Sandston

By L E Bulstrode

This coming-of-age novel takes place in the mid-seventies in West Africa. A series of events is set in motion after seven year-old Cadenza is uprooted from France and abandoned to a courtyard-based community in Cotonou, Benin. The separation fractures her. But among the people of the commune she learns the language and adapts to the customs. A year later her father arrives with her sister. As Cadenza performs the duty of a responsible adult, in charge of the household, her love for her absent mother fades. What follows is her experience of a strange world, of which perception will alter everything for her, including her love for her mother.

• Language: English
• Publisher: L E Bulstrode
• Release date: Sep 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393236221

L E Bulstrode

L.E. Bulstrode was born in France and worked as a French teacher in London for many years where she lives with her partner. Her first book, Minor Holidays, was published on Amazon this year. Sandston is her second novel.

Book preview

one

Across the bracket buildings, the façades spread lonesome with unlit windows and darkened doors. The interior tarmac laid empty to the enclosure where a lonely tree hung its foliage over the wall. A child, a race or a skipping rope were amiss, and the cat on a branch, watching. Most mornings – hectic mornings, from her seventh floor vantage point, Cadenza jumped at the school bell. And in a game of defiance at levelling down punctual, she dashed to the lift, her satchel in the wind, and downstairs exited the block of flats, rue Dorian, turned left then entered the school, sped through the small hall, then met with her class at the tail, noticed, yet forgiven.

Today on her big day she had a strand of time. Twenty five minutes my sweet, her mother had said. Hence her watchful eyes rebounded off nothing of what she knew, but a loss of those days.

The panorama extended to the column of Place de la Nation. The sun had yet to arch above this part of the sphere. Cadenza pivoted. Her mother was busy with baby Aïda and Salomé. Cadenza put her thumb in her mouth and, in a movement of despair, flanked the window tight. The syrup of her flesh was a dreamy comfort. The blue of the sky, without a single cloud, disallowed her reverie. Soon she would journey over there with her father. On an aeroplane; how exciting! He would pick her up from school. She was not to attend her drawing club. Then her life would be the most unknown thing ever, but for the reunion with her sister Natacha.

And while Natacha reacquires her ability to walk, Cadenza will keep her company.

It will be like that.

- Mummy what does it mean again to keep Natacha company?

All the explanations in the world would not rest her mind.

A gentleness coddled her mother's eyes; her voice softened to a caressing pledge.

- To keep Natacha company is to stay with her and to support her in her endeavour, to be there for her so she would not feel alone.

Meantime Cadenza will attend school. And when Natacha will be cured, both will rejoin them here in Paris and she will resume school from the year gained, cours moyen 1, and scarcely anything besides this will have changed. Papa and Mama had thought it through. And she had to remember, they were gathering together in fatherland for the summer holidays in August.

In the actual setting then, Cadenza thought, she could yield the capacity to convince her mother she need not keep Natacha company. If Natacha required more time to improve even more than she had, toward her chance of walking as before, then how her presence would effect differently?

At the end of August, in goodbyes and reassurances and recommendations and kisses, her paternal family crowded over her mother and her younger sisters to whom her skin poured out: Mama dont go.

The taxi absorbed them and her sense of existing trailed with it. 

Albert and Didi released their grips from holding her in place, against her running after the car. Cadenza refused to play games, showed a lack of appetite, and resigned to a footstool. In the afternoon, she would not quit from nap. Back from the airport, her father, at a touch of her forehead and neck – burning, predicted a Malaria fever. Sylvestre Kpalourd alerted his brothers and the situation perplexed them. The parasite should have struck in June, at the beginning of her stay, not after three months. Sylvestre blamed himself, his inattention at her probable ingestion of forbidden beverage and food. But Cadenza had not eaten peanuts that weaken the defensive cells; and not a mosquito bite spiked her flesh. She had choked on her loss, the truth of it, and her impotence to convince her mother to keep her with her plagued her so much she loosened in her spine, and  unhindered by natural strength, Malaria penetrated.

