Mmuo

by Christopher Parvin-Walsh

‘Do plants have ghosts?’      

Grandmother Nwabara waits with me by the traffic lights. It’s a warm day thick with summer scent and cars roar past on the way to the beach. I’m bent by the kerb watching a spectral dandelion sway in a non-existent breeze. Close to the tarmac is the twisted remains of the actual plant flattened by an errant tyre.      

‘All things have mmuo, one way or another child,’ she says using the Igbo word for spirits.      

We cross as the lights turn green making our way over cobbled streets past reeking rubbish bins and sticker plastered lamp posts. Here are the city’s oldest buildings, Georgian brownstones like immense blocks of dirty toffee and columns that strain my neck to follow.      

The Logos Museum is by far the biggest. Broad steps lead up to a pair of statues and my legs ache by the time we reach them. Suddenly intimidated I slip my hand into my grandmother’s looking at Darwin’s weather eroded face devoid of expression.       

In the entrance a cool cloud of air conditioning raises goosebumps on my bare arms and ruffles my braids. We pass the smiling ‘donations welcome’ guard without making eye-contact. One look at my grandmother and he doesn’t press the issue. Beyond him we join a line of school children waiting by the cloakroom and she clears her throat.           

‘Your Nne tells me you’re not sleeping,’ she says casually. She still holds my hand but doesn’t look at me. I refuse to look at her instead I watch as kids only a little younger than me scamper around the foyer irritating their teachers.     

‘Not all the time,’ I complain chewing my lip.      

‘Because of what you see?’ she asks.      

My heart lifts a little. The conversation with my mother hadn’t been as direct and left me more confused than anything.      

‘Yes,’ I’m defiant, chin thrust out. She laughs at my expression.      

‘Zukky,’ she smilies using her pet name for me, ‘It is not so so scary. You will see.’       

We finally pass our bags to a stressed looking woman and take tickets before entering the museum proper. I catch my breath.      

Worn honey coloured flagstones are littered with display stands of smaller fossils, carved masks, weapons more rust than metal. Hanging from taunt wires in a vaulted ceiling is an incomplete Pterodactyl skeleton, wings spread as if in flight, its long bony face dipped towards us threateningly. I stare.       ‘It is time I tell you a story Azuka,’ my grandmother says leading me through glass doors to a room heavy with giant Chinese Paper Plants and prehistorical wall charts.       

‘Once when I was little, smaller than you are now, I could see things too,’ she starts warming to her topic. To our right is a display of ancient teeth.      

‘I would walk with my father and see buildings that were no longer there. Watery images child, like those photos that are overexposed? This was not scary. It was odd but so are many things to a child. Scary were the Laughing Doves. So many by the roads where they had been hit by cars. Their ghosts sat on power-cables so thick they overlapped, all silent.’      

I shiver and make a meal of studying the teeth in their display. T-Rex canines yellowed with age, rows of striped amber coloured Spinosaurus teeth, deadly looking Velociraptor incisors. It doesn’t help. I’ve never seen a Laughing Dove but it’s hard not to picture pigeons with manic Velociraptor fangs grinning silently on power lines like badly tuned TVs.      

‘It is a gift in our family to see mmuo; or a curse. Seeing how it was effecting me my father, who had the gift himself, decided to teach me a lesson. Back then we had relatives by the coast. This was back in Nigeria when your great Nne Nne’s brother’s son had a house in Lagos.’      

Her voice is soft in the narrow corridors. I’m not really looking at the tall skeletal birds laid out in landscapes of plastic earth or the turtle shell large enough to climb through.      

‘Spirits are best seen at night he’d say. It did not comfort me at all,’ she throws me a glance as if reading my thoughts, ‘but I went with him to the beach carrying our towels. It was cold I remember but the gulf was warm as it lapped at my toes. You could see stars like scattered talc, taste the fresh yet rotten tang of the ocean on your tongue. My father was a great swimmer, skinny and darker than me he cut through the waves like a black knife waiting for me to follow.’      

‘Did you go in?’ I’m horrified and find myself sweating despite the climate control.      

