Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (19 page)

Dad

RICHARD

We walk home in the dark behind Dad, without a torch, following the silvery gleam of the sandy road in the moonlight. I follow the red cherry of Dad’s cigarette. I want to hold his hand, but he’s too bunched and quiet and angry.

The next morning, when we wake up, Dad has left. Charlie Chilvers says he has gone to Mutare General Hospital to see Mum.

“And bring the baby home?”

“Right,” says Charlie.

“Do you have a brother?” I ask her.

“Yes.”

“Any sisters?”

“One.”

“Like us. Hey, you’re like us?”

Charlie says, “Eat up your porridge.”

“But I’m not hungry.”

“You’re always hungry.”

“Is everything okay with the baby?” says Vanessa.

“Hm,” says Charlie vaguely.

“There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

“Why don’t you eat up?” says Charlie.

Vanessa sighs and pushes her plate away. “It’s too hot to eat,” she says.

Vanessa and I spend two days making up a baby’s room out of the storeroom at the end of the corridor. We assemble the crib and mattress, and when we shake out the blankets they smell of Olivia. Baby smells. We take the tins of vegetables and floor polish and bottles of oil and shampoo and rolls of spare toilet paper off the shelves and find all the stuffed toys we own to put in their place. Two bears and a knitted green snake, one blue poodle, and a brown knitted dachshund which Olivia won at the Umtali fair for being so beautiful in a beautiful-baby contest. The place still looks bland and white. We cellotape cutout calendar pictures to the wall. The calendars have been sent to us by Granny in England and show west-coast-of-Scotland scenes or breeds of horses standing politely in green fields.

On the morning of the fourth day Charlie says, “Your mum and dad have gone on a little holiday.”

“With the baby?”

“Without us?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Charlie clears her throat. She says, “Just to Inyanga.”

“They’re going fishing?”

“Without us?”

“With the baby?”

Vanessa takes me by the hand in such a violent grip I protest, “Owie man, let go.”

She says in a dangerous voice, hissing like we’re going to be in trouble, “Let’s empty the baby’s room.”

“What?”

“Let’s take everything out.”

“Why?”

“Shut your trap, Bobo. Can’t you shut your stupid trap?”

I shut my stupid trap and try to stop the tears squeezing out from under my eyelids.

We spend the next two mornings emptying the baby’s room.

“But where will he sleep?”

“He’s not coming home.”

“Then where’s he going?”

“How can you be such a doofus?” says Vanessa.

“I’m not a doofus.” I start crying.

“Bring the tins back from the kitchen.”

Vanessa replaces the tinned vegetables, the oil, the toilet paper. She puts the stuffed toys away in a trunk, which she pushes under her bed. She folds up the crib. She tears the pictures off the wall and crumples them into the dustbin.

When Mum and Dad come home, Charlie says, “I’ll just go for a walk.”

Mum and Dad look pale when they climb out of the car. I run up to Mum.

Dad says, “Careful.”

Mum is walking hunched over, as if she has suddenly grown very old. She puts up her hands to stop me, like I’m one of the dogs, liable to jump up: “Gently,” she says. She leans over and I can kiss her cheek. She has dyed her hair, dark over the gray.

“Where’s the baby?”

Vanessa says, “Oh
jeez.
”

“Come inside,” says Mum. She takes me by the hand to her bedroom and makes me sit down on the edge of the bed. It’s only then I notice that her eyes are shiny and half-mast, but not in a drunken way. This is a more profound half-mast; deep enough to slow the way she moves and talks, but not so deep as to make her slur and sing. She hands me a new brown canvas satchel. “Look what we bought you.”

I look inside the satchel and start crying. “But where’s Richard?”

“Who?”

“The baby.”

“He’s not here. He . . . went away.”

“Where?”

Mum shrugs helplessly. She says, “That’s what happens when you have a baby in a free African country. A government hospital . . .” Her voice is tight and cold, brittle like thin slides of glass.

I say, “What happens?”

Vanessa is standing at the door. She says, “He’s dead, Bobo.”

The sob that comes out of me is racking, like vomiting. I feel my face and hands and the skin on my arms go cold.

Mum looks away as if I disgust her.

“How did it happen?” I am screaming.

Vanessa says, “Shhh.”

I turn on Mum. “How do you think I feel?” I ask her.

She looks at me astonished. “Well, how do you think I feel?” she asks. She sinks down onto her bed; I can see from the way she goes down like that, suddenly, that she has lost the strength in her legs.

