‘Cro-co-diles here!’ Mary pointed to the words on a sun-bleached arrow. Belinda’s arm swung as Mary released her grip and skipped up a dirt track.
‘Careful, oh! He come from the Northern region – and we have left him unfed for some four days – budget cuts!’ The stewardess headed in Mary’s direction.
Following, walking through foliage, Belinda bit her nails, spitting out the red varnish that broke onto her tongue. Belinda wanted the right sort of place: somewhere hidden; theirs for that moment. But visitors busy with their own intimacies occupied all places the path led. An Indian couple wearing matching baseball caps, necks looped with binoculars, sat on a bench. A father near the porcupines opened his briefcase in front of three waiting children. The three nurses from the entry queue unlinked their hooked arms; one stopped to rub her hip. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there were no pockets on Belinda’s dress, and so after Mary got a generous share of the cash Belinda had been given to pay for the day, Belinda squeezed the remaining cedis into her bra, giving herself an uncomfortable, monstrous breast. The high-heels Aunty and Nana said made her feet ‘feminine’ pinched her toes and were more painful than stomach cramps.
‘I face the most severe of high recriminations if the girl comes lost. Akwada bone! Wo wein?’ The stewardess hopped, checked the air around her, shouted in the direction in which Mary had sped off. ‘This crocodile will be bearing the most emptiest of stomachs, small child. He will come, snapping for even your no-meat ankles. You must exact caution!’
Mary jumped up from behind a tree. Belinda leapt with shock.
‘Why does budget cut have to mean bad signs?’ Mary asked the stewardess. ‘I mean how long we have been walking for and have I seen one cro-co-dile? No, Mrs. No even one of them to snap at my size-five feet.’
‘This one has so much lip!’ The stewardess became suddenly playful, extending her hand to Mary.
‘You will take me?’
‘I will take you.’
Mary asked the stewardess her name, then asked if she was married and about being married. Behind, wrestling with the layers of her long gold dress, Belinda remembered what women claimed about fat-cheeked babies who did not cry when they were passed between relatives. ‘Oh, he is such a good boy – he goes to anyone!’ Though she would have hated being compared like that, Mary had that same ease. Belinda wiped away something sticky from her neck, fallen from the canopy above. She considered beginning with reassurances about the smallness of the loss. There would be a new Belinda soon, surely. Another plain girl from some bush-place, come to clean Aunty and Uncle’s fine-fine retirement villa nicely. All Mary needed to do was introduce herself politely, show this housegirl where the towels and things were, and then they could start. It would be easy to go to this new Belinda. Good for Mary, even. Yes. But Belinda knew Mary would ask if she herself was so replaceable; if a new Mary would be found so easily. Belinda could not mention Amma.
Ahead, through the heat’s shimmers, the stewardess ‘Priscilla’ lifted her staff, pushed a curtain of leaves aside and ushered Mary beneath. Belinda stumbled forward. Tired fencing and browning grasses ringed the swamp. Dragonflies and midges rose and fell in the steam. Broken wood and lengths of something like soiled rope drifted across the surface and Belinda understood their slowness. Peaks of mud forced up through the water. A dripping sound worried the silent air and the sickly light.
‘Ladies and no gentleman, I am presenting … Reginald!’
Mary applauded, but soon Belinda saw her face squash when it became obvious that the clapping fell deafly. Cross-legged on the wet soil where Priscilla joined her, Mary said, ‘I don’t like Reginald for a crocodile’s name. Tell me his local one. On, on which day was he born?’
‘He arrived here some three years. Big men brought him in a truck all far from Bolgatanga.’
‘Which. Day. Please?’
‘I believe the delivery came on a Tuesday, so –’
‘So we will say that. Let us call for Kwabena. Come.’ Belinda made her way to them, cursed the shoes, squatted as the other two did, and clapped towards the water. ‘Kwabena?! Aba! Eh? You want to be shy? Adɛn?’
Nothing. Nothing but stillness.
‘There are, erm, tarantulas also for us to show you? Erm.’
‘I hate spiders. And anyway, I have spiders at my house, at my Aunty and Uncle house where I do clean, we do cleaning, Ino be so, Belinda? They, they come into bathroom. They don’t mind the cockroaches. Neither do we.’ Mary shifted her attention between Belinda and Priscilla dizzily and then became strict. ‘They not our real Uncle or Aunty, by the way. But you know how we have to use these words for our elders out of a tradition and respect and I am a 100 per cent respectful child.’
Belinda wondered what sort of companion she would have chosen for herself, if a choice had been offered. Half a year ago, when the driver took Belinda from Adurubaa and from Mother, then made his unexpected stop near Baniekrom, what if some other girl had stepped into the car and gently introduced herself?
The water tore apart. The three of them staggered backwards. Diamonds jumped and splashed as Kwabena dashed forward. He snapped at the fence and Belinda gulped. His roaming eyes were massive, dark planets. His fat, knobbed tail whipped, sending up water again as Mary screamed. His long jaw flipped and crashed shut with a sound like falling bricks or breaking glass. He scuttled back.
‘I didn’t even get to be taking one single picture,’ Mary moaned, pointing the camera at the ripples Kwabena had left. Belinda did not breathe. He was enormous. He had not yet shot out of the water but she knew he could leap and reach high enough to brush the trees and drop onto her, onto all of them. They would be crushed. Mangled beneath his rough belly.
‘You see that bucket over there? Listen, do you see that bucket over there?’ Belinda heard Priscilla softening. Mary, giving in to her tears now, sobbed. ‘Listen: in that bucket are bits of meat – collect it. I didn’t want to waste, but …’
Belinda said nothing as Mary ran to a nearby hut and returned with a dripping chunk.
‘Good girl! See your friend? Not so courageous and bold like you. She seeming like she has come across a ghost, or is in preparation for the vomiting.’ Belinda tried to find it funny. ‘When he comes up again, you throw this meat at him, OK? OK then. Here we go. Kwabena, Kwabena –’
Priscilla paused, tapped Belinda on the shoulder. ‘Help me, madam? Madam?’
Belinda added her calls, irritated by a wavering in her voice that wouldn’t shift. Within seconds a blur of grey, brown, pink and green rose again, thrashing even more this time.
‘Throw, throw!’
With a bark, Mary launched the meat. It hit Kwabena’s snout and he began tearing at flesh before he and the red block disappeared into bubbles. Belinda gasped.
‘That. That. That. The most brilliant thing!’
Belinda looked over at Mary’s cheeks. They were streaked with tears, mucus, sweat, water, blood.
The zoo’s canteen was a long, narrow room painted in sludgy tones, filled with rows of wooden tables. Each bore a matching island of condiments, bent cutlery and a miniature Ghanaian flag. Rusted ceiling fans dropped dust on the customers below. No one complained. A plump attendant wearing a splattered apron manned the till beneath a calendar, which, for the month of April, showed Jesus bursting through light. A chewing stick drooped from one corner of the woman’s mouth. A thin cat lay at her feet. Somewhere in the back a radio crackled silly jingles into the oiliness.
Beneath their table, Belinda crossed her ankles, hoping to control her quaking thigh. Her plan seemed to work until she started fidgeting with the ketchup’s lid instead. She rattled the can of Coke and watched Mary push Red-Red around her plate.
‘Finish