Free The Child's Elephant by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

She watched the women as they haggled and bargained and tried to hold to their prices, scowling and puffing and pulling at their under-lips, spitting in the dirt when a deal had finally been done.
    In the street leading away from the square, Muka paused to look at the wood-carvers assembling their miniature armies; at the cobblers with rows of bright tin-tacks clamped between their lips; at the tailors whose needles streamed ant-trails of stitches or the braiders who plaited corn-rows and starbursts of spikes. Walkers passed, bent almost double under huge bales of cotton. Men pedalled bicycles with their wives perched on the back. Dogs skulked along gutters, goats blundered about bleating and stray chickens dashed excitedly wherever they spotted a tasty scrap. The bus that came in from the east would send them all scattering. A clutter of shrieking children dangled off its back.
    At the far end of the street was a clearing where the kapok tree stood. It was there that the butcher strung up his carcasses, wielding his cleaver amid clouds of buzzing flies, wrapping sloppy purple livers in banana-leaf bundles and scolding the buzzards as they made off with giblets in their beaks. But Muka, as always, headedstraight on past it towards the shadowy corner where the witch doctor sat, his little square of black cloth laid out neatly in front of him. On it a grisly jumble of medicines was arrayed: phials of bright powders and flasks of dark potions, snake heads floating in alcohol and tangles of healing roots. Sometimes he would pull out the goat’s foot that stoppered a bottle, offering some passer a gustatory sniff.
    The witch doctor could tell fortunes by throwing chicken bones in a calabash. He could find the future in splashes of blood on the dust. But what he predicted was often not good. It was better to stay away from such things, people muttered, although, when push came to shove, when a baby cried with colic or an uncle got into debt, when rats raided the grain stores or a nursing mother had no milk, there were always ready customers for his magical remedies, and when old Kaaka had fallen so ill that the spirits had come for her, she had been dragged back from their clutches by a flask of rock-python fat.
    Now the witch doctor called out to Muka as she lingered. ‘Give me one of your plaits,’ he croaked. The decaying stumps of his teeth were bared in a smile. ‘I can weave it with gizzards and a rat skull,’ he persuaded. ‘It will make the boys crave you more than the sweetness of a newly cut piece of cane.’
    ‘I don’t want them to,’ Muka snapped, stepping briskly away, and, clasping her arms round her chest, she walked hastily off. She was heading, as she always did, up the hill into that part of the town where the shops were more than just blankets thrown down onthe ground. Walking between buildings made of bricks and breeze-blocks, of sheets of rusted metal and cross-nailed struts of wood, she made her way towards the shack of the man who sold electrical goods. She was fascinated by this place. Easing her way into the group of gathered children, she stood and stared entranced into a row of little boxes full of light. There were pictures inside them; they shifted and flickered like the shadows of moths, and she gazed at them, mesmerized by each changing fragment. They all seemed so different. She struggled to work out how they might all come together, but there were always more gaps in the puzzle than pieces that could be made to fit.
    Muka was about to leave when she heard someone calling her from inside a doorway. She turned but couldn’t see who it was: the day was so bright and the interior so black. All she could make out was shapes among shadows. She stepped closer, and suddenly Lobo dashed out. ‘Come and meet my friend,’ he cried, grabbing her round the wrist.
    ‘This is Amuka,’ he called, as he tugged her into a bar. ‘She’s the prettiest girl in Jambula.’
    A man swivelled round slowly in