Black Mamba Boy (6 page)

Ambaro’s hand was thrown over her mouth. He could hear a terrible gurgling sound with every intake of breath. Jama crept closer to his mother, his eyes darted from her knees to her ankles, swollen with the same fluid that was drowning her lungs. “Where have you been, Goode?” Ambaro gasped.

“I’m sorry, hooyo,” Jama whispered as sorrow, regret, shame seared through him.

“Put me by the window, son.”

Jama threw open the window, picked her up under her arms, and dragged her with all of his strength; he gathered her head in his lap and stroked her cheek. Ambaro’s heartbeat shook her body, every pulse pounding against her ribs as if there were a butterfly inside of her, battling free from a cocoon. A gentle breeze washed over them. Ambaro’s lips were a deep, alarming red but her face was pale yellow. He could never have imagined seeing her so sickly, so ruined. Ambaro’s eyelids were clenched in pain, and Jama looked on jealously as her convulsing lungs took all of her attention. He wanted her back, to shout at him, call him a bastard, get up suddenly and throw a sandal at him. Jama placed his mother’s head gently on the floor and rushed from the room.

“Aunty!” Jama cried. “Aunty, hooyo needs a doctor!”

He ran into each room looking for Dhegdheer, finding her in the kitchen. “Hooyo must see a doctor, please fetch one, I beg you.”

“Jama, how did you get in? What kind of people do you think we are? There is absolutely no money for a doctor, there is nothing anyone can do for your mother now, she is in God’s hands.”

Jama pulled out the remnants of his pay and held it up to her face. “I will pay, take this and I will earn the rest after, wallaahi, I will work forever!”

Dhegdheer pushed his hand away. “You are such a child, Jama.”

She turned her back to him, ladled out soup. “Here, take this through to her and don’t make so much noise. Inshallah, she just needs rest.”

Jama took the soup, his head drooping down to his chest, his heart a lead weight, and went back to his mother. He gathered Ambaro in his arms and tried to put the soup to her lips. Ambaro jerked her head away. “I don’t want anything from that bitch. Put it down, Goode.”

Jama felt a surge of power run through Ambaro. She turned her face to the window and took in a smooth, deep breath.

“Look at those stars, Goode, they have watched over everything.” The sky was as black and luminous as coal, a white-hot crescent moon hung over them like a just-forged scythe, the stars flying like sparks from the welder’s furnace.

“It’s another world above us, each of those stars has a power and a meaning in our lives. That star tells us when to mate the sheep, if that one does not appear we should expect trouble, that little one leads us to the sea.” Ambaro pointed at anonymous specks in the distance.

Jama saw only a sea of solitude, an expanse of nothingness impossible to navigate on his own.

“Those stars are our friends, they have watched over our ancestors, they have seen all kinds of suffering but the light in them never goes out, they will watch over you and will watch over your grandchildren.”

Ambaro felt Jama’s tears falling on her and grabbed hold of his hand. “Listen to me, Goode, I am not leaving you. I will live in your heart, in your blood, you will make something of your life, I promise you that. Forgive me, my baby snake, don’t live the life that I have lived, you deserve better.”

“I wanted to make you happy, hooyo, but now it’s too late.” Jama wept.

“No, it is not, Goode, I will see everything that you do, the good and the bad, nothing will be hidden from me.”

Jama pushed his face against his mother’s cheek, rubbed his moist face against hers, hoping to catch whatever she had, to go with her to the next life. Ambaro pulled her face away from him.

“Stop that, Goode. Shall I tell you what the Kaahin told your father?” she cajoled. “A great Kaahin once told your father when he was a boy that his son, the son of Guure Mohamed Naaleyeh, would see so much money pass through his fingers. Guess what your father said to the Kaahin? He asked him, ‘What’s money?’ Neither of us had seen any before, but now I know money is like water, it will give you life. Take the Kitab amulet from around my neck.”

Jama began to unpick the large knots in the string that hung the amulet over Ambaro’s chest. Folded in a paper heart lay prayer after prayer, and in this heart Ambaro kept her hope, as she did not trust her body anymore. The Arabic script had smudged and faded on the thin exercise paper the wadaad had used.
“Inside the amulet is one hundred and fifty-six rupees. I do not want you using it until you absolutely need to; wait until you have grown up and know what you want to do with your life.”

