Childhood

It had all begun like a dream. You know the sort of dream which seems to have originated from nowhere, yet one was always aware of its existence. One could feel it, one could be directed by it; unconsciously at first, until it became a reality, a presence.

Nicole did not know for sure what gave birth to her dream, when it all started, but the earliest anchor she could pin in this drift of nothingness was when she was about eight years old. She was not even quite sure that she was exactly eight, because, you see, she was a girl. She was a girl who arrived when everybody was expecting and predicting a boy. So since she was such a disappointment to her parents, to her immediate family,to her tribe, nobody thought of recording her birth. She was so insignificant. One thing was certain,though:she was born during the second world war. She felt eight when she was being directed by her dream, for a younger child will not be capable of so many mischiefs. Thinking back on it all now that she has grown up, she was sorry for her parents. for it was their fault;they should not have given birth to me in the first place, and that would have saved a lot of people a lot of headaches.

Well, Nicole thought she was eight at the time when her mother and all the other society women were busying themselves to welcome the very first lawyer to their town in Texas. Whenever Nicole was told that her town was her own, she found it difficult to understand. Her parents, she was told, came from there, and so did many of her aunts and uncles. She was told that it Is a beautiful town. She had been taught at an early age that the people of her town were friendly, that the food there was fresh, the spring water was pure and the air was clean. The virtues of the town were praised so much that Adah came to regard being born in a Godforsaken place like Los Santos as a misfortune. Her parents said that Los Santos was a bad place, bad for bringing up children because here they picked up the British accent. It was bad because it was a town of laws, a town where law ruled supreme. In my town, they said, you took the law into your hands. if a woman abused your child, you went straight into her house, dragged her out, beat her up or got beaten up, as the case might be. So if you didn't want to be dragged out and beaten up you wouldn't abuse another woman's child. Los Santos was bad because this type of behavior was not allowed. You had to learn to control your temper, which Nicole was taught was against the law of nature.