A Cat, a Hat, and a Piece of String

by Joanne Harris

  Meanwhile, Lorraine was speaking to Chris. ‘I warned you,’ she said. ‘Did you think it was funny, eh? Did you really think you could get away with a stunt like this?’

  Chris said nothing. So blessedly talkative in ordinary circumstances, he still clams up when anyone in authority addresses him. Instead, he shot a sideways glance at me, looking guilty and slightly sick. There was a smudge of soot on one of his arms, at which he rubbed nervously.

  Lorraine took another step. ‘I’m talking to you,’ she said loudly. ‘What was it, some kind of a joke? Or did you have something else in mind – what was it, going through lockers while I was out of the way? Looking for valuables in the rooms?’

  That was more than Hope and I could take. ‘You leave him alone,’ I told Lorraine, and she turned and gave me one of her most poisonous looks.

  ‘You keep out of this, dearie,’ she said. ‘That door was locked, and there’s only one other person here who could have locked it. Isn’t there?’ She glared at Chris. ‘You saw me give him the keys. Didn’t you, Maureen?’

  Maureen nodded.

  ‘Only he could have locked the door.’

  Once again, Maureen nodded as Lorraine’s peculiar magnetism began to reassert itself. Her face hardened; her small eyes grew smaller. ‘Well, did you?’ she said.

  There was a pause. Under Maureen’s scrutiny Chris looked more wretched than ever.

  Then Hope spoke up, not loudly, but in that Cambridge voice of hers that seems naturally to command authority. ‘He couldn’t,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’ said Lorraine with scorn. ‘Because he’s a friend of yours? Well, let me tell you—’

  ‘No,’ I told her. ‘Because I’ve got his keys.’ I pulled them out of my coat pocket. ‘I saw him drop them when he carried me out,’ I went on. ‘I called after him, but he didn’t hear me.’ There was a pause, during which Maureen stared at Lorraine, Lorraine glared at Chris and almost everyone else looked at me with the keys still in my hand.

  I held them out to Lorraine. ‘Here you are,’ I said with a smile. ‘Oh, and Maureen—’ Maureen was watching me now, her expression slowly veering from astonishment to a kind of grim understanding. ‘I had a few things hidden in a little cushion, back in my room. I’m sure they’re safe, but do you think we could check? I mean, I’d trust Chris with my life, of course—’ I gave Lorraine my sweetest smile. ‘Which room did you say you were trapped in, dear? Now fancy that. What a coincidence. Well, I’m sure my things would have been perfectly safe with you. What’s that?’ Lorraine made an inarticulate sound. ‘Oh, you’ve brought them with you. How very kind. And how clever of you to guess where I’d hidden them – my pearls, my engagement ring, my mother’s brooch – oh yes, and the money. Two hundred pounds. What a relief. How nice to know that there are still some decent, honest people left in the world.’

  Still smiling, I slipped my possessions into the pocket of my coat. I’d gathered quite a little audience by then; Sad Harry with something suspiciously like a smile on his face; Claire almost forgetting to chew her gum in her astonishment; Mr Braun; Polish John; Mrs Swathen, who can be as clever as the next person when she really puts her mind to it, now staring at Lorraine as if she’d never really seen her before; Maureen, her doughy face frozen behind a furious smile; Chris, looking dazed; and behind him the firemen, five or six of them; young men, grinning; turning off the flashers on the unneeded fire engine, checking the building for stragglers, faults, electrical hazards, anything that might endanger the residents of the Meadowbank Home, now waiting quietly on the grass.

  It took almost an hour for them to clear the building. It was a warm day, sunny and bright; there were daisies in the lawn and bumblebees in the azalea hedge alongside. Polish John started a game of cards with Sad Harry and Mr Braun; Mrs Banerjee took off one of her overcoats and Hope and I talked quietly while Lorraine and Maureen took their conversation (by now it was getting quite animated) to the car park by the main gates where they thought they couldn’t be overheard. They could, though – at least in snatches – but we politely refrained from listening, except for the part when Lorraine told Maureen to stuff her effing job, it wasn’t paying more than effing peanuts anyway, and who the hell wanted to spend their lives in a pit like the Meadowbank Home, you know what they call it in town, eh? The effing Morgue. How d’you like that, eh – dearie?