Jama squeezed the amulet in his palm. He had never seen a rupee, never mind hundreds of them, his world was of ardis lost in the street, paisas to pay for stale cakes, occasional annas thrown to Abdi from the passenger ships.

“I have been saving that for you, Goode, promise me you will not waste it. Don’t tell anyone about it either, tie it around your neck and forget about it.”

Ambaro’s swamped lungs protested against her chatter and her face suddenly contorted as she gasped for breath. Jama did not believe a word of the old Kaahin’s prophecy; he knew that no boy born for a special fate would have to see his mother choking on strange liquid that poured out of her mouth and nose. Jama wiped his mother’s face on his ma’awis and held her in his arms. “Shush, hooyo, shush,” he soothed, rocking her gently. His mother fell into a curl with her back turned to him and soon fell asleep. Jama watched the rise and fall of her back and grabbed a handful of her tobe to keep himself connected. The fabric dampened in his nervous grip; she was already slipping from him. He would have preferred his umbilical cord to have never been severed but to extend limitlessly like spider’s silk between them. He belonged to no one else, she belonged to no one else, why couldn’t God leave them together?

Jama’s eyes remained open all night, scanning the dark room for any figures that might materialize to take his mother away. The gloom was alive with shifting densities, lumps of gray light that hovered slowly along the floor, furry black masses that shivered in corners. Jama’s fingers loosened their grip on Ambaro’s tobe and reached out. Ambaro’s arm was relaxed along
her side, her fingers resting on her hip. Jama placed his hand on hers, she felt like one of those shells washed up on the beach, cold, hard, smooth, veins making superfluous swirls under her skin. Everything powerful and vibrant about her had gone, only the worn-out machinery of her body remained, and the little life that wondrous machinery had produced was left to grieve over everything she had once been.

The chaperone finally released his hold on Jama’s forearm, leaving a sweaty handprint on his skin. Jama’s legs shook from the long journey in the back of the old lorry, and he clasped both of his thighs to steady them while his clansman went to replenish his stash of qat. Jama had put up with the mushy green spittle and the acrid stink that had accompanied the ostrich catcher’s habit for the day and night it took to cross the Red Sea by dhow and get to Hargeisa. Jama’s bloated, gaseous stomach bulged out before him and he wondered why it stretched farther and farther out the hungrier he got. His stomach had been relatively peaceful throughout the journey, but for weeks after the burial it had contracted, cramped, made him vomit, given him diarrhea, the pain in his gut slowing his steps to that of a decrepit old man. A clanswoman of his mother had found him huddled in an alley, covered in dust and blood. It took just three days for a human telephone network
of clansmen and women to locate his great-aunt and deliver Jama to her like a faulty parcel. In Aden the Islaweynes had paid for Ambaro’s burial but expected Jama to look after himself. Estranged from Shidane and Abdi, he had hung out with the dirtiest of Aden’s street children, eating fitfully and badly, sometimes picking up food from the dirt and giving it a casual clean before swallowing it in a few untasting bites. He became argumentative and loud, often fighting with the other abandoned children. To appease the hungry demon in his stomach, seething and cursing from his cauldron of acid, Jama had fought with stray cats and dogs over leftover bones. He tried to be brave but sadness and loneliness had crept up on him, twisting his innards and giving him the shakes. Jama dreamed of his mother every night; she followed a caravan in the Somali desert, and he would follow, calling out her name, but she never turned around, the distance between them growing until she was just a speck on the horizon.

