The Butterfly Heart (4 page)

After we discovered that we both knew the Snake Man, we also worked out that our dads were from the same place. Before that she had not known that we could speak Bemba. Ours is not perfect like Winifred’s because we speak mostly English at home. Bemba has a nice sound to it: it is a round language, not a square one. No hard corners on any of the words. Here’s an example: a ghost in Bemba is a
mulungulwa
and a tsetse fly is a
kashembele
. If you compare that to German, where a ghost is a
geist
and a tsetse fly is a
tse-tse fliege,
you can see what I mean. Not to be horrible about German, it’s just personal preference. For example, I would prefer to tell someone that I had just seen a
mulungulwa
. Sounds more mysterious.

I write down any words I like, in any language, in my notebook. But the notebook is mainly for observations. I call my notebook
Obuza-ba’s Observations on Life in General.
Obuza-ba
means “observer” in Japanese and it is my name for myself when I don’t feel like being Bul-Boo. My real name, Bul-Boo, means “kangaroo rat” in Aboriginal. Neither of my parents are Aboriginal; they have in fact never stepped foot in Australia. I have no grandparent called Bul-Boo. And as far as I’m concerned, I do not resemble either a kangaroo or a rat or a terrifying combination of both. My parents, in their wisdom, picked the name out of thin air, tossed it around a little and decided to plonk it onto me. They told me it was an international name, whatever that’s supposed to mean. If you look on the bright side, it is unique – but whether that makes up for it I am not sure. That’s why I gave myself another name, although I’m the only person who uses it. My notebook is very, very secret. Not even Madillo knows about it. Which is just as well, because sometimes I write things about her and Mum and Dad in it.

Like the day I made the mistake of saying to Dad that the best thing about being bitten by a tsetse fly would be that you’d get sleeping sickness and could lie in bed all day. I said that if it was me, I reckon he and Mum would try and coax me out of my sleep with large bowls of ice cream. Dad, who prides himself on being unafraid of the truth, said that it was not an entertaining or restful illness, and if you slept for long enough you would die. Plus, if I got it there’s no way he’d be bringing me ice cream. So I stopped wishing for it. That day I wrote in my notebook:
Sometimes I wish Mum and Dad were less devoted to the truth.

Today
I was supposed to speak to Winifred. Again. She was at school, but she looked so sick and silent that I was afraid to speak to her. Tomorrow will be better. I noticed that she got most of her maths wrong. Well, to be precise, nine out of ten wrong. Something must be troubling her, she never usually gets even one wrong. I must remember not to tell Madillo, or she’ll start off again on her spirit theories.

It’s hard to get used to Winifred like this because she’s usually the one who stops us from being grumpy. One day Madillo and I had a fight on the way to school, a really stupid fight. I had seen an
nsolo
, a bird that’s called a honey guide because that’s exactly what it does: it leads animals and people to beehives so that after they have broken the hive open the honey guide can eat from it. Honey guides eat everything in the hive, even the wax. I love them. So I pointed this one out to Madillo. Now Madillo is more interested in things you can’t see, things that I think mostly don’t exist – spirits and the like. I’m interested in things you can see. So I know more than her about things like wildlife and birds and insects. But Madillo also likes to be right.

“That’s not an
nsolo
, Bul-Boo,” she said. “You don’t get them in town. If they lived in town, how would they get to the hives? And even if they did, there are no honey badgers in town to break them up, so they would have nothing to guide. No hives, no badgers, no food – therefore, no honey-guide birds.”

“It is! I saw it and heard it,” I said.

“You’re probably just imagining it. I think it was a drongo.”

That is probably the only bird name she knows, apart from things like chickens or peacocks, so I shouldn’t have got into an argument about it. I knew I was right, so it was pointless. Anyway, I did get into the argument, and by the time we arrived at school we weren’t speaking. It was Winifred who put a stop to it by asking, “You were fighting about a
bird
?” as if she couldn’t believe it. “A small thing like that?” Then she started leaping around us, flapping imaginary wings, which made us feel even sillier. We both got embarrassed at the same time, even though I had no reason to be because I wasn’t the one who was wrong. And that was the end of the argument.

I think Madillo gets her stubbornness from Mum. But apart from Mum’s stubborn streak – and the fact that she and Dad gave us slightly unusual names – our parents are OK. More than OK, really. If I had to choose parents, I’d choose them.

They can be a bit silly sometimes and Fred says they don’t always act like real parents. He’s one to talk – his own family is pretty weird – although he did say that after I told him about the time Mum decided to stop wearing shoes, so there’s some excuse.

“People have been doing this for thousands of years,” she’d said, kicking off her sandals. “Shoes are just a barrier between us and our world.”

That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.

