The Sleeping Baobab Tree (10 page)

Another downside to the journey taking so long was that I had time to think. That’s not always a good thing. Even though I had been trying hard not to think about Mum’s patients who had died, I couldn’t help myself. Their names were stuck in my head. Especially Sonkwe’s, as we had seen that photograph of him. My so-called investigation seemed to have come to a standstill. I couldn’t even call it an investigation as I was spending all my time trying not to think about it and putting pretend suspects on a list, which meant that the other eight people were still in danger while I was stuck in the back of an old yellow car. And I couldn’t really call my one and only suspect a real suspect as that would mean I thought Nokokulu was a serial killer, which I definitely didn’t.

Luckily I had my
Book of Rocks
with me and a small clip-on light. That helped me pass some of the time and stop thinking. Fred and Madillo have never been especially interested in rocks – apart from batholiths, and that’s only because Madillo says they sound like someone with a lisp trying to say “basilisks”. She loves the idea that a basilisk can kill someone just by glancing in their general direction. She finds that more impressive than the fact that some of the granite rocks around Kafue are 3,000 million years old – in other words, three billion years old. How cool is that? Much cooler than a basilisk because it’s actually true, not just made up.

After many more detours and arguments between Fred and Nokokulu we stopped again. Apparently the signpost for Ng’ombe Ilede was finally in view.

As she turned off the engine I heard Nokokulu announce, “We still have time before the sun sets. It is only when the sun sets that
he
comes out of hiding. We can rest now.”

“What do you mean, Nokokulu?” asked Fred, a mixture of terror and helplessness in his voice. “We all have to be back by evening. That’s why we left early – you said that. And who’s ‘he’?”

“Never mind who ‘he’ is. Who is ‘we all’?” said Nokokulu.

“I mean
me
. I have to be back – I’ve got soccer practice.”

“You don’t play soccer any more,” she said.

That is true; I really, really don’t know how Fred got to be such a poor liar.

“And we left early because that is when I decided to leave. Anything could have happened on the road. We could have sunk into one of the potholes and never come out again. One of the tyres could have exploded, and then you’d have had to walk many miles to a garage to get a new one. No more questions. We’re here. We’ll rest.

“If I start searching after the sun sleeps,” she continued, almost talking to herself, “I will be done by the time he walks again. I can feel he is out there, the Man-Beast. But we are here now. His end is coming.”

Fred was silent. Madillo gave a little squeak. For once in my life I felt like giving a very big squeak. None of this tied in with what I was investigating. At least I didn’t think so. But something was definitely going to happen. She had a plan and it involved some kind of beast that sounded completely terrifying.

Madillo grabbed my leg. I decided I would try Dad’s trick of pretending everything was all right.

“The poor old lady,” I whispered to her. “I think she has finally lost her marbles. Let’s just play along and try to get home as soon as possible.”

Madillo didn’t answer.

“All right,” Nokokulu said, “I’m going to sleep now. Chiti, you be quiet.”

With that there was a clatter as she let her seat go back.

I held my breath and waited. Sure enough, within about three minutes the rumbling started. The loudest snores I had ever heard, so loud they shook the car.

Then I heard Fred carefully opening his door and coming round to the back of the car. He clicked open the boot and peered in at us mournfully, almost as if he expected us to be dead.

He pulled the large suitcase away, trying hard to be quiet, and we rolled forward, unwrapping our legs as best we could. We crouched down behind the car and I pulled him down next to us.

“How are we going to do this?” I whispered.

He shrugged his shoulders. We hadn’t thought this far.

Madillo looked at me. “Come on, Bul-Boo,” she said. “Think of something.”

I sighed. Neither of them were going to be any use.

“Well…” I said, trying to think clearly.

“
Well
what?” Nokokulu’s voice shouted, right next to my ear.

I jumped up.

There she was, on her hands and knees, like a ninja. She had somehow crept from her seat, round the car and sneaked up on us.

Madillo burst into loud noisy tears and stayed crouched down behind me. Fred looked stricken.

There was nothing we could say that would make this any better at all.

Nokokulu stood up.

