: Mandy Sutter
: Bush Meat
: Parthian Books
: 9781917140133
: 1
: CHF 2.10
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 228
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
For Sarah's family, memories of early Sixties Aba in south-eastern Nigeria are scorched onto their hearts. A days-old burial mound exposed as an 'exploded diagram' of bones picked clean by beasts. Adaku the Barbary duck with a 'melted face', who was conscripted into friendship by six-year-old Sarah in the first of a lifetime's unlikely alliances, forged by necessity and relocation. The narcotic puff let out from the freezer in the meat-man's shack off the Ikot Ekpene road, where Maureen, Sarah's lonely mother, gave up aspirations to be a 'proper oil company wife' to Jim, and risked buying 'bush meat'. The dry 'snakeskin' bark of the old iroko tree on the bend of the town's river, under whose shade Jim sought sanctuary from people, and whose 'two long white catkins the tree one day bestowed onto his head like confetti.' Back home, Jim swaps adventure and agency for woodwork and more whisky. Maureen, denying her love of Igbo crafts and cloth, considers reinventing herself as an Oxfam shop assistant. In the days before her grandmother's funeral, Sarah finds the platitudes of her father evasive compared to the wisdom and ritual taught by servant Chidike while burying the household monkey. Sarah's hard-won Nigerian barter goods, a silver thumb-ring and a dare taken to eat fried-fat market 'snack', become devalued. At Aba's Sancta Maria, unaccustomed food was a cone of hot roast groundnuts paid for by a penny with a hole. In Britain, 'unaccustomed' means milk with a 'thickened band of yellow'. Now, the currency is a dare Sarah first honours, then refuses. As people of that time and place are scattered like those bleached bones, Aba acts as centripetal force on their imagination. Today's city was a small town the like of which Tim Winton gnaws at from different angles in The Turning. Mandy Sutter's approach is similarly innovative. Her themes are substitution, racism, and whether the spirit can ever survive transaction.

Mandy Sutter went to school in Nigeria and Bromley but now lives in Yorkshire with her partner and a large black dog called Fable. She has co-written two non-fiction books about the lives of Somali women. Her first novel, Stretching It, was published in 2013, her third poetry pamphlet, Old Blue Car, in 2015. She won first prize in the New Welsh Writing Awards in 2016 for this novel's opening chapter, 'Bush Meat'.

Bush Meat


Day after day, a boy tends his cows and watches the sky. The grass is brown; the animals dying; the trees unable to put forth leaves. The clouds cast shadows but release no rain. One day, an eagle flies overhead and a feather floats to the ground. The boy makes an arrow from the feather and shoots it into the dark clouds. The rain falls in sheets.

 

Under the wrecked frangipani bush, the bird sits like a steamboat. It’s a Barbary duck, I think, with that strange red head that looks melted, as if a new face has run down and set on top of the old one.

‘Is it an orphan?’ asks Sarah.

‘Don’t go too close,’ I say. ‘Careful of your dress.’

The rain has pelted down all morning, making the red dirt shine. The locals will be glad: the dry season lasted forever apparently and killed half their livestock.

The bird makes a whirring sound.

‘It’s wagging its tail,’ says Sarah.

At the bottom of the compound Chidike comes out of his hut, wearing the regulation red check shirt that the oil company provides for everyone’s servants.

‘It’s time for your nap,’ I tell Sarah.

But she waves him over. She was wary of him for the first few months then something changed. ‘Look, Chidike! Look what I found!’

He looks at me. ‘Madame.’

He can inject contempt into a single word. He crouches by the bush, in the litter of white wax petals. ‘This bird, she swim down from Heaven. All the way.’

Sarah gazes at him.

He touches the bird. It shifts uneasily. ‘Lucky for she, land at house with good, kind daughter.’ I sigh. ‘We dry her feather,’ says Chidike.

Sarah reaches for the duck. I grab her wrist. ‘I’ve told you about touching animals.’

‘Buthe touched it!’

‘That’s different,’ I say, glancing at him. But I know he’ll never be on my side.

While Sarah is in her room, Chidike digs a hole behind the house. Jim gives him one of the thick pink plastic bags they use to keep the dynamite dry and by the time she comes out, Chidike has anchored it with stones and fitted the