  And so on. Worse than Mr Bannerman on one of his bad days. Anyway, there was little doubt in my mind even then that that was the last we’d see of Lorraine. Across the grass, Chris was pretending not to overhear, but the smile on his face gave him away.

  Of course I knew he’d locked her in. I was willing to bet he’d lit the fire in the staffroom, too; making it look as if one of Lorraine’s eternal Silk Cuts had started the blaze. I guessed he had immobilized the front doors, and I was sure that it was he who had omitted to key in the fire-drill code, so that news of the emergency had been relayed straight to the fire station.

  ‘Good thing too,’ said the fire chief as he emerged from the building with the last of his men. ‘Just goes to show you can never be too careful with those things around. Good job you had that smoke alarm.’

  ‘Time to go in,’ bugled Maureen from the car park. ‘Is everyone here? Did everyone hear me? I said time to go in!’

  A murmur, almost of protest, went through the residents on the lawn. Sad Harry stood up reluctantly from his game of cards. Denise looked up from the daisy chain in her lap. Mr Bannerman turned his hearing aid on again. Mrs Banerjee took off another of her coats and Hope said, ‘Where’s Mrs McAllister?’

  For a second we all looked at each other. It was typical of Hope to have noticed the one thing that none of the sighted ones had taken in. Anxiously I scanned the grounds for signs of Mrs McAllister, imagining her lost and wandering, or worse, halfway down the busy main road in search of some place or person that hadn’t existed since before the War.

  ‘Mrs McAllister!’ bellowed Maureen. ‘We’re going in now, dearie!’

  Still, no sign of Mrs McAllister. I looked at Hope. I was beginning to get a bad feeling – a premonition, if you like – and imagined the old lady collapsed behind the angle of the building, toothless mouth caved in on itself, one hand flung out like a dry branch on the gravel path …

  Well, it just goes to show that you can’t trust those premonitions.

  Just as I opened my mouth to speak she rounded the building, arm in arm with one of the firemen, a cheerful-looking young man of twenty-five or thereabouts, tall and dark and rather muscular in that understated way that firemen often seem to have (yes, I know I’m seventy-two, but that doesn’t stop me noticing, does it?). Anyway, he must have said something hilariously funny, because Mrs McAllister was cackling away like a mad hen. I hadn’t seen her this cheerful since that day in the lobby when Lorraine had told her Peter had died, and it brought a lump to my throat to see her this way; so old; so small; but clinging to the fireman’s arm like a monkey and laughing fit to split.

  ‘Where have you been?’ said Maureen disapprovingly.

  The young man grinned. ‘Training for the fire brigade,’ he said, detaching Mrs McAllister’s hand (with some difficulty) from his arm. ‘I’ll give you this, Norah’ – can you believe it, I never knew Mrs McAllister’s first name was Norah – ‘you’re a hell of a sprinter.’

  Mrs McAllister laughed again. She peered up into the young man’s face (her own face was about level with his belt buckle) and took his hand in one of hers.

  ‘I’m so glad you came,’ she said brightly. ‘Now you can meet all my friends. This is Faith – and this is Hope.’ She waved at both of us, birdy-eyed with excitement. ‘They’ve got me through some hard times; they’ve been very good to me, you know.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Hope bracingly. ‘Now – suppose you introduce us to your friend.’

  ‘My friend?’ Mrs McAllister laughed again. I don’t think I’d ever seen her laugh as much; it made her young again. Her eyes shone; she
skipped and danced; her toothless mouth was merry with wrinkles.

  She took the young man by the hand and led him to the patch of grass where Chris and Maureen and Denise and Sad Harry were waiting to lead us back into the Meadowbank Home.

  ‘This is my son, Peter,’ she said. ‘He’s a fireman, you know.’

  Road Song

  Five years after ‘River Song’, I travelled to Togo with Plan UK. There I learnt all about the traffickers of children, who lure susceptible youngsters into slavery and prostitution with promises of wealth and fortune. This story is one of the many I collected when I was there.

