The Drowning Lesson

by Jane Shemilt

  Car doors open and slam, engines start: some of the journalists are leaving, having got what they wanted for the day. The gum trees tower above me as I walk back. Kabo told me trees have a powerful spirit and it consoles me to think that the ancient African tree gods might be watching over us. My hand against the silvery bark looks like a skeleton hand. Staring up into the canopy of leaves, I find myself praying for death. As a child I once persuaded my father into a medieval torture museum in Siena. Racks and spiked cages would be unnecessary to punish a mother; those twelfth-century Italians would only have had to take her child away from her and she would have agreed to anything for his safety, even death. But my torture won’t end. I can’t die.

  Up at the house the girls’ faces, like pale flowers, are pressed to the windows. The dried bunch I was given rustles as I place it at the foot of the tree, my offering to the tree gods.

  Inside, the girls have slipped from the window and are watching a cartoon on television. What’s happened to my resolve, to the normal structure of the day? I ought to turn off the television; read the girls a story or help Elisabeth, who is quieter without Josiah, thinner. She moves more slowly. I’m letting things go, letting the fabric of our lives unravel. I can’t remember when the girls last did any work. We never heard from Simon’s friend, and after the police questioned Simon, I couldn’t pursue it.

  Later that morning, both policemen turn up. Kopano disappears but Goodwill stands in the sitting room, rocking backwards and forwards on his feet, leather shoes creaking. Elisabeth takes the girls into Josiah’s yard. Through the window I see her set down a bucket to milk the goat. Alice leans against the wall, near the dogs’ cage. She taps the wire; one wakes and lumbers to his feet. She aims a little kick in his direction. The animal crouches swiftly, tail flat against his body. Alice never used to be cruel. Grief is changing us all. Meanwhile Zoë squats, looking up at Elisabeth, waiting to be told what to do.

  Goodwill sits, but remains silent. Perhaps he is finding the words for bad news; perhaps he is simply bored: this job has gone on too long with no end in sight. There must be others waiting for his attention. He is dressed as usual in spotless uniform, though his shirt strains at the buttons. School children along the road wear perfect uniform too, though their homes often lack electricity and running water. Goodwill might live in a hut like that, he might mind that we are wealthier than he is, though surely he knows we have lost everything; no one could possibly envy us now. Maybe the international attention bothers him; after all, there are missing children who are never mentioned. For a moment Baruti’s face floats between us.

  The kettle whistles in the kitchen. The task of spooning black leaves from the tin into the chipped yellow teapot and pouring the bubbling stream from the heavy kettle is calming. Back in the sitting room, Goodwill takes his cup, sips and sighs loudly, then looks down to his lap at the papers he has pulled from the case.

  ‘Josiah,’ he says finally, frowning deeply, as though the name itself is a statement of guilt.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We are concerned with this man. He is not telling us the truth.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Thirteen days ago, the day after your son disappeared, Josiah went to his home in Mochudi. He told his brother he needed money, then he left. He didn’t arrive back here until the following morning. He refuses to tell us where he went in the hours in between, but he seems frightened, which worries me.’

  Goodwill would be frightening to a frail old man, pushing him into silence; even so, these words are a warning. What has Josiah done that he is keeping so secret?

  Goodwill wipes his hand rapidly over his face. ‘In my profession, fear means guilt. I am wondering where he might have gone that day, and how we might find out.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you. I have no idea at all.’

  What Josiah does when he isn’t working and where his family lives are unknown to me. As with Teko, we didn’t involve ourselves. A bleak wave of regret breaks over me, leaving a backwash of bitterness. Goodwill is still staring at me. He seems suspicious that I am protecting Josiah; he thinks I’m not telling the truth, but I am. Almost. They have forgotten about Elisabeth. They may not know she is his sister. She may be able tell us more, but if there is more to find out, I will do the finding.

  I begin to think about Josiah as Goodwill must, like a detective: a man with no money who unexpectedly breaks his habits to disappear for a while shortly after our child has vanished and refuses to say where he’s been. A man who had always singled Sam out for special attention.

