Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty (19 page)

I went back into class and collected my things while my classmates went on muttering, ‘It's a serious matter! A serious matter! A serious matter!'

We walked down the street, me in front, my father behind. After half an hour or so we arrived at the deserted house. As soon as we pushed open the door the dogs started barking in their own complicated language and disappeared through the holes in the wooden slatted walls. Papa Roger put his hands on his hips and glanced around him. Then he turned to me.

‘Is this the place? Where's your report then?'

I knelt down in a corner of the house and started digging, while my father watched. I went on and on digging. When I felt the plastic bag it was a bit wet, as though bags sweat too, like people. Papa Roger snatched it from my hands and undid the knot. There
was the report, inside the bag. When my father started reading it I thought: I'd better run for it, soon he'll get to the bit where the teacher writes remarks about the pupil's behaviour.

I took two steps back, turned around and scarpered, like the rats and dogs living in the deserted house. Every now and then I looked back, but Papa Roger wasn't behind me. As I ran I was thinking: Pretend I'm Carl Lewis, the black American that Roger Guy Folly's been talking about. Carl Lewis is still only a student at lycée, but already he can run and jump like an adult, and within two or three years he'll be the fastest runner in the world.

I got back to our house, panting. I went straight into my bedroom and hid under the bed, wondering, ‘Will Papa Roger thrash me? If he thrashes me it will be the first time ever since he decided I'm his son too, like the children he had with Maman Martine.'

‘Michel, come out of there! I know you're hiding under the bed!'

I came out with my face covered in dust and spiders' webs. I was already starting to cry. I could hear noise outside: it was Maman Pauline coming home from the Grand Marché. Since I was now standing there like a chicken waiting to have its neck wrung on New Year's Day, my father signalled to me: ‘Sit down there, I need to talk to you. I am not pleased about what you've done.'

I sat down where I sit when we have beef and beans and I peer at the big shiny piece of meat on my father's plate.

‘What is it this time?' asked Maman Pauline, who had come to stand behind me.

‘I've found Michel's school report at last.'

‘Where?'

‘He'd buried it in a deserted house, the one just on the edge of the
quartier
.'

My mother sat down while my father opened the report. Impatient, as usual, she said, ‘Well then?'

‘Michel has worked well. He's made the grade, and the teacher has written, “Very assiduous pupil”.'

Now I was really confused. The reason I'd hidden the report was because I thought ‘Very assiduous pupil' meant a pupil who behaves badly, who talks all the time in class and is stupid, like Bouzoba.

So now Papa Roger was congratulating me, and Maman Pauline was starting to prepare my beef and beans. But my thoughts were elsewhere. I had just realised that ‘very assiduous pupil' meant a very good pupil, who behaves well, who turns up to lessons and listens to what the teacher says.

Whenever Maman Pauline goes into the bush for her business, like now, I go and stay in my father's other house along with my seven brothers and sisters: Yaya Gaston is twenty-four, Georgette's eighteen, Marius is thirteen, Ginette is eleven, Mbombie is nine, Maximilien's six and Félicienne, the last of all, is two.

This is my home too, my sisters and brothers never say that Papa Roger's my foster father, they consider me their real brother.

Yaya Gaston is the oldest child in the family. Even at twenty-four he already looks like a proper grown-up. He has a little moustache, which he clips, like on the film posters at the Rex cinema. He looks like Papa Roger, except Yaya Gaston is taller. They nickname him ‘the Frenchman' because he always answers in French, even if you say something to him in munukutuba, lingala or bembé. Also, he only ever wears French clothes. He buys them at the port in Pointe-Noire, where he works in Customs. Sometimes he doesn't buy his clothes, people give them to him, if they want to collect a big parcel from the customs office without paying anything. He has a big gold bracelet, which he wipes with a cloth dipped in something called Mirror. It stings your eyes like Flytox and smells stronger than wild cat's piss. Every morning he polishes his bracelet standing outside the door of his little studio, which is on the side of the road, but
attached to the main house where the rest of the family lives.

