Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty (33 page)

He lifts his head and points up at the sky. I lift my head too,
but I can't see the stairway up to heaven. He lowers his head and then hands me the old key. I'm so excited, I snatch it from his hands.

As I get up to go he says, ‘Are you off for good then? Will I never see you again?'

I'm not listening though, I'm already running. I feel free, I can breathe deeply too. I feel like I can fly. I feel like I want to laugh like I've never laughed before. My feet hardly touch the ground. I think of Carl Lewis, and I run even faster.

I've already gone a long way, and I've even stopped thinking about the moment when I'll hand my mother the key, when I suddenly remember that I've forgotten to ask Little Pepper two important things. So I turn back and I find him still in the same spot, with his head still bowed. He lifts it and smiles, and it's as though he knew I would come back.

‘Ah, you're back!'

‘There are two things I forgot to ask you…'

‘Then start with the first one.'

‘Have you still got the little key you found when we were looking through the bin together?'

‘Which little key?'

‘The tiny one that opens the cans of headless sardines from Morocco.'

He fumbles in the pocket of his old coat and gives me the little key.

‘What are you going to do with it, now I've given you a real one?'

Without thinking, I reply, ‘Maybe the little one is the right one. I'm going to keep them both, just in case.'

‘And what was the second thing you wanted to ask me?'

‘Have you seen My Sister Star and My Sister No-name?'

He stopped laughing then.

‘You didn't give me their real names! I meet so many people, and if I don't have their names I can't tell who's who, can I? Come back and see me any time, with your sisters' real names.'

I run off again, without saying goodbye. I'm scared the night will grab hold of me, just as each ghost is settling back in its grave for a rest, after a long walk through the town.

As I run I hear the two keys knocking together in my shorts pocket. The noise soothes me. I feel light, I still feel like laughing, like I did just now. But if I laugh, people will think that I'm a mad child. How else will they understand that I'm happy and I'm talking to myself because what I have in my pocket is the key to my mother's happiness, and my father's. And mine too?

I can see a fat woman talking to our neighbour, Yeza the joiner. I peer at them, and make out Maman Pauline with them too, and Papa Roger and Monsieur and Madame Mutombo. When people are talking to Yeza it's usually something to do with a coffin. Perhaps that's why the fat woman's crying and my mother and Madame Mutombo are comforting her.

As I'm now at our front door, I can't quite see what's going on. From this distance the faces seem blurred and when they talk it's as though there are no words coming out of their mouths. It's like those films in black and white that the priest sometimes shows us in the courtyard of the church of Saint-Jean-Bosco. There all you ever see is men, women and children on their knees praying.

I move forward into the middle of the lot and now I can see that the fat woman crying is the mother of Longombé, the apprentice. I recognise her, she's the one who always comes to ask her son for money outside Monsieur Mutombo's workshop. So I say to myself: ‘That's it then, it must be Longombé the apprentice who's dead'. And I start thinking about how it always made him laugh when I came to the workshop. How he would take my father's trousers or my torn shirt and mend them. I'm not going to stay standing here in the middle of our lot. I want to know everything.

So here I am in front of Yeza's lot now. My mother's just
noticed me, and she shouts: ‘Michel, don't just stand there, go on home!'

Longombé's mother disagrees. ‘He can stay, Pauline, my son was fond of him.'

I go into the lot, and walk towards the sad little group. I discover that Longombé was hit by a car in the Block 55
quartier
. The car had no brakes, and after knocking over the apprentice it crashed into an electric pylon. The driver ran off and they'll never find him if he goes to live in the bush, where most gangsters live, and where the police never go.

Longombé's mother yells that a young man like her son can't just die, the old should die before the young. ‘Why didn't the car run me over, eh? It's witchcraft!'

According to her, Longombé had a spell put on him by someone, and it's not the driver's fault, they should let him be, because the accident happened in front of the shop that used to belong to the Senegali, Ousmane.

