Hold: An Observer New Face of Fiction 2018. Michael Donkor

body had been passed on.

      ‘You don’t care what is happening to me at all, do you? You have nice flight to London, they get you husband and a palace. And me? They will send me back.’ Mary paced. ‘You bloody –’

      ‘Swearing! Who is teaching you swearing?’

      ‘FUCKING. FUCKING. No one is FUCKING ever coming to see me from my home village. No Papa. No Grandma. And now, you telling me Uncle and Aunty will drive me back there, push me out of the door and leave me? That is what going to be happening, Belinda. Because they don’t want only me. We came as two. Two.’ She flopped to the floor like a cheap doll.

      Belinda crouched down.

      ‘I –’

      ‘FUCKING. And also, SHIT. You. Your dress is ugly and I hate your idiot shoes!’ Mary lashed out, pushed an unsteady Belinda and ran through the coloured strips of plastic in the doorway. Splayed on the linoleum, Belinda wanted to shout after her friend. But nothing came out.

      Encumbered by the bags, Belinda found Mary sitting on one of the security guard’s stools at the zoo’s exit.

      ‘If you misbehave, they may beat you,’ Belinda panted. Gravel crackled under her feet. ‘For your own benefit and peace, I say this to you.’

      Belinda stopped, caught her breath and squared herself for Mary’s next insult. But Mary only hopped down from the stool, ran up to the bars of the main gate and stroked them. She tried to fit her head through one of the loops in its rusting pattern. Belinda knew she would be unsuccessful but thought it best to let her try.

      ‘Mary, you don’t –’

      Mary returned to the stool, pulled herself up, kicked her legs backwards and forwards. Neither of them were skilled at fights like this. Mary started well but continuing was difficult. It was true what she had suggested: Mary wasn’t clever enough. She was incapable of creating some plan to keep everything safe and the same.

      ‘You don’t have to carry my things. They are mine. I will carry.’ Belinda watched Mary hop off the stool again and come forward to struggle with the shopping herself. ‘We should go.’

      Mary walked on, leaning down towards the fuller bag, limping with the weight. ‘When we are late and Aunty wants to coming finding a person to be blaming, don’t push me up. I am doing hurry hurry and you want to be waiting and playing. Not time for one of your daydreaming now.’

      Led by a tall woman with a clipboard, a snaking line of loud schoolchildren marched past, two by two, pristine in their blue and white and straw sun hats – not the usual brown and yellow most wore to school, and that Belinda had been so proud to wear in Adurubaa. Blue and white meant somewhere expensive. Their scrubbed faces and clean feet in matching blue sandals, agreed with her guess. Belinda watched Mary hobble to one side to make way for them. Then a hunched Mary turned her thinking face to the sky, to the showy swallows dipping and dipping there.

       3

      That evening, back at Aunty and Uncle’s, Belinda twisted the kitchen tap firmly and was amazed again by the water’s purity, so different from the gritty coughings of the communal pump back in the village. She picked up her terracotta asanka, its complicated decoration of interlocking diamonds matching the design of the kitchen’s smart grey tiles, and placed the bowl beneath the tap’s steady flow, tilting it so shallow waves skimmed its grooved inside.

      In the tro tro on the way home from the zoo, Belinda had done her best to enjoy Mary’s sulking silence. Mary’s quietness as they went through Bekwai and Melcom should have given them both a moment to calm; time for Belinda to realise the threat had passed. She had told Mary that she was leaving and so the worst was over. But Mary’s silence had not been calming at all. Mary’s eyes were narrowed, her jaw set, her mouth mean.

      Mary seemed slightly less distant when they arrived back in Daban and they returned to the familiarity of their routine. In their room Mary unpacked the bags, arranging everything they had bought in rows in the small cabinet by her side of the bed. Belinda listed the tasks that needed doing in preparation for the evening meal and Mary listened to and acknowledged each clear order. They both slipped out of their clothes and then put on their matching uniforms at the same time.

      Belinda’s swilling of water round the asanka, the rhythm of Mary scouring saucepans at the kitchen’s island and the drain’s glugging were disrupted by a shout. Another shout came and Belinda glanced through the window’s louvres. Near the pool, lit up by the sunset, Uncle was thrusting tilapia at Aunty. Aunty was screaming and clutching her breast. Shaking and stroking his bald head, Uncle threw the fish onto the barbecue, then waved towards Aunty until she fiddled with something in her hands. Belinda recognised the voice that soon came from speakers as Sarah Vaughan’s because Aunty and Uncle played this CD so often. The woman’s voice spread and slid and spread.

      ‘Aba! They always causing a complete racket when we try and concentrate,’ Mary pounded her fist. ‘Don’t they know that we like to have a peace when we make them eto?’

      Since Belinda arrived in Daban, Uncle often told Belinda he planned to make the most of his retirement, laughing his roundest laugh as he said it. ‘Making the most’ seemed to mean eating, listening to the trumpet man Miles Davis or the lady Sarah Vaughan, sleeping in the day, drinking, and playing pranks like that one with the fish. Mary kept on scouring, Uncle bullied a reluctant Aunty into dancing with him and yet again Belinda found it difficult to imagine that man handling all the big monies they said he dealt with in London. He must have changed himself a lot between there and here. Pulling the tough green skin from four plantains, she wondered if she could change so much in her own lifetime. Tossing the peelings in the rubbish, something made her flip the louvres down. She laid the pale plantains side by side on the chopping board, like tired infants ready for sleep, then sliced them fast.

      ‘And so please start the boiling, me pa wo kyew.’

      ‘I shall do that one, Belinda.’

      Belinda turned her attention to the Scotch bonnets, using the knife to scrape out some but not all of the peppers’ seeds, allowing the meal to keep its fire as Aunty and Uncle liked. Belinda heard pleasing grunts of effort as Mary carried the heavy pan to the stove; heard the click of the kettle, the clattering as the little girl rested the pan on the hob, the crackle as she lit the match, the whispering of poured hot water and salt, the plop as she let the eggs go.

      ‘Now, Belinda, pass me plantain, please.’

      With a nod, Belinda did as she was told, watching Mary drop the plantain pieces into the water too.

      ‘You know the story of this one?’ Belinda asked, pulling the roots off two onions.

      ‘Wo se sɛn?’

      ‘What eto is for.’

      ‘You tell me.’

      ‘Is the egg, really. That’s the important part of it all.’

      ‘How is that?’ Mary stood on the tips of her toes to reach the shelf with the seasoning and tall bottles on. She grabbed the deep red palm oil and set it on the side.

      ‘So on the wedding day they will give the eto to the bride. In the morning, perhaps; I don’t know. And they will give it to her as we will to Uncle and Aunty. I mean that after it has been prepared – we’ve mixed together the mashed plantain, fried onion, nuts and things – they will place a boiled egg on the dish. Then all the elders and everyone will watch the bride. Because she has to eat the whole egg in one go. Without biting or chewing anything at all. Swallow in one.’

      ‘Adɛn?’

      ‘The elders’ rule is that if you consume it all in one then you will have many, many children. But if you bite even one small bite into the thing then is like you are eating into your unborn child and you will never have any children ever