Where Bones Dance: An English Girlhood, An African War

Underwater

172 Underwater S ome days I want to build a castle, tall and strong, around my brother, set it with bones and teeth. He is standing at the end of a dead tree looking down into the pool. The tree leans out over the water. The water is dark green and shiny. His eyes are screwed up as if he is trying to see down into the underneath of the water. The Nigerian boys are lined up at the beginning of the tree. They are laughing and pushing each other. They will just run down it and jump. He looks like a small brown heron waiting for fish. When he dives he keeps his arms spread out like a bird. He cuts into the water without a splash. The boys hit the pond like an explosion of rain, shattering the surface, rocking me where I lie. Bill comes up beside my mother on the other side. “That was a beautiful dive, darling,” she says. I can’t hear her but I see her lips moving. The forest lies down again on the water. I think about monkeys and the crimson butterflies we saw climbing the trail. They were bigger than my hand. I think about one landing on the reflection of a tree by mistake, and how I would slide my hand under, how glad its feet would be to find my finger and then I’d lift my hand into the air and the butterfly would stay and dry its giant wings and I could see up close the pattern like shadows of blue on the crimson. We couldn’t swim in the river because of Belharzia, which lives in river snails and becomes a worm that crawls out through your eye and makes you blind. But we can swim in this pond, which is too high up for the snails. School starts in four days. Dad has another three weeks of duty in Benin. I wonder if he will come back here alone and swim from end to end making the grasses at the edge shiver and whisper . I think about Lagos and Bill and Christine and school but I don’t think about Mum. Her eyes looked funny this morning. I fill my lungs with air until they push on my bones and then I duck under the water. I swim with long slow strokes. The light in the water is pale green. I can’t see far in front of me. My arms pull me through the water. My feet push. The water slides all over me and everything is slow. I let bubbles come out of my mouth. They tickle my cheeks. I think about amber and flies that got stuck in it and how they moved slower and slower as the amber hardened around them. I see myself swimming forever underwater and then I see the whole pond, my father with one arm stretching into the water as the other arm comes out, the boys with their arms and legs folded as if they are sitting, dropping down through the air and the water, my brother with his arms still spread wide and his head thrown back, hanging upside down in the green light, my mother floating on her back, her belly and breasts sticking out of the hard water. My lungs are hurting. I let out all the air that is left and I keep swimming. My head feels light and far away. My body is choking. It is a hard hurting, like someone knocking on my chest. I want to go longer, longer but my legs kick me out into air and I crouch gasping at the edge. 173 C y c l e 3 174 “I wondered where you’d gone,” says my mother’s voice. I must have swum right under her. “It’s time for us to go.” I close my eyes. Everything is crimson and black and blue, is opening its wings and shutting them. I am lying in the middle. We are flying away. In the jungle monkeys chatter and worms crawl out of the eyes of children and there are lepers and nuns and Obas. The wings of the butterfly move like breathing. They make the world into shadow then light then shadow then light. I look down. Curled at my feet is my brother. I don’t remember his...