And she just goes on shouting: ‘It's all Ousmane's fault, not the driver's! Ousmane used his magic mirror to make a sacrifice of my son and make lots of money for his shop!'

Now if I remember correctly, Ousmane doesn't own the shop in Block 55 any more. He's sold it, and opened another one in the Grand Marché. How can he still be doing his magic mirror when a Congolese has bought his shop?

It's as though Longombé's mother's read my mind. I hear her telling the others: ‘Yes, and you'll tell me that Ousmane doesn't run the shop on Block 55 any more! He's sold it, you'll say! Oh yeah! You think I'll swallow that one? What am I, an idiot? My child's death makes nice business for him, because he was my only one. And only sons are the sacrifice the fetishers like best in this country. You think it was by chance he had this
accident? No! No! No! That Senegali, Ousmane, he's the one behind all this. He sold his shop to that Congolese guy, and he sold him a piece of the magic mirror along with it! The two of them are in it together! And the mirror has to keep being fed with human blood, to create custom. The Congolese guy that runs that shop is his accomplice, they split the profits at night when everyone's asleep, and they decide which child around here's to be sacrificed next! You watch out, Pauline, you just be careful, one day they'll try to take your son too.'

She says Longombé was crossing the street in front of the Congolese bar, that he thought the car approaching from the right was a long way off, when in fact it was only a metre away. And bang! While she's talking I remember about the story of the magic mirror when I used to walk to school with Caroline and our parents would tell us not to go past Ousmane's shop. The cars would have run us over too, because of Ousmane's magic mirror.

Now they're discussing the price of the coffin.

Yeza wants far too much money. They're begging him to lower the price. They tell him that Longombé's mother is very poor, that she has no husband, that he ran off when Longombé was born. The joiner listens sympathetically. I get the feeling he's going to cry. He even takes out a handkerchief and wipes away a tear, then says: ‘No, I'm sorry, I can't lower the price of a coffin. I've given you a good price, but wood's very expensive now. Go and ask the other joiners the price of a coffin and you'll see!'

Since Monsieur Mutombo and my father can't get him to change his mind, they get their money out and start counting. The joiner watches them, with the look of a greedy man with a
tapeworm. His head bobs up and down each time a note comes out of the wallet and is laid on the bamboo table that stands in his yard. They hand over a lot of money, and he takes it and stuffs the whole lot in his pocket with a little smile that really irritates me. Then he gets the money out again, puts it back on the table and counts it as though he doesn't trust Monsieur Mutombo and my father.

The whole group leaves the lot. The joiner goes into his workshop and we can hear the noise of his saw cutting up the wood.

Maman Pauline comes over to me and leans forward slightly to talk to me without the others hearing: ‘Michel, you must sleep on your own in the house tonight, your father and I are going to the wake. Don't forget to put up your mosquito net, and to switch out the lamp when you go to sleep.'

She hugs me tight and kisses me. It's the first time she's hugged me like that, and given me a kiss. My cheeks are wet with her tears. If Maman Pauline is crying, she must be really unhappy, it must all be too much for her. I don't want her to be unhappy. I know my mother isn't crying for the death of Longombé. She has often told me that when someone weeps for a death outside their own family it's because they're thinking about their own fears. But I'm not thinking about my own fears, I'm actually thinking about how Longombé used to laugh in the workshop, the way he used to look at the women getting undressed in front of him so he could take their measurements. And when all these thoughts come into my head then I do start to feel a bit of a bug in my eye.

I hold out my arms for my mother to kiss me again, because I don't know if she'll ever kiss me again one day, or if I'll have to
wait for someone else round here to die first. She stoops down so she's at the same height as me. My voice won't come out, I don't know what to say to comfort her, to stop her crying over Longombé's corpse because she's thinking of her own fears. Since my mouth is pressed up against her ear, I whisper: ‘Maman, I've got something for you…'

I take out the key and show it to her, she takes it quickly and starts crying really loud. When they hear her, the others think she's still crying about Longombé's death.

