Black Mamba Boy. Nadifa Mohamed
as a kinsman. She thought only he would understand how it felt to be an outsider in their family, to be called ‘cursed’ and ‘miserable’. She watched him for a long time before he noticed her, but then he began sneaking up behind her as she trekked to the well or collected firewood.
When Ambaro heard that her father and uncles had rejected Guure in favour of another man, she asked Jinnow to send word to Guure to meet her. She wrapped herself in her newest shawl and escaped into the night. Guure stood waiting under the great acacia as she planned, lithe and smiling, his skin shining in the moonlight. His brown afro formed a halo around his head and with his luminous white robes she felt she was running away with the archangel Jibreel. He had brought with him a cloth bundle. He kneeled down to open it and brought out a pomegranate, and a gold bangle stolen from his aunt; he passed these to Ambaro, kissing her hands as she took them. Then he removed a lute and pulled her down to sit next to him, placing the cloth underneath her. He plucked the strings sparsely, delicately, watching the shy smile on her face grow mischievously; he then played more confidently, easing out a soft bucolic melody. It sounded like spring, a lover’s lullaby. They sat entwined until the moon and stars tactfully dimmed and took their leave of the secret lovers. They were married the next day, in a wedding witnessed by strangers and conducted by a rebellious sheikh who laughingly placed two goats in the role of the bride’s male guardians. They returned to the family camp and the admiration of their cousins but the elders were furious and gave nothing to the young couple, who were forced to build a ramshackle aqal of their own. Ambaro quickly learned that her husband was a hardened dreamer, always stuck in his head; he was the boy everyone loved but would not trust with their camels. Guure could not accept that his carefree youth was over; he still wanted to wander off with his friends while all Ambaro wanted was a family of her own. Guure played the lute with all of his passion and attention but was listless and incompetent with the practical details of life, they had no livestock and depended on Jinnow’s charity. In the blink of an eye, Ambaro became Guure’s judge, his overseer, his jailer. When Jama arrived a year later in Ambaro’s eighteenth year, she hoped it would force Guure to start providing but instead he carried on endlessly combing his hair and playing his lute, singing his favourite song to her, ‘Ha I gabin oo I gooyn’. He occasionally dangled the baby from his thin fingers before Ambaro snatched Jama away. Ambaro carried both a knife and a stick from the magic wagar tree to protect her son from dangers seen and unseen, she was a fierce, militant mother, her sweet mellow core completely melted away. Ambaro tied the baby to her back and taught herself how to weave straw baskets, make perfume, sew blankets, intending to barter these items in neighbouring settlements for food. Whatever Ambaro did, they remained destitute, and she was reduced to foraging in the countryside for edible plants and roots. When Guure began to spend his days chewing qat with young men from whom he caught the Motor Madness, Ambaro was ready to tear her hair out. He bored Ambaro with obsessive talk about cars and the clansmen who had gone to Sudan and earned big money driving Ferengis around. It all seemed hopeless to Ambaro who had never seen a car in her life and could not believe that cars were anything more than the childish sorcery of foreigners. Ambaro tried desperately to extinguish this fire that was burning in Guure but the more she criticised and ridiculed him, the more Guure clung to his dream and convinced himself that he must leave for Sudan. His talk stole the hope out of her heart and made her wonder how he could desert his family so easily; she would cry and he would hold her but she knew only heartache lay ahead. Guure quietened down when a daughter arrived a year after Jama, a smiling golden child with big happy eyes that Ambaro named Kahawaris, after the glow of light before sunrise that heralded her birth. Kahawaris became the light of their lives, a baby whose beauty the other mothers envied and whose giggles rang through the camp. Jama had grown into a talkative little boy, always petting his little sister, accosting the adults with questions while he carried Kahawaris on his back. With his two children pawing at him, complaining and crying with hunger each night, Guure promised that he would take any work he was given, even if it meant carrying carcasses from the slaughterhouse. He began to help Ambaro with the chores, scorning the jeers of his friends to collect water from the well and milk the goats alongside the women. Life carried on bearably like this until after a long exhausting day, Ambaro unstrapped her daughter from her back and found her limp and lifeless. Ambaro screamed for Guure and he took the child from her arms and ran to Jinnow. Ambaro’s soul emptied after her baby’s death, she wept in sunshine and moonlight, she refused to get up, to feed herself or Jama. She blamed Guure for making her carry a young baby from village to village in the heat and dust. Ambaro had feared for Jama, she had constantly put her ear against his heart to check it was still beating but he had thrived with her. Now she felt that she had failed Kahawaris, had been a bad mother to the beautiful child. Guure hopelessly struggled to look after them, he fed and bathed Jama but he could not trade and barter like Ambaro so they often went hungry or begged. Guure’s father had died before he was born so he had no idea what a father did or didn’t do, he just floundered along guiltily, frightened that Jama would also die. Finally, when a drought decimated the clan’s camels, sheep and goats, everything disintegrated and families dissolved as people sought survival down every dirt track.