First off she blistered – big, puffy, watery blisters, the kind that are very tempting to pop, but she wouldn’t let either of us touch them. Only Dad was allowed near them, because he’s a doctor. (The fact that she is also a doctor had passed her by.) Then she got hookworm.

The dreaded hookworm. I know the hookworm journey off by heart. They literally worm their way in through the soles of your feet into your bloodstream then head straight for your lungs. They don’t stay there too long, but wriggle towards your mouth, where you promptly swallow them. That’s how they end up in your intestines. Once they get there, they suck your blood and lay eggs. They live for ten years and can lay up to ten thousand eggs a day. You do the maths. I wonder if Sister Leonisa has a cure for them as well.

I didn’t intend for this to be a lecture about hookworm. It must seem a strange way to introduce my parents. Anyway, their names are Sean and Lula, short for Tallulah. If that was my name, I wouldn’t have shortened it. Mum doesn’t even have to make up an interesting meaning for it: it means “leaping water” in Choctaw or “fruitful woman” in Gaelic. I would opt for the first meaning, as there is something a bit gross about the second. It makes me think of a large, round woman producing endless babies from under her voluminous skirts. Her smile is beatific (I have been waiting for an opportunity to use that word) as they crawl around her, mewling and puking. And yes, that is a stolen line – from Shakespeare, as it happens.

There’s nothing too poetic about Dad’s name. Sean is Gaelic for John, which means “God is gracious”. If it had been “God is great”, then in Arabic that would have been
Allahu akbar
, which literally translates into “God is greater than can possibly be described”. That would have been verging on the edge of poetic (although I added in the word “possibly” for dramatic effect). But his name is just Sean. Even though he has an Irish name he is not Irish, he was named after an Irish priest who had lived in Zambia and who his parents must have liked. Dad left Zambia when he was eighteen after he got a scholarship to study in Dublin. It was at university there that he and Mum met. Mum once told us that it was love at first sight, and Madillo said, “Mum, we don’t want to know.” Which was true, really. They are just Mum and Dad – the thought of them as young lovers is too much.

We all moved to Zambia when Madillo and I were only small, about three years old. Mum says it was because Dad was homesick for Zambia and she wanted to do something useful with her life by going where doctors were actually needed. I’d imagine they are needed everywhere, but she is right really, because of AIDS. I think AIDS is one of the saddest diseases there is. That and cancer.

In Uganda they call AIDS “the slim disease”, for obvious reasons. I know that there is treatment now, but it is so expensive that most people can’t afford it. Dad says that people in Africa with AIDS get thin and then die, while in Europe and America people with AIDS live pretty long lives. And they don’t even get that thin. There is nothing fair about that.

It
was because of Winston that I left home. My mother told me that he would do to me what he had done to my grandmother if I stayed there. It was time for me to leave my mother’s home; I was at an age where I could work and seek a wife.

I did not want to leave my mother on her own but she told me that Lesa, the sky god, would look after her. I told her it wasn’t true. Lesa does not come down to meddle in our business but merely looks down from the sky and sees everything. The best we could hope for would be that he would kill Winston by sending a bolt of lightning down to him. He did not do that.

My mother would not listen to me, though, and sent me away with my heart full of sadness and pain. She gave me this bicycle so I could travel where I wanted, but she stayed behind. I never saw her again, not alive and not dead. He killed her, in the same way that he killed my grandmother. And he took her body away and hid it. He hid it so that to this day we have never found it. One day, when I feel strong enough, I will go back there and I will find him. I will make him show me where he put them both. My friends, those that slither along the earth on their bellies, they will help me. Perhaps, for him, I can ask the pale one for help. Then Winston will not laugh at me or ask me, “Where is your grandmother’s magic now?”

When he sees the pale snake coming out of my bag, there will be fear in his eyes. That is how it should be, because he, like all the others, does not believe that the pale one exists. The only time anyone believes is when they see it with their own eyes. Then it is too late. I will call upon my grandmother then, in his presence, and he will know fear. When I am strong enough.

Finally
, today, I spoke to Winifred. And I was highly unsuccessful. I spoke to her at break but she wouldn’t answer me when I asked if something was wrong. She kept looking around to see if anyone was watching us and then just stood staring down at the ground. She almost looked ashamed, as if she had done something that was so bad she couldn’t even speak of it. Then she said I should leave her alone, she was tired. Winifred is never tired and doesn’t know how to lie very well – she should ask Madillo for some lessons if she is going to start that now.

Later she went missing, just like that. I didn’t see her go; I only noticed that she was not there. I asked Sister if Winifred had gone home and she told me, as I could have expected, that it was none of my business. I took that as a yes. I didn’t know what to do then. I hope it wasn’t my fault that she left.

Fred came round to our house after school and I decided to speak to him about Winifred. This, of course, meant that Madillo would be involved in the conversation and I’d run the risk of exposing Fred to the evil-spirit theory, but there was nothing I could do about that.