At specialists retailers Sylvestre purchased roots of medicinal plants – leguminous, rutaceous – and simmered them inside a tall cooking pot over a wood fire. At four hands the pot was transferred onto a low table in a corner of the room. Sylvestre installed his daughter on a chair near enough the stew and confined her with fastened layers of straw mats. The steam of browning leaves reeked through her like pooh. Cadenza strained to remain seated. Her father called her out from a gap atop the tent; his imperative that she breathed the pestilence constricted the goodness in her mouth. Then quietness bumped her. Unavoidable, Mama had said. Cadenza panted. It was so unfair. Natacha was not even here.

Cadenza huddled in and sulked. A beat climbed to her shoulders and accelerated into her ear canals where it ached against her cranium. Her huddled back was padded with a wee breath. She coiled in away from the hotness of the pestilence. The beating and the heat pulsed through her as if to possess her, to smother her; she tired of the effort to sit up and slackened. A dullness roamed her, a motherless soul, a place of hazy living. Her heart pumped to change this. Too late. Cadenza was too weak. She surrendered to the impossibility. And to a traceless journey, imperceptibly, her pulse permuted quietly.  

Out of doors a trembling attack startled her. The nebulous darkness had changed into a bright  courtyard and before her squatted her father. His lips moved soundlessly. He scrutinised her, gave her the impression of a want. The tip of her nose shone with trickles of water and humid plaques on her back fuzed dread into her. She shuddered at a release from her shoulders. Despite her shuddering anew her father drenched her. Within the drips she inhaled and her breathing gnawed for space. A coughing girded her chest, hurt all the way to the hind of her skeleton. Then her ears popped, and a boom rang in her head. That is enough, she heard herself muffle. To her dismay her father laughed. And a familiar voice pegged above her head. Her father clenched her wrists. You alright?Someone above crushed her shoulders apples in a rubbing motion. You awake now? Cadenza nodded then arched her neck and into the sky distinguished Tonton Mejomeh. He reprimanded her for curling in and crushing her respiration. Other voices reprimanded her. Cadenza said it was not her fault. The steam suffocated. An uncle said she could have died sitting so low and close to the vapour. Died? Cadenza enquired. Not see anyone ever again. She quaked, and tears welled behind her eyes. She said she did not want to not see anyone ever again. If not for her mother, as she was not here, nor Natacha as she was not here either, for her father, she had to live.

But he too abandoned her and flew back to France.

To a far perspective of crinkled iron roofs, sand runways flanked cement brick perimeters. Occasionally a trunk of vivid foliage camouflaged the flatness and mess of the roofs, of the stocky abodes that not a building elevated. A lintel signalled the entrances into the perimeters. Outside those brick walls sometimes, on a circuit of straw mats, men spent siesta drowned in a radio broadcast. The shadow of an elegant tree bordered their feet and insulated their companionship. Not a number marked the lintels at this junction, and the lintel of her lodging had a bench-like step stone. Inside on the right, soles-polished steeps upped a one-storey building, a sort of bungalow made of the same cement brick as the perimeter. Upon entering, on the left and straight ahead, alignments of bamboo stalks tilted in blocks out of proportion, and unlike the bungalow with steeps, at ground level dark wood planks delimited the individual homes. The doors opened out onto more bamboo panels and bamboo ceilings. Anthracite sand flocked the courtyard of this complex. In the middle bobbed a watering mouth fashioned in stones so ancient the mortar had darkened with moss. For plant stood a single tree growing the guava fruit small as a lemon. In Lomey, Togo where she had stayed so far with Uncle Dagbo, a sibling of her grandmother, one house sheltered his wife and children. Here a sibling of her grandfather, Honoré Kpalourd, rented out the bamboo flats, and inside the unit-compounded bungalow, housed four of his progeny from two marriages, a pied-à-terre for his carline sweetheart reputed a witch, and Tonton Mejomeh, whose chamber sallied like an extension. Cadenza lived with him. A vast mattress on the cement floor crowded the cosy room, and piles of his vestments, her valise, a guéridon topped with turned over glasses with a carafe of water for the Aunty visitors and herself. On a post she received she learnt the full address: Quartier Ratisso, Carré Sainson, Cotonou, République Populaire du Bénin.

