Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by Sarah Ladipo Manyika Read Free Book Online Page A

worry. Will I become just another old woman with Alzheimer’s? And who will look after me? As a child I only remember one mad person – man or woman, I forget. Was it a bare-breasted woman who removed her wrappa to reveal a torn and dirty petticoat? Did she shriek and scratch her head? Or does this memory come from the book of myimagination? Or was it a man with thick, knotty, lice-infested hair? He was the only bearded man I saw in those days. I never dared to look too closely for fear that his curses might land on me. All the children knew that somewhere between this madman’s legs hung a large penis. Swinging. Menacingly.
    At lunchtime and dinner, it’s the smell of boiled potatoes that first fills the air here. It reminds me of my boarding school days where cod and boiled potatoes were served on Fridays. Shepherd’s pie on Saturdays, and roast lamb and boiled potatoes on Sundays. All followed by wobbly Bird’s custard or Rowntree’s jelly. I don’t think mother ever cooked potatoes. She used to cook rice – sifting it carefully before she boiled it, letting me run my fingers through the tray of white pearls in search of small brown stones that needed to be discarded. I remember that the rice came from India and sat in a huge white sisal bag in a dark pantry with the serving calabash resting on top. It was only from boarding school then that I remembered the smell of boiling potatoes along with the forlorn cry of Eastbourne’s seagulls, and the matching greyness of its skies and pebble beaches. Now it feels not unlike those lonely evenings lying face up in my school bunk bed, crying because my mother had died and my father was so far away.
    On my first night they wheeled me into the dining hall, but I haven’t been back since. I keep remembering the man who repeatedly lifted an empty fork from his plate to his toothless mouth. One of the aides would sometimes come to his rescue, but as soon as the aide left to help someoneelse, he returned to shovelling air between his gums. I’ve named the poor man, Santiago. The one who tries not to think, only to endure. That’s why I find it better to stay in my room, in the company of my own thoughts with my one book of poetry, delighting in Satin-Legs Smith.

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    I had planned, after retiring from the university, to try my hand at writing, starting with a novel set in Nigeria. This doesn’t fall into my birthday bucket list of new and daring things to do. But perhaps it should do as I’ve found the writing to be much more challenging than expected. I named my main character, Joslyn: a reference to my home city of Jos, as well as to my closest childhood friend, Jocelyn, the houseboy’s daughter. I’d always hoped that Jocelyn would marry a kind man, give birth to healthy children, and lead a happy life; but we’d lost touch after I left for boarding school so I never knew what happened to her. The book would therefore be the story of a life imagined and hoped for. It would be a love letter, both to my friend and to Jos where the two of us had grown up. Though I’d returned to Lagos many times since my childhood, I’d only been back to Jos once and never since the troubles broke out between Christians and Muslims and never sincethe arrival of Boko Haram. I’d always hoped to return with father, but when he died I couldn’t bring myself to go back. One morning, as I stood in my San Francisco kitchen drinking coffee, I opened my newspaper to find on the cover an aerial shot showing bodies in Jos, wrapped in brightly coloured Ankara prints. From a distance, they looked almost beautiful, scattered like crayons in a jumbo-sized box; until I read the headline and peered closer and saw that some of the bodies were splattered, and many soaked, in a deeper red not belonging to the original fabric. The accompanying text detailed the massacre. I doubted it was my Jocelyn, but what if it was? Her name was written right there in the article, bearing witness to how people fled in