So I run to the sideboard on the other side of the room and find the little plastic toothpick dispenser. I shake out three or four toothpicks and hurry back to him. My face still holds the question. ‘Tell Mum I’ll be back later.’ These are the last words, the very last words he says to me. And he steps out into the rain.
At the bedroom door I call to my stepmother that my father is gone. A moment later she runs past me with Morlai right behind her. They run silently, eyes fixed ahead, and disappear into the crystal darkness. Through the rain I hear the sound of the car engine starting; the tyres splashing through the puddles.
The next morning we three children have our breakfast together, just the three of us. Outside the truck arrives and deposits another load of rocks. The rain is still coming down: it rains all through the day and the next night. It rains until October.
‘Daddy’s back!’ It was my brother. I had never seen him so excited, adult poise utterly cast aside. The early morning sun was bright and reflected in his face and eyes; his whole expression was radiant.
Everyone was smiling hard at me, Yabome and my sister. The same excitement glowed in their faces, too. Obviously, I was the last to find out and I stared up at them warily, not wanting to believe.
‘It’s a dream,’ I said at last.
‘No, it’s not. He’s really here.’
‘It’s a dream,’ I insisted. ‘I’ve had them before.’
Yabome put her arms across my shoulder and squeezed me. The others laughed; it was a beautiful, silver sound. ‘It’s true. He’s coming. Sheka and I are going to fetch him.’ And before I could shake the feeling of unreality that clung to me, they were gone.
I sat down again. Breakfast was laid at the big, wooden table. Memuna stayed behind with me, but she seemed to be taking events in her stride, as ever. Her calm was a source of envy for me. I, who became so easily heated and could be wound into a frenzy by my family.
When I was ten, after my father was taken away, I began to suffer migraines that remained undiagnosed for years. With the heels of my hands pressed against my temples I would run round the house making desperate circles, as though if I moved fast enough I might succeed in leaving the pain behind. Often there was nobody at home except for us three children, but if my stepmother or Santigi were in the house they’d take me to my bed, fetch me aspirins and try to subdue me, holding me by the shoulders and pushing me down against the pillows. It never worked: when they left I would cry and bang my head hard against the bare walls of the room.
I poured a glass of orange juice and drank half of it. I found myself dithering, unable even to find a place to put the glass. The table was laden with food and with the debris of a half-eaten breakfast. The room was part of a stately home, heavily furnished, oak-panelled and cold. I didn’t recognise the house, but it was familiar as the kind of old country house where I had gone to boarding school. Eventually others started to come down to breakfast: friends of mine, who joined us at the table. A red squirrel appeared at the window. It was large and had a strange, pointed face. To me it didn’t look much like a squirrel at all: the nose was too long, like a mongoose I once owned as a child.
When I heard my stepmother and brother come back, I started up from the table. The sound of their footsteps was on the stairs.
‘July the fourth,’ said Sheka. He was still breathless. ‘He’s going to come on July the fourth now!’ What the reason was for the delay nobody suggested. I thought he would be here, with us that very day. But I didn’t feel disappointed. Instead I felt this was how it should be: time to prepare after so many years. I left the dining room.
The huge staircase dipped away below me and the carpeted stairs swung round in a lush sweep. I put a hand on the banister, feeling the cool, varnished wood, one foot out onto the first step, and I began to walk down the stairs. My family were crowded around behind me. I could hear the rustling and feel them jogging each other. What on earth were they all doing?
As I turned the arc of the stairs I understood. The bearded figure standing in the hallway at the bottom wore a tan, short-sleeved suit, despite the cold. He had on polished brown shoes and a gold watch and although he was talking on the telephone with his back half turned towards me, I recognised him in that instant. I could still hear their voices behind me as I hurled myself down the stairs. He hadn’t seen me yet and I felt like a child again, my legs moving in great, galloping strides as I threw myself towards him. In that moment he turned round, smiling with surprise, and caught me in his one free arm.
‘Hey, hey. What’s all this?’ he said, as though I really was an overexcited ten-year-old. But I didn’t care. I put my arms around him and hugged him. I could feel everyone gathered around behind me. My face was against his shoulder and I squeezed my eyes shut.
When I opened them again the pale, grey London dawn had cast a triangle of light on the wooden floor. I could see the shadows of my clothes hanging from the pegs on the back of the half-open door. The blinds were still closed. On the chair by my bedside the faint glow of the alarm clock lit the shapes of a pencil, paper, a lip balm, a book and a wooden box. The sheet below me was wrinkled, cold with sweat.
Once a year, twice at the very most, the dreams had grown fewer as the decades passed. Sometimes I dreamed he came back from living in a far away country, that he had been looking for us, but couldn’t find us. Other times I dreamed that he had been in hiding and everyone around him sworn to secrecy. I’m sorry, Am, he’d say with a smile. We wanted to tell you sooner. Yes, the dreams came less frequently now, but despite the twenty-five years that had passed, they had never ceased entirely.
All my life I have harboured memories, tried to piece together scraps of truth and make sense of fragmented images. For as long as I can remember my world was one of parallel realities. There were the official truths versus my private memories, the propaganda of history books against untold stories; there were judgements and then there were facts, adult stances and the clarity of the child’s vision; their version, my version.
There were times, a summer holiday or a few months, when I lived my childhood as a seamless dream where time ebbed like the tide and there was nothing to break the rhythm. But for the most part that was not so. Over and over the delicate membrane of my sphere would be broken and I tumbled out of my cocoon into the outside world.
Afterwards no one explained. People imagined these were things children shouldn’t know, or they did not think we had a right to know. We were encouraged to forget, dissuaded from asking. Gradually I learned to spy: I eavesdropped on adult conversations, rifled hidden papers, devised lines of questioning and I began to build onto my fragments layers of truth. And as I did so I discovered how deep the lies went.
I grew older, became a journalist and made a living using the skills I spent my childhood honing. All the time I hoarded my recollections, guarding them carefully against the lies: lies that hardened, spread and became ever more entrenched.
Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?
In the African oral tradition great events and insignificant moments, the ordinary and the extraordinary, are notches on the same wheel. They exist in relation to each other. The little occurrences are as important as the grand designs: the threads are the texture of truth that separate man-made myth from fact. They are the testimonies; the words of history’s eyewitnesses.
I remember cockroaches.
The tiniest of tickles across my toes made me look down. Early morning and I stood alone, chin high to the bathroom sink, both taps running. The cockroach was standing next to me and his sweeping, chestnut