The chairs are strung with green and yellow plastic cord which is no longer taut and cuts into the flesh. The people sit uncomplaining on the uncomfortable chairs, nursing their requests until my father comes home from work. If he is late or busy, they come back the next day. Some of them are his former patients wanting further treatment but without money to pay another doctor; others bring news of a death or need help to school a child. Sometimes he is asked to intercede in a family dispute or help find someone a job. Most of them just want a little money.
When they start to arrive I usually disappear somewhere else. Once a blind man climbed up the stairs from the road and accidentally sat on top of me. In school we were taught that blind people had super sensory powers and hearing like a bat’s radar; we were warned never to treat them as though they’re helpless. So I watched as the blind man lowered his bottom, believing, until it was too late, that he must somehow know I was underneath him, my tongue locked with the shame of the moment. As soon as his buttocks touched me the blind man shot up in the air like a jack-in-the-box and groped his way silently into another seat. The blind man isn’t here today. There are no visitors at all. Perhaps it is the rain that is keeping them away.
After an hour or so I wander through the house. Inside all are preoccupied with their own business. Santigi is at the back of the house sorting the laundry. Morlai is in the room they both share off the kitchen. I expect he is studying. Santigi wants to go to school too, but he’s already over thirty, though he fibs about his age and says he’s twenty-one. He was once sent to literacy classes but he struggled to learn to read and write. Still, on occasions he borrows my maths and English schoolbooks and works through the chapters alongside me. ‘I want to learn,’ he always says. A few months ago Santigi bought a Bible and changed his name. One day he stood before us all at supper and addressed our father directly with a deadpan face: ‘Doctor,’ he said, in Creole, ‘ah wan change me nam. Please, oona all for call me Simon Peter.’ He has remained resolute since: he withstands our teasing and corrects us every time we call him Santigi.
Santigi arrived at the same time as my stepmother four years before. No one knows who Santigi is, meaning that we don’t know his family or to whom he belongs. In a society built, layer upon infinite layer, on the rock of the extended family, Santigi can produce neither mother nor father, aunt nor uncle, sibling nor cousin. All he knows about himself is that he was born in a village called Gbendembu, near Makeni in the Northern Province. After giving birth his mother, who was without a husband, put herself to work digging diamonds in an illegal pit many miles away in Bujubu. She left her baby with neighbours and never returned to claim him. Much later news came that she had died. Once Santigi was of an age the couple who had taken care of him sent him to Magburaka to work for my stepmother’s family. He first met my stepmother Yabome off the train when she was a schoolgirl returning home for the holidays and he has been by her side ever since. Santigi often spends time with me, but not right now.
The rain and the day wear on. Sullay drops by at lunch time and stays at the back of the house whispering with Santigi and Morlai. Sullay has a deep, matt-black complexion, a strong jawbone and sharp eyes shaded beneath a rather brooding brow. His whole face is a study in intensity. He rarely smiles, but he is very kind. I stop by to say hello. Sullay doesn’t stay long.
Shortly before dusk the sound of the pickaxe stops. There are no more rocks to split. The man stands in his doorway out of the rain, dwarfed by the enormous pile of stones. He is listening and waiting for the truck to come back.
My stepmother drives up in her Volkswagen and goes through to the master bedroom. A little while later our father comes home, running through the rain.
I am restless. I fetch a game of bingo given to me for Christmas. It is an inexpensive set with small wooden discs upon which the characters are stamped, slightly irregularly, in red ink. Once I had unwrapped it I ignored it in favour of grander gifts, but this summer holiday I have rediscovered it and there have been several uproarious games involving the entire household.
We use matchsticks instead of money and today I ask Santigi to let me borrow the big box of Palm Tree matches. On the cover it has a drawing of an inky native stepping between two palm trees that reminds me of the pictures in an old book of Edward Lear poems I used to own. I empty the matches out and count them into neat red-tipped piles, one for each player.
Each card has a row of numbers along the top and another row of letters down the side. The caller must pick from corresponding bags of letters and numbers. As our games draw to a close everyone always starts to call the combinations they need to win. It’s the best part of the game. Some of us call our numbers out as loudly as possible; others jig with anticipation; Morlai half closes his eyelids and mutters the figures like an incantation. Whoever is calling blows his fingertips, plunges into the bag and with great theatrics calls the winning sequence. Since I own the set I get more turns to do this than anyone else.
The last time we reached this point our father was sitting in the front on the settee, his card covered with little torn squares of paper. He only needed one more to win but several others were in the same position. The atmosphere was intense, and yet there was one outcome in which we were all united: if you couldn’t win yourself the next best result was that our father should win. After a few games I had reached the point where I stopped wanting to win at all. Instead I wanted to protect my father from the disappointment I imagined he would feel if he lost.
I had been calling the numbers. My father needed a B and a five. He said: ‘Give me a B five, Am! B, five!’
Everyone was hopping about, waving, calling out. I took my time, drawing the process out for as long as possible. I closed my eyes. I wished for a B and a five. I put my hands in the bags simultaneously and pulled out two wooden discs.
‘B, five!’ I was astonished. I dropped the five back into the bag. No one believed I had actually drawn it. ‘I did, I did!’ I shouted and started to grow upset.
I saw my father watching me. He was not sure what to believe. He smiled as if to say, ‘You don’t have to do this, Am.’
Outside the truck has arrived. The two men are shovelling stones into the back. Afterwards the driver takes some money out of his pocket, flicks off two notes and hands them to the man who lives in the panbody, who nods in return but doesn’t smile. As the truck departs he leans on his shovel and watches.
On the coffee table I lay the bingo cards alongside the matchsticks. Outside the window a movement makes me look up. Two men have come up the outside stairs and are standing on the veranda looking in at me. I go out to see what they want. They are standing directly beneath the fluorescent strip light with their backs against the growing darkness; the white light casts downwards, bouncing off their cheeks and their foreheads, turning their eyes into dark orbs. I have never seen either man before but I sense something indefinably familiar about them. They are both slim, sinewy with close-cropped hair and they wear short-sleeved safari suits. One of them has on a pair of fake crocodile-skin shoes, of a type sold in the market. The shoes are badly scuffed. Who are these men? Many years later I will discover they are called Prince Ba and Newlove, names as surreal as stage names – or aliases. Their faces are impassive; they impart an air of unutterable menace. One of them tells me they are here to speak to the doctor.
My father appears directly and speaks to them for a few moments. My bingo set is beside me on the table ready for our game. He turns to me, sees that I am there and says: ‘I have to go with these two gentlemen now, Am.’
He walks ahead of the two men through the door and out onto the veranda. I see them pass the window.
‘Daddy, when are you coming back?’ I am unsettled.
My father half turns from me, seems to pass a hand across his eyes, takes a few more steps. Then he stops and faces me again. The two men wait and so do I. All my life my father