can’t remember,’ I said.
‘It’s …’ said my mother, and she couldn’t think what to say.
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to like it. I know it’s a bit strange.’
‘Sometimes I wonder what is going on in that little head of yours,’ said my mother.
She did not frame my poem.
My mother was called Aurore, which means dawn.
And my motherland, still waiting for its dawn, is called Burundi.
Burundi carries its poetry in the hummingbirds drinking from the purple throats of flowers, the leaves glistening green after a night of rain; in the cichlid fish which flash like jewels deep beneath the surface of Lake Tanganyika, where crocodiles slumber like logs, still and deceptive, and hippos paddle downriver, in a line.
It carries its spirit in the dignified faces of all who are willing to forgive in the belief that Burundi will one day be beautiful again.
Dignified faces like my father’s.
I was his first son, and he prayed that by the time I was grown, we’d be living in peace.
‘You were born smiling,’ he told me. ‘And you were so perfect. Everything we’d ever dreamt of.’
‘So we called you Parfait,’ said my mother.
‘Parfait Nduwimana,’ said my father (which means I’m in God’s hands).
‘You were the most beautiful baby,’ said my mother ‘with those little dimples in your cheeks.’
‘Why would dimples be beautiful?’ I said.
‘Just because!’ she answered, hopping over to me on her wiry legs, and stroking my left-hand dimple with her right hand.
She reminded me of a bird, my mother.
I loved to spot birds when I was out and about: the hoopoe, or the Malachite kingfisher, or my favourite, the Fischer’s lovebird – a little rainbow-feathered parrot which used to bathe in the stream up above our homestead.
‘That bird is so …’ I said.
And my father said, ‘Unnecessary.’
Which I suppose is what beauty is.
Yet later I found I couldn’t live without it.
Then my father said, ‘Unnecessarily extravagant.’
I said, ‘What’s extravagant?’
He said, ‘This is,’ turning in a circle and pointing all around him, at the sky and the trees and the water running, clear, over the pebbles.
My family went on washing in the stream, like the birds.
There were nine of us in the beginning.
The girl twins: Gloria and Douce, who liked to dress up in the shiny bridesmaid dresses brought down the hill by the Baptists in plastic sacks.
The boy twins: Wilfred, named after an English missionary who lived (and died) on our colline, and Claude, named after a French one.
Pierre was strong and stubborn, and you couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
Zion was the baby, and you could. Even from when he was tiny, he wore his heart on his sleeve, as they say in English.
My father’s face always had a glow about it as if he had a candle inside him, shining light through his eyes. I see his smile, so wide it seemed to reach from one earlobe to the other, and I hear his laughter, bubbling up from some mysterious source inside him. I see his fingers sculpting a whistle from a stick, or fashioning a football for us out of coconut and twine.
I feel my mother’s arms around me, the slight damp of her armpits on my shoulders, the warmth of my cheek against her soft chest and the deep shiver of belonging running down my spine to the soles of my feet.
All of us would sit around the fire, the twin girls singing; the twin boys tied together at the ankle and refusing to separate; Pierre quiet and brooding; the baby in my mother’s arms, with something still of heaven about him.
‘We’ll call him Zion,’ said my father, as my mother pushed him out between her legs to the sound of gunfire in the homestead on the left.
The women tied the umbilical cord into his navel.
‘Yes, Zion!’ said my father. ‘And we’ll all keep dreaming of the city that is to come!’
On the last day of 1999, the last day of the twentieth century, the last day of the old millennium, a day full of potential drama, there was a New Year’s Eve party at the Pattons’ house, number 13, the only detached house on the crescent, which was empty except for several towers of identical beige cardboard boxes in every room, each labelled in black marker pen with strange vowel-less codes on them like R1/shf or R3/cpd, which made you think that Mr Patton was a member of MI5.
The point of the party, whilst allegedly to celebrate the new millennium, was in fact to have lots of musical performances by the Patton children, practically every five minutes. Cello, violin, clarinet and a recorder ensemble, and then the whole lot all over again, until the rest of us nearly died of boredom.
Then it was 1 January 2000 – Julia and I were nine and a half years old, and the sci-fi millennium was here.
It made me hopeful. As if something monumental was about to happen. As if a battalion of silver robots was about to walk around the crescent. But actually, the next day, 2 January, in the rain, a grand piano rolled down the pavement. Because the Pattons (who were, as you’ve seen, very musical) were moving out of Willow Crescent. We saw Tabitha Patton through the window in an entirely empty house practising her violin amongst the boxes. She was ten years old and doing Grade 8. She went to private school, where apparently everyone is a genius.
Grade 8!
‘It’s cruel,’ said my mother.
‘Or brilliant,’ I said (to be oppositional because, to be honest, I couldn’t stand Tabitha Patton).
‘Do you always have to disagree with me?’ said my mother.
Next thing we knew, a huge removal lorry arrived, with foreign words down its side, and the removal men started bringing out carved benches and jewelled cushions, antique bird cages and hat stands, and cardboard boxes in bright canary colours.
But better than any of these things was the appearance of a dark-haired boy, who could carry four boxes at once, easy as anything.
Julia and I went and hung around in our raincoats, pretending to have lost something on the roundabout, and we spied on him from behind the ragged branches of the willow tree, which were actually pathetic for spying because they were too thin and straggly, and only covered us down to our waists.
We walked over and started looking for our lost thing on the wet pavement outside number 13, and we found out that the boy’s name was Diego, and then we completely forgot about our lost thing, and when Diego asked us the next day if we’d found it, we had no idea what he was talking about.
Looking back, Diego was a chubby twelve-year-old, but he was three years older than us, and we thought he was the bee’s knees with his dark Spanish skin and his black eyes. His sister was called Paloma which means Dove, though she wasn’t at all bird-like, and this possibly wasn’t the right name for her.
‘Which animal does she remind you of?’ I said to Julia.
‘I’m