Where Bones Dance: An English Girlhood, An African War

Beggar

163 Beggar B lack bottoms,” says my mother, washing her hands, “that’s what you like. You’re a dreadful racialist.” Red wags his tail. His lip is hooked up over one tooth. His gum is black and pink. He is grinning. She puts away the Dettol and the gauze. We put towels on the car seats. Where I touch the plastic it scorches my thigh. On the way up King Edward Road I see two children squatting by the side of the road. They are crying. One of them looks up and sees us. His face is dusty and streaked. They run away into the cemetery. I say, “Why don’t we just give them some mangoes, then they won’t steal them?” “They’ll only want more,” says my mother. We pass the Guinness Gives You Power ad and cross the bridge. It’s just my mother and me. Bill stayed at home. My father is away. “Where are we going?” “The Economat and then the market.” The Economat is the French Embassy’s shop but we’re allowed to use it too. I get out of the car. A man is sitting on the step in front of me. He doesn’t have any hands. A tin cup is tied to his 164 arm with a piece of leather. He shakes it so it rattles. Where there aren’t any hands the skin makes a crease. The skin is pink like bubble gum and brown, and on his face too he doesn’t have a nose, just more pink and brown skin. His eyes look cloudy like a fish’s eyes after it is cooked. “Come on,” says my mother. In the shop it smells of ice and cheese and wine. “Monsieur, le brie, c’est bien?” “Oui, Madame.” “What made him look like that?” “Really,” says my mother, “please stop talking about it. I’m trying to buy dinner.” She is looking at the meat. Some of it is pink and some is brown. When I touch it, it is hard and cold. “Are there beggars in England? There aren’t, are there?” “No.” “Only in Africa?” “No, there were plenty in Hong Kong but you don’t remember.” When she gets her change back she doesn’t put it all in her purse. “Can I?” I say and she gives it to me. When I step out of the air conditioning it’s like walking into soup, like the first time getting out of the airplane, the air brown and sticky pushing up my nose and into my throat, and his cup rattling is like shivering inside. I throw the money in. He keeps shaking it back and forth, his arm with no hand. I look down. He has no feet. The rattling and laughing and honking and bicycle bells fill my ears. I stand, a boat at anchor, the tide coming in, filling the harbor, filling and filling it. I float higher, straining at my chain. Hot rubber and sweat, frangipani, piss, fish, the smells lap around the hurrying shoes of businessmen. Somewhere someone is playing High Life. The music and the smells are weaving into each other, bright as the cloths the women wear on their heads C y c l e 3 waiting in the mammy wagons, laughing and calling, their heads wrapped in tie-dyed pink and emerald, blue and white, blue and orange. They sit in the open backs of the lorries which are caked in dust, but the women are brighter than the brightest birds. They are big and they are laughing. The cup rattles and rattles. “Come on,” says my mother. “Don’t just stand there. The diesel fumes are choking me.” Crabs climb over each other in baskets. Sharks hang from hooks by their gills. Barracudas lie in ranks smiling with their needle thin teeth. I look at the woman standing over them, one hand on her hips. She jingles the money in her apron. She is rich. All the stalls are run by women. She has strong arms. She jokes with a customer as she turns, picks up a basket full of fish, empties it onto the counter. She arranges them, her hands quick and brown on their silver bodies, and they are a school again, swimming , not knowing they are already in the net, already caught in the canoe, eyes dimming in the...