  Goodwill pulls himself to standing and drains his cup. ‘Kopano is digging up the grave by Josiah’s hut.’ Casually imparted, but I feel his eyes follow me as I run from the room.

  Kopano leans on a spade, soil scattered around his feet in crumbling heaps. The wooden cross is in pieces on the ground. There are scraps of yellow fur in the earth, a long shallow skull. I walk back to the sitting room on trembling legs. ‘The dog,’ I tell Goodwill. ‘Just the dog.’

  Goodwill leaves silently. He has sharp instincts: he thinks I’m keeping something from him. He must have known the grave was for Josiah’s dog, but perhaps he meant to terrify me, believing I would talk more freely from pure relief.

  In the kitchen, the girls are with Elisabeth, collecting empty jars from a cupboard to make butter from the goat’s milk; she sends then to scrub their hands and begins to scour the jars at the sink. A pan of water containing clothes bubbles on the hob, filling the air with the steamy scent of hot cloth.

  ‘About your brother, Josiah.’

  The jam jars bob about in the soapy water as she washes them. She seems absorbed in her task: there is no indication she has even heard me.

  ‘He is in trouble; the police may keep him. He visited his brother, your brother too, of course, thirteen days ago, then disappeared for the afternoon. No one knows where he went before he came back here.’

  Elisabeth looks out of the window above the sink. Her eyes rest on his small vegetable patch; the neat rows of leaves are dried and dying.

  ‘Ngaka ya setso,’ she murmurs.

  That Setswana word, meaning traditional doctor. ‘So he’s ill?’

  She looks at me and away, her glance is full of secrets.

  So, it’s more complicated than illness. The steamy air thickens, clotting into the shapes of a small heart, limbs and lips. I lean against the wall for a moment, ‘Why did he go to see the doctor, Elisabeth?’

  She shrugs and her mouth turns down: she has said too much already.

  ‘I need to see this doctor. He may help us to help Josiah.’ She turns at my words and this time her gaze lingers on my face. Can she guess what horrors are passing through my mind?

  ‘Could you take me there?’

  She inclines her head, so briefly it could be mistaken for an accidental movement.

  ‘Shall we go this afternoon, when Adam is back?’

  Another small nod.

  ‘You will need money for the doctor,’ she tells me. Zoë runs back into the kitchen followed, after a while, by Alice who, walking as though half asleep, stumbles against a chair and almost falls. I put my arms round her and she stands quite still, waiting for me to go. Elisabeth puts two jars on the table and pours goat’s milk into them, screwing the tops on tightly. She shakes them and the milk slops up and down. Zoë laughs. No one notices me leave.

  Josiah’s room is stifling. The sun strikes through the metal roof, releasing a harsh clay smell from the plaster. The drawers have been pulled right out now; there are the marks of boots on the shirt and towel, which are lying on the floor. I fold both, lay the towel and the shirt back inside and close the chest. There is nothing behind the door; I even peer into the keyhole. My fingertips pick up a layer of gritty dust from the windowsill. The mattress is back on the bedstead, but has been slashed at one end with a knife, and some of the stained foam-rubber lining has been pulled out. Kopano must have done this on his return visit.
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  The room is so silent the air hums. The old man has gone and I am unable to grasp even the faintest echo of who he was. Questions begin to invade the barren space around me: could the emptiness itself be a clue, a screen behind which another Josiah is hiding? He seems to have so very little: is the real stuff of Josiah’s life somewhere else? A stash of money or knives in a box? I begin to feel frightened.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Botswana, April 2014

  My father once showed me grainy newsprint photos of ex-Nazis. ‘Look what resolve can do,’ he’d said of the hunters who’d tracked them down, but I’d stared at the pictures of the old men in the dock. It was hard to imagine the white-haired, stooped figures capable of such cruelty.

  The sunlit patch of ground outside Josiah’s hut is the same as it was back in December. The goat backs away, eyes wild and hoofs scrabbling, just as before. I still feel I’m trespassing. Apart from the grave this could be the day we arrived but underneath the surface everything is different. He was invisible to the journalists, but has the real Josiah been invisible to us as well? If he is a criminal, this house would be a good place to hide. He might have been here a long time or maybe his arrival coincided with ours, deliberately coincided. How would Elisabeth fit in? Innocent sister? Collaborator?

