A Song Of Shadows

ONE

A friend of mine once told me that people are like songs. That each person is a composition of two elements that can be compared to the lyrics and melody of the everyday song.

The melody, he said, are their personality. Their behavior. How they walk; how they dress; or how they stutter every now and then when they talk; and since no two songs ever really sound the same, no two people ever really behave the same either.

The lyrics, he also said, are their unique story. Their experiences; their highs; their lows; their heavens; and their hells. And just as a song can not be understood unless its lyrics are known and understood, neither can a person be understood if we're oblivious to their unique story.

My unique story began when I was sixteen. I wish I could say it began much earlier, but if I did, I would be telling a lie. My name is Isabel Ndlovu. I'm short, and my friends call me Bella. I'm not like you, or like anyone you either know or think you know. It took several tragedies for me to realise that; and as much as my grandmother often tried to tell me how blessed I was, I felt rather cursed.

The first body was found hanging from a pine tree next to the school gate. It was the first thing early pupils had noticed on that cold Tuesday morning as soon as they had walked in through the gate. Most of us didn't get to see it first hand because we got to school too late. As a matter of fact, by the time I arrived, the police had already hung police tape around the scene, and the body had already been taken down. A few metres away from the scene, a dark detective in a grey suit was taking a statement from the deputy head mistress, Mrs. P. Gumbo. It became clear to me that a pupil had been found dead when, on my way through the parking area, I overheard a fragment of Mrs. Gumbo's statement in fluent Ndebele.

"...but he was quite popular among the teachers as well. We didn't expect this from..." the deputy head mistress had been saying her raspy high pitched voice.

I stopped and turned to look at the pine tree. The thought of a boy hanging from one of the branches brought a familiar yet dark and unsettling feeling over me. For a while, the cold air began tightening, the natural sounds around me slowly began to fade into a sharp and high pitched sound -like that of a cicada, and the light blue sky and everything else in the pine tree's background seemed to darken to an eerie grey colour. I shut my eyes and turned away. I had had enough. The last time I had felt this way from just looking at something, I had been a grade three pupil and another tragedy had occurred; so for the past week, I had known something terrible was gonna happen, and as I walked around the school's administration block to wards the computer laboratory, I wished I had told someone.

I spotted two fifth formers standing at Computer Lab doorstep. One of them was a tall dark boy in the standard A-Level boys' uniform. A white shirt; a plain white tie with the school's crest; a black trousers and a white jersey. I only knew him by his first name, which was John. I never got around to know his surname, but I knew it was a Shona surname that began with the letter "M". The other fifth former was a girl named Ruvarashe Moyo. Most people just knew her as Ruva, just as most people knew me as Bella. She was just ten centimetres taller than I was, with a moderate skin tone, and a friend of mine often ranked her as the prettiest girl in our A-level stream.

"Bella," she announced, in English, as I approached the two of them. "You're good? How's the cold treating you?"

"I don't know," I said. I wasn't lying. "I'm quite disturbed, how are you?"

She shrugged, "Good as always."

I nodded, then greeted John in a similar manner. He greeted back too.

"So what happened over there?" I asked, in Ndebele.

It felt easier to ask in my vernacular, even though I could speak up to five dialects at the time-two of which belonged to the same language.