re young, we’re not to face danger alone. I know this and yet, because of what I did yesterday, I realise I’ve crossed a line. I can’t change my name without a bit of a backlash. No one understands as well as I do how much words matter. They can soothe and heal, sting and wound, making the strongest of us bleed. That’s why I’m convinced that the lake is testing me, teasing me.

  ‘Linet-lake, Linet-lake, do you doubt my devotion?’

  A cluster of waves lap and loop around my waist as the lake lavishes me with kisses. I’m in deeper still, until I’m barely standing on tiptoe.

  Bracken starts mewling. Whiskers bristling, she clamours at the water’s edge. When I ignore her, she screeches loud enough for Nana Merrimore to hear.

  I plunge into the water and swim closer to the edge of the drowning pool than I’ve ever done before. I swim and the lake lifts me in a loving embrace. Underwater weeds murmur at my shins and stroke my thighs. They lap against me, pressing me forwards.

  My right hand grabs the dock leaf and wraps the bird in it. Then, with both feet kicking, I try to push my way back to the shore. I lunge, but my feet, knees, legs, my entire body, flails.

  I dive underwater to break the current’s grip. Cough, splutter, dive again, but the eddy is stronger than I am. It slurps, sucking me in until all I can see above is a dazzle of luminous sky through water.

  ‘Hukaa!’ my heart cries. ‘Sisters, sisters, help me! Or I shall die in the pool of my Linet Lake.’

  On the slope of a mountain in the Gobi desert, Zula, herding sheep, stops, while Adoma, on her way to school in Ghana, slips behind a kiosk. Eyes closed, they focus, listening.

  ‘Sisters, sisters, tell the Linet Lake to have mercy on me!’

  ‘Let go!’ my sisters say. ‘The lake won’t harm you. Let go, Linet-girl! Let go!’

  Easy to say, much harder to do. But with our hearts beating as one and their fingers entwined in mine, I’m able to smooth creases from my mind. As my thrashing limbs relax, a final thought blooms: Mama, I never knew you, now I never will.

  Lungs aflame, the thought wilts. In that instant, when the only way out is to sink to a silty grave, the dock leaf in my hand twitches and a circle of hands pokes me. Around my ankles and feet, the prod and push of bony fingers shove me up. Hair swipes my face. My eyes open and gape. So this is the reason I’m not to venture this far. There’s no escaping this watery tomb, for after all these years, through tempest, drought and flood, fragments of them are still here.

  Where once there were eyes, I see sockets, and below cavernous holes gurgling. Light shimmers, particles of bone take on flesh, and faces emerge. Around me, a host of women: women dressed in sackcloth, solid one moment, next pale and insubstantial as ash. This isn’t a trick of light in water. The witches who drowned here remain.

  Among them, closest to me, is one whose smile reminds me of Nana’s. Her smile tickles my soul and as her bony finger touches my forehead, the memory that haunts me unfolds. Only this time I see what happened. My mother’s face ripples above mine while she holds me down. I struggle to breathe, to live. Behind her, Bracken spits.

  The finger touches me again, and a jolt of electricity pulses through my body propelling me from water into air. The linnet in my hand bursts free, and as it flies away, I tumble to the ground.

  6

  Linet

  When I come to, Nana Merrimore, alerted by her cat, is kneeling, her hand around my wrist. Bracken clambers over my legs. I splutter. Nana sighs – a long, slow release of breath that makes me realise she’s been tracking my pulse. Fear burns bright on her face. So bright it might have frightened me at any other time or place, but I’m alive, aren’t I? My sisters answered my call and in testing me the lake has confided its secret. In my left hand, I’m holding a purple, heart-shaped stone, a hole in the middle.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I sit up gulping air. ‘The bird…’

  ‘It’s gone,’ Nana says.

  Lifting me to my feet, she helps me back to Carbilly where she runs a hot bath in which she sprinkles oils of lavender and clove. My nightdress already in the bin, the stone on a window ledge, Nana plonks me in the tub and scrubs me clean of my adventure. My toes and nails free of grime, the slime on my legs brushed away, Nana towels me dry. She touches me slowly, tenderly while I wait for her fury to erupt.

  I feel it whenever she touches me: coiled rage. And with each caress a crush of emotions I find hard to untangle. Emotions pumped by relief, which increase as she dabs behind my ears, my neck, my belly. She touches me as if she needs to know that every bit of me is intact.

  When Nana’s satisfied that I am as clean as I ever can be, she cooks me a breakfast of porridge sprinkled with nutmeg and cinnamon. Porridge followed by a slab of Spanish omelette. We eat in silence, Bracken, a warm curve of tenderness at my feet, while Nana’s fury simmers.

  She pours herself tea, then as an afterthought, offers to treat me to a bowl of hot chocolate. Its delicious aroma wafts through the kitchen settling in every nook and cranny of our home, beading the windows with droplets of steam. I watch Nana, her hand stirring a wooden ladle, as she slowly adds milk to melted chocolate. I watch and tremble at what I think I see: Nana’s rage smelted into a strip of steel sharp as a Samurai sword.

