MY MOTHER WANTS more palm wine. A lot more. Handed a wodge of notes, I saunter off: first to Ama’s house to enlist her help, and then to the kiosk of a woman who sells palm wine.
On our way home again, carrying water-coolers stacked with booze on our heads, our little fingers loop in friendship as Ama practises her list of insults on everyone we pass: son-of-a-toad (our headmaster); daughter-of-a-vulture (a new girl in our class); daughter-of-the-worst-witch-in-the-world (our headmaster’s daughter); devil’s spawn (Gaza’s uncle). She flashes a smile at each of them before muttering abuse under her breath. For some reason or other, Ama’s in a foul mood. So much so, we’re almost home before she catches my eye and I ask: ‘Bestie-best, what happened?’
‘I dey tear head and talk plenty,’ she replies. Face tight with fury, Ama lip-talks disgust. Spits. Lip-talks some more. ‘Our classroom be full of rumour-mongers, They say, they say… rumours paaah.’ Spits again.
‘What dey say?’
‘Dey say Maybe walk wi too much swagger, so your mother blind him to save you.’
‘Ma? She had nothing to do with it.’
Ama shrugs. ‘For sure! And you?’ In a heartbeat, she answers her own question. ‘Mother trouble! What’s Queen Sasabonsam done now?’
It’s not easy having a chat with a heavy load on your head.
‘Mek we stop proper. Mr Owusu,’ I call to a passer-by. ‘I beg you, help us.’
Water-coolers safely on the ground, Ama and I sit side by side on top of them.
I tell her about Maybe’s visit to the clinic this morning. I describe the blooming of his eagle-eyes and how he’s now staying in Nana Gyata su’s old room with Gaza.
Once she’s heard me out, Ama gives me a blow-by-blow account of the gossip at school spread by a senior – ‘a bush boy, a rat in a rat hole’, she calls him.
‘That boy is big,’ Ama concedes. ‘But his brain?’ Her forefinger almost touches her thumb. ‘A pea brain at best. His lights may be on, but inside that skull of his, I swear, there is nothing!’
She grumbles, mumbling to herself until I pluck up the nerve to ask a question that’s been bothering me. It’s one of those questions which wriggles between us once in a while; a question no one in my family is willing to answer – another secret that bugs me. By now dusk has arrived, and the sun almost gone, bathes us in shadow light.
‘Bestie-best, do you know why our mothers stopped being friends?’ From my calculations, the friendship ended around the time that my Uncle Solomon’s visits to our village ceased. I must have been about three years old when I last saw him.
Ama looks at me strangely. She’s used to me shunning gossip by keeping family palaver sealed under our roof. ‘You don’t know?’
I shake my head.
Ama frowns, chewing her bottom lip as she considers how much to tell me.
‘Everyone knows the story,’ she says. ‘Everyone.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘Fine, let me be the one to boss you.’ Ama quickly reveals the bare bones of a skeleton that’s been dangling in our family cupboard for years. I’ve heard it jangling in the frostiness between Ma and Aunt Esi, next door, but before today, had no idea of its shape or size.
‘My mother says that your ma’s the sort of friend who steals husbands from their wives, like she stole Big Man from Gaza’s ma. Auntie Sika tried the same trick with my father,’ Ama declares. ‘She failed.’
I pretend not to wince. ‘Ah,’ I say, while thinking, Of course. No wonder Ma has no women friends. No wonder women scorn her.
We stagger home, the drinks on our heads. Sure enough, just as I’d imagined, the first thing we see on our return is Ma lounging on the recliner.
Arrayed in an up and down – a diaphanous flowing gown in lime green with matching trousers – she’s glamoured herself in such a way that the gossamer-thin sheda of her outfit shimmers when she moves, revealing three rows of love-beads around her waist. If the river goddess were to take on a human form, I swear, she would look like Ma. Ma glistens, as luminously molten as the element she’s named after – Sika. Gold. Bedazzled, even someone like me, someone who doesn’t like her much, can’t take their eyes off her. Neither can Ama. We’re enthralled, drawn to the warmth of Ma’s inner glow as we arrange calabashes for her guests on a table.
A question sparks in Ama’s eyes, scalding truth off her tongue. ‘Auntie Sika, how do you do it? How do you get to look the way you do?’
‘Ama Smart, if your mother hasn’t taught you how to use bottom-power yet, watch me and learn. Don’t pay attention to my little chick here. She’s embarrassed when I flaunt what I have. I am woman.’ Ma sways her hips. ‘And I revel in it.’
‘We’re women too,’ Ama replies, thrusting an arm through mine.
‘So are my grandmothers and aunts,’ I protest, ‘as well as Auntie Esi, next door.’
Ma eyes lock with ours. ‘Young ladies, you can’t compare eating hunks of breadfruit to the pleasure of sucking a ripe mango dry.’ Ma smacks her lips in a kiss. ‘Take it from me, girls, breadfruit and mangoes may both be fruit, but the sweetness of one is a gift from the gods. I am the mango to those breadfruit women you’ve mentioned. Watch me and learn.’
Taking Ma’s advice to heart, Ama and I stay on the sidelines, watching, as, for the second night running, Ma’s guests saunter into our yard and carouse in her company. Among them, to Ama’s distress, is her father, Allotey.
Is this how it was for my father, I wonder. Did his heart quicken in Ma’s presence? Was he dazzled by her shine? Was her charm his undoing?
This is how Ma preys on her victims. This is how my father was murdered.
But what if what happened between them was an accident?
‘Do not underestimate your mother,’ Snake replies as Grandma Baby calls me inside.
In her hand is a small bottle identical to the ones in which she stores essential oil. ‘Take this,’ my junior grandmother tells me. ‘Put two drops, at least, in your mother’s calabash as soon as you can. It’ll knock her out and put her to sleep. Your senior grandmother needs to have a good rest tonight.’
‘Will two drops be enough?’
‘No more than two, Sheba. Take it from me, murder, even by accident, gnaws at the heart forever.’
I put the bottle in my pocket of the house-dress I’m wearing – a hand-me-down kanga from Grandma Baby’s glory days in East Africa. Tonight, of all nights, I’m going to make sure, if nothing else, that Nana has some peace.
‘Sheba! Sheba! A glass of water.’
I answer Ma’s summons.
Fetch a glass. Fill it with water. Add Grandma Baby’s sleeping drops to it.
One. Two. I stop at two.
But then, before I can change my mind, I double the dosage.
Just in case, I tell myself.
In case Ma spills the drink.
Four drops to ensure that Nana sleeps well.
I’m doing this, I tell myself, to keep Mother Crow off the roof of our house; doing this to ease death’s talons from my family, Nana especially.
Fighting fire with fire, I return to the terrace and hand the glass to Ma.
She glugs the water down.
I wait for every dribble to slip down her gullet before, stepping aside, I say goodnight.