Jama looked around him. Somaliland was yellow, intensely yellow, a dirty yellow, with streaks of brown and green. A group of men stood next to their herd of camels while the lorry overheated, its metal grille grimacing under an acacia tree. There was no smell of food or incense or money drifting in the air as there was in Aden, there were no farms, no gardens, but there was a sharp sweetness he breathed in, something invigorating, intoxicating. This was his country, this was the same air as his father and grandfathers had breathed, the same landscape that they had known. Heat shimmered above the ground, making the sparse vegetation look like a mirage that would dissolve if you reached out for it. The emptiness of the desert felt purifying and yet disturbing after the tumultuous humanity of Aden—deserts were the birthplaces of prophets but also the playgrounds of jinns and shape-shifters. He heard from his
mother that his own great-grandfather Eddoy had walked out of his family’s encampment and into the sands, leaving no one word of where he was going, and was never seen again. Eddoy became one of the many bewitched by the shifting messages left among the dunes. Though these stories of people losing their minds and vanishing terrified Jama, his mother used to tease him, telling him that it was no bad thing to have a jinn in the family and that he should call on his great-grandfather if he ever became lost. His ancestors had been crow worshippers and sorcerers before the time of the Prophet, and the people still kept tokens of their paganism. Precious frankincense and myrrh still smoldered in the same ornate white clay urns; black leather amulets hung from the chubby wrists of infants. His mother’s amulet was tied tightly around his neck, the sacred pages grubby and hardened together. He lay down under the acacia tree and spread his arms out, the sky covered him like a shroud and he felt cooled by the watery blueness washing over him, he guessed the time by looking at the position of the sun and decided to rest. He awoke, disturbed by the sound of two voices above his head, and opened his eyes to see an old woman standing over him, as tall as a policeman. She bent down to wipe the drool from his sleepy face and held him to her bosom, filling his nose with her sour milk smell. Tears beaded up in the corner of his eyes but he drew them back, afraid of embarrassing them both. Jinnow took his hand and led him away, Jama floating from her hand like a string cut loose from its kite.

Hargeisa appeared all of a sudden in a valley scattered with trees. On the outskirts of town Jama and Jinnow passed the Yibro settlement, their tents hardly distinguishable from the brush, and Jinnow picked up her step as they neared it. Jama looked over his shoulder at the children drawing shapes in the
sand and felt Jinnow tugging his hand. “Don’t go near them, Jama,” she whispered, “they hate Eidegalles and all other Ajis, be careful or they will use their sorcery against you.”

It was only the expanse of emptiness around it that made Hargeisa seem like a town, but unlike the straw-and-skin tents they had passed, the houses in Hargeisa were forbidding white stone dwellings, as utilitarian as beehives. Large barred windows were decorated above with simple geometric designs, and the wealthier houses had courtyards with bougainvillea and purple hibiscus creeping up their walls. Everywhere you looked there were closed doors and empty streets. All the town’s dramas were played out by figures hidden behind high walls and drawn curtains.

Finally the gate to his grandfather’s compound creaked open and a smiling girl said, “Aunty, is this Jama?” but Jinnow pushed past her, still holding Jama solidly by the arm.

In the courtyard, women stood up to get a closer look at the boy.

“Is this the orphan? Isn’t he a spit of his father!” “Miskiin, may Allah have mercy on you!” they called.

The girl bounced along in front of Jinnow, her big eye constantly peering back at Jama.

Jinnow reached her room. “Go now, Ayan, go help your mother,” she said, shooing away the girl, and pulled Jama in after her. A large nomad’s aqal filled the room, an igloo made of branches and hides. She caught Jama’s look of surprise and patted his cheek. “I’m a true bedu, could never get used to sleeping under stones, felt like a tomb. Come lie down and rest, son,” she said.

The inside of the aqal was alight with brightly colored straw mats. Jama lay down obediently but couldn’t stop his eyes roving around. “Do you remember that you once stayed here
with your mother? No, look how my mind is rotting, how can you remember, you couldn’t even sit up,” Jinnow chattered.

Jama could remember something, the snug warmth, the light filtering through woven branches, the earthy smell, it was all imprinted in his mind from a past life. He watched Jinnow as she fussed around, tidying up her old-lady paraphernalia. She had the same high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and low-toned, grainy way of speaking as Ambaro, and Jama’s heart sank as he realized his mother would never be old like Jinnow.

After a restless sleep, Jama ventured into the courtyard; the women carried on with their chores, but he could hear them whispering about him. He ran toward a leafless tree growing next to the compound wall, climbed its spindly branches, and sat in a fork high up. Leaning into the cusp, Jama floated over the roof and treetops, looking down like an unseen angel on the men in white walking aimlessly up and down the dusty street. The tree had beautiful brown skin, smooth and dotted with black beauty spots, like his mother’s had been, and he laid his head against the cool silky trunk. Jama rested his eyes but within moments felt tiny missiles hitting him. He looked down and saw Ayan and two little boys giggling. “Piss off! Piss off!” Jama hissed. “Get out of here!”