Cadenza fluttered. On the verso her heart bounded the name Francine Palourd, and her Paris address. The handwriting hers. Open it, her uncle urged. His eternal weary frown was extending to his lips. Her mother had believed despite six hours of flight, the reason it said Par Avion, the envelope would land in her hands like she in the hands of the R.P.B.. Then the letter would have dates and would detail arrangements. Cadenza would read the content of her heart.

The envelope hugged one folded paper, one photograph, and one navy leaf. At once she parted the leaf. Two pieces flew to Tonton’s feet. Careful Cadenza, those are money. He rescued the banknotes. She perused her cousins Karine, Anna and Sophie upright behind her younger sisters. She was reminded Salomé wore glasses. Chez Pépère et Mémère. A brewing longing to cradle baby Aïda like Salomé did, on a chair, brewed for a moment, and in the dream of it ravished her.

She hurried along the handwritten lines, throbbed with impatience for the sentiments she hoped would be mirrored. But her mother was wishing her Joyeux Noël, was transmitting family’s best. A motionless lull supervened. What? Mejomeh said. She handed to him the post and scuffled to a slow recumbence over the mattress. To the taste of her saliva, her thumb in her mouth, she closed her eyes. The lies, the unmet promises to, in the end, have her brave strangers.

Rage gangrened her blood until blood cleaved her from her game companion, Vivi, who screamed and dropped a thorny chip then pressed onto her arm.

- Yehgueh! Kpon noueh ablo-o.

- Zounds?!

Cadenza was indignant. A red liquid was boiling through her cousin’s fingers and red strings were dangling and Vivi had exclaimed she had done it. How could she have? Bolts for the door and calls for help aimed above the perimeter. Cadenza winced with confusion at Vivi’s distress, asked her if it hurt; tears burst with the answer.

The exit door finally unlocked, uncles and aunties spurted in, their faces in turmoil. They had constrained their offsprings unsupervised on an adjunct property of the landlord. Martial had accustomed them to it during the youth interminable holidays. Of his progeny at Carré Sainson solely Gaston and Martial Honoré Kpalourd trusted with his affairs. Gaston collected the rents and Martial oversaw this property with surveillance against trespassers, thieves and wild occupancy. An unbuilt land of upper earth crust, of virginal sand rich in crystal hues, of pure rockery the Sun blasted into jewellery, and where neither a contraction like a building or a tree spilled over with a shade. In the relentless heat the forsaken children sported pretend money in the form of broken ceramic chips. Honoré made commerce of the discharge facility. In Carré Sainson Cadenza had witnessed incomers, a large circular enamel vessel of greater width than depth atop their heads, a basin, climb the stairs at the end of the latrines alley and rested it on the wall then tipped it. In a clatter fell the ceramic ware. Chips were selected after their size to real coins, and the value of each decided beforehand. Sometimes the girls aped the boys game, I dare you, bets. Outside the games Cadenza’s money had no value. Besides, the uncles scanned hands, pockets, and waist shawls for any, and ensured none were towed outdoors to the danger of a wound. Unforeseeable that a child would sever her own kin.

At a glance of her stepdaughter’s arm Séverine squeezed her head and screeched. Vivi’s father rounded up his senses, brought out a handkerchief from his trousers then amassed it into the blooded hollow. He bid his daughter to maintain her arm folded. When he wagged a rigid finger for an explanation and for the culpable, Vivi did not say a word. When she was asked directly she designated Cadenza. The accusation stopped Cadenza’s heart. She had no idea how that bloodstream ended up inside Vivi’s arm.

A wire was heard: Vivi never lies.

Martial reached forth and had her hand in his. Under his injunction she opened it. A piece of ceramic, triangular as a pumped muscle, buddied her palm. Young men shrieked the clearest. Cadenza stared at the ceramic, brain-stunt with terror. She had never been aware of that chip in her hand. Uncle Marcelin summarised in French to her the descriptions of the children. In point of fact he mimed a stabbing motion. Her hand in the air successively down onto Vivi’s arm; the memory rushed forth: she was brutalising Vivi so as to obtain the money Vivi refused to give back!

- You yourself you owning up at last, a person said.

She confined herself as motioned to the doorstep of Mejomeh’s chamber. The footfalls past the entrance into Carré Sainson shook her, feral to a cold terror, the cold of Malaria fever after her mother had abandoned her. And an image would persisted: Vivi with a blooded arm, arrayed with worries about what would become of that arm.

