I Am Change by Suzy Zail

Author:Suzy Zail [Zail, Suzy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760650155
Publisher: Walker Books Australia
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lilian studied the crumpled list in her hand. She’d searched the clothing stores and seamstresses on the main road, asking everyone she met whether they knew of a girl called Nakato. She looks like me, except her ears are bigger. She might have been asking for work? No one had seen her.

Lilian stabbed the next entry. Hat shops. She’d visit hat shops tomorrow. She walked home searching the streets bordering Beneh’s home looking for a businesswoman in a suit or a woman carting bolts of cloth, but she also gazed at the faces of the maids in starched uniforms and the nannies pushing prams. Just in case.

“Oh, it’s you.” Amara seemed disappointed when Lilian appeared in the kitchen. She pulled a slab of meat from the fridge and set it on the bench. “I thought you were Beneh. He’s coming for dinner. Pass me an apron?” She pointed to a drawer and Lilian opened it.

“Would you mind?” Amara said, holding her arms out. She was wearing a pink sleeveless shirt and a billowing skirt, her face masked by make-up. Lilian slipped the apron over her aunt’s smoothed hair and tied a bow at her back.

“You must be missing home,” Amara said, her mood lightened by the impending arrival of her husband. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. I wanted to go home, at first.” She tucked a wisp of stray hair behind her ear. “That was years ago. And Beneh’s coming for dinner,” she smiled nervously, “so things are good. Things are great.” She sawed the meat. “Do you want to call your parents?”

“They don’t have a phone.”

“Of course,” Amara said, her eyes on the door. “There’s paper in Beneh’s study if you want to write them a letter and you can dust while you’re in there.” Amara pressed a rag into Lilian’s hand.

Lilian raced to the study and flung the door open. She grabbed a sheet of crisp white paper from the pile on Beneh’s desk and sat down.

Dear Taata.

She set her pen down, wondering what to tell her father first. That she was looking for Nakato but had failed to find her? Or that Uncle Beneh preferred the wife who bore him a child? Telling him the girls at school were mean would only upset him. She thought about introducing him to Shakespeare but then she’d have to tell him she hadn’t finished Romeo and Juliet, and she was so far behind she might never catch up, not with all the cooking and cleaning she had to do. I made a new friend today, she wrote instead. Her name is Kamali. You would like her.

Lilian wrote about the school canteen and the library, the grassy oval and her teacher, who hadn’t laughed when she got an answer wrong, but said even wise men didn’t know everything. Take your time, Madam Kyobiggya had said. He who goes slowly goes far.

Lilian filled three pages writing herself back together, back to the person she’d meant to become, a girl like Kamali, humming with energy.

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