Georgette is very pretty, everyone's always telling her, and since she knows already she spends all her time looking at herself in the mirror, asking her girlfriends what the boys think of her. She puts red lacquer on her nails at the weekend, but she has to take it off during the week because you're not allowed it at school. Last year when she was seventeen, Papa Roger nearly sent her off to live for good with a young man who often stops outside the house to pick her up and take her for a walk in the dark. This guy's called Dassin and he acts like the Lady Whistler who had the fight with Yeza the joiner.

Yaya Gaston got hold of him once and said, ‘Dassin, if you don't stop hanging round outside our house, if I hear you whistling one more time to get my sister to come out, I'll smash your face in.'

Dassin was trembling, there was sweat dripping down his face, because our big brother's as strong as Tarzan. The whole neighbourhood is scared of him. But Dassin wasn't born yesterday, or the day before. He's found another way to confuse us: he sends the kids from round about, he pays them twenty-five CFA francs if they can get our sister Georgette out of the house.

Papa Roger isn't a bad man, but this was serious, Dassin had got our sister pregnant. The only reason we never saw the baby was because it went straight to heaven, without ever coming to earth.

Marius is an old man's name, that's what people say around here. Papa Roger likes the footballer Marius Trésor – he's a black who plays for the French team – so he called one of my brothers after
him. Sometimes he gets called Trésor, which he likes. Marius dreams of going to France one day, so he can become a footballer like Marius Trésor who, according to him, is the first black captain of the French team, when there are players like Michel Platini and Didier Six in the team, who really ought to be captains, not him, because after all, you don't expect to find a black ordering whites around.

Marius knows how you smuggle your way to Europe. He's only thirteen, but he already knows that stowaways make their way through Angola where there's a civil war, and no one has time to keep checks on things when there's a war. The stowaways get the plane from there to Portugal, then make their way to France. He knows because his best friend, Tago, is Jerry the Parisian's little brother, and Jerry the Parisian's a young man who comes back home every dry season and tells us how in France you can get everything without working, including suits and ties. Jerry the Parisian's a Sapper, so Marius wants to be one too, it was him that told me Sapper stands for
Société des ambianceurs et personnes élégantes
. Sappers are people who dress really well, that's all they care about, they walk elegantly and wear expensive clothes made by European tailors, not by Monsieur Mutombo. Maybe that's why Monsieur Mutombo doesn't like them and is always criticising them. He says the Sappers are thugs that come from Paris to get our girls pregnant then abandon them and their children and go back and live a comfortable life in Europe.

Marius plans to leave our country the day he turns eighteen. So that means, if I've worked it out right, that in only five years' time, he'll go off to be a Sapper like Jerry the Parisian. Now at eighteen I don't think he'll be able to become a footballer, because the king, Pelé, started playing when he was fifteen. I
think my brother's more likely to become a great Sapper than a great footballer like Marius Trésor, Didier Six or Michel Platini. You can be a Sapper at any age, you don't have to do lots of fitness training, go running every morning or work up a sweat training. But first Marius needs to find the money to get to France. Lots of money. That's why he works at the Victory Palace Hotel in the school holidays, putting out the bins and watering the flowers. Papa Roger got him this little job, but he doesn't know that the reason Marius works is so that one day he can leave us all and go and live with the Whites in Europe. So Marius is saving up his pocket money in a little wooden box he hides under the bed and checks before he goes to sleep and when he wakes up. He thinks there are jealous people in the neighbourhood who might cast spells to stop him going to Europe and becoming a great Sapper, or footballer. The jealous people might send rats to get under his bed, and they might eat all his money, even the coins. So every night he sprinkles this stuff round the box, called Death to Rats. Any rat that comes round trying to eat his money is going to die an instant death from the poison.

People round here always find the name Ginette surprising, but I think it's really pretty. It's the name of the owner of the Victory Palace Hotel. Our father wanted to please his boss, who'd given him his job and held on to him for years. Apparently the boss was pleased my father had called his daughter after her. The result was, Madame Ginette increased Papa Roger's salary by 130 CFAs a month. In December she gives our sister Ginette a bigger present than she gives the other children of the hotel workers who were not clever enough to call their daughters Ginette.