Straight from the hospital Séverine ordered Cadenza down onto her place, aggrieved, unapproachable. The aunty had blared with aberration when Cadenza had cocked a snook at the general advice to wear flipflop, when Cadenza had cantered on her heels, had searched her feet, bold on the scorching sand floor. From underfoot heated pulses and tingles climbed to her head and excited as well as frightened.

Sternly, Séverine updated the Carré on Vivi’s condition.

A grandmother came bawling Cadenza out, and beneath brooding eyes wagged a finger.

- If I ever catch you doing a thing like that to my granson––

She kissed her teeth and, her sentence unfinished, ruled that Cadenza cast her eyes yonder and hid this face of hers. Then she targeted Martial, accused him of leniency in relation to his niece. Martial descended his steep, for a face-to-face of scaremongers. At once a punishment sundered the girl. None but Mejomeh Kpalourd were her parents in the French sense with which she grew up. Nonetheless, each had a say in her bearing, and everyone was aunty, uncle, granma, granpa, whose words, with indiscrimination, she had to obey as if spoken by an oracle. Kneel, arms stretched out, palms skyward. Few seconds of it and the cross burial position banded her muscles, jointed her clavicles. Needy tendons she had, and the pain twisted her arms. She packed her will to retain their fall, emitted a cry, dangled her head backward and forward. Uncle Martial said she had dropped her arms. Should she drop them again he would reset the timer to zero.

At sight of Tonton Mejomeh her nerves reawakened the pains. She leapt from her seat. Martial enjoined Mejomeh to ignore her and expounded the reason. The whole of Mejomeh’s facial features tumbled.

After her mother’s departure her father had deemed it important to precise to her that Tonton Mejomeh and himself were of the same parents, brought up together, from a lineage of chieftains of mores, of inheritance in the family name, Kpalourd, notched into the country’s history. He had removed the K to remedy the unpronounceable Kp for the French, had slapped on a frenchisised Palourd. Like her father Tonton Mejomeh rigged out her vision, the sky on his shoulders. Throughout the day in his absence she longed to be clustered with his necessities and the routine of them. Straightaway he footed the step stone she ran at him, then exhausted affection against his hand. A climbing tactile envy, heart-rending, warmed to her eyes, and she acted on it in his steps, wherever, for the ground after him was strengthened. Tonton Mejomeh inquired about relevant things, her consumption of water for hydration, her nourishment, her distraction with Didi – for Bernardine, and Kiki – for Joachim, and Albert, the children in Carré Sainson. That she coped mattered to him. He had weary eyes that fared changeably behind a gas tide of stunt breaths, but his gentleness of manners mushed her anxieties. Thanks to him she took a head down over her upset of lost promises.

Martial relayed Marcelin’ stricken remark: Cadenza owned a bigger piece herself. The caprice flowed through her with a vehemence – Serves her right. She should have given me what was mine – supplanted by a second, for her Tonton to forgive her. But a violence coloured his traits. She saw her father in him; she slithered away from him past the door of his chamber. He lamented her chariness. He would not wing his hand and correct her; had she not sussed this about him?

He sat on the bed. Why? he asked. His whole face trembled. His eyes in shock recalled the bystanders eyes. The implication of this, of what she had caused. She found herself lowered to her valise on the floor.

- Yyy-you d-dont care. 

A sleek paper happened onto her fingers.

- Am ttt-talking ttt-to––

Tonton was angered, disappointed. Her cousins and siblings on the photograph composed a tender grouping. For you, we remember you. Baby Aïda from her baby sphere had minded the camera eye as well, bless. Tonton said Papa.

- ...–whwhwha-at to do.

Furtively, she met his stare.

- And my Mama? she said.

She had not posed for the photograph. Mama had not shown herself. 

The peels of flaking paint up the mattress fertilised her mind. She warred along the withered purls in tales of pursuits and catches and falls. She had one-on-one chases versus Caroline, versus Franck, versus Cyril, versus Malick, chases till the end of her arm, to the ceilinged shadows and the creased bedclothes. Her school chums were back at school they were, since September, while her life had been enlarged and relegated to bad happenstance and torments.

