if I give you a sickness.’
‘I thought you might still have rage. Sometimes. Anger is hard to die.’
‘My sister, I’m too busy for such things.’
‘Eh-hehhn.’
‘Only reason I might be coming angry is that you missing it out.’
‘You mean what?’
‘I mean you talk all long as this and can’t even mention the girl, not even one time? Cats and Post Office? What of your new princess friend?’
‘Oh. Amma.’
‘“Oh. Amma.” Yes, Amma. When you said to me you were going there to meet this Amma princess friend I thought: wow wow wow! That will bring you a great fun paaa.’
‘I remember.’ When Belinda had finally told Mary that the Otuos had a teenage daughter, Mary was, to Belinda’s initial relief, interested rather than envious as she had feared. Mary had bounced up and down on their sunken bed, shouting Amma’s name repeatedly until Belinda made her stop.
‘Tell me,’ Mary continued now, ‘tell me about her face, the face of this Amma – what is it like? Very black? Black like me? Black like you? Or a fair one?’
‘She is black.’
‘Ah-ah! Come: Does she have different smell from you and I? How is it? How is her smell? Is coming like flowers, I bet that.’
‘I haven’t. I haven’t been up so close I am putting my nose against –’
‘OK, OK. But, maybe if not that one, what about her voice? Her white voice? Do her white voice as an impression so I can learn it to show Gardener tomorrow. He will like it very much.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why? You holding all back.’ Mary tutted. Then she began to whisper loudly, ‘Oh! She standing too near so you have become shy and have to do it as secret. OK, OK …’
‘Is not that. I. I haven’t even heard her speaking many times.’
‘Sa?’
Belinda thought her statement sounded unbelievable too, but in the days since arriving mostly Amma had been ‘out’. The longest she had spent with Amma was in the taxi: a memory that brought a tackiness to the roof of Belinda’s mouth.
‘The girl, she. She seem to be very quiet. Which is no problem, of course. If that is how she like to be. I don’t have a right to force her. Is only … Well, nothing. Is too early to –’
‘Spit out, Belinda. We haven’t the whole of the day for it. The phone card will beep soon.’
‘I only feel sometimes as if is when I speak – to do thank you at a dinner time, or, or asking about weather because Aunty told me they will like this type of conversation – when I do this, is almost like Amma does a noise similar to laughing. Laughing at me. At my expense. Is not a big laugh. Not louder than, maybe, a cough showing you fever comes. But I hear it. And yet I have offered no funny words. And then I think about the sound again, in my own time, and I wonder if it is a rudeness. Why rudeness at me? She hasn’t had a cause. I give her none. I. I feel scared enough to do any speaking here. In case I get it wrong. Or say a thing they won’t like. And this Amma’s weird noise it isn’t helping me. Wa te?’
‘If I was there, I would like to take one of those Science Magnification glasses and put it up on her.’
‘Still so silly, eh?’
‘If we check it again, you are the silly thing: What? You going to sit there and not even ask the girl one question about why, and why she behave as this?’
‘Will she even answer me? She doesn’t have to.’
‘My sister, if one is a quiet, you have to find clever tricks for to stop them being as that. Sneak into her to make her chat properly.’ Mary kissed her teeth. ‘Everyone always tell me you are the clever one, with your old schooling. Now seem as though it fell from your head on the plane.’
‘And what do you know of planes? Oh, I forgot, you are in aeroplanes all of the time, isn’t it? Like a smaller Naomi Campbell.’
‘Aboa!’ Mary laughed. Aboa was Mother’s insult of choice too; it was what Belinda had expected to hear the evening when Mother lurched towards their room after work and found charred fabric on the pillow. How stupid of Belinda to wait for that mean sound. Of course Mother had only quietly brushed off the pile of ash, then padded over to the sink to clean the black stuff off her hands. Belinda remembered listening to the water and the scratching of the sponge, thinking that no amount of washing could help Mother now.
‘Never. Do. Swearing, Mary. Is bad.’
‘You think of that as a swear? I have a lot better swears than that one.’
‘Promise me to never. It show you to be a wicked person, and is not true of you. You are better. Promise it. Never.’
‘Stop being all this weird and drama, and go for to talk with the girl. I want to find out about her. If you can’t even do that then I should never have allowed you and said is all right for you to go in the first place. Is waste of everyone’s time if you not collecting good information.’
‘Maame? You allowed me?!’
‘Agoo! Me pa wo kyew, agoo!’
The local carpenter’s daughter’s braying in the background behind Mary’s chuckling, deepened Belinda’s smile. ‘Greet Afua for me, w–’
‘So I’m going now because my little friend is here for a break. She beat up some small boys down in Sokoban who call her ugly or some like this, and she took their football as a revenge. So now we have a ball for fun. Is a bit busted and old, maybe why come they let a girl take it without proper fighting. I don’t care. We never have a ball before, did we, Belinda? I cannot be more excited than I am.’
‘Well done.’
‘Eh eh? Listen to this heavy heavy speaking voice now. Well done: you sound as a big old dog would or a big old man. You don’t have to be as miserable. Even though you have no football as me, you still have a chance to play games with your Amma.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes. I know it. Trust your Mary. I never lie.’
The following afternoon Belinda asked Nana for the kitchen scales. She wasn’t frightened when informed they were ‘electronic’ while Nana tied her into an apron. The small glass shelf presented to her was mean-faced, like the calculator from SS2. Belinda squared her shoulders at it.
‘Me pa wo kyew, leave me please to shape and fry the bofruit, and you please ask your Amma to join us for a taste of these in perhaps half an hour. In that upstairs living room, or whatever you have call it before. For a change? And I will prepare the coffee in the special pushing-in thing I’ve seen she uses.’
Belinda wondered if their hopeful smiles matched. Perhaps that possibility kept the smile there long after Nana had gone, and Belinda was alone, tapping eggs against the bowl, licking swipes through leftover batter, dropping sweet dough into blipping oil. With the cooking done, the grin remained as she arranged the grainy globes and fanned napkins. Her hands slipped into the breakfast tray’s rounded slots, a feeling that reminded her of teaching Mary to carry properly and not to balance food on the head any longer. The grin stayed as she transported the doughnuts and coffee, each step an effort against the jangling of porcelain. Her cheeks contracted as she saw Amma.
Amma’s head faced the ceiling, ignoring the crouching mother in front of her who struggled up to full height. Amma’s skyward expression was of concentration, set on the plaster vines weaving