My mother’s debt blooms on my face.

A blue-black that grows between my parents. A spurned love that makes its way into my blood and out here. Out here is the skin I follow out of my mother. Out here is the peach four roomed house I live in with mama and Nkuku. Out here, is Harrison Lake. There is no lake in Harrison. Sometimes there is no water for a week in Harrison. You can lie a lot in English and not feel guilty.

 

Nkuku says that sometimes they give white names to townships they plan to take and make beautiful for white people. As if English can make anything beautiful. Anyway, I guess they forgot to take this place from us, or they saw how crowded it became and changed their minds. Whatever the reason, this is home. Here a neglected sewerage pipe floods a street for weeks, lifting the litter with it. On Sundays the spice in your neighbour’s meat makes its way through the closest window and into your house; another neighbour burns the pumpkin and serves it in your nose. Here there are only two kinds of people: those who go to church and those who don’t.

 

Sounds, like siblings born too close together, resent each other. Beverly Knight, sings from the taxi driving through our street, that she is the real thing. And I don’t hear her tell us why she thinks so because the lyrics are swallowed into the music coming from the shebeen a street away. The beat in Maliaka’s ‘Destiny’ pushes through all the other sounds, not to make something new but to make sure that it is witnessed too. I am disfigured in the same way. I do not stop growing. I eat and eat and eat but I cannot get full or fill the cold thing inside me.

….

My name is Tale.

You don’t pronounce it like you would the English word that means myth. Mama didn’t want to give me a name that stays in the throat long after it is said but Nkuku would not let her betray me with a name that could be thrown out of the mouth without rehearsal.

 

My name begins behind the bottom teeth, mouth stretched at the corners like a secret. Breakable. It climbs the chest then the throat, lifting into the tip of the tongue to make me.

 

Noble, that is what my name means. As if you can change the future of a thing by naming it or keep secret how it is abandoned.

 

I am sixteen now and I have memorized the shape of many things, even broken things. I follow the sorrow into the kitchen where the linoleum covering the floor is coming undone around the sink and the stove; frowning in places we use most. It moves away from the house the way scorned things do. I am inspecting my uniform in the oven, which doubles as a mirror, when mama walks in. The top and the bottom of the oven are separated by a thin emptiness in the middle that divides me. I turn to each side, like a garment on sale. I am not whole. But this is the one place I can survey my uniform from head to toe before I go to school.

 

Mama comes  into the kitchen to put her teacup away. I make her tea every morning, I know how many sugars she takes. I know that she likes the milk warmed and the teabag lifted out of the cup before I present it to her on a saucer. I study her, hoping to make her slow to turn away from. Sometimes she calls to me for another cup, which tells me that she likes my tea. But she never thanks me for it. So, to avenge myself I spit into her tea. I do this to see if swallowing the thing you hate can kill you; or cause you to love it.

 

I don’t tell anybody this because that one time I told Caroline (who was supposed to be my best friend) that I thought God was a man. Like my father. That he was either busy or dead, which is why we never saw him or heard from him. She told her mother, who told my mother – who beat me for what she called blasphemy.

 

I had to look that word up.

 

Mama calls God her father, which means he is bigger than her. I don’t know why she needed to defend big him against small me. But she did. On an afternoon when Nkuku had left to see about a sick friend. (Nkuku is so old that all her social engagements include funerals, and hospital beds. Most of her friends are sick from living too long.)

 

I was sitting on the lounge floor watching Anaconda while mama napped. I’ve watched it so many times, and yet I still enjoy how it scares me. Mama says most things are full of Satanism. Wherever there is indulgence, the devil is there too. I can only watch what I like when she sleeps. So, when I felt the belt flutter furiously from behind me, and make its way around me like a snake with teeth all over its body. My breath fell out onto my legs, and my back arched to move away from the bite.

I was so startled when she started talking because I didn’t hear her coming.

“God doesn’t exist?” She said, drawing might for another turn.

“It’s just a movie” I said.

“God is a man?” she kept swinging. Finally, I knew why she was so angry

“No mama.”

“I will not have that talk in my house. Not in my house!”

“I didn’t say…” I was trying to turn myself around. How could I avoid a weapon I could not see?

