It’s only a ring. There’s a stand in the shopping centre beneath a golden cardboard euro sign manned by a smiling youth with a knot in his tie like a fist. I’ll go in when it’s quiet, in the early morning maybe, and he’ll turn the ring into a small pile of cash. That’ll keep us in gas and electricity and groceries for a few months.
The shadow still moves outside. A prayer to Saint Anthony drifts through my open window on a gentle breeze. The world is filled with unwelcome words.
Grace
THERE WERE TWO boys sitting in the centre of the bus this morning. The only empty seats were across from and in front of them. Their fellow travellers in silent concord had quarantined them. The one on the outside was wan and shaven-headed. His leg was extended across the aisle, blocking it. He did not move as I approached, only held my eyes with his and smiled. His smile was twisted and wet, and brought a memory to me of the dogs that would stalk one another about the township, some days in uneasy league with one another and other days in ragged battle. His trousers had stripes that, when I looked more closely, revealed themselves to be tiny shadow-women, sitting back-to-back, in a line along the length of his leg. I smiled at the sight of them, and laughed when I saw that the ends of these trousers were tucked inside white socks. His foot was splayed outwards in a dirty training shoe. The fuck, he said, in a questioning way, half turning towards his friend, widening his eyes in mock wonderment. The fuck? And I knew then that these boys were going to try to hurt me in some way, that they would be allowed to do so by the others on the bus, and I wondered again how there could be pleasure in the causing of sadness in others, how a healthy young man in a country of such fertile soil could choose to expend his precious energy in such a wretched pursuit.
A woman I work with says all the time that she is afraid of her life. I laughed when I first heard this. Afraid of your life? You should be more afraid of your death, I said, and thought that she would laugh. But she didn’t smile or give any sign that she had heard me as she went on moving dust from place to place with a feathery stick and explained that she was afraid of her life she’d be caught working. She is not supposed to work, as I am not. She claims to have nothing in order to claim money from the government. I claim to stay all day in the reception centre while I wait for my application for asylum to be processed, a grey building of four hollow floors, but in truth I could not stay alone there. I’d do this job for nothing, just to be away from that place, busy, moving. I’m afraid of my life, Grace; she says to me, I’m afraid of my Jaysus life. And I laugh softly to myself and tell her not to worry, not to worry, as we work on into the darkness.
The victory my father achieved in the village was of a particular type. I cannot remember at this remove the correct name for it. A priest told it to me who visited our school in the township after I had explained to the class how our family had come to leave the village of my birth. My sister scolded me for being so foolish, for being so free with truth. As though our story was some form of currency. The meaning of the word the white-haired priest put on Father’s victory was that more was lost in battle than was gained in victory. I wish I could remember that word.
My father refused to pay a tribute to the elders from our harvest. Let them raise their own, he yelled, and our neighbours clicked their tongues and sighed but stayed mostly silent. No one came to help with the saving of our crop. The rains came while we laboured and washed our wealth away. My father bellowed at the gushing sky as my mother stood silent behind him, wringing her hands. The elders decreed that we were to be shunned. So tall my father was as we began our journey to Kinshasa, so noble and unswerving as he led us through the centre of the village. No man dared impede him, or mock him to his face. The elders’ eyes followed him; they mourned their drowned tribute.
Shortly after I told that story in the school my father crossed me from the page in his heart that bore his children’s names. My fourteenth winter was spent in the house of my mother’s cousin, a shack of tin and discarded timber. My father left me there with instructions to him to see that I continued to attend the missionary school. He would pay him for my keep as soon as he found work. My mother’s cousin laughed as my parents left with my brothers and sisters strung in a sullen line behind them. A holy man came once to the house and remonstrated with my mother’s cousin. He was unmarried, living with a child not his. Stories were being told. People wouldn’t tolerate it. Who were the men that visited? What business had they at night in the house of a market trader? My mother’s cousin smoked in silence and looked into the distance over the holy man’s shoulder as he spoke on in urgent whispers. Now and then, to emphasize some point or other, the holy man would point from where he stood on the narrow stoop towards the sunless inside of our house where I sat unseen, watching and straining to hear. And when my mother’s cousin had smoked his cigarette to the butt he broke suddenly from his stillness and put his hands around the holy man’s throat and screamed that his business was no one’s concern but his and that if the holy man came again to his door he would surely kill him.
Days and nights coiled themselves together. My father did not return to pay my mother’s cousin for my keep. But he didn’t care; my visitors paid handsomely. Somewhere in the tangle of time, towards spring I think, a policeman came to the stoop. A truck idled on the road, waiting. My mother’s cousin raised himself slowly, his eyes wide with alarm. He hissed at me to stay behind the bead curtain. The policeman had a rifle strapped to him; he held it before him, lengthways across his chest, as though to show my mother’s cousin the bulk and the weight of it, as though to intimate the damage it could do to the flesh and the bones of his body. I allowed my heart to swell a little with hope. I watched through the beads as the policeman spoke in a flat tone, all the time with the rifle resting on his upturned hands and raised slightly out from him, like a man proffering an infant in church for blessing. But my heart shrank again as he hung his rifle from the nail on the back wall of my tiny room and turned smiling towards me, that familiar hunger lighting his eyes. I heard my mother’s cousin’s low laugh, the relief in it and the delighted amazement, and the noise of metal scraping on metal as he opened his moneybox.
I stayed in that house until the day my mother’s cousin stood burning on the street outside. A tyre had been placed over his head to rest on his broad shoulders and it was doused in petrol and set alight. His hands were tied high behind him. He spun in a small circle for a while. His screams were shrill, piercing; they pained me. The neighbours and the dogs stood still to watch. Some men grinned; others kicked dust into tiny plumes and looked at the ground or sky. Flames licked my mother’s cousin’s face and melted his eyes. He died on his knees, slumped to one side, his fleshless face melded with the livid wires that remained when the rubber had burnt away. The dogs nosed at him and shrank from the heat. They settled, slavering, to wait.
I walked from the township alone. What worse could happen? Perhaps I hoped I’d be killed. I walked south, away from people. I took a lift in a lorry with a flat bed. Glory, Glory, it said along the wooden side, in white letters. A dove was painted crudely beside the words. I jumped from the flat bed at the edge of a town that had hanging above it a dark cloud, obscuring the sun. The driver pointed towards a mottled window with a door beside it, half opened on a room of shadows. A large woman sat behind a desk. I laughed at the sight of her; it seemed as though the desk grew outwards from her midriff. She appraised me coldly and nodded at an empty chair. Every morning for four years I reported to this fat lady and was told where to go to work. Some days I worked in a factory where plastic delights for children and idiots were pressed from foul gum in great machines, the parts of which could be arranged and rearranged again to make a million shapes. My hands were quick and slender; I was able easily to move the template’s edges along routes commanded by a line of red light. Other days I worked in houses, cleaning and caring for white infants whose mothers shopped or talked on telephones. I slept at night in a narrow bed in a long dormitory of other girls and women that stretched like a stem from the back of the fat lady’s office. I dreamt often of my family and the village and knew I would see neither again. I dreamt of my father’s drowned crop, being rinsed from this earth by the bleeding sky.