  She gives me the chocolate and sits down.

  She doesn’t wag a finger at me. She doesn’t need to. Not Nana Merrimore! She leaves me churning
in misery until I begin to wonder if her anger will peak before I break. Should I say sorry first? Surely, she’ll have to say something eventually?

  Just when I’m about to stand up and scream because there’s no way I can endure a moment longer, Nana says: ‘You are never, ever, to do that again, Linet, you hear?’

  ‘Yes, Nana.’

  ‘You could have drowned. I’ve told you time and time again, you are never to go anywhere near the whirl of the pool. I’ve told you and yet you did! Why?’

  I try to explain. I try to tell Nana that I had, in fact, remembered her advice. Not only that, Bracken warned me not to venture deeper too. I do my best but my stab at truth fails to convince.

  An eyebrow raised, Nana frowns, and my voice draggles to a whisper.

  ‘The lake insisted!’ I say. ‘I couldn’t help myself.’

  ‘So now you’re telling me you had no choice in the matter?’

  I nod.

  ‘And your sisters? Did they know what you were up to?’

  ‘I asked them for help, Nana, and they came.’

  Nana shudders, shaking her head.

  ‘They told me to let go. So I did. And then…’ I hesitate, puzzled by a new expression on my grandmother’s face. She gets up to clear the table.

  Her back to me, Nana says: ‘Go on, Linet. Tell me what happened!’ Nana turns, hazel eyes searching mine for an answer: ‘What are you keeping from me, child? Did you see something?’

  ‘Nana, why are you frightened? I’m fine, really, I am!’

  ‘What did you see down there, Linet?’

  I could pretend that nothing unusual took place this morning, but instinct and loyalty to my sisters pushes me in another direction. If you can’t be open with your teacher and guide, who can you be true to? Certainly not yourself! That’s what Nana says.

  So I ask: ‘Haven’t you seen them, Nana? The women at the bottom of the lake. Haven’t they told you? Mama tried to drown me…’

  Blood drains from Nana’s cheeks as a palm slams over her mouth. When she’s stopped trembling, she says: ‘Go on, Linet…’

  ‘They’re still there, Nana, and among them is someone who looks like you. Her smile reminds me of yours… When she touched my forehead, I saw what Mama did.’

  Tears slide down my grandmother’s cheeks. She brushes them away and opens her arms. I run to her and she draws me in, swaying from side to side, while I cling to her.

  Nana, my anchor, my lifeline, my teacher. I hug her. As she weeps, I sweep strands of silver hair from her face, and use the same words she does when I’m distressed: ‘It’s going to be all right, Nana. Nothing’s ever as bad as it seems. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And that’s a promise.’

  Nana sniffs and dragging her fingers through her hair, pulls it up with a clip. ‘There!’ she says. ‘If there’s one thing I want you to remember, no matter how events unfold, it’s that your mother wasn’t herself when she tried to harm you. Unhappiness unhinged her. That’s why she left you with me.’

  ‘She won’t come back, will she, Nana?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Her hand in mine, Nana sits me down. ‘From what you’ve told me, I think what you saw in the lake this morning was the ghost of Hester Merrimore. Old Hester was one of us: a sharp-tongued truth-teller, the first woman in the parish to be accused of witchcraft and murdered for it.’

  Nana shrugs as if that’s all there is to it. But there’s more, I can tell. A shadow lurks behind her eyes. She can’t look at me, can’t meet my smile.

  ‘What is it, Nana? Whatever it is, I want to know.’

  She shakes her head, then relenting, sighs. She repeats the action – a single shake of the head – again and again until grudgingly, she says: ‘Very well, if you insist.

  ‘You may not like what I’m going to tell you, child. There’s always more to seeing a ghost than meets the eye, Linet. There are rumours and stories to consider as well as how that person died.

  ‘As you can imagine, Old Hester’s drowning wasn’t the easiest of deaths. Her friends and neighbours, encouraged by the local priest, tied her up in a woollen sack and threw her in the lake out there.’ Nana jerks her head in the direction of the drowning pool.

  ‘As Hester started to sink, a sign in those days of her innocence, the witnesses present held back. They wanted to be sure, you see, certain that she wasn’t in league with the devil. They waited too long. By the time they hauled her from the water and out of the sack, by the time they’d pummelled her chest and tried to breathe life back into her, Old Hester was dead.

  ‘She was innocent. Cleared of witchcraft, yet for ever remembered for crimes she didn’t commit. That’s how it is with Merrimore women. The gifts the lake gives us, gifts we practise daily and nurture, put us in harm’s way.’

  Nana might have left it at that, if it wasn’t for a smell emanating from the pores of her skin.

  ‘Nana, why won’t you tell me what’s the matter?’

