When Hoopoes Go to Heaven by Gaile Parkin

Author:Gaile Parkin [Parkin, Gaile]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780857894106
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

Mama would love all the colours at the candle factory, and Benedict told her about it at supper to cheer her up. Baba had been away for three whole days now. Mama said that Baba had already been there for his work, and that he had said the candles were an excellent export to countries in the West, though most of the rest of Africa had only one requirement of a candle, which was neither decorativeness nor expense.

‘Too many books can blind a person to beauty,’ Mama said sadly, shaking her head. Then she smiled. ‘We’ll go there together, Benedict. You and me.’

Benedict beamed. Mama’s driving test was tomorrow, and when she had her license they could go anywhere at all together.

‘Why not us?’ asked Grace, indicating herself and Faith. ‘Can’t we come too?’

‘And us,’ said Moses, almost choking on his mouthful of ugali.

‘I’m sure you can’t play ball in there,’ Titi said to the boys.

‘You’d be bored,’ Benedict said to the girls. ‘Like you were at the gorillas, Grace.’

‘I was not bored!’

‘Only because there was a girl for you to talk to about anything but gorillas!’

Grace shrugged as if Benedict had a point, and as she went back to making balls of ugali to dip into the spinach and peanut sauce with her fingers, Benedict thought back to the trip they had been on to the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda. A neighbour of theirs who was going with his daughter had had space for two more, and Mama and Baba had wanted Grace and Faith to be the ones to go.

‘Gorillas are very big,’ Benedict had told Faith in the bedroom all the children had shared with Titi back then. ‘Much bigger than Baba.’

She had looked at him with very big eyes. ‘Do they eat people?’

It would have been easy to lie, but that wasn’t right. ‘No. But they can chase you and then you can get lost in the forest. Specially if you’re small.’

When her eyes had begun to fill with tears, Benedict had put an arm round her, feeling bad that he had scared her quite so much. ‘I’m only joking, Faith. They’re not so scary, but they are big.’

‘I don’t want to go,’ she had whispered. ‘Benedict, please don’t let them make me go.’

Benedict had gone in Faith’s place, and the gorillas had interested him so much that he had very quickly stopped feeling bad about scaring Faith so that he could go in her place. Grace had been only a little bit scared, but their neighbour’s daughter had been there for her to hold on to and giggle with, and to talk with about things other than the gorillas, which really hadn’t interested her much.

Benedict knew that if he hadn’t found the gorillas so exciting, he would have felt lonely and sad on that trip. It was one thing for Grace to prefer the company of her sister, but when any girl at all was more interesting to her than he was, it really didn’t feel nice.

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