Ginette's a tiny little thing. You wouldn't think she was eleven, she looks more like eight. I guess she won't be very tall because Papa Roger's short. But you mustn't tell her she's too short or she'll get mad and refuse to eat her lunch or supper. If we want to really annoy her and eat her food we tell her she's really small, that she looks like she's only eight. If she's very hungry she'll eat anyway, and swear she won't eat tomorrow, at lunch or supper. By the next day she's already forgotten that we told her the day before that she was really small.

When he saw that his boss was really happy that he'd called our sister Ginette after her, Papa Roger decided he'd do the same again when he had another daughter. He planned to call her Marie-France, after Madame Ginette's older sister. But this time, Madame Ginette was not pleased. She said enough was enough. That it was getting ridiculous. Papa Roger was very disappointed. In the end he named his daughter after his late mother. So the sister who's nine is called Mbombie like our late paternal grandmother. Otherwise she'd have been called Marie-France and she would have always had a big present at the end of the year. Sometimes Papa Roger calls her Marie-France anyway, because he really likes his boss. But Mbombie doesn't like that name and she won't answer when you call her by it.

‘Don't call me Marie-France! Have you ever heard of anyone called Marie-Congo or Marie-Zaire?'

Maximilien is a boy who never says no, where most people by the age of six have long since learned to refuse to do things that grown ups want. So at home everyone asks him to go and buy this or buy that, close the front gate, go and see if the pan is
boiling over in the kitchen. As soon as you ask him to go and buy something he runs off like the world 100 metres champion. Then after a little bit he stops, comes back again and asks you all wide eyed, ‘What was I meant to go and buy? Where do I have to go to buy it?'

Often we send him to get doughnuts, or sweets, or a Gillette razor blade for Yaya Gaston, ribbons for Ginette's braids, palm oil for Maman Martine. But when he gets back he gets shouted at because on the way home he's lost the change the shopkeeper gave him. We know he's lost it when he starts crying and pointing back at the street, as though the street had stolen his money. Sometimes he forgets to come straight home with the shopping and stops at the crossroads to watch a row between some prostitutes from Zaire who are fighting with forks and pan lids because the younger one has stolen the older one's client. Maximilien is determined to stop them fighting so that afterwards the older one, who's been beaten up by the younger one, will give him a bit of money for saving her life.

Félicienne is the baby of the family. Maman Martine looks after her as though she's her only child. As a result she still acts like a spoilt five month old baby even though she's two. It's as though she doesn't want to grow up. She still crawls, even though she can walk fine when she chooses, especially when she's coming to me. And she looks like she's going to hang on to her bottle for a while yet. Once I came across her fixing her own milk. As soon as she saw I was watching her she stopped and started crying, as if she'd been stung by a wasp. Maybe because she realised I had found out her little game.

Félicienne likes me to take her on my knee, but when I do I always feel something hot on my belly: she's wee'ed on me, and
now she's laughing. She does it on purpose. So whenever she holds her arms out to me with a big smile to get me to pick her up and carry her on my shoulders, I look the other way. Because I know it's me she wants to wee on, no one else. It's not really naughty, it's just her way of playing with me, and perhaps it's also her way of telling me she loves me as much as her blood sisters and brothers.

I love it when Yaya Gaston lets me sleep in his studio, even if it makes my brothers a bit jealous. Yaya Gaston knows I won't gossip about what goes on in his studio, though honestly I could tell all sorts of stories, because I see all the pretty girls who come to visit him and even bring him food. The food they bring is so good, they must make it extra well to make Yaya Gaston love them even more. I listen to them talking, boasting about how pretty they are, prettier even than film actresses, when it's not possible, in fact, to be prettier than an actress. They try to be nice to me so that Yaya Gaston will love them. But it's just a smokescreen really because when Yaya Gaston's back is turned there are some of them that stare at me with these big mean eyes; they want me to get out of the house so they can be alone with our big brother. I don't go, unless Yaya Gaston tells me to go take a walk outside. It's not their house, it belongs to us.