Vanessa says, “Come, Bobo. Let’s leave Mum alone.”

Mum is lying down now. She says, “I’m very tired.”

I am still crying noisily but Mum has closed her eyes and she is either asleep, or she is pretending.

Vanessa pulls me away.

“Then why didn’t we have a funeral? If he’s dead we would have had a funeral.”

“Dad just buried him.”

I shake my head. We had a funeral for Olivia. We have funerals for all the dogs and horses that die. We would definitely have a funeral for a baby. “Maybe they gave him away.”

“No, they didn’t.”

“Then where’s his grave?”

“It’s unmarked. He’s buried with all the rubbish from the hospital.”

“You’re lying,”

“Think what you like.”

The next day Charlie hugs Vanessa and me and says, “Time for me to hit the trail.”

Dad drives her to Masvingo and leaves her in the middle of town. When he comes home, he has the horses brought to the house and he takes me out riding until after dark, and he doesn’t talk except to say “Race you down the airstrip” and “Race you up the river” so that we don’t walk for long enough to talk and the horses come back in a shiny sweat and I am scratched from dodging camel-thorn branches.

Mum’s okay in the mornings when she’s just on the pills; she’s very sleepy and calm and slow and deliberate, like someone who isn’t sure where her body ends and the world starts. At night she has a few drinks and some more pills and then a few more drinks, and that’s when things start to not be so okay. She gets drunk enough by six o’clock that Dad runs her a bath and says, “Go on, Tub, why don’t you have a bath?” And she is obedient, stunned, taking a brandy with her into the bath, and I can hear her in there crying softly to herself. Then she comes into the sitting room, wringing wet, wrapped only in a towel, so Dad goes into the kitchen and tells Thompson it’s okay, he can knock off now. Mum puts on the old Roger Whittaker record and stands in front of the window where she can see her reflection and she dances to herself and sings softly, “I’m gonna leave old London town, I’m gonna leave old London town. . . .” And the towel gapes open in the rear and exposes her naked bum. I point and giggle and Vanessa hisses at me sternly, “It’s not funny.”

I snort. “Yes it is,” I insist.

“No, it’s not. Mum’s having a nervous breakdown.”

“Oh.”

Vanessa lays the table for supper, since Thompson can’t come out of the kitchen with Mum half-naked in the living room. We eat impala steak, potatoes, tinned peas with a cup of milk, and Milo. Dad says, “Come and eat, Tub.”

But Mum is swaying and singing. She has put the record back on from the beginning. It’s the background music to her nervous breakdown. Dad serves up the food. He says, “Sit up straight. Mouth closed when you chew.”

Night after night for the rest of the holidays it’s the same.

When Mum and Dad drive us back to boarding school at the beginning of term, some of the other mothers ask Mum where the baby is. And they peer over Vanessa and me, as if we might have the baby hidden behind our backs. Mum has to say, “We lost him.”

“
Ohmygod,
I’m so sorry.”

“Yes.” Mum’s eyes are shiny glazed. She’s holding on to my hand so tightly that her rings bite into my flesh. I hold on to her back. When she kisses me good-bye, she wraps me briefly in the safe, old smell of Vicks VapoRub, tea, and perfume and it’s only when I look into her eyes that I remember she is in the middle of a nervous breakdown. She says, “Be a brave girl, okay?”

“You, too.”

She smiles at me.

Dad says, “Come on, Tub.” He says to me, “Pecker up.”

“
Ja.
Pecker up to you, too.”

Long road

NERVOUS
BREAKDOWN

Things get worse. When Mum is drugged and sad and singing tunes from the Roger Whittaker album every night, that is one thing. It is a contained, soggy madness, which does little more than humidify the dry, unspoken grief we all feel. But then the outside world starts to join in and has a nervous breakdown all its own, so that it starts to get hard for me to know where Mum’s madness ends and the world’s madness begins. It’s like being on a roundabout, spinning too fast. If I look inward, at my feet, or at my hands clutching the red-painted bar, I can see clearly, if narrowly, where I am in spite of a sick feeling in my stomach and a fear of looking up. But when I pluck up the courage to look up, the world is a terrifying, unhinged blur and I cannot determine whether it is me, or the world, that has come off its axis.

Thompson is beaten up in the compound. One day he comes to work and his eye is purple-black, the skin split open on the brow. He says it’s because he’s from a certain tribe in the east and these people are from a different tribe from the south and they fear and hate him.