  When Adam returns from the bush, he falls asleep on the bed for an hour. I find my purse in the wardrobe, slide out five hundred pula and stuff them into my pocket. I take the car keys from his jacket. The jeep I used is still being repaired. I am walking out of the door when he stirs. ‘I’m taking Elisabeth to see a doctor. I’ll need the car for a while. The children are in their room – they’ll want supper later.’

  He rolls on his back, eyebrows raised. His face is still streaked with sweat and dust. ‘Can’t we help Elisabeth ourselves?’

  ‘She says it’s private.’

  He nods, accepting this.

  Elisabeth is waiting by Adam’s car. She is wearing her green woollen hat pulled low, a long mauve scarf covers half her face. Her eyes are watchful. As we get into the car, she murmurs, ‘Mochudi.’

  At the end of the drive the journalists gather around the jeep, knocking on the window and shouting questions. They have become more aggressive through boredom, or perhaps they think we’re hiding something. Elisabeth shrinks back in her seat.

  As we near Gaborone, the verges are cluttered with stalls: fruit is for sale under broken awnings. Children are everywhere, walking along the edge of the road, dawdling by the fences, trailing after adults, some barefoot. One or two toddlers trip and straggle behind on their own and my heart clenches in panic. By a junction, something white moves at the edge of my vision: a sheet or blanket spread out against a fence. I stop the car by the side of the road and run, panting, to inspect: close up, it’s finely striped with red. Sam’s blanket was white.

  Driving through Gaborone, my hands grip the wheel as if I’m holding onto a boat in rough water. I haven’t faced traffic for a while. At the crossroads a tall policeman in white gloves leaps and gesticulates with ferocious energy amid traffic that shoots and swirls around him. When Kabo drove us from the airport, we must have come a different way: the tall buildings with gleaming windows that I’d noticed then have vanished. The streets are crowded: people are walking or dawdling, pushing bikes and prams, talking, eating and dancing. At one intersection, two youths stagger and collide, throwing punches; there are bottles at their feet. The backdrop is a line of fences strewn with rubbish and, behind, concrete houses and huts made of tin. It seems like a different town from the one I saw when we first arrived.

  After forty minutes, the first houses of Mochudi appear, dotted along the highway. Elisabeth indicates right: the roads twist and turn, the disjointed settlement thickening down a slope into a tight-knit jumble of streets lined with concrete huts.

  She cranes through the windows, then holds up her hand. Pulling the scarf more closely round her face, she points to a wooden door in a white wall. The words ‘Tuck Shop’ are painted in thick red letters above a hatch; paint has dribbled from one arm of the T, bleeding a crimson trail down the wall. Elisabeth shrinks further into the seat. I park under a shady tree and she closes her eyes; perhaps she will sleep. I cross the narrow street, knock and wait by the door; the sun scorches off the whitewash. After a few moments, a child with a frilly pink collar and stiff plaits peers through the hatch; a bolt slides back and the door opens into a small earthen yard surrounded by sheds. She points to a bench and stands, stomach out, against a wall, watching me fixedly; a bone-thin dog with swollen teats walks slowly towards me, then half sits, half falls against a step to lie panting on her side. An old woman waits on the bench too, her twisted hands bunched on a stick; her corneas are white. Flies rise from dark puddles at our feet.

  After a while, the door of a hut opens and an older girl, tightly wrapped in brilliant orange and blue, beckons me into the darkness. I indicate the old woman who was there before me, but the girl beckons again.

  A small man sitting by a window is just visible in the gloom. The room smells musty and faintly of herbs. A woven rug stretches in front of him; to the side is a small patch of ash and burn marks scored on the concrete. The girl indicates a seat next to him; close up, his face is broad, the thin yellow skin finely wrinkled. His slanted eyes flare with recognition. I’d forgotten that my image has been on television and in newspapers for weeks. I’d planned to start by asking if he knew Josiah, then pick up clues from there, but now he knows who I am, he might be evasive and, if guilty, vanish. I could inform the police but the door is shut now and the girl leans against it.