‘Let us sit here for a moment,’ my grandmother sits on a bench and pulling out a bag of Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls offers me one.      

‘Of course I did! Back then you did what your parents told you,’ she leans back again the wall facing a bright section of egg fragments and closes her eyes in memory.      

‘At first it was pitch black,’ her voice drops lower, ‘I was terrified. The water felt thick, as if it would hold me down if it could, but I swam deeper my ears filled with my own pulse.’       

I’m picturing it myself. A void that grips.      

‘Then I see my father. Not far far and becoming clearer. There were lights behind him, pale colours that ripple and dart and he is grinning at me releasing air bubbles.’      

‘What were the lights?’ I whisper.      

‘Ghosts,’ grandmother breathes, ‘thousands of them! There used to be a living reef, but pollution; you know these things. Now it was a fish graveyard! Some had kept their colours, though pearly, and they swam in vast shoals as if they still lived. Great clouds of green and cerulean, hot orange and blood red. Octopuses with arms that taper off into phantom mists watched from their rocky tombs, eels with faded ivory scales flashed like bolts of lightning between coral trees. They're not of this world Azuka, lit by another they glow like lightbulbs under the sea.’      

She sighs screwing up the sweet wrappers and puts them in her pocket. We start walking again the museum opening up around us to show larger specimens. Our city is not the largest in England and the Logos boasts only one complete skeleton.      

‘It was beautiful. My fear was gone. We resurfaced and dived many times while the sea was calm to see the light show below. I have never felt closer to my father.’      

We turn a corner and I gasp. Ahead is a collosos. A complete Triceratops it’s mighty horns lowered in challenge, the barrel of it’s ribs large enough to hold a car. School children silenced by it’s size stand around the security rope gazing in awe at the fossil.      

I stare to it’s left where the larger Triceratops ghost huffs and puffs until the nearest child’s hair is flipped in a slight breeze. It stamps it’s feet with success, tossing it’s great head and wagging it’s stumpy tail. The child chilled by what it can’t see runs to stand by his teacher. The rest gradually overcome their reverence to laugh and shout again, taking photos on their phones.      

‘Not every mmuo is a thing to fear Zukky,’ Grandmother Nwabara whispers in my ear.      

I start to smile watching this giant ghostly beast play like a dog. Though almost transparent with flesh it is three times the size of it’s fossil and moves with a power that resonates without vibration.      

Deeply set eyes ringed in soft glowing yellow regard us as the school trip departs and it shuffles over. I reach out a hand and overcoming it’s initial surprise the Triceratops lowers it’s nose to my palm. For the briefest moment I can feel it, it’s moist breath, the rough scale of it’s flared nostrils before my hand passes through it. It’s a thing of pure wonder.      

My grandmother lets me play with the triceratops for fifteen minutes before a group of German tourists arrive and give me odd looks for running around and tagging thin air. We make our way to the nearest lift and travel to the first floor.      

‘What my father didn’t know is the gift runs stronger in woman than man. Do not ask me why. I do not have all the answers.’      

We exit into another corridor walls thick with printed hieroglyphs and guarded by glossy plaster cat goddesses. An image of Nut, blue and speckled with stars, is bent like a staple over the doors to the Egyptian exhibition.       Beyond are vases and fragments of pottery. Almost everything has a ghostly after image of what it once was so the room appears cluttered and hurts the eye.      

‘The last dive before we left I went alone. I was a proud child, I wanted to have the experience to myself,’ my grandmother continues as we stop to touch tablets carved with hieratic and red with old dye.      

‘The shoals were thick as ever. It was hypnotic seeing them pass through each other, like a child’s tube...?’      

‘A kaleidoscope?’ I offer.      

‘Yes. A  kaleidoscope of colour. Wonderful. Then they scattered! I felt it too. A sudden threat. What could scare the dead I wondered. Despite the warm waters my body had gone cold and I stayed treading water for a long time frozen with fear.’      

‘I saw it Azuka. A dark shape against the rocks. At first I thought it was my father playing a trick but he was not known for his humour. The shape darted around under me, shark like, a piece of the night stalking me. I was only released by my burning lungs. I raced for the surface seeing two lamp like eyes and webbed hands grasping at my kicking feet.’      

