Dreaming of Light

very fine, the others a little fatter.

She is painting her sticks, decorating them with little red and yellow flowers. A green vine with leaves winds its way through the flowers.

. It’s one of the colours I think about – try not to think about too much – when I’m inside the earth, remembering all the different greens you get on trees and other plants.

When he was a young man he worked in a mine. Legal. Then the mine was closed, men laid off. The same week, someone stole the money he was saving – stole it from right out of his bank account. Now he says doing things the right way is for soft fools.”

She’s pointing at a picture. Squatting beside her, I look at it in the grey evening light. It is of a man, not old, not young, wearing a red T-shirt that shows his powerful arm muscles. He is surrounded by what look like paintings, with lots of black and grey and red and orange, except that they seem to have other things stuck on to the paint – chips of stone, bits of barbed wire, curls of wood. They have an angry look about them, but the man himself looks calm and strong.

There are coiled hosepipes and forks and spades hanging from one wall, but in front of it are boxes full of cupboard hooks and things for hanging pictures on walls. There are also buckets of fake flowers, bags of small coloured stones, mosaic kits and pots for plants.

Some people want to give money to Katekani just because they’ve seen she’s crippled. She takes it, but her face goes dark every time it happens. I feel bad for her.

Narina trogons, purple-crested turacos, crowned eagles.

They’re names we first learned from a tourist who had laughed at our baboon story and showed us the birds.

They say it was some sickness I had when I was a baby. I don’t remember. When my mother died, Babe said no one would want me, for work or wife, if I can’t walk without my sticks, so I must just stay and cook and clean for him. He didn’t let me go to school much any more