Guure cupped Ambaro’s face in his hands and said, ‘Look, either I go and make a living for us or you do. What will it be?’ Ambaro took his hands away and kept silent.
The very same day Guure set off on a mapless, penniless journey to Sudan. That was the last they saw of him, though they heard tales of his wanderings. Ambaro waited and waited for him, not knowing if he had died, gone mad, met someone else. Her family demanded that she divorce him, the clerics told her that she had been abandoned and was free but still she waited. She went to Aden and its factories hoping to earn enough to track him down. She cursed her admirers and sent them away in the hope that one day Guure would appear over the horizon with his lute strapped to his back.
Returning to the Islaweynes’ house was too bitter a fruit for Jama to stomach; the bloated, pompous pig of a woman treated Jama and his mother like flies hovering around her heaped dinner plate. He had grown tired of making his small body even smaller so that false queen could feel like the air in the room was her sole reserve. Jama had also grown weary of his mother, she did nothing but give him a headache. Living in the open had furnished him with a wolfish instinct for self-preservation; he could sense danger through the small hairs on his lower spine and taste it in the thick, dusty air. He thought from the primitive, knotted tangle of nerves at the base of his spine, like Adam
– his needs were primal, to find food, find shelter and avoid predators. Sleeping on roofs and streets had changed his sleep from the contented slumber of an infant, safe within his mother-sentried realm, to a jerky, half-awake unconsciousness, aware of mysterious voices and startling footsteps. His favourite place to sleep was an earth-smelling crook on the roof of a teetering apartment block. The crook was made up of a mud wall that curled over to make a three-walled tomb, inside it Jama felt as safe as the dead, in this world but not of it, floating high in the sky. At dawn he would wake up and watch the little insects as they carried on with their busy lives, scurrying across the wall with so much self-importance, crawling over his fingers and face as if he was just a boulder in their way. He felt as small in the world as them but more vulnerable, more alone than the ants with their armies or the cockroaches with their tough shells and hidden wings. But this night he would return to the new apartment block he had been sleeping in with Shidane and Abdi. Days and weeks and months came and went but Jama rarely knew where he would be eating or sleeping on any given night, there was no order to his life. Jama could easily imagine growing old and weak on these mean streets, eventually being found one day, like other market boys he had seen, cold and stiff on the kerb, a donkey cart carrying him away to an unmarked pauper’s grave outside town before stray dogs made a meal of him. Letting himself into the building, Jama wished the sleepy-eyed caretaker goodnight and went up to the roof, feeling a hollowness in his chest from wanting to be with a mother whose company he found too difficult to bear. On reaching the roof, he saw his inner emptiness matched by complete silence. Abdi and Shidane were not there. The loneliness Jama felt carved even deeper into his soul, he needed Abdi’s small warm body to huddle up with tonight, his wet nose buried in Jama’s neck. Jama stepped onto the ledge and looked up at the unblinking stars and the still pregnant, indifferent moon.
He hung there, enjoying the vast drop inches away from his feet, and at the top of his lungs called out, ‘Guure Naaleyeh Mohamed,