The Cinnamon Tree Read online

  THE CINNAMON TREE

  ‘Flegg conceives another masterpiece, infusing each dark theme with startling insight and empathy’ Inis, Children’s Books in Ireland magazine

  ‘Aubrey Flegg, who won the Peter Pan Prize 2000 for his first book, Katie’s War, has again come up with a very likeable heroine in The Cinnamon Tree’ Margrit Cruickshank, The Irish Times

  ‘An arresting and well-written novel’ Irish Independent

  DEDICATION

  To Vincent,

  friend and representative of all the local people around the world who go out every day and risk their lives to make their countries safe from landmines.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book could not have been achieved without the assistance of a number of organisations, and an even greater number of individuals (many now friends). Most significant has been the support and encouragement I received from Norwegian People’s Aid, who not only allowed me to visit their demining operations in Angola, but also looked after me for the duration of my visit there.

  I also want to thank my former trade union, IMPACT, for their contribution to my travel expenses.

  Individually I want to thank Niamh O’Rourke, herself a veteran of landmine rehabilitation in Cambodia, who sparked my interest and introduced me to Tony D’Costa, of Pax Christi Ireland. Tony is one of the architects of the enormously successful Campaign to Ban Landmines. It was through Tony that I was introduced to Norwegian People’s Aid. Here my thanks go to Per Nergaard, in Oslo, who organised my visit to Angola, and also to Håvard Bach, the NPA Programme Manager in the capital, Luanda, who planned my stay. Dr Guy Rhodes, Programme Manager in Lobito ensured that I saw all relevant aspects of the demining operations: manual, mechanical and even the training of dogs. Through Håvard and Guy, I would like to thank all the staff, Angolan and European, who looked after me in Angola, mentioning in particular Hans Kampenhøy, and Vincent (Adriano Vincente Augusto), to whom this book is dedicated.

  In Dublin I was made welcome at two key rehabilitation centres. At the Central Remedial Clinic my thanks to fellow author Jane Mitchell and to Joan Hurley. At the National Medical Rehabilitation Centre, Charles Murray and Michael Sweeney showed me how artificial legs are prepared for individual patients.

  For advice on child soldiers I must thank Dr James O’Connell of the Department of Peace Studies, Bradford, England, for introducing me to Dr Ananda Millard of that department. Ananda’s help was invaluable, both for her wide knowledge and her generosity in allowing me to read transcripts of her live interviews with child soldiers. Mike Bourne helped me with essential information on the arms trade. Back at home, Joe Murray of Afri gave me valuable information on the arms trade in Ireland.

  My thanks to all of these people. Any inaccuracies or biases that may have crept in are entirely of my own making.

  Heartfelt thanks to my wife, Jennifer, for her support throughout – even when I said that I wanted to visit a minefield in Africa. And finally my thanks to my editors, Íde ní Laoghaire and Rachel Pierce, and to all the staff at The O’Brien Press who have worked so hard and enthusiastically to make this book. My final thanks to Aoife Webb, whose inspired comments were such a help in the final stages of this book.

  CONTENTS

  Reviews

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  1 The Cinnamon Tree

  2 The Night Mirror

  3 Sindu Mother

  4 Demons!

  5 Trial and Sentence

  6 The Road to Simbada

  7 Isabella

  8 Into Exile

  9 Catherine

  10 Fintan

  11 Airbags for Africa

  12 The Silver Chain

  13 The Hangman’s Noose

  14 Gabbin’s Game

  15 The Satellite Phone

  16 The Arms Game

  17 Operating Theatre

  18 Bubble Wrap

  19 An Inhumane Weapon

  20 Good Time Girl

  21 Gabbin Needs You

  22 The Child Soldier

  23 The Long Night

  24 Before the Dawn can Come

  25 Letting in the Light

  Epilogue: Cutting the Noose

  About the Cinnamon Tree

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  I want to be back in Africa. I want to look up at the night sky and feel the earth spinning beneath me while the stars hunt above. She told me you could hear star voices if you listened really hard. I heard nothing but the soft sound of her breathing as she stood beside me, as invisible as Africa in the night.

