Dead Means Dead

From The Tears of a Painter

It took me two years to learn that dead meant dead. My father wasn’t ever going to come back.

Can I tell you what happens when a child doesn’t understand death?

The summer came, and my mother and I went on our annual visit to my grandparents. They were stunned to see I hadn’t grown. My mother told them it was normal, sometimes a child doesn’t grow.

But it was more than that. I looked anaemic, absent, missing from my body. And although they fed me every sweet and pastry they could think of, I remained a waif living in the clouds, a sheet blowing in the wind. With my father gone, I couldn’t find my footing. And it was visible on every cell of my body.

At the end of the summer, when we returned to Mombasa, my mother began lying to my grandparents. Twice a month, she phoned them and told them not to worry, I was growing again.

Another summer arrived. I was ten years old by then. And this time, when my grandparents saw me, they couldn’t believe I was their granddaughter. My elbows and knees had become knobs. My arms and legs looked like sticks discarded on the earth. When I lifted my shirt, my ribs showed. I had never heard my grandfather shout as forcefully as he did then.

They argued constantly that summer. They begged my mother not to return. They said things like, she was killing her daughter. In the end my grandfather lost his temper. “I forbid it!” he shouted one afternoon.

They took me to four pediatricians at the hospital and I was checked for all kinds of tropical diseases. This was still in a time when their biggest fear was that I had contracted something ‘tropical’. In the end no one found anything. Of course not. Blood tests don’t measure grief.

It was Mark who saved my life. He was in boarding school by then, so we only saw each other in the holidays— in the summer for a couple of weeks here and there, at Christmas and the midterms.

It was on one of those midterms, we were all staying at the beach house for the weekend, when in the middle of the night, a sound woke me. Or had it been a dream? I wasn’t sure. I’d been dreaming about the monkeys we’d seen at the coffee farm two Decembers ago. It had been our first Christmas without my father, and Kirstin and Tim suggested we drive up with them.

The black and white Colobus monkeys appeared on our second night there, as we were sitting on the verandah, the parents drinking their sundowners, Mark and I lingering nearby because his grandparents expected it of us.

At first, we heard them more than saw them, their low groans drawing us to the edge of the verandah.

Colobus, Mark’s grandmother said. Over there. They’ve been coming closer and closer.

There were two visible in the tall Red Stinkwoods at the edge of the garden. But if you looked carefully enough you could see a whole troop in the trees further back.

They eat children, Mark said. They steal them in the middle of the night. By morning all that’s left is skin and bones.

Mark, don’t, that was Kirstin. She called me by her side then, put her arm around me, and I leaned against her. She loved me like a daughter. And I ate up every moment of it. I sometimes think, it was her who got me through those first two years without my father.

He’s just teasing, she said, stroking my hair. They’re monkeys, they aren’t going to do a thing.

But the damage was done. Since then, on unsuspecting nights, the monkeys appeared, echoing through my dreams, snatching me out the window of my father’s pickup or straight off his shoulders in our garden. I hated those nightmares. Twice, I wet my bed from them.

But back to the night at the beach house. Awoken by a sound, I checked the slit under the door for a sign of light. Everything was dark; the grown-ups had gone to bed.