“Are you saying Caroline’s mother is a liar?”

“Please mama,” I called out, scrambling to my feet. I saw then that she had changed into her church clothes, all white from head to toe. She had been waiting for me to think myself safe.

“My child, why do you insist on embarrassing me?” She stopped to hear my response.

“I was joking,” the words moved me backwards, away from her. Eyes fixed on the belt.

One apology passed over another and mama turned them all away, serious about making me right again. I became so desperate for her pardon that in-between the lashings I issued her a few of Caroline’s secrets, to prove that she shouldn’t be trusted to tell the truth. I only told her the ones that were useful but not too incriminating, because unlike Caroline, I was a good friend. It didn’t work; Instead it gave her more fervour with which to wind the offending spirit in me.

 

She started praying as she continued to move the belt around me: four, five…eight…when it did not look like the lesson would stop, I knew I had to beg mama’s forgiveness. I was wet and burning, out of breath from jumping through the belt as it followed her swinging. I caught enough air between the cuts and tried again for her mercy.

 

Screaming: “I’m-sorry-I-will-never-do-it-again. Mama!”

 

The lake in my chest was building in my breath. I gasped, drowning.

 

The neighbours could hear me screaming. But I knew that no one was going to help. You didn’t insert yourself like that in people’s business. You just gossiped about them. In any case, mama didn’t care that they could hear her beating me from here to Cairo. She was delivering me. Emptying me of my sin. Making me right again. And nothing would stop her good work and prayer.

 

‘Twelve, thirteen…’ The belt coiled around the bones, biting into the sin.

 

I deserve this, I thought. The pain and my screaming heating my body until I fainted. That must have satisfied mama.

 

I woke up to Nkuku standing over me in our bedroom, crying, pouring my name into my body. “Tale! Tale! Tale!” She said, until I woke up. I could tell by the way her hands were afraid to touch me that the purifying was done very well. I was right about God being a man, because even then, he never came.

 

….

 

In the kitchen, I move back into the fridge and out of mama’s way so that she does not have to squeeze past me as she makes her way to the sink in her crisp work skin, teacup in hand. I would climb into the cutlery drawer if it gave her more space. I would gather away, flatten, be beautiful.

 

Mama looks so small over the sink in her navy-blue nursing uniform. Turned away from me. Delicately balanced over the sink, on a string that hangs from the ceiling. Her throat is a branch that can be pulled away from the body. I want to cut the string and see where she falls to, heaven or hell. I want to pull away at the blue and see what is inside.

 

“Your father gave you that.” she says, rinsing the cup with so much fury, it is as if she is holding my face under the tap; washing off the trouble and my father. The wickedness she is referring to is the blue-black mark on my face, shaped like a country. I have my father’s blue-black mask. A birthmark that seals the right side of my face, almost completely. It does not divide itself or make space for another colour. It stretches like a collapsed tent, taking into it my eye and cheek, joining the black of my hairline and the skin near my ear.

 

Mama says it is spiteful.

 

I don’t agree, I have this skin that is in my father’s blood, which must mean that I have not been completely forsaken by him. I touch the thing on my face and talk in my heart-a faraway room- out of mama’s way. I caress the thing. Finger the connection, to speak to the father from whom I long to hear. if I am so much like you that it makes mama angry, why then can you not hear me when I talk to you? I say.

 

He never responds.

 

“Have you prayed?” She asks from the sink

A quick “Yes” shoots her in the back.

“Yes?”

“Yes Ma.” I say, addressing the absence.

“I didn’t hear you,” she says, turning away from the sink to look at me. She waits. Her wet hands dripping water and soap onto the floor. I fold onto my knees and raise my hands to catch the spirit. The thing I am catching must know that I am terrified of my mother. I begin: “Our father who art…” and the words fall through me and into the kitchen, without touching anything. I am an echo. The Vaseline I use to lotion my body threatens to move my knees apart, making this position difficult to hold. But I must, because if I slip mama will take that to mean that the disobedient spirit in me objects to praying and therefore to God- whom she adores. She will make me start again or give me a hiding and I’ll have to explain the welts on my legs to people at school. I tighten my thighs and stomach to keep my posture straight up towards the kingdom, and grow my voice on “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”, like I have seen the women at Seven Children of God do it.

