The Sleeping Baobab Tree (11 page)

One of these took place in a church in a small town in Italy where lightning struck the steeple of a church. The trouble was that in the basement of the church there were a hundred barrels of gunpowder. These were ignited by the lightning strike and a huge explosion destroyed everyone in the town.

After telling us this Sister asked, “So, what’s the moral of that story?”

Because there’s always a moral with Sister Leonisa.

“Don’t store gunpowder in the basement?” Madillo said, which seemed logical.

Sister shook her head sadly. “Anyone else?”

“Don’t build steeples?” Fred tried.

“No, Fred, that’s silly,” Sister said. “Nowhere is safe. That’s the moral, girls and boys. Nowhere, not even a church. Especially not a church.”

We all went silent then, as that was just confusing. Firstly, it wasn’t a moral. Secondly, why was she, a nun, warning us against going to church?

She suddenly looked a bit confused herself, as if she’d forgotten why she was telling us this.

Anyway.

I finished putting up the tents and Fred ran to the car to get Nokokulu’s suitcase. He carried it easily because it was so light.

Madillo, who had now found her voice, whispered to me, “She probably brought it with her so she could put Fred’s dead body in it to bring back. Now we’ve foiled her evil plan.”

I didn’t answer. Why did she keep putting words like “dead body” and “murder” in the same sentence as “Fred”?

“You go and have a rest in your tent now,” Nokokulu told us. “I will call you when I need you. And remember, no noise. You must not wake up the ancestors.”

She seemed to have forgotten that all the bodies that were buried here had been dug up many years ago. If we wanted to wake them we’d have to go and make a noise outside the Livingstone Museum. But none of us was going to point that out to her. We were all relieved, I think, to be able to escape into the tent, where we could talk without her listening in. We needed to decide what to do.

When we got into the tent, before either Madillo or I could say anything Fred blurted out, “She’s evil. She planned all along that we’d stay here. My own great-grandmother, lying to me.” He sat down on one of the rolled-up sleeping bags. “And those disappearances, Aunt Kiki and the others, I bet she’s behind them. She’s so … mean sometimes. And rude.”

“It’s not her,” I said.

The others looked at me. Neither of them were in the mood right then to hear someone defending Nokokulu.

“I’m not saying she’s not evil or anything,” I explained, “just that she’s no longer the prime suspect in the abductions.”

There I was, talking about the disappearances as abductions, like Madillo.

“So who is, if it’s not her?” asked Fred, looking a little relieved. I think in a funny way he does love Nokokulu. It’s just that sometimes she makes herself unlovable. Like today.

“The primary suspects have just been reinstated,” I said, getting a little carried away with myself. “I just know.”

“You just know?” Madillo said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not going to go into the details now,” I said. “But trust me. We will have a peaceful day and night here. Knowing Nokokulu, she’s probably brought really good food with her. If her temper improves, she might even share it with us. And when we get home tomorrow I will prove to you that somebody else is to blame for the disappearances, which means we’ll be able to find Aunt Kiki and the others.”

I was quite wrong about the peaceful night part.

Madillo
and Fred both looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, which was understandable really as I wasn’t exactly giving them much to go on. Just that I had a strong hunch that was growing by the minute. The hunch was based on evidence; I just didn’t want to talk to them about it till I really knew.

“Your phone had a bar of signal over by the car,” said Madillo. “Maybe we ought to phone home and tell them the truth, then they’ll come and fetch us.”

This wasn’t like Madillo. She likes adventure better than anyone I know. Certainly more than I do. Nowhere spooks her. But something here was spooking her badly.

Before I could respond we suddenly heard a strange sound from the other tent. Fred looked at me and Madillo, who shrugged. I crept out of our tent towards the noise. The others followed. First we heard the snores. Then they stopped abruptly and Nokokulu started talking. Very fast.

“She’s in a trance,” whispered Madillo. “She’s casting a spell.”

“Or maybe she’s just talking in her sleep,” I said.

Nokokulu’s voice grew softer. She was speaking in Bemba.