I see Monsieur Mutombo, Madame Mutombo, Maman Pauline and Papa Roger all walking away with Longombé's mother and several other people from the neighbourhood come to join them. My mother turns round every now and then to look at me. Papa Roger too. The two of them have just been talking, and I get the feeling my father has now put the key I gave Maman Pauline into his pocket. I can tell even from here, because he keeps touching his pocket, as though he's afraid the key might disappear. I do the same thing, touching the pocket of my shorts, and I can tell there's still a key there, the little key for opening tins of headless Moroccan sardines.

It's the first time I've been down to the river Tchinouka with Caroline. I asked her to come. I went past her house and whistled three times. I was worried it would be Lounès who came out, but I knew, too, that he wouldn't be there, that he'd gone into town with his father to buy fabric. So the day before, when he told me he was going out with Monsieur Mutombo, I said to myself: I have to meet Caroline, it's very important.

At the third whistle, Caroline came quickly out of their house. She stood barefoot outside their front door. She signalled to me to wait, then she went back inside. What was she going back to fetch?

She came back a few minutes later, nicely dressed, in a blue dress, white shoes, and a red scarf. I felt a bit scruffy in my blue trousers that were too short for me, and my brown shirt that her father made for me two years ago. I hadn't combed my hair and I looked like I'd just got out of bed.

Caroline looked at my feet: my plastic sandals were a bit worn looking.

‘Where are we going then?'

‘To the river.'

She wanted to go and walk about in town. I said no, because it's too far and you have to take the bus. Anyway, in the town centre we might run into Monsieur Mutombo and Lounès. Besides which, I'm scared of accidents now, with the buses
going too fast, and not stopping at red lights.

We walked in silence. Caroline seemed to be walking slowly. So I slowed down too, to wait for her, and she gave me her hand, and I took it, and we went on our way like that, still not speaking, all the way to the river.

‘Michel, what have we come down here for? I don't like this river, it smells, and the toads make such a noise! Did you know, toads are devils? They say they're bad people who've died and been turned into toads.'

I hear a plane. I can only make out its wing, the rest is hidden behind a big dark cloud. I don't want to try and guess which country it's going to, or the capital of the country. Instead I'm thinking about next year. Maybe I'll have my School Certificate in my pocket and I'll go to Trois-Glorieuses secondary school. I'll take the workers' train with my friends. I'll be in year 7, but Lounès will be in the big children's class, in year 9. I'll learn difficult things without worrying about becoming a madman like Little Pepper, Athena or Mango. I'll be a little chap with hair under my chin and down below, inside my pants. I'll walk faster than I do now because I'll have muscly legs. My voice will change too, it won't be high any more, and when I laugh people will say: ‘Hey, that's a man laughing, not a little boy from Trois-Martyrs primary school, where water comes through the roof when it rains.'

Caroline gives me a shake, ‘Michel, are you dreaming, or what?'

‘I was thinking about next year when I go to big school.'

‘Did you find your mother's key?'

I nod. Just now we were sitting down, but now she stands up suddenly and smiles at me.

‘Where is the key? Can I see it too?'

‘I gave it to my mother.'

I take out a little piece of paper from my pocket and hand it to her. She unfolds it to find the poem I wrote for her a long time back. Her lips move, her eyes fill up. But she doesn't tell me what she thinks. I know she likes the poem, even if it's not like the poem by Victor Hugo that her brother once recited.

She folds the piece of paper again, and hides it in her dress pocket. Just at that moment I take the key out of my pocket, the one that opens tins of headless sardines made in Morocco: ‘Here, this is for you too. Look after it carefully. I know you'll need it one day to open your belly with.'

She has a bit of a bug in her eye and I can feel my heart dipping down into my stomach. I am so in love with her.

She tells me to get up and she takes me in her arms.

‘Do you still want to have two children with me?'

‘Of course.'

‘I love you Michel.'

‘I love you too and…'

‘Tell me how you love me.'