We have stopped in a large room dominated by the giant head of a crowned sandstone statue. It’s eyes are blank spheres of warm coloured stone, the stylised mouth curved a little in a knowing smile. I take comfort in the grainy surface so real and solid under my palm while my grandmother stares into the middle distance reliving this horror.      

‘What happened?’ I don’t recognise my own voice.      

‘I made it to the beach. The ghost wasn’t behind me, my father too weak in the sight hadn’t seen it. It broke something that day to see his lesson leave me more scared than before. We rode the last bus home in a silence to rival the feral dog mmuo glowing by the outskirts.’      

She is hushed now, one hand at her chest, her greyed brown dreads falling forward to cover her eyes.      

‘That night we had a late supper. My mind was full. I didn’t know how I would live with this curse. My father and our host went to the bottle shop leaving me alone in the house. He was not a man used to failing. I went upstairs wanting to curl in my blankets and sleep but on the landing there was water….’      

I take a step back from my grandmother as if her story is contagious. I have never know her to show fear and now it’s all she shows her soft brown cheeks hard with it.      

‘The sight of it made my heart bang, like a punch. I could not move. My breath stopped. In the still I could hear something. Frozen on the top step I strained to listen longing for it to be the  sound of my father’s shoes on the path or the snores of the neighbours dog. But it was none of these things….. it was the noise of dripping.’      

I’m in the hallway with her, I can’t help myself, painting the scene in shades of black and grey, the pool of water mirrored by moonlight.      

‘I ran to the room where I was staying and dived for the bed. However beautiful the fish had been I wish I’d never come here, never showed fear of ghost birds and phantom buildings when there are worse things haunting the earth. I huddled in my covers not blinking until my eyes hurt and my limbs ached with tension.’      

Her eyes are closed now, breath laboured. Behind her the headless likeness of a pharaoh throws shadows against the walls that suddenly look threatening.       ‘The sound of dripping stopped. One long slim leg slid through the door, webbed toes, skin bumped and pockmarked like set tar dripping seaweed. Long disjointed fingers wrapped around the door-frame. My head is pounding, I want to cry out, to stop this. It’s head was a maw and two slit nostrils, hair thick and rubber like hanging limp to it’s shoulders. It’s eyes….’

She pauses to look at me huddled by the Egyptian head as if it would save me.   

‘It’s eyes were so large and pale, glowing like moons to lure in it’s pray. A mermaid I realised. A hungry mermaid mmuo come to steal my soul o!’       I wait for her to continue, screaming ‘what happened, what happened?’ in my head.      

‘It crept into the room going down on all fours. It’s neck, rippling with gills, twisted to find me. I closed my eyes. Perhaps I thought if I ignored it it’d go away, but the not knowing is worse. I felt the mattress depress. It’s rank cold breath on my neck. Below I heard the front door open. It gave me courage. I burst from the bed taking the mermaid by surprise, desperate for help...’       ‘You touched it?’ I almost scream. Far across the room a museum attendant glances in our direction.      

Abruptly my grandmother smiles and all the trepidation drops from her. She straightens as if she’d been discussing the weather and offers me her hand.       ‘Touched it o!’ she laughs, ‘I went right through it! It snarled and bit at the air with strange silver fangs but it could not reach me here in the land of the living!’      

We exit the room and into another. There is a section separate from the rest with a sign urging caution to younger visitors.      

‘My lesson is this Azuka. Whatever you see, however real it feels, it is but a remnant. We are living, breathing creatures, hot with blood and life. They are attracted because they no longer have that. But nor can they take it. Fear is the only power you can give them hee?’      

My limbs feel weak with tension. I remember the Triceratops and it’s warm nose passing in an instance to mist. Then I look at where we are. The Mummy room.      

‘You must face your fear my bright little Zukky before it tarnishes you.’       She watches me closely. Sizing me up. I am defiant, chin thrust out.      

‘Are you ready?’ she asks.      

I nod… but still hold her hand just in case.