  Diary of Fintan O’Farrell.

  1

  The Cinnamon Tree

  ‘Yola … Yola …’

  The girl stopped her grinding for a moment. On the stone slab in front of her the white maize flour gleamed. She listened … nothing. She leant forward and swept the hard, yellow, unground maize into the path of her grindstone. She hated this job; it was tiring and cramping for legs that longed to run. The stone rumbled over the hard grains. Then she heard the voice again.

  ‘Yola … Managu has gone away!’

  The treble voice of Gabbin, her little cousin, sounded frightened. Managu was the herd’s bull, and Father’s pride and joy. Managu was a magnificent bull with huge spreading horns, the leader of the whole herd. If Managu were hurt, poor Gabbin would get the beating of his life and a shame that would last forever. How could Gabbin lose the bull? He was nine years old, too young to be left in charge of the whole herd anyway; if Yola were allowed she would herd the cattle like a boy – she’d take a book with her and read, you could do nothing while grinding.

  She turned a basket upside down over the ground maize to keep away the hens and stood for a moment as pins and needles chased through her legs. She was fond of Gabbin. He was her first cousin and an orphan from the war; they were very close.

  ‘Gabbin, do you hear me?’ she shouted. ‘Stay where you are – I’m coming.’

  ‘Managu has gone, and the demons will get him,’ he shouted.

  Yola snorted. But then something in Gabbin’s voice held her frozen for a second. Despite the blazing African sun a shiver passed down her back. What was it? What was making her uneasy? Then she knew – Gabbin had talked of demons! That, for him, was baby talk, back to the time during the war when Mother had used the threat of demons to keep them all away from dangerous places. There was only one place they all felt that there might be ‘demons’ and that was on the hill, and the hill was taboo. If Managu had gone up the hill …

  She knew she ought to tell someone, but she couldn’t betray Gabbin. Surely she could get Managu down for him. She looked around the compound – the high thorn hedge, grainstores, the three thatched huts where her mothers lived, Father’s house – nothing stirred, no one had heard Gabbin calling. She would go on her own.

  She ran lightly, ready with an excuse should anyone call out, until she was out of the compound, then she increased her speed, enjoying the cool draft of air in her face and the feeling of pushing the ground back under her feet. All during the war they had been cooped up in town while soldiers from both sides fought to possess this very hill. She was free to run now if she kept to the paths, but only the foolish, or the very brave, followed the narrow paths that led over the hill because when the soldiers had left they also left their booby traps and bombs all over it. People might know to keep to the paths, but a bull, hungry for the lush grass that grew on its slopes, never would.

  She increased her pace again when she saw the cattle at the foot of the hill, where Gabbin, having raced back, was waving his stick to prevent the cows from following the distant call of their
leader.

  ‘Which way did he go?’ she called as she ran up. Tears were streaming down the boy’s face in black rivers.

  ‘There, there, up past the Russian tank,’ he sobbed. ‘Get him back Yola, please!’ Then he changed his mind, grabbed her hand and said, ‘No, no, don’t go, don’t go. I don’t want the Demon to get you.’ His feet were pattering on the ground with anxiety as he was torn between the wish to go himself and the terrible taboo of the hill.

  ‘Now, Gabbin,’ said Yola, taking charge. ‘I’m thirteen and a half, you’re nearly ten. You keep the rest of the cows down here! Do you hear me? That’s your job. That’s a real man’s job, understand? Don’t worry, I will keep to the paths the grown-ups use every day, and there aren’t really any demons, all right?’

  Gabbin nodded, but his eyes were round with fear.