  THERE ARE SO many gods here. Rain gods; death gods; river gods; wind gods. Gods of the maize; medicine gods; old gods; new gods brought here from elsewhere and gone native, sinking their roots into the ground, sending out signals and stories and songs wherever the wind will take them.

  Such a god is the Great North Road. From Lomé by the Bight of Benin to Dapaong in the far provinces, it runs like a dusty river. Its source, the city of Lomé, with its hot and humid streets; its markets; its gracious boulevards; its beach and the litter of human jetsam that roams along the esplanade, and the shoals of mopeds and bicycles that make up most of its traffic. Unlike the river, even in drought the Great North Road never runs dry. Nor does its burden of legends and songs; of travellers and their stories.

  My current tale begins right here, outside the town of Sokodé. A large and busy settlement five hours’ drive north of Lomé, ringed with smaller villages like handmaids to the greater town. All depend on the road for their existence, although many of these villagers have never been much further than a few dozen miles to the north or south. Often people walk up the track and sit and watch and wait by the side of the road for whatever flotsam it may bring: traders on cycles; mopeds; trucks; women on their way to the fields to harvest maize or to cut wood.

  One of these watchers is Maleki, a girl from nearby Kassena. Sixteen years old; the eldest of five; she likes to sit in the shade of the trees as the road unwinds before her. Her younger brother, Marcellin, used to watch the sky for vapour trails, while Jean-Baptiste preferred the trucks, waving madly as they passed, but Maleki just watches the road, ever alert for a sign of life. Over the years she has come to believe that the road is more than just dirt and stones; it has a force, an identity. She also believes that it has a voice – sometimes just a distant hiss, sometimes many voices, compelling as a church choir.

  And in the mornings at five o’clock, when she gets up to begin her chores, the road is already waiting for her; humming faintly; sheathed in mist. It might almost be asleep; but Maleki knows better. The road is like a crocodile; one eye open even in sleep, ready to snap at anyone foolish enough to drop their guard. Maleki never drops her guard. As she ties her sarong into place; knots it firmly at her hip; ties the bandeau across her breasts; slips barefoot across the yard; draws water from the village well; hauls it back to the washing hut; as she cuts the firewood and ties it into a bundle, as she carries it home on her head, she listens for the song of the road; she watches its sly, insidious length and the dust that rises with the sun, announcing the presence of visitors.

  This morning, the road is almost silent. A few bats circle above a stand of banyan trees; a woman with a bundle of sticks crosses from the other side; something small – a bush-rat, perhaps – rattles through the undergrowth. If they were here, Maleki thinks, her brothers would go out hunting today. They would set fire to the dry brush downwind of the village, and wait for the bush-rats to come running out of the burning grass. There’s plenty of meat on a bush-rat – it’s tougher than chicken, but tasty – and they would sell them by the road – gutted and stretched on a framework of sticks – to folk on their way to the market.

  But Maleki’s brothers are long gone, like many of the children. No one will hunt bush-rat today, or stand by the road at Sokodé, waving at the vehicles. No one will play ampé with her in the yard, or lie on their back under the trees watching out for vapour trails.

  She drops the cut wood to the ground outside the open kitchen door. Maleki’s home is a compound of mud-brick buildings with a corrugated iron roof around a central yard area. There is a henhouse, a maize store, a row of low benches on which to sit and a cooking pot at the far end. Maleki’s mother uses this pot to brew tchoukoutou, millet beer, which she sells around the village, or to make soy cheese or maize porridge for sale at the weekly market in Sokodé.

  Maleki likes the market. There are so many things to see there. Young men riding mopeds; women riding pillion. Sellers of manioc and fried plantain. Flatbed trucks bearing timber. Vaudou men selling spells and charms. Dough-ball stands by the roadside. Pancakes and foufou; yams and bananas; mountains of millet and peppers and rice. Fabrics of all colours; sarongs and scarves and dupattas. Bead necklaces, bronze earrings; tins of harissa; bangles; pottery dishes; bottles and gourds; spices and salt; garlands of chillies; cooking pots; brooms; baskets; plastic buckets; knives; Coca-Cola; engine oil and sandals made from plaited grass.

