Free The Sleeping Baobab Tree by Paula Leyden Page A

about lying, but it was too late to change our minds now. We had to go so that Fred wasn’t on his own.
    Madillo didn’t seem too worried.
    “Fred says that there may not be a Man-Beast in Ng’ombe Ilede, that maybe he didn’t hear properly. He thinks Nokokulu might have said ‘manatee’, not ‘Man-Beast’,” she said. “And of course it would be impossible for a manatee to turn up in Zambia every forty years to eat people.”
    “Unlike a Man-Beast?” I said. “There are loads of those wandering around.”
    Madillo ignored my eminently sensible intervention.
    “When he first told us I thought he was making it all up, but he did look scared, didn’t he?”
    I had to agree. “He did actually. But he could have been pretending to look scared. He’s quite a good actor.”
    Which is true.
    “He once told me that his grandmother – you know, the one that never was his grandmother, because she died before he was born – was in fact eaten by a hyena,” Madillo said.
    “Who told him that?”
    “Well, no one told him, but he heard his dad one day talking about a man-eating hyena and he heard the word ‘mum’ in the conversation, so he worked it out.”
    “If Fred overheard the words ‘frog’ and ‘brother’ in the same conversation he’d turn the frog into a poisonous spitting toad and have his brother blinded before you know it,” I said. “He’s the master of worst possible scenarios.”
    “Well, it is strange that he’s never been told what really happened to his granny. You have to admit that,” Madillo pointed out. “Mum and Dad never keep things like that from us.”
    That is also true and sometimes I wish they would.
    “I think,” Madillo said, “that they wanted to protect him from developing a phobia about hyenas.”
    “Surely that would be a good phobia, as it might prevent you from being killed by one? I think they just didn’t want him having bad dreams about it, if that was what happened at all.”
    “Maybe. I wish he hadn’t told me though, because you know how hyenas’ jaws are stronger than any other creature’s, even a lion’s? Can you imagine a young version of Nokokulu being crunched by this huge hyena, like a dog with a bone? Her legs sticking out one side and her head the other? Horrible.”
    “I hope you didn’t say that to Fred!” I said, knowing that the answer was probably going to be yes. Or silence, which is as good as a yes.
    I had my answer. Madillo just looked at the ground.
    When we said goodbye to Mum and Dad I gave them really, really big hugs. If I were them I might have been a little suspicious. But they’re not easily suspicious, because we don’t normally give them reason to be. Today they should have been.
    Fred was sitting outside his house holding a round goldfish bowl scattered about with frangipani flowers. In between the flowers I could see two very dead goldfish. He had only had them for a little while – since his parents had decided that the only pets he couldn’t kill were ones that could swim.
    “What happened?” I asked.
    “She cursed them, just like all the rest.”
    “You weren’t trying to teach them to do tricks or anything?” I said suspiciously.
    “Well, just small things. You know, like you see on TV where they get dolphins to throw balls to each other. Only these two weren’t very good at it. Then when I got home from school they were dead. I am never having another pet in my whole life, at least not as long as Nokokulu is alive.”
    “Why the flowers?” Madillo asked, trying hard not to laugh.
    Fred looked at her, debating whether or not she deserved a reply. “Funeral. Flowers. You know?”
    “Sorry, Fred,” she said. “I’m not laughing at the goldfish dying, that’s sad, it just looks weird you sitting here with a bowl full of flowers. Sort of like a meditating guru.”
    Although Fred doesn’t really know how to handle pets he does love them, so we both helped him bury the goldfish in his ever-expanding