“Amen” I finish and open my eyes.

 

She uses her eyes to pick me up off the floor. And when she arrives on my face, she curdles.

“A holy terror” she says. Naming the black on my face, I should stay down. If I get up, it will look like I am challenging her.

“…like your father” She says, dripping onto the floor.

“Don’t you think so ma?” She calls to Nkuku from the kitchen

“Heh?” Nkuku shouts back, voice coarse from the short travel from her bedroom to the kitchen

Separating each word so that it reaches Nkuku in the bedroom, she says, “This one is like her faaaather”

“God has punished me”

Nkuku ambles in without her walking stick.

I have found that the best way to turn mama’s words back is to say nothing. To never let her see them reach me. Nkuku sees me on my knees, struggling to keep the holy posture. There is a very small puddle forming where mama’s hands hang, dripping. You have to be looking down to see it.

Knowing that my freedom will not come until mama leaves, “You will be late,” she says to mama.

Since I was born Nkuku has had to stand between us like this. If she didn’t my mother would have killed me, trying to make me clean. Other mothers are not this sharp with their children. I guess love and how it is given, depends on who it is being given to. I say this because mama holds other children the way she doesn’t hold me. She calls them beautiful and good, and her face doesn’t spoil at their sight. But when she looks at me, you would swear I haven’t washed since the day my father left her.

 

Sometimes I am scared that I will always be a child. I will never be able to deny permission for the things that are being done to me. To survive I learn my own magic. I learn how to catch the good spirit with my body whether it comes or not. Since mama has convinced herself that I am carrying a curse, she has also convinced herself that the Seven- Children- of- God church will wash it away. This is where I have learnt to catch spirits. When I am being prayed for, I know that I must shake, tear at my face in pain, then close my fists tightly as if to shackle the good spirit and roll my eyes the way you do when someone says something unbelievably annoying. When all that is done, I must fall backwards, or sideways; where ever there is a body big enough to fall into. Mama is always the first to catch me. I know she would rather have me fall through the floor, away from her. But when people are watching she makes her arms safe for me. On the night the cleansing ceremony is done, in order to help God, mama will scrub the mark until my blood threatens to come through the blue-black rind. Then she rubs a yellowish salve that burns through the skin until the bones of my face ache.

Nkuku cannot help much. If she reports mama, I will be taken away. Worse things can happen when you are separated from your family. Sometimes she will beg mama to stop or try to convince her that the mark on my face is just a mark. But mama is so desperate to disappear the shadow on my face, this thing that her priest says is a stain on the spirit and in the blood. She will pray and scrub and pray and scrub until I am made clean. I do not know how the spirit is kept clean or why the mud in mine rose through the skin. I know that blood is borrowed over and over again until God forgets which sin belongs to whom. This same God believes in punishments. Mama and her church believe that the punishments for these sins are inherited over and over again through the blood, and because of it my mother misunderstands me.

 

She thinks that I am her punishment. And so I must be cleansed.

….

“Wipe the floor” Mama says, turning her back to reach for the hand towel on the counter next to the sink. And just as suddenly as she commands, she slips on the puddle under her, falling, like a blue house towards the corner of the broom cupboard. Her hands are wings trying to catch the counter, but the thing pushing her moves with so much force that her head hits the broom cupboard, bounces off and returns into it again. This happens four times as if someone is holding her face and repeatedly slamming the side of her head into the cupboard. The cold thing in me beats, stretching until it is warm and then hot.

 

Nkuku is shouting stop, her hands gasping over her head.

 

The cracking fills the kitchen. Mama is falling towards me.

I move back, to make room for her to land, just above my shiny black school shoes. A pool of blood flowers out of the crack in her face. She looks up at the gold trimming on the row of badges pinned to my blazer. They twinkle in the light. It must be beautiful because she doesn’t look away. Mama says that I am not beautiful so I should be good at things. I do not challenge her when she says this because she is beautiful. I look in the oven and measure with my eyes the hem of my skirt, four fingers away from the knees, any shorter and I would get detention. All the while mama doesn’t turn away from me.