Where Bones Dance: An English Girlhood, An African War

Christine

105 Christine I stand outside the servants’ quarters with my catapult, looking at the lizards. They have orange heads and blue bodies. Jeremiah says there is poison in their heads. I stand on the hot gravel and watch them until the wall is a pattern, blue and grey and orange moving in and out and the lines are a whirlpool sucking me in. I dig my heels in the gravel and make it like my eyes are taking a photograph. Click. Stop. But the lines won’t stop, they make one giant lizard with two black eyes and half a tail. The eyes are watching me. The lizard tongue flicks at my ears and face. It touches me over and over. It touches my feet and legs and belly and face until all my skin is licked away and I am wet with bleeding. “Child, what are you doing, standing in the rain like a fool?” I hear her voice but I can’t make my eyes go away from the lizard . It has a horny orange forehead. Its scales are shining. “Child,” she says, “bring yourself here.” My legs feel squat and angled out from my body like the lizard’s. I hear my feet in the gravel. I am going into the servants’ 106 quarters where I have never been before. Christine stands in the doorway. She is wearing a dark green and pink cloth. “What has got into you?” “The the.” I can’t make the words unstick. I keep walking towards her and she doesn’t go away. She puts her hands on me and skin begins to grow again. I cry. It is Sunday. It’s her day off. I smell pepper sauce on her skin. I’m inside yellow light. It’s like hugging the sun. “Come,” she says, and I walk down the narrow passage. The walls are black with smoke. In the room at the end of the passage there is a metal pot with an orangey yellow mush in it. She takes the banana leaf which is sitting on the ground beside the pot and she puts some of the mush on it. She takes a ladle from another pot and pours a red oily liquid over it. She hands it to me. “Fufu,” she says. She goes in the corner and gets herself another banana leaf. We sit on the floor. No one else is here. They are visiting with friends or family. I watch how she eats with her finger and thumb and I eat too. At first the fufu tastes like hot cotton wool but then it is like mashed potatoes only sweeter, and curry with groundnuts . “Mmm,” I say. I know I stood outside because I wanted her to ask me in. My cheeks get red and fat. I don’t want her to know that’s what I did. “Thank you,” I say when I have eaten all the food on my leaf and licked my fingers carefully. She goes to the corner and pours water from a bottle onto her hand. The water runs onto the floor and down a hole. I do the same. “Come.” She pushes through the green bead curtains hanging in the second doorway down. There aren’t any windows, only openings in the cement wall high up near the ceiling so it is dark. I see a narrow bed with a green and white cloth covering, a shelf on which there are more cloths and her two white dresses. By her bed is a gin box with a photograph in a bamboo frame. On the floor is a pair of blue flip-flops. C y c l e 2 “Sit,” she says. I sit on the bed. On the floor too is half a calabash with oil in it and a wick, and beside that is a box of Swan matches. She lights the wick and her cheeks shine gold in between the shadows. I am trying to see the photograph. She picks it up and holds it in front of me. There is a white man with a stringy neck and a big belly. Beside him stands an Ibo woman with a long curved neck. What I see most are her hands which she holds together in front of her. They are huge, much bigger than the white man’s. One of his hands is by his...