  The Russian tank, looking evil, squatted in the grass like a rusted tin-can. The ragged hole that had finished it and killed the men inside gaped black. Yola knew it as a landmark, the edge of the safe ground, but it also showed the beginning of one of the illegal paths that people used to go over the hill. The path was narrow and she felt as if she were on a tight- rope as she tried to keep to the centre of it. Bushes, which had sprung up since the fighting had stopped, crowded in about her. She wondered why the path was so narrow, just wide enough for her feet. It was as if people had been afraid to put even a foot on the grass beside it.

  The path wound on up the side of the hill, then divided. Yola stopped, her heart thumping harder than it should for such a little climb. The ridiculous talk about demons suddenly seemed real to her. She forced herself to examine the ground for hoofprints, but there was nothing to show which way Managu had gone. Flies buzzed, it was hot; she wanted to go down, get away from this hateful place. She saw a movement out of the corner of her eye and froze: a butterfly had momentarily opened its wings. This was stupid. Yola forced herself to breathe slowly and listened for the great bell that Managu wore around his neck. Yes, there! Surely that was it, down there below the path. She ran along, stretching to see over the bushes. The bell clanged somewhere below her now. She needed to be able to see; if only there were a rock or something she could climb on.

  All at once the path widened and there was a tree spreading a pool of shade. It was a cinnamon tree, planted long ago by the white people for its spicy bark, which they used to flavour their food. People had rested here, a cigarette packet and a couple of Coke cans made that clear. At any rate the tree was what she had been looking for, she could climb it and see how to entice the bull to safety. The tree stood only a step from the resting place. She measured the distance to the lowest branch with her eye – it would be an easy jump and she was as agile as a monkey in a tree. She stepped off the path, treading lightly, and coiled herself for the jump. She didn’t remember it afterwards, but as she jumped the ground gave under her ever so slightly; there was a tiny click.

  For an eternity, in the flame of forty sunsets, she rose, thrown up and rag-dolled against the branch above. The upward blast from the landmine she had stepped on suspended her for a second, shook her as a terrier shakes a rat, then dropped her, pierced by her own bones, into the smoking pit where the mine had been laid. Spirits crowded her now, spirits of the dead jostling with spirits of the living, all fighting over the young life that she could feel pumping out of her before she lost consciousness. Her only other sensation, and the only one she would remember afterwards, was an overpowering scent of cinnamon.

  Gabbin stared at the hill; his jaw dropped and he trembled uncontrollably. The Demon had spoken! He watched as the small column of smoke that had spouted above the trees sagged and drifted away: the Demon’s breath. A high, tremulous whimper began in his throat: ‘Yola!’

  The Demon would be coming for him now. It had no shape but many shapes, it was all the things that had ever terrified him: Grandfather in a rage, the forest at night, the cold, hard eye of a snake, the masks of the medicine men dancing in the flickering firelight and Mother’s stories before she went away from him. It was coming! The echo of the blast bounced back from the hills around. It was reaching out for him. Now!

  Gabbin turned to run, the skin on his back crawled at the thought of outstretched claws, the Demon’s breath was on his neck. He collided with something huge and shrieked in terror. It was one of the cows. The cattle had moved up quietly behind him and were now standing in an interested half-circle, blocking his escape. Their heads were raised expectantly, their liquid brown eyes fixed on the hill behind him. Head down, Gabbin started to thrash and push through them, thrusting at them, fighting to get away. Warm, bony flanks towered above him, he beat against them with his fists, but it was no good. He turned and looked up the hill from within the safe stickle of the cow’s horns. Slowly, his first panic was subsiding. He had responsibilities. Yes, he had been playing in the Russian tank. Yes, it was he who had let Managu climb into danger on the hill. Yes, he should have gone after him, but instead had called for Yola, a girl, and let her go onto the hill alone. What sort of a herd-boy was he?

  For an eternity, Gabbin knelt beside Yola under the cinnamon tree, pressing with all his might, his small hands finding by instinct the floodgate through which her life was draining away. And so he saved her life.

