The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah

Author:Petina Gappah [Gappah, Petina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571271771
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2015-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

SUMMER MADNESS

1

The dreams that startled me awake in my first years with Lloyd have come back to me in Chikurubi. And when I am not dreaming of the creature that comes to me at night and speaks in my mother’s voice, I find myself walking through the rooms and corridors of Highlands police station, past broken furniture and windows coated with what seems like centuries of grime, past peeling walls, the laughing faces of the officers, past the ceiling leaking blood.

I see chairs with cracked leather through which the discoloured stuffing shows. I smell the fetid smell of too many unwashed bodies in the airless space. Above all, I hear the mocking laughter of Officer Dimples and Officer Rollers in the interview room. I hear their echoing questions.

‘Where in this country do such things happen?’

‘Where do people sell their children to complete strangers?’

‘If such a thing really happened as you say it did, such an outrageous thing, why were your parents not tried?’

‘Why did no one report it?’

‘Why didn’t you report it?’

‘Why were they not arrested?’

‘Why was there no prosecution, no trial, no public shaming?’

Perhaps Vernah Sithole, surrounded by law reports and books that set out precise punishments to be meted out for the kind of crime that my parents committed, is reading these notebooks and asking herself the same questions. Perhaps, reading this, she will regret that she agreed to represent a fantasist. And even you, probably conditioned to believe in the worst that can come out of darkest Africa, are asking yourself whether this really happened.

Those questions from the police officers at Highlands, the questions that you and Vernah are probably asking yourselves now, are questions that I have asked myself countless times over the years.

It all seems so utterly improbable.

And yet it happened.

I used to think sometimes that all those books about abandoned Victorian waifs that I feverishly devoured as a child had somehow confused me; that I had mistaken my life for that of Elizabeth-Jane Henchard, sold along with her mother, or Oliver Twist, sold to be a mourner at children’s funerals. But I did not imagine the wad of notes that passed between Lloyd and my parents in the tearoom at Barbours. I did not imagine my mother stuffing those same notes into her blouse. I did not imagine my father then handing me over to Lloyd at the Post Office without so much as a backward glance.

Most objectively of all, incontrovertibly factual: I have not imagined my own reality. I spent the first nine years of my life with my parents and my sisters, Joy and Moreblessings, and with the memory of our dead brother, Gift, at 1468 Mharapara Street in Mufakose. I then spent the next nine years with Lloyd, and Poppy and Namatai, at Summer Madness in Umwinsidale. I have not imagined Poppy, with her paper-thin skin and Ella Fitzgerald records. Or Lloyd. Or Liz Warrender and Sandy Knight-Bruce. I have not imagined Zenzo.

For as long as I lived with Lloyd, we did not talk about the circumstances that had brought us together.

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