“Fear and hate you for what?” I ask.

Thompson shrugs. “I am not one of them.”

“But if they fear you, then why did they beat you?”

“Because they hate me more than they fear me.” And, “Fear makes anger.”

Dad says, “Thompson was probably after their wives.”

But I shake my head.

When we first moved to the ranch, before Richard died, in the brief, blissful period when Mum was well enough to be at home—with her health, and with her swelling belly, and with the end of the war, it seemed as if we might at last be allowed some peace and undisturbed happiness. There was then a period in my life of uncomplicated childhood, a pause of delicious hubris. In those days, I explored the ranch as if I were capable of owning its secrets, as if its heat and isolation and hostility were embraceable friends. I covered the hot, sharp, thorny ground of the ranch on horseback, foot, and bicycle, ignorant of her secrets and fearless of her taboos, as if these ancient, native constraints did not apply to me.

Most mornings, I rode Burma Boy across the river in search of kudu and impala, the dogs panting through the bush on either side of me. In the afternoons, I walked, or rode my bike, down toward the compound past the old airstrip (a hangover from the ranch’s more prosperous days) and searched the ground for wildlife finds. Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both. When I picked up the skulls to add to my growing collection of what Vanessa called “Bobo’s smelly pile,” the hooked horns fell away from each other and the story of the impalas’ death struggle was undone.

On one of my rides, I had found a game track to the surprising kopjes, which bulged with dark, shiny boldness out of the flat blond savannah, alluring in their strangeness, small islands of secret life. I circled the outcrop, looking for an obvious way up, into the dark creases of rock, but the routes were too intimidating for me. Besides, I was afraid of the leopards I knew might be panting silently in the kopje’s caves, or the snakes that lay like fat coils of rope, sunbathing, on the heat-absorbing rocks.

Then one day Vanessa suggested we take a picnic and explore the kopjes.

“What about leopards?”

“It’ll be okay.”

“What about snakes?”

Vanessa said, “Don’t be a scaredy-cat.”

“I’m not a scaredy-cat,” I whined, “it’s just . . .”

“It’s just you’re a scaredy-cat.”

“Better take someone with you,” said Mum, “just in case.”

“See,” I said, “even Mum thinks it might not be safe.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Mum. “And make sure you take your hats, it’s hot out there on the rocks.”

It was Cephas’s day off, so we were sent with Thompson, still gleaming in his white kitchen uniform, as an escort. Thompson carried a string bag with oranges, boiled eggs, an old wine bottle, corked, with water, and a fragrant clutch of warm buns fresh from the oven that morning. When we reached the kopjes, we chose the one closest to the road to climb. Thompson let Vanessa and me go ahead, helping us up over the steep sections of rock until at last we were panting, itching with sweat, on top of the world, able to see as far as the river over the top of the gray-hot haze and the mopane trees. Thompson sat on his haunches and peeled an orange, the creases of his hands turning chalky white with the juice. He handed sections of the fruit to Vanessa and me, and we ate quietly. Happy with our accomplishment.

It was later, after we had eaten our oranges and climbed around on top of the kopje singing, “Needles and pins-a,” that Vanessa and I found the old grave sites, cool dark places of ritual and burial where half-broken pottery, cracked, blackened jewelry, dull arrowheads, and crumbling water gourds lay heaped on top of pyramids of rocks. We scrambled excitedly through our find.

“What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know, maybe people lived here.”

“Maybe they died here.”

Suddenly Thompson was upon us. “What is it?” He was frowning into the gloom of our narrow cave.

“Look!” I showed him two pieces of pottery, which put together made up part of a zigzag pattern. “It’s an old pot.”

“Leave that stuff!” said Thompson. He had almost shouted, raised one prohibiting hand.

I looked at him with astonishment. I had never been spoken to—ordered around—by an African before. My nannies had never dared speak to me so sharply. But Thompson was stumbling back, out of the cave, as if he had seen a snake’s hole.

“I want to take it home to show Mum.”

“You must not touch the things of the dead!”

I had my head to one side and my mouth drawn up, to show I was skeptical, but still, I came out of the cave, as slow-casual as I could, holding the piece of pottery, and I said, “How do you know they are dead people’s things?”

“Anyone can see these are graves,” said Thompson. “Don’t touch! You mustn’t touch.”

I laughed. “It’s a bit late for that, Thompson.”

