The History of Mischief by Rebecca Higgie

Author:Rebecca Higgie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Jessie

‘That’s Lou!’

I shouted. I didn’t mean to.

‘The lady at the end, with black hair. I bet it was Lou. Or Chloe.’

‘I bet you’re right,’ Kay says. ‘Did you like this history better?’

I nod. I loved it. I loved Bezawit and Balcha and even Lema. I loved slicing up the ocean and stealing the bones. But …

‘Is the next mischief going to be the grumpy Englishman?’

‘I guess so,’ Kay says.

‘I don’t like him.’

She smiles. ‘But his brother was okay. Maybe he’ll be in the next history. Maybe Lou and Chloe too.’

‘Can we read it now?’

‘No.’

Worth a try.

‘Do you think Queen Victoria went after Bezawit?’

‘Don’t know. You can find out when you do your mischief report!’ She tries to be cheery.

‘Can I use your laptop?’

Kay pauses. She has a video open. Her baking show. But then she smiles at me.

‘Sure.’

I open another browser, careful not to close her video. I go straight to the State Library catalogue. Time to find some books. Over the next few days, I research and make cranes with Theodore. I request a kids’ book about Alemayehu called The Prince Who Walked With Lions. I imagine him walking around London with a pet lion on a lead, like Mrs Moran and Cornelius, only bigger and golden. This makes me laugh but later I feel annoyed because there are no other books about him. I request every travel book about Ethiopia I can find on the library catalogue. Kay says I should look into Queen Victoria and Windsor Castle, but there are too many books about her and she’s boring, so I just ask for books about the castle.

I do a google search and find photos of Alemayehu. He looks sad in every photo. I also find pictures of Balcha. He’s not as pretty as Bezawit makes out. He became a Dejazmach (a General) after the Battle of Adwa, where Ethiopia beat Italy in a big battle. Even though the Ethiopians won, the Italians came back and killed Balcha in 1936. It says he came out of retirement to fight. He killed one of them before they killed him. He was seventy-three.

I find articles from 2007 and 2015 that say the Ethiopian Government asked for Alemayehu’s bones to be ‘repatriated’, which Wikipedia says means ‘returning an asset, an item of symbolic value or a person – voluntarily or forcibly – to its owner or their place of origin or citizenship’. Britain said no. I wonder if Taytu buried the bones in secret. Should I write to the Ethiopian Government and tell them they do have the bones, they just need to look?

I tell Theodore about Ethiopia when we’re in the library at lunchtime making cranes. He saw a documentary about Africa and learnt that in Ethiopia, they have churches carved out of mountains. I tell him about the prince’s bones and the requests to have them returned. Theodore says it’s sad Britain won’t give them back. We don’t talk for the rest of lunch.

It takes THREE WEEKS for the

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