“When you took my flower away from me I should have come after you. Now you are taking the next one. This time I am here. If it’s me you want, I am here. If you will spare my Kiki, you can have me without a fight. My powers are passing to my boy. You will not be able to touch him. He is beyond your reach. He is here to witness. He has come to take Kiki home.”

We were all quiet. Fred had tears in his eyes. I looked down at my shoes. Suddenly Nokokulu had gone back to being a very sad old lady. Who knew how many sorrows a person could pick up in a hundred years. My mum was much younger than Nokokulu and she already had sorrows. Why had I never thought of it like that before? The reason Fred’s great-granny was bent down and crotchety was because of the load of life’s sorrows she was carrying.

Of course that still didn’t make her a very nice old lady. All of us knew enough about Nokokulu not to expect her to come out of the tent transformed into someone gentle and kind. But she was definitely not our serial killer.

“We must stay the night now,” said Fred quietly. “I don’t want our parents coming here to take us all back before Nokokulu has had a chance to do whatever it is she thinks she must do. I owe her that much after betraying her in my head, thinking the worst of her.”

This was a longer, more serious speech than I’d ever heard from Fred. It made me feel sort of proud of him.

“I agree with Fred,” I said, dismissing the pleading look from Madillo. “But we still have the problem that Mum and Dad are expecting us home tonight. We’ll have to tell them we’re staying over at Fred’s again.”

“What about us?” Madillo asked. “We’re not beyond the reach of the Man-Beast. Chiti may be protected but we’re not. That’s why she didn’t want us to come.”

It was strange to hear her call Fred “Chiti”. Neither Fred nor I commented. She had a strange look about her.

“Don’t think like that,” I said firmly. “She’s just confused by her regrets. By tomorrow she will have met her dreaded Man-Beast in her sleep and sorted things out with him. Then we can all go home and sort out the real demons.”

“But why does she think he’s taken Aunt Kiki? She was living in Lusaka. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I agreed. “She’s just upset and it’s made her muddled.”

“My phone battery is flat,” interrupted Madillo, “and if I make the call I don’t think I’ll be able to stop myself from asking Mum to come and collect us straight away.”

Which was her way of saying that I had to be the one who phoned. As usual.

Mum sounded tired when she picked up the phone. She had been called out to the clinic during the night and was still half asleep so she didn’t ask any questions – which was lucky, because I’m sure if she’d been properly awake she would have known from the sound of my voice that something was not quite right.

I had gone to stand by the car to make the call and when I came back to the tents I saw that Fred and Madillo had wandered off to look at the strange lying down baobab tree.

“Hey!” I shouted, running over to them.

“How did it go?” Madillo asked.

“It’s done, that’s all. And you two were supposed to be waiting here in case Nokokulu woke up.”

“She’s still asleep. Can’t you hear?” Madillo said.

She was right – the snores were rumbling again.

Not for long though.

“Ha!” came Nokokulu’s voice from her tent. “Ha! You talking about me, Chiti and your two twin friends? What are you up to?”

It was as if, even though she had been fast asleep, she had heard every word we’d said.

“We’re going to climb the tree, Nokokulu,” Fred said quickly.

“And the lightning?” she said.

At that moment, the large black cloud moved across the sun, blocking it out almost completely.

I
had almost forgotten about the lightning. Almost. I know Bul-Boo doesn’t believe that Nokokulu has magical powers but it was not a coincidence that just as she said the word, the cloud blocked out the sun. I sometimes think my great-granny likes scaring me. She said to Dad once that it’s good for children to be scared now and again, otherwise they’ll think there’s nothing to be scared of.

There is no danger whatsoever of me growing up imagining that there is nothing in this world to be afraid of.

Last Sunday Nokokulu brought a wooden coffin-shaped box into the kitchen and put it on the table. She told me and Joseph that inside it was a very small dead ancestor and that if we dared open it we would be cursed for infinity. I stared at the small coffin (it was only big enough to hold a cat) and knew that I wouldn’t ever touch it. I didn’t even want my breath to touch the outside of it in case it thought I was approaching with the thought of opening it.

Joseph is different from me. He doesn’t talk much and he doesn’t really believe in things he can’t see.