  Most of these things are beyond the means of Maleki and her family. But she likes to watch as she helps her mother prepare maize porridge for sale at their stall, grinding the meal between two stones, then cooking it in a deep pan. And the song of the road is more powerful here: a song of distant places; of traders and travellers, gossip and news, of places whose names she only knows from maps chalked on to a blackboard.

  The road has seen Maleki travel to and from markets every day since she could walk. Sometimes she makes her way alone; most often she walks with her mother, balancing the maize on her head in a woven basket. Until two years ago, she went to school, and the road saw her walk the other way, dressed in a white blouse and khaki skirt and carrying a parcel of books. In those days its song was different: it sang of mathematics and English and geography; of dictionaries and football matches and music and hope. But since her brothers left home, Maleki no longer walks to school, or wears the khaki uniform. And the song of the road has changed again; now it sings of marriage, and home; and children running in the yard; and of long days spent in the maize fields, and of childish dreams put away for good—

  It isn’t as if she wanted to leave. She was a promising student. Almost as clever as a boy, and almost as good at football, too – even the Chief has commented, though grudgingly (he does not approve of girls’ football). But with a husband away all year round, and younger children to care for – all three with malaria, and one not even two years old – Maleki’s mother needs help, and although she feels sad for her daughter, she knows that reading books never fed anyone, or ploughed as much as a square inch of land—

  Besides, she thinks, when the boys come home there will be money for everyone; money for clothes, for medicine, for food – in Nigeria, she has heard, people eat chicken every day, and everyone has a radio, a mosquito net, a sewing machine—

  This is the song the mother hears. A lullaby of dreams come true, and it sounds to her like Adjale’s voice – Adjale, of the golden smile – and although she misses her boys, she knows that one day they will both come home, bringing the wealth she was promised. It’s hard to send her children away – two young boys, barely into their teens – into a foreign city. But sacrifices must be made, so Adjale has told her. And they will be cared for very well. Each boy will have a bicycle; each boy will have a mobile phone. Such riches seem impossible here in Togo; but in Nigeria, things are different. The houses have tiled floors; a bath; water; electricity. Employers are kind and respectful; they care for the children as if they were their own. Even the girls are given new clothes, jewellery and make-up. Adjale told her all this – Adjale, with the golden voice – when the traffickers first came.

  Traffickers. Such a cruel word. Maleki’s mother prefers to call them fishers of men, like Jesus and his disciples. Their river is the Great North Road; and every year, they travel north like fishermen to the spawning grounds. Every year they come away with a plentiful catch of boys and girls, many
as young as twelve or thirteen, like Marcellin and Jean-Baptiste. They smuggle them over the border by night, avoiding the police patrols, for none of them has a passport. Sometimes they take them over the river on rafts made of wood and plastic drums, lashed together with twine woven from the banana leaf.

  Maleki’s mother wonders if, on the day her sons return, she will even recognize them. Both will have grown into men by now. Her heart swells painfully at the thought. And she thinks of her daughter, Maleki – so clever, so young, with red string woven into her hair and the voice of a golden angel – still waiting, after all this time. And when the daily chores are done, and the red sun fades from the western sky, and the younger children are asleep on their double pallet in the hut, she watches Maleki as she stands perfectly still by the Great North Road, etched in the light of the village fires, singing softly to herself and praying for her brothers’ return.

  For Maleki knows that the road is a god, a dangerous god that must be appeased. Sometimes it takes a stray child, or maybe, if they are lucky, a dog – crushed beneath some lorry’s wheels. But the traffickers take more than that: four children last year; three gone the year before. So Maleki sings: Don’t let them come; please, this year, keep them away – and she is not entirely sure whether it is to God or Allah that she prays or to the Great North Road itself, the sly and dusty snake-god that charms away their children.

  By night the road seems more than ever alive; filled with rumours and whisperings. All the old, familiar sounds from the village down the path – the chanting, the drumming, the children at play, the warble of a radio or a mobile phone from outside the Chief’s house, where the men drink tchouk and talk business – now all these things seem so far away, as distant as the aeroplanes that sometimes track their paths overhead, leaving those broken vapour trails like fingernail scratches across the sky. Only the road is real, she thinks; the road with its songs of seduction, to which we sacrifice our children for the sake of a beautiful lie, a shining dream of better things.