  She bends over, kisses the top of my head and smiles her special smile, a smile as surprising as a cat’s lick of sunshine on a winter day: ‘Rumours and stories, child,’ she says. ‘It’s nothing to worry about, but people used to say that once a Linet-girl has seen Old Hester’s ghost, it’s more than likely that the oldest Merrimore alive will soon join her. That’s what they said a long time ago.’

  It takes me a few seconds to grasp what she means – seconds for my pulse to quicken, my head to swirl. ‘You don’t believe that do you? Tell me you don’t. Please.’

  She gives me that special smile again.

  That’s when I ask: ‘Are you going to die, Nana?’

  7

  Adoma

  When Linet called us a second time that day, I was with Milo, a rescue monkey I look after, watching a match on Ghana television: Asante Kotoko versus Accra Olympics. It was half-time and our emblem, a porcupine, was up against theirs: the Olympic flame with its five rings. Kotoko supporters were jumping up and down, doing the Kotoko jig, because we were halfway to thrashing Olympics three nil. Yah-yah! I was singing our song, when I heard Linet’s call: ‘Hukaa!’

  I’m used to being summoned. After all, I do my fair share of summoning myself: when it’s dark and I want to speed through the night sky somersaulting with my sister squad; when I want to chat long and hard about what we’re learning and how our gifts are growing, I call them, ’cause I’m a sucker for sister-magic. But to be called twice in one day, a cola at my side, eyes scanning the television in case the game started again, now that was difficult. What’s more, I was at a friend’s house: my one and only true friend, Kofi Agyeman, the boy I shall marry when he admits I’m as fast as he is at football – sometimes faster. I should know, because we practise dribbling and tackles whenever we can. I’m the dribble princess of our village, a future contender for the Black Queens, while Kofi has set his heart on playing for Chelsea. My One and Only has big dreams – oh! ‘Poor on earth, a loser for ever in heaven,’ he says. So what better way to learn about football than by watching our team on TV? It’s not every day Kotoko meets Olympics. But then it’s not every day that I hear twice from my O broni, my white sister, Little Linet.

  ‘Hukaa!’ she called again.

  ‘Chale, I have to run,’ I said to Kofi.

  He screwed up his face in disgust: his nose, his eyes, all of him. ‘Adoma, how? When we dey kill those Accra boys? Noooo! If you want to be my girl, you go stay!’

  ‘Your girl? Kofi, I’m one hundred per cent my own girl, you have no idea!’

  ‘Then I beg you, stay.’

  ‘Girl talk!’ I flashed my phone at him and ran outside, Milo following. Quick-quick, I had to find a place to talk with Linet.

  I live in a ramshackle village a good distance from Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti region. My grandfather, Okomfo Gran-pa, likes to say that Kumasi is the garden city of Ghana. Didn’t see any gardens last time I was there. But hey – this be Ghana – oh! And in my broke-down village we’ve learned to make do with the little we
have. Poverty snaps at everyone’s heels, here. It gnaws at the belly, gobbling up sleep when on market day, there’s no money for food, no money at the start of a new term to pay school fees. We live by the sweat of our brows, we do. We have to.

  Linet called late in the afternoon when farmers were on their way home from their plots, cutlasses sheaved on their shoulders, and women and girls, heads laden with firewood, hurried down a track that passes as our main road.

  A tumult of sound came from every compound. Thump! Thump! Wooden pestles hitting mortars. Fufu pounding: heavy, monotonous, up and down. The whole wide world and his wife were getting ready for an evening meal of fufu: boiled plantain and cassava, pulverised into a round ball and wolfed down with soup. Boom! Boom!

  The noise spoke to me saying: ‘Adoma! Girl, you’re hungry! Cola no be food!’

  Another voice whispered: ‘Adoma! Instead of wasting time watching television with Kofi, you should be at home helping Gran-ma like a “good” girl.’

  I sniffed, disgruntled. Now, if I were a boy, no one would expect me to stop roaming and stay put. Believe me, I’d be allowed to play football at every street corner and do exactly as I please. No problem!

  I scampered to our house on the outskirts of the village and entered round the back, through the open kitchen where, sure enough, my grandmother was pounding and turning fufu on her own. She looked at me, eyes dark with reproach.

  ‘I’m coming,’ I told her and fled to my corner of home before she could call me back. Before she could shout:

  ‘Adoma, that monkey-child of yours is not to go in the sitting room! Come back!’

  Gran-ma’s command echoed behind me. Thankfully, I was already inside. I slammed the back door and could no longer hear her. Perfect.

  What I call my ‘corner’ is in an alcove of the main room of a zinc-roofed house that my grandfather, Okomfo Gran-pa, built years ago. Gran-pa’s a priest. A traditional priest, by which I mean a Before-The-White-Man-Came priest, when most people behaved differently. A woman couldn’t have a baby? She consulted Okomfo Gran-pa. Perplexed by the burden of a family curse? If you visited my grandfather, depending on the potency and longevity of the hex, he might be able to help you.