  Managu the bull emerged from the hill in his own good time, unscathed, unrepentant, and rejoined the herd. Gabbin was a hero – he had saved Yola’s life; no one asked awkward questions about how Managu had got to be on the hill. Everybody gave him great praise, anything to draw his mind away from Yola’s tragedy: let him be happy in believing that he had saved her life. But they talked in low voices to each other and Gabbin heard. He had grown up a lot in the last few hours. He had loved Yola, they all loved her – when Yola was happy everyone around her was happy. He had saved her, but now they were talking about her as if she had died. Who would give a bride-price for a girl on crutches or with a wooden leg? they were asking. What man would look twice at a girl whose only use would be to sit on a rock grinding maize? A girl with one leg can’t work in the fields or carry water.

  That evening, Gabbin looked up at the thatched ceiling above his bed, his face stiff from the tears that kept coming whenever he was alone. Finally, with a last deep sniff, he said to himself, ‘Well, if nobody else will marry Yola, I will. I will have lots of wives, like Yola’s father, but Yola will be the first and the best.’ With this satisfying thought he slipped off into a demonless sleep.

  2

  The Night Mirror

  Yola was running. She could hear Faran, one of her older brothers, laughing just behind her. She had tried to be clever and had dodged between the main hut and the granary, but now she realised why Faran was laughing: it was a trap. The others had cut her off. Gabbin was hopping up and down, yelling. In front of her was a circle of older women sitting on the ground; before them was spread a sheet with a neat pile of sorted millet seeds at the centre. ‘Home’ was the great tree at the centre of the compound. She decided to jump clean over both the sheet and the women. It would be a huge jump. She stepped back to increase her take-off, accelerated, coiled and sprang. As her foot pressed down on the ground, she felt it give slightly. As she was thrown skyward by the blast, she heard her own scream.

  ‘Eeeh … eeeh … Quiet, child … quiet … you’re all right. You’re safe now.’

  Yola realised that her mouth was open. Had she really screamed? Yes, her back was arched to scream again. She closed her lips tightly, but it became a silent scream, slicing through the hospital walls and racing like a jackal through the town. Past her home, up the hill where ghost soldiers from years ago hesitated in their work, spines chilled, suddenly uneasy, as the jackal passed by.

  ‘Eeeh … easy, my child … relax … it was just a dream.’

  Gradually her back unbowed. Her mother was pressing a cup to her lips.

  ‘I was jumping, Mother. I was jumping so high.’ She paused. ‘Mother … my leg’s hurting again.’

  ‘It will
love, they say it will. You must be brave.’

  In the ceiling above her, a fan turned lazily, it moved the thick, hot air and stirred the frightening smells of the hospital. She watched a fly on one of its arms turning … turning. It must be giddy, she thought.

  Yola remembered very little about the drive to the hospital. Mother told her she had been taken on a moped. All she remembered was the smell of the man’s sweatshirt; he was a mechanic and he smelt of oil. She was tied on to him in case she fell off. She drifted in and out of consciousness.

  When they had arrived at the hospital, the doctor was cross. He was from a different tribe and was fuming and fussing in his own language. Was it her fault? But when he spoke to her in English, he was kind and said that he was just angry with the people who made landmines. She hadn’t even known what a landmine was. She had asked him if Managu were safe, but he didn’t seem to know who Managu was.

  Someone in the ward said, ‘Power cut.’

  Yola was called back to the present. She looked up. The fan had stopped turning. The fly buzzed, spiralling down. She knew it would be giddy.

  There’d been a power cut during her operation, too. She told the surgeon how she had woken to see them all crouched over her, faces masked, foreheads streaming with sweat, and how one of them had said, ‘She’s coming round.’ The surgeon had laughed when she told him this.

  ‘So you did wake? Yes, we had to put you to sleep again; we’ve so little anaesthetic, I’m sorry. You see the lights went out for half an hour and I couldn’t see a thing. Then they got the generator going. I’m afraid we didn’t save your knee,’ he added, smiling as he walked away.’