“Where do these useless, useless, bad, wicked, stupid, smelly little children come from to torment me?” she shouted to the sky. “And YOU,” she said as she turned to Fred and grabbed his ear. “Bad, bad boy. Very bad. As bad as a rotten pumpkin. As bad as a snake with no brain. Why?” she wailed, letting his ear go and falling to the ground in a little angry heap of
chitenge
s, “why am I cursed in this way?”

Not one of us said a word.

She sat up and dusted herself off.

“And the doctors?” she said very quietly to me and Madillo. “The doctors know you are here?”

I shook my head.

A small grin appeared on her face. A small evil grin.

“Oh. Not good. Not good at all. Big, big trouble coming your way,
mpundu
. Big, big trouble.”

As if we didn’t know that already.

Madillo’s sobs were subsiding but she remained hidden behind me

Fred was just looking at the ground muttering to himself under his breath.

Nokokulu heard him too.

“And now I have a great-grandson who talks to himself. No good will come of this I tell you. No good at all. There was a man in my village who always talked to himself and he quickly forgot how to talk to other people. No woman would marry him. Who wants a man who says nothing to anybody? Nobody, I tell you. So what did he do? He ran away from the village and they say he is living among the animals, because he has learnt how to talk to them. You want to become like that man, Chiti? You think one of these twins will marry a man who talks to himself?”

I felt so sorry for Fred. He looked like he’d rather be anywhere than here. I am very pleased that my relatives don’t get cross with us in front of our friends. It’s a horrible embarrassing thing.

Nokokulu stood up.

“Well, now you’re here you’ll just have to stay while I do my business. On my own,” she added, looking at Fred. “The Man-Beast would smell a lying boy from miles away. So. No silly singing or shouting. You do what I say, when I say it. No arguments. No laughing.”

She didn’t need to add that one in. I wasn’t sure any of us would ever laugh again.

“I have work to do tonight. You three will stay in the tent while I do my work.”

“Tonight?” I ventured. “We’re staying here tonight?”

Her grin reappeared.

“
I’m
staying here tonight. You want to go home, you can go. I don’t think it was me who invited you here!”

Maybe Fred hadn’t been exaggerating after all. Everything he had ever said about her was probably true. Imagine her being quite happy to let us walk off on our own in the middle of the bush!

“Not going?” she asked, watching as neither me nor Madillo went anywhere. “Fine. We will all stay here tonight then. I have two tents – one for Chiti, one for me – and I have food. You can stay with Chiti in his tent and try and get some sleep in between all the talking he does to himself.”

With that, she turned and got back into the driver’s seat, shouting as she went, “Get in the car now. We have only one mile more then we will be at The Place of the Cow Who Lies Down.” She started up the engine and all three of us ran and jumped into the car.

Everything had gone wrong. Absolutely everything. Now we were stuck here for the night, when Mum and Dad were expecting us back. When we didn’t arrive they’d phone Fred’s parents, who would tell them we had gone home early that morning. Then they’d contact the police and a huge search party would be sent out. They’d probably think we’d been abducted by the same person who had killed Sonkwe and Thandiwe.

That’s the problem with making something up. It grows. One small lie leads to another and another till there’s nothing left for you to do but lie full time. Imagine being condemned to a life like that? You’d wake up in the morning and have to try to remember all the lies you’d told the day before just to make sure you didn’t make any mistakes.

Terrible.

The
car was completely silent as we travelled the last mile to the huge sideways baobab tree. Madillo sat and drew a tent with three miserable faces looking out of it and giant black clouds above it. Fred just stared straight ahead. I checked my phone and saw that I actually had three bars of signal on it. I considered phoning Dad or Mum. They’d be mad, there was no question about that, but it couldn’t possibly be worse than the night we were facing, camping with an angry Nokokulu who was here to search for some unknown two-legged half man, half beast creature. She had gone back to the top of my list of suspects. I was now considering writing her full name in. In pen.

But if I phoned Dad and he came to fetch us it would mean us leaving Fred here on his own with her. We couldn’t do that. We couldn’t let him down like that.

Nokokulu braked hard and the car skidded on the dirt road. “Wait here,” she said to us. “I will be back. Don’t talk.”

