pair of crowbars. But when the fox did make its leap, it tacked too far to the right, so that the stag could easily bounce sideways out of the way. And after that the fox paid the stag no more attention. Instead, it pawed and snuffled at the ground where the stag had been standing. Cherish tiptoed close enough to see that the fox was grazing on white grubs about the size of the dung beetle grubs her uncle sometimes liked to cook in a disgusting omelette. Then she heard her mother screaming for her, and she ran back towards the ridge, resigned to a spanking.
It wasn’t until she was falling asleep that night that she worked out her theory of what must have happened. The fox had deliberately made the stag lurch to the side so that it would stretch out the skin of its flank, where some sort of insect had laid its eggs. When the skin went tight over the ribs, the grubs popped out like beans from a pod, and the fox got an easy meal. Cherish did wonder why the stag couldn’t have performed the same surgery on itself without the fox’s help, but perhaps it was for the same reason that she couldn’t scare her own hiccups away so she always had to get Zaya to do it. Years later she would still imagine hiccups as pallid larvae jumping out of her mouth.
Zaya was Cherish’s half-brother, six years older than her. His father had died of a viper bite not long after Zaya was born, leaving their mother a young widow. So when dollars invaded Gandayaw, their mother had started a beauty stall selling shampoo and thanaka paste, from which she earned just about enough to feed her children when Cherish was growing up. In those days, her mother mostly seemed sad, her brother mostly seemed angry, and Cherish herself mostly felt puzzled and out of place: she knew she looked different from her relatives, and at a certain point she worked out that her father must have been a white man, but no one wanted to tell her anything more. Later, she would come to feel as if her personal indeterminacy was designed to click right into the general indeterminacy on which her home town ran: intelligent kids can’t bear the feeling that the world is spinning and meshing all around them in ways they aren’t supposed to understand yet, but because of how deals are made in a place like Gandayaw, even the canniest adult has to accept that for every three parts of the machinery she’s learned to follow there are seven or eight farther back that she’ll never even glimpse.
When Cherish was ten years old, however, something happened that showed her far more of the machinery of her own life than she’d ever seen before. One morning a few days after that year’s lantern festival, she and Zaya were on the way to buy vegetables with their mother when a black Mercedes-Benz drove past, so slowly that perhaps one of the passengers had told the driver he wanted to get a good look at the town. Cherish had seen a lot of cars like that before, and was more interested in establishing diplomatic relations with a macaque on a chain that she could see in a bar across the road, but her mother stopped dead. Then she grabbed both her children by their arms and dragged them off into an alley. Here two crows bickered on the support struts of an air-conditioning unit.
‘What are you doing?’ said Zaya.
‘Go back and open the stall,’ said their mother.
‘Why?’ Zaya’s friends all made fun of him when they saw him on his own behind the baskets of cosmetics, even though most of the time those boys were quite an earnest, secretive gang, muttering about politics and crowding around half-broken radios. Some of them smoked yaba tablets, sucking the fumes off heated foil through a plastic straw like a butterfly’s proboscis, but not Zaya himself as far as she knew.
‘Just go back and open the stall. Cherish and I have something to do. We’ll be back later.’
After Zaya was gone, their mother led Cherish aimlessly from shop to shop for a while, but eventually they made for
It wasn’t until she was falling asleep that night that she worked out her theory of what must have happened. The fox had deliberately made the stag lurch to the side so that it would stretch out the skin of its flank, where some sort of insect had laid its eggs. When the skin went tight over the ribs, the grubs popped out like beans from a pod, and the fox got an easy meal. Cherish did wonder why the stag couldn’t have performed the same surgery on itself without the fox’s help, but perhaps it was for the same reason that she couldn’t scare her own hiccups away so she always had to get Zaya to do it. Years later she would still imagine hiccups as pallid larvae jumping out of her mouth.
Zaya was Cherish’s half-brother, six years older than her. His father had died of a viper bite not long after Zaya was born, leaving their mother a young widow. So when dollars invaded Gandayaw, their mother had started a beauty stall selling shampoo and thanaka paste, from which she earned just about enough to feed her children when Cherish was growing up. In those days, her mother mostly seemed sad, her brother mostly seemed angry, and Cherish herself mostly felt puzzled and out of place: she knew she looked different from her relatives, and at a certain point she worked out that her father must have been a white man, but no one wanted to tell her anything more. Later, she would come to feel as if her personal indeterminacy was designed to click right into the general indeterminacy on which her home town ran: intelligent kids can’t bear the feeling that the world is spinning and meshing all around them in ways they aren’t supposed to understand yet, but because of how deals are made in a place like Gandayaw, even the canniest adult has to accept that for every three parts of the machinery she’s learned to follow there are seven or eight farther back that she’ll never even glimpse.
When Cherish was ten years old, however, something happened that showed her far more of the machinery of her own life than she’d ever seen before. One morning a few days after that year’s lantern festival, she and Zaya were on the way to buy vegetables with their mother when a black Mercedes-Benz drove past, so slowly that perhaps one of the passengers had told the driver he wanted to get a good look at the town. Cherish had seen a lot of cars like that before, and was more interested in establishing diplomatic relations with a macaque on a chain that she could see in a bar across the road, but her mother stopped dead. Then she grabbed both her children by their arms and dragged them off into an alley. Here two crows bickered on the support struts of an air-conditioning unit.
‘What are you doing?’ said Zaya.
‘Go back and open the stall,’ said their mother.
‘Why?’ Zaya’s friends all made fun of him when they saw him on his own behind the baskets of cosmetics, even though most of the time those boys were quite an earnest, secretive gang, muttering about politics and crowding around half-broken radios. Some of them smoked yaba tablets, sucking the fumes off heated foil through a plastic straw like a butterfly’s proboscis, but not Zaya himself as far as she knew.
‘Just go back and open the stall. Cherish and I have something to do. We’ll be back later.’
After Zaya was gone, their mother led Cherish aimlessly from shop to shop for a while, but eventually they made for
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