A melancholy of unknown repair set in her heart. Outside the door, in a fickle language Cadenza repeated, a stringing of voices contested her melancholy. Tongue flexes and clacks for scorn, nasal forces and vibrations in scales for specific agreement or emphasis, throats’ actions for disapproval and retreat, a stomach-drum of sonorities with takeoffs as for reinforcement, and tonal variations in births and fades. She imaged the bosoms’ charges from the waist, absolute rises one had to believe, then falls impossible not to dog, kisses of the teeth in hisses and grunts, neck to nose variations with a flick of the regard, a skyward finger with tiptoeing feet, a negating finger while the other hand maintains the train of the apparel. The hived emotions and accents travelled past and wooed her in her isolation, enraptured her like a gestative mission.

Up the mattress the withered colours evened out and dilated into roles she distributed for the Balle aux Prisonniers (Dodgeball) game. Palavers broke out over prisoners, the lack of prisoners of missing the square deal: swapping and freeing prisoners.

Her initial interaction with Carré Sainson, manacled to who she was, strong on her feet, had attracted a sobriquet pronounced in a thunder: Eh! Yovovi! Cadenza would reply mistakenly, Ma non yovo-a. The term Yovovi transliterated a white’s child, not the white child she averred. Indeed, on the occasion of her mother’s holidays in August with her younger siblings they had ranged the coast, and at their passage bundles of infants had sung,

Yovo yovo bonsoir,

ça va bien, merci.

to the amusement of her mother.

It defined her entry into the race issue. However, Cadenza did not consider herself yovo, and would say so to them. Ma non yovo-a. Her father clarified. Yovo designated a person distinct from the blacks of the country. She argued. Except for her mother none were yovo. Her and her siblings were the offsprings of a yovo and a mehou. Her father said those terms referred to a colour; the Fongbeh language lacked the French equivalent of métisse.

About her surroundings she would skim for a discovery of her skintone double. But offsprings of both genic worlds were rare, and if spotted it was in the midst of unattainable attires of dignitaries to and from luxury cars.

At catching sight of her rid of her European clothes, and since she neither had shorts like Albert or a waist shawl like Didi, her chums had pouted suspiciously, then they had squealed when she had sped the ordinary flipflop out her feet. The sandals trapped the perversive sand and irritated her to the intolerable. For respite she would lag in corners of hard shadows: the well, a steep; but never the guava tree. Ants proliferated in the guava tree. Abundance of sweet fruits would mean bands of sweet people. The tree secreted ants into your hair – itched your skull, into your ears – labouring legs sickened you, into your eyes made you blind.

An ant stung one of her eyes so fiercely she came off the suave fruit instantly.

Vivi was leaving that day. She had sojourned beyond the special night, New Year’s Eve. Cadenza susceptibility to the separation had betrayed her affection. She could never have hurt Vivi. Vivi always accepted to play, unlike Didi, and never made a fuss, was fearless, and she spoke perfect French. Her father Marcelin Belojeh was the firstborn of her father’s aunt. Didi and Kiki called him Daddy whilst Vivi called their mother Aunty. For sure Vivi would never want to speak to her.

Siesta had cooped all the colours of Carré Sainson behind closed doors. The land assumed a brutal fade in desertion. Not a hustle or a bustle coursed the place. Cadenza accepted from Uncle Martial the plate of cooked dough, crushed condiments and fried dowevi (little fish), and unwontedly ensconced it between her knees on the last step of his steep. Usually, she tuned into the goings when out for a toilet break, sifted the present that an alteration might improve it.

The ungracious urn for the great urge was a high cube-seat so high she could not sit and clambered over it, atop a lord proliferation. Down below her, rallying wriggling things – united as pus and infested in dozens, in a browning tank of larva weaved fumes with hygienic leaves. The down the cube ruined her great business once, so she learned to bear the idea of it beneath her. Later, the rallying wriggling things were tortured by a septic truck with a long trump – worm-like attached under a flap-cache to the urn. Its ducting noises warned the streets of possible danger, of the worm-like trump conducting loosely and bursting. Then, over the cleared still ungracious urn, nobody wished to go and squat, lest the vacant vertiginous vat absorb your arse as the sceptic worm. 

