The Shadow Girls полностью

They returned to the kitchen. Even though it was warm, Tea-Bag had not taken off her coat. She hadn’t even unzipped it. Tanya sat down at one corner of the table where her face was in shadow. Leyla picked at a spot that was growing on one of her nostrils. Tea-Bag rocked back and forth on her chair.

‘What happened?’ Humlin asked, thinking the moment had arrived.

Tea-Bag shook her head and tucked her chin even deeper into her coat.

‘She tried to steal a monkey,’ Leyla said.

‘A monkey?’

‘A Chinese monkey. Made of china. It was in an antique store. It broke. It was pretty expensive.’

‘How much was it?’

‘Eighty thousand.’

‘How could it be so much?’

‘It’s from some ancient dynasty. Three thousand years old or something. It said something about it on the price tag.’

‘Good God. What did they do?’

‘The owners locked the front door and called the police. But she ran away. But the bag with the mobile phones was left behind.’

‘Why did you want to steal a china monkey, Tea-Bag?’

Tea-Bag didn’t answer. She got up and turned off the light. It was dark outside now. A narrow strip of light fell into the kitchen from the hall and living room. Humlin sensed that he was about to hear the continuation of the story that had been interrupted so many times before. He would perhaps even hear it to its end.

When I’m at a total loss for what to do next I sometimes choose a shop window at random and peer in to see if there’s something there behind the glass that can give me a sign as to what I should do next: where I should go, who I should talk to, what I should avoid. Before I came to Lagos I hadn’t even seen a shop window before. There were no shops in the village where I was born or in the small settlements out on the plain where roads came together and where the rivers were wide enough to sail on. Anyway, I saw that china monkey in the window display and its eyes looked straight into mine and I felt I had to hold it for a while. If the owners hadn’t started tugging at me I would have simply put it down again and walked away. I looked into the monkey’s eyes and knew it was very old, several thousand years probably. It was like looking into the eyes of a very old person, like my grandmother’s eyes, Alemwa’s eyes. It was like being sucked into a waterfall and then being driven straight into her soul. Perhaps it really was Alemwa’s eyes in that china monkey — I don’t know — but suddenly it was as if I was back in the village where everything had started. I could see my journey, my whole life, completely clearly, like the stars in the African night sky.