We all just looked at one another. Right now there was no way we were going to disobey her.

I looked down at my phone again. Still a few bars. I decided to put off phoning and go online and resume my search instead.

“That’s really strange,” I whispered, forgetting the instruction.

“What?” asked Fred.

“Well, I’ve been searching for something here, in Zambia, and a US site keeps coming up.”

“If there aren’t many instances of the thing you’re searching for in Zambia,” said Fred, who liked an excuse to show how much he knew about the Web, “then sites located elsewhere will come up.”

“But there are a
lot
of instances of this in Zambia.”

“Then you can be sure that the US site makes some reference to Zambia,” said Fred with authority. “It might not be on the front page, it could be a link or a meta tag, but most likely there’s text on that site that says something about Zambia. You should look through every page.”

My phone signal was failing as the Ratsberg and Wrath site started to show itself on my little screen. I couldn’t see anything obviously linked to Zambia at first, then as I was about to exit I saw a funny link right at the bottom of the splash page:
HOPE IN AFRICA!
I clicked the link, but then the signal went altogether. I asked the others to check their phones. Madillo’s of course was out of charge. Fred had no signal either.

Nokokulu arrived at my window and banged on it. “Open up,
mpundu
!” she shouted. “I don’t know why you think these silly phone things will work in this place where powerful spirits rule the air and the earth? This tree,” she said pointing to the baobab, “this tree doesn’t want to hear any city noises here. You understand?”

She shook her head sorrowfully. “No sense, no sense in the brains of children in this century. Now, out, out all of you. You,” she said, pointing at me, “take the tents out of the boot and put them up. The biggest one is mine and I want it near the tree. And you, Chiti, when the tents are fixed, you get my suitcase out of the car and put it into my tent.”

I’m not sure why Madillo escaped any work, but she did. It was probably because she had still not uttered a single word so Nokokulu had forgotten she was even there.

I wasn’t about to ask questions, anyway. I just got the tents out of the boot and started to put them up. Fred looked like he wanted to help, but because he hadn’t been instructed to he just stood to one side watching. He was right – we didn’t need any more trouble from Nokokulu.

Madillo sat down near where I was working until Nokokulu shouted at her, “Hey, small twin, you know if you sit in the dirt too long you’ll get worms in your bum? Mad Girl, if the worms find a way in, they’ll crawl up to your brain and make you even madder.”

I think Nokokulu is missing that switch in her head which stops parents, grandparents and especially great-grandparents from being rude to other people’s children. She just doesn’t have it.

Last time she called Madillo “Mad Girl”, Fred asked her not to and she said that our mum and dad shouldn’t have given her a name which starts with “mad”. Sometimes she shortens my name to Boo and thinks it’s really funny to shout it out as if she’s giving me a fright.

Madillo just got up without saying anything and went and stood next to Fred. As they were standing there watching me a dark cloud appeared, as if from nowhere. The sky had been bright and sunny all morning, but now the cloud blocked all that out. It was definitely a thundercloud and I saw Fred looking at it and thinking the same thing. He’s not fond of thunderstorms. He has a theory that he is going to be killed by a bolt of lightning – and that’s not so far-fetched because a lot of people do die each year in Zambia from being struck by lightning. One of the reasons Fred stopped playing soccer was because he read that story about a soccer team in Congo where all eleven players were killed by lightning. He said no one from the other team was killed. After reading that nothing would persuade him to go back to playing.

Fred’s father decided it would be a good idea for Fred to conquer his fear of lightning by doing a project on it. This was probably the worst idea he’d ever had. Fred called his project “Lightning Can Strike Twice, In Fact it Can Strike Seven Times”, and it was about a man in America called Roy Sullivan who was struck by lightning seven times and each time he survived. He then apparently got so tired of all this that he shot himself. The worst part of the story (apart from the fact that he shot himself) is that one of the times he was struck he was travelling in his car, which is supposed to be a really safe place to be during a thunderstorm. The results of Fred’s project were: (a) he got more scared of lightning and (b) Sister Leonisa decided to tell us some lightning stories of her own.