Martial ate late. Silence could come across as grim as yoghurt talk. There was really nobody. To her left, the inclined end of a tree – coiling from a gap in the roof of the witch’s home – propped up its foliage like a single branch, and calqued itself onto the bigger wall of the landlord flat. The sun's brightness ripped the cement bricks of the bigger wall into a white hole. Cadenza obliterated the intimidation in the comfort of her flesh.

- You've finished? enquired Martial behind her, from a top his steep.

Cadenza unstuck her thumb and lumped a dollop. The dough, soft when hot, had hardened. She dabbed it into the crushed condiments and gulped it. The fiery taste of the scotch bonnet pepper scorched her throat. Yet, she continued her effort, fragile with her wholehearted will to do things right by him, by them, the Carré, and make Tonton proud.

The anticipation for his brother to reply with his future arrival defeated Mejomeh, for Sylvestre advised him to intermit his employment until Cadenza commenced school.

- That would mean giving up an element of my happiness, he said to Antoine and Ernest, two lodgers inhabiting the bamboo flats facing him.

Mejomeh spoke mostly with Antoine and Ernest. He conferred his ordeal some thoughts with them, pepped himself for solutions, then went claiming the help of his uncle Hector Kpalourd.

The guardianship of a troubled girl attracted no one.

Earlier on after her father's departure, Cadenza had lined her water reflection inside the well. And by the heavens she had wished to be reunited with Natacha. At Tonton's mention of a letter to her father she had hoped her parents would either lay out her homeward journey or the reunion with her sister.

Solitude engrossed her. When the chases up the withering paint and the cryptic plays on the bedclothes cornered her tiresome, she wished to be listened to. Upon his entrance from work, Tonton started off on the subject of her laundry, her messy valise, then sent her to shower. Oftentimes afterwards, she found herself distrustful of him ever reentering from the maquis, a neighbourhood cuisine emplacement where he bought dinner. She began talking to herself while showering, bowed to the water-blotched sand, to the geometrical creations at her feet, and fancied them as friends. Escapes of words splashed off her lips to that shape and that bump and these blackened sand noses out the ground. She shot the water over herself and a shattering documented her ears; a spewing contentment, impervious to the mockeries.

- Nothing of what she says can be understood, Séverine deprecated to Mejomeh. And she is ages there. Either she stops that malarkey or showers elsewhere than opposite my flat. 

An absurd desolation piqued Mejomeh’s mien. He worsened with a phrase which dipped curiously into Cadenza, although indeed the harm clung onto her. She saw it rim their livid regards dubious of her, dubious to an intimidation. She had the sentiment she deserved their deviated eye and cold shoulder, their hatred and grievances. He commanded never to do it again. The imperative upset Cadenza for, her Papa and Mama informed, obviously left it up to her to sort for the boon.

The moment occurred of the visit to the tailor, in whose hands eventually a khaki uniform vesselled her size. A handheld satchel completed her purpose, which a photographer immortalised, and Bic pens of each colour, a pencil, a rubber, a fifteen centimetres ruler, plus a notebook.

The ubiquity of sand vastly fetched wide to a bordered forestry. Hand games energised the air. Heads scampered with cries of joy. Didi was with girls of her gang, quite cheery and proud; and Albert with his gang, proud. Her acclimatisation of play with them had jarred.

A line of timbers the width of a thigh instilled an acute parallelism to the single cement brick construction. Series of five steeps led onto interiors, onto planes of desks within windowless rooms – in shelter of the morning sun.

- Cadenza?

Didi signed her forward to join a game of, Hit and Run. You hit and say, Your turn you it. Hit and run. Your turn. You run too fast and slap too hard. Cadenza butted away. Girls were such ninnies. The slim timbers, pale as the sand, or else the building shadowed them equals, in and out of them she vanished. Her Parisian school playground, a trapezoid engrafted with windows and a single enclosure, and the view of it from the apartment, flashed by her path. Her careering friends guided her through her past. She remembered her last day at school. The pair of eyes into the livingroom window which always watched her arrive to the glasspane. Down below into the playground her watchful eyes