Free The Other Side of Truth by Beverley Naidoo Page A

dancing in rows down the faded blue curtains when Sade woke. A dull light filtered through the material between the dancing figures. For a few seconds she was confused. Where were her bright-yellow sunflower curtains and the golden streaks of light calling her to join the day? Instead chilly air tingled her nose and face.
    The room was very still. Sade rolled over, making the camp bed squeak. Quilts matching the Mickey and Minnie curtains lay rumpled on the other two beds. Mrs. Graham must have taken the infants out. In the middle of the night? Or this morning before she was awake? All she could remember was Mrs. Graham trying to calm their wild crying with soothing words. Hidden under the bedcovers, she had ached for Mama’s arms. After that she knew nothing until waking again now.
    She studied Minnie with her red ribbon and smiling Mickey with his blue bow tie. There would be more questions today. What are your names, where are your parents, where do you live, what are you doing here, how did you get here,have you got any relatives? And so on and on…She needed to sort out her own thoughts first. Yesterday they had behaved like crazed butterflies trapped under a jar. If Papa could have seen them like that, he would have pressed his face against the jar urging them to stop.
     
    Slow down! Think! Remember the children who entered the forest all on their own? When they met the small drum and heard it thumping, they should have stopped. Instead they jumped over it and traveled in deeper. The medium-sized drum tried to warn them too but they just raced around it and got even more lost. So it was too late by the time they stumbled into the largest drum…the swallowing drum! It gulped them down. And that would have been that except, luckily for them, their mother came to rescue them .
    But your mother can’t .
     
    Right now, Papa couldn’t rescue them either and they had no idea how long it would take him to arrive. So what should they say when the questions started again? Mama always said, Truth keeps the hand cleaner than soap .
    Yet look what trouble had come through Papa writing the truth in his newspaper.
    Every now and again, Sade heard walking or running footsteps outside the window. It sounded as if the bedroom was next to the passageway. She buried her head in the pillow. Who would come to question them? Miss Police Business or Cool Gaze? She winced at the thought. Or the Emergency man with the ginger hair-tail, what was his name…Robert?
    But it was someone else who sat on Mrs. Graham’s sofa later that morning studying them. Mrs. Graham had insisted that they borrow her son’s tracksuits so they wouldn’t catch colds. Kevin had already left for school and they were not looking forward to his return. It was bad enough having to wear a stranger’s clothes without that person giving you nasty looks.
    The lady on the sofa smiled at the children. Her eyebrows arched like a bird in flight and Sade was immediately reminded of her own Iyawo. Here was the same steady gaze as from the figure on her desk! If Iyawo came alive and her ebony plaits could hang down instead of rising into a crown this was surely how she would look with her wood transformed into soft rich brown skin. However, when the lady spoke, it was not with a Nigerian accent. She sounded more like a newsreader from the little radio on the sideboard, on Papa’s beloved BBC World Service.
    Iyawo’s twin introduced herself as Jenny from the Children’s Team. She was a social worker with Robert who had already told her how the children had been found. She and Robert wanted to help, she said, but could only do so if they knew more about them. She would like to start by knowing their names.
    Sade’s heart pounded. This Iyawo-Jenny sounded friendly, yet how could they be sure? It was the police who had handed them over to Robert Hair-tail, so anything they said to this lady might go back to the police. What if the police in England sent the information to