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giving birth to her sixth child. But everyone said she was killed by a curse. On the day of the funeral the yard behind her house was filled with drumming and women ululating. The sound started to send me into a trance. I can’t explain it exactly. Even at six I knew that certain types of drumbeats would make me drift away from myself. You start to dissolve. Your spirit gets drawn out of you until there’s nothing left. I could feel it happening. It was terrifying. I ran as far from the sound as I could because I knew that if I didn’t I would lose myself and disappear.’
    I was listening to Esi speak, but for a moment all I could think of was how I used to creep into her room at night in London when we were kids. A pile of books lay on the floor beside her bed. Enid Blyton’s
Mallory Towers
,
The Hobbit
and, at the bottom, the
Encyclopaedia of Epic Films
, a giant volume that claimed to ‘capture in glorious detail all of Hollywood’s greatest historical movies’. Esi was the book’s oracle. She’d imbibed every scene of every movie. When I couldn’t sleep I’d wake her up and we’d leaf through pictures of the chariot race in
Ben Hur
, the flaming ship taking Tony Curtis to Valhalla at the end of
The Vikings
and Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, borne into Rome on a golden sphinx.
    As it rose from her bed, Esi’s voice was grave. She talked about the pictures as if she’d lived through ancient times and was recalling now those former years. As if she’d already seen too much at ten years old.
    â€˜When we first went back to Ghana Mum and Dad took us to see a fortune-teller,’ said Esi. ‘He was an old man with red robes and red eyes. He made us throw cowrie shells so he could read our future. He pointed to you and said, “Fine.” Then he looked at me. He shook his head. “Her? No.”
    â€˜I was going to have a terrible life. I was five years old. How could he say something so cruel? Mum and Dad took me back to see him, and he changed his prediction – I suppose on their insistence. But it was already too late. After that it felt like I couldn’t touch anything without it turning to ash.
    â€˜In Block O we had a Labrador puppy called Husky. He was very cute, but completely unruly. When I played with him I forgot how strange it felt being in Ghana. But Husky’s barking used to really irritate the neighbours. They complained to Dad and he decided Husky had to be put down. Some men from the north were hired to come and deal with the dog. Everyone said the reason they hired themselves as dog killers was because they liked to eat them afterwards.
    â€˜There were three of them who came, tall and silent, with scarification marks on their cheeks. They carried a machete each and an empty brown sack. They chased Husky round the courtyard. His feet were scrabbling on the concrete as he tried to escape. The men cornered him. Husky was wailing. They raised their machetes. I couldn’t bear to watch any more. Just before I turned away I saw some fleas jump from his fur and splatter themselves red against the white wall.’
    Esi’s voice drowned in a fizz of static. The phone line died.
    In the distance, sunlight beat off Accra’s tall buildings. I stayed on the balcony till the evening. Underneath, the shadows of banana trees stretched gradually thinner until they vanished into the gloom of the evening. Nothing stirred. In the dark I felt like Laika the space dog, spinning above the earth while longing for a scratch between the ears.
III
    The following day I rode into Accra on a tro-tro – one of the customized minibuses which serve in place of public transport throughout Ghana. When it became stuck in traffic I pulled out a guide book and discovered that Ghana had been a voguish destination for African-Americans in the 1960s. Having won independence from Britain in 1957, the former crown colony of the Gold Coast had