Nokokulu looked at him. She knows what he’s like. “And if you open it, Joseph Mu wi wi Mwamba, it won’t only be you who is cursed, it will be your older brother as well.” She then left the room.

Dad once described her as “wily”. She was being very wily then, because even if I had to knock Joseph to the ground and make him unconscious, I wouldn’t let him near the box.

His middle name is not Mu wi wi by the way. That means “mosquito”. And the letter in it, n, is a letter only found in Bemba. You pronounce it
ng
. I like it. And he is a bit like a mosquito when he decides to be annoying.

We never found out what was in the box, but Dad said it was most likely chocolates.

“Nokokulu,” I said, “if a storm comes we all have to stay in the car away from the tree.”

I tried hard to keep my voice deep. At the moment it is in the process of breaking, and breaking is the right word for it. I never really know what it’s going to do. I like the sound of my new voice. I just wish it would stop running away and leaving this awful noise in its place.

“Chiti, stop speaking in a girl’s voice,” she said. “You want me to make the storm go away? I can do it, just like that –
hocus pocus, psika psoka
.”

She made her hands into little claw-like shapes in front of her and started muttering magic words. Well, they sounded like magic words – they weren’t in any of the languages I know. Some days I wish I had been born into a family that was witch- and ancestor-free. An instant family with parents who were never born but who just appeared one day, fully trained to be nice fair parents and that was it.

“Yes, yes, please, Nokokulu, make it go away!” a voice said behind me.

I didn’t even need to turn around to see that it was Madillo speaking. Identical twins they may be but I know how different they are. Not in a million years would Bul-Boo ask Nokokulu to make a spell. If Nokokulu lived with them instead of with me I just know Madillo would make her do spells all day long.

I regret ever telling Madillo that Nokokulu is a powerful witch. I think what sealed it was when I told her about when she magicked a man into growing horns on his head that just grew and grew until he could no longer stand up with the pure weight of them.

All the witch things I know about my great-granny are what she has told me. It’s not that I don’t believe she’s a witch; it’s just that sometimes I wonder. Maybe it’s because of Bul-Boo. I think I’m going to ask Nokokulu to prove it to me one day.

Except not today.

Nokokulu looked at Madillo. “For you, Mad Girl, I will chase the storm away. But I want my boy to ask me as well.”

I took a deep breath. “Please, Nokokulu, make the storm go away with one of your spells,” I said very quietly, wishing that Bul-Boo wasn’t there listening.

And just like that, away it went. I can’t prove it was Nokokulu, but five minutes after she’d muttered something and done a funny little dance, the clouds cleared and the sun shone.

“Coincidence,” Bul-Boo whispered to me. “Pure coincidence.”

It might have been, but even Bul-Boo sounded like she was trying to persuade herself.

“Now can we go and climb the Sleeping Cow tree?” Madillo asked. “That was brilliant, Nokokulu, a perfect spell.”

“I know it was brilliant. That’s what I do, brilliant things.”

Nokokulu always answers a compliment about herself with another one – about herself!

I wished I could tell her about my feeling of doom, perhaps then she’d make it go away like the clouds. But I didn’t feel like hearing her laugh at me. I decided just to keep it to myself and hope that we would escape from there without anything bad happening.

If I was Hindu, according to what Sister Leonisa taught us I would believe that if I did good things in life then good things would happen to me, but if I did bad things then bad things would happen, and in my next life I might come back as a crab or a tick. Or something worse. I don’t think I agree. I mean, bad things happen all the time to people who are good. Say if you look at the soccer team who crashed into the Atlantic. What had they done apart from being the best ever soccer players? Or Aunt Kiki? Most of all Aunt Kiki. She never did anything bad to anybody and then she got sick and disappeared. How could anyone say she deserved that?

I couldn’t think of anything that I’d done in my life that would mean I deserved whatever disaster was about to befall us if my prediction of doom was correct. Mind you, Sister may have been wrong about what Hinduism teaches, as she’s wrong about most things. Dad says that Hinduism is at least a peaceful religion, because it doesn’t spend its life telling everyone else that they should be Hindus.