The Other Hand

that there was no telling where the one ended and the other began—whether the jungle grew out of the jeep or the jeep grew out of the jungle. The foot wells of the jeep were filled with the rotted leaves of many seasons, and all the jeep’s metal had become the same dark color as the fallen leaves and the earth. Lying across the front seats there was the skeleton of a man. At first I did not see it because the skeleton was dressed in clothes the same color as the leaves, but the clothes were so torn and ragged that the white bones shone through them in the early-morning light. It looked as if the skeleton hadbecome tired from driving and he had laid himself down across the two front seats to sleep. His skull lay on the dashboard, a little way apart from the rest of the skeleton. He was looking up at a small bright patch of sky, high above us through a gap in the forest canopy. I know this because the skull was wearing sunglasses and the sky was reflected in one of the lenses. A snail had crawled across this lens and eaten all the green mold and dirt off it, and it was in the glistening trail of this creature that the glass reflected the sky. Now the snail was halfway along one arm of the sunglasses. I went closer to look. The sunglasses had thin gold frames. On the corner of the lens that reflected the sky, the snail had crawled across the place where the glasses said Ray-Ban. I supposed that this had been the man’s name, because I was young and my troubles had still not found me and I did not yet understand that there could be reasons for wearing a name that was not one’s own.
    I stood and looked down at Ray-Ban’s skull for a long time, watching my own face reflected in his sunglasses. I saw myself fixed in the landscape of my country: a young girl with tall dark trees and a small patch of sunlight. I stared for a long time, and the skull did not turn away and neither did I, and I understood that this is how it would always be for me.
    After a few minutes I walked back to my sister. The branches closed behind me. I did not understand why the jeep was there. I did not know that there had been a war in my country nearly thirty years before. The war, the roads, the orders—everything that had brought the jeep to that place had been overgrown by the jungle. I was eight years old and I thought that the jeep had grown up out of the ground, like the ferns and the tall trees all around us. I thought it had grown up quite naturally from a seed in the red soil of my country, as native as cassava.
    I knew that I did not want my sister to see it.
    I followed my steps back to the place where Nkiruka was still sleeping. I stroked her cheek. Wake up, I said. The day has returned. We can find the way home now. Nkiruka smiled at me and sat up. Sherubbed the sleep out of her eyes. There, she said. Didn’t I tell you that the darkness would not last forever?
    “Is everything alright?” said Sarah.
    I blinked and I looked around at the spare bedroom. From the clean white walls and the green velvet curtains, I saw the jungle creepers shrink back into the darkest corners of the room.
    “You seemed miles off.”
    “Sorry,” I said. “I still have not quite woken up.”
    Sarah took my arm, and we went to find Charlie.
    Charlie was very excited when Sarah told him we were going on an adventure. He said, “Is we going to Gotham City?”
    Sarah laughed. “ Are we going. Yes, Batman, we’re going to Gotham City.”
    “In the Batmobile?”
    Sarah opened her mouth to say yes but Lawrence was in the kitchen with us and he shook his head.
    “No, let’s take the bat train. It’s a nightmare trying to park a Batmobile on a weekday.”
    Charlie looked disappointed, but as soon as we were out of the door he raced ahead of us along the pavement with his bat cape blowing behind him.
    It was the first time I had been on a train. Charlie was very proud to show me how to sit on the seat and to explain how he was driving the train. It looked complicated. There were a great many levers and buttons and switches, although none of them were visible to my eyes. Charlie drove the train to a station called Waterloo and then the doors opened and a voice said, All change please, all change. Charlie moved his lips so that I would understand it was his voice.
    The station was very crowded with the ghosts I saw the first time I was in London. There were thousands of them and they did not look at one another in the eyes and they moved very fast