She’s Not There. Tamsin Grey

beyond the Bay of Gurtle,

       Lay a large and lively Turtle, –

       You’re the Cove,’ he said, ‘for me;

       On your back beyond the sea,

       Turtle, you shall carry me!’

       Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,

       Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.’

      There were another two verses, but it had got too dark to read them. Jonah sat still, feeling himself to be very small. Were the gods all talking about him, deciding whether to help him? Or had they forgotten about him? Had something more interesting come up? He closed the book and ran his finger over the title on the front cover. The black letters had been stamped into the red cardboardy stuff, so you could feel them.

      THE JUMBLIES & OTHER

       NONSENSE VERSES

      The book had been Lucy’s mother’s book, and it was on its last legs. Lucy had Sellotaped its spine, to keep it going a bit longer. There had been a raggedy paper jacket, but it had fallen to bits. He opened it at the first page, where Lucy’s mother had written her name, very neatly. Rose Marjorie Arden. Arden, because she’d written it when she was a child, long before she’d married Lucy’s father and become Rose Marjorie Mwembe. Underneath, in much bigger, messier writing, was Lucy’s name: Lucy Nsansa Mwembe. She was still Lucy Mwembe, even though she was married to Roland. These days women who got married didn’t always change their names to their husband’s. Nsansa had a meaning; she’d told him, but he couldn’t remember what it was.

      He let the book slip from his lap, tipped to one side and curled into a little ball on the floor. They hadn’t sung the song, he realised, the song she sang to them every bedtime; a kind of prayer, thanking God for the day, and asking him to look after them through the night. Glory to thee, my God this night … He sang the words in his head, picturing that old, Christian God, with his big white beard, all fatherly and silent, waiting to be noticed. Then he stopped, thinking instead about Rose. She had died a long time ago, when Lucy was a child. Lucy couldn’t remember her that well, but she remembered the bedtime song, which was an English song; and that she’d called her Mayo, a Zambian word for Mummy. She had a tiny photograph of her face in the locket she wore on her throat, showing that she’d been white, with a very straight fringe of dark hair. Their other grandmother. Was she up there with the old, fatherly God, and the angels, with their white, seagull wings? Or had she been reborn? What would she have come back as? He tried to get a sense of her, of her smile, her motherliness, but all he could get was that tiny, faded face in the locket.