  Playing for time, I pile pula on the floor in front of him; the girl gathers the notes carefully and slips them into an iron box next to his seat. He lifts his chin questioningly at me.

  ‘Josiah …’ I begin, then stop, at a loss.

  He nods and, without turning his head, speaks in rapid Setswana to the girl by the door; as he talks I look around. There are plastic pots cramming wooden shelves that line the walls, little bottles, ceramic dishes and small cardboard boxes with faded labels in red and orange. A necklace of dried pods dangles from the top shelf, exactly like the one Alice made with Teko. The doctor is watching me; he nods, then points to a snakeskin pinned to the smoky wall. Though the edges are dried and curling inwards, the bars of bright coral shine as they did when I saw the living animal slither into the grass. There is a moment of utter silence.

  The girl begins to speak to me. ‘This doctor knows of you and your son. He says Josiah came with the pods and with the skin of that snake and other skins. He needed a charm, made with your things.’ Then she adds quietly, almost as if it were self-evident, ‘A special charm, so that your son would be found.’

  If what she says is true, I’ve got it wrong. Very wrong. Josiah has been helping us all along. It must have been Josiah who skinned the snake, the frog and the lizards. Josiah who slipped the pods from the kudu horns. He would have borrowed money from his brother, then made his way here. After the doctor had made the charm, he would have journeyed home, waiting patiently for a bus, possibly all night.

  Why didn’t he tell the police? I know the answer to that, though: Esther told me months ago. Everyone is frightened of the power of these doctors. Josiah wouldn’t dare say a word. If the police visited the doctor, what vengeance might he fear?

  ‘How would it work then, this charm? Is it a medicine? Who would take it?’ I am ready to believe. Despite a lifetime of evidence-based practice, I want to believe it’s possible a charm might bring Sam back. I would trade everything I own and all my knowledge of medicine, if only it were possible.

  The girl translates my question to the doctor, and he replies to her at length. She turns to me. ‘No one takes this charm. It’s not for the body. The doctor takes the pods and cuts the skin of the snake. He makes a powder together.’ She demonstrates a grinding action, her fist in her palm. ‘Then he made a fire with the powder. The smoke goes up.’ She lifts her bunched
hand high into the air and opens it suddenly, spreading her short fingers wide. Up and out, the movement implied, out into the room, the village, the miles and miles of bush around, molecules drifting across the spaces of Africa. I close my eyes, drifting with them in the warm air.

  The sun shines in my face.

  I kick my legs hard, my arms pull though the water.

  My father calls to me above the noise of splashing, he tells me I can do it.

  My body moves forwards towards the boat.

  The doctor stands up. My eyes snap open. He holds a small bag made of leopard-skin; he demonstrates that I am to stretch out my hands. When I cup my palms he tips the contents of the bag into them, a heap of tiny bones.

  They are cold in my hands: mouse vertebrae? Snake? There are yellow shards of horn and a domino buried in the mixture. The girl tells me I am to whisper my wish to them.

  ‘Help me find Sam,’ I murmur into my hands.

  Then as he mimes opening his hands, I do the same, scattering the bones on the mat in front of him. Watching them closely, he moves them a little with a stick. Then, glancing back from time to time, as if their pattern spelt out a recipe, he gathers powder from different pots and mixes them in a stone dish. He pours liquid from a small bottle onto the powder. Purple flames leap and dance, and when they die down, he tips the powder into a small pot.

  ‘Touch the powder to your face,’ the girl says, handing me the pot, touching her eyelids.

  ‘What will it do?’

  ‘It is a powerful charm, from roots and leaves. It will to help you see your son,’ she replies.

  The doctor’s hand is cool as he clasps mine; his eyes are remote, as if his thoughts have already turned to the next patient, the blind old woman on the bench outside.

  ‘Josiah is in prison,’ I tell him quickly. ‘The police think he’s hiding something from them.’

  His eyes meet mine. They close and open once. Then he turns away.