“Please picanin madam.” Thompson looked as if he were about to fling himself backward off the bald head of the kopje.

“Well, if the people are dead, they won’t mind.”

“No, they will mind. They will think of you most terrible things.”

“Thompson, don’t be so superstitious.” In an effort to rid myself of the tainted pottery and to still maintain my superiority, I tossed the pottery carelessly back into the cave and dusted my hands on my shorts. “There. Happy?” And then casually, “I didn’t really want it, anyway.”

Thompson looked as if I had struck him, as if I’d thrown the pottery in his face. He said, “Oh, you should not have done that, picanin madam. You shouldn’t have
thrown
it like that.”

Vanessa was ducking out of the cave behind me. Her face had changed, the way a shadow comes when a thin cloud scuds across the sun. She said, “Come on, Bobo, let’s go home.”

“But we haven’t even eaten our picnic yet.”

Thompson, his shoulders poking and bony out of the back of his thin cotton uniform, was already scuffling down the face of the boulder that made up the top of the kopje. He had the string bag of uneaten food over his shoulder.

“Come on, you guys, I’m hungry. Let’s eat first.”

Thompson didn’t even turn around, much less slow down.

“Why are you frightened?” I had to quickly scuffle down on the seat of my shorts to keep up with Thompson and Vanessa.

“You touched the things of the dead,” said Thompson. And I saw then that he was beyond scared, he was angry too.

I remember the soft, silty, gritty feel of the grave pottery when I see Thompson, his eye split open like that. And then I think of Richard dead, and Mum gone crazy. And I think that if I hadn’t touched the things of the dead we wouldn’t be having all this bad, bad luck.

And then Oscar, our Rhodesian ridgeback, is found lying on the road outside our house and he has been sliced up and down with a panga. Mum is screaming at the front door, holding his body in her arms. He is so weak from lack of blood he doesn’t even struggle. “Those bastards! Those bloody, bloody bastards.” I open the door and Mum staggers in, barely able to hold herself up with the dog pressed against her chest.

“Is he still breathing?”

Mum lays him down and covers him with blankets. “We need to get fluids into him.” She feeds him whole milk, with the cream, dry-season thin and pale, floating on the top. Oscar gags and the milk dribbles back out of his mouth. “He can’t even swallow,” says Mum, her hands slippery with the milk. She finds a vein in his back leg and punctures it with a needle, letting a bag of intravenous fluid seep into his body. She stays like that, crouched over the dog with the plastic bag of saline solution held up over her head, until Oscar begins to struggle. Then she pulls the needle out of his leg and sits back on her haunches, wiping sweat off her forehead.

“Who did this?” I ask.

Mum says in a hoarse whisper, “They did,” and lifts her eyes toward the ranch manager’s house.

“Oh. The ranch managers did this?”

Mum nods.

I let this sink in for a moment. “Why?”

Mum rolls her eyes and says in a soft voice, like she’s telling me a secret, “They want to kill me, too.”

“They want to kill you?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Why would they want to do that?”

“Because I know about them.”

“You know about them.”

“They’re crooks and they’re poaching leopards.”

“We all know they’re poaching leopards.”

“Watch yourself,” says Mum. “Watch yourself.”

A week later, Burma Boy contracts horse sickness, and he is barely recovered from that when he comes down with tetanus.

Mum says, “We need to get fluids into him.”

She fills a bucket with water and empties a bag of brown sugar into it. Burma Boy sucks at the water weakly to get to the sweet silt at the bottom of the bucket, and then he collapses. Mum puts blankets over him and lies with him in the garden for four nights. The dogs curl up next to her. Even Oscar, who has been allowed to sleep inside, on the sofa, during his convalescence, relinquishes his comfortable position and crawls onto the blanket under which the horse lies quivering with rigid spasms every time there is a loud noise.

Thompson gives notice and goes back to the eastern highlands. He says, “This place is poisonous.”

Dad says, “It’s time we moved on, too.”

That night it is so hot that we sit outside in the dark with the windows to the living room open so that we can hear our records. We have managed to hide the Roger Whittaker album in a Chopin sleeve. Dad is playing Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture.

“Loud enough to scare the bloody elephants.”

“There aren’t any elephants.”

“That’s because we scared them with the
1812.
”

“Ha.”

We eat a supper of impala steak, balancing plates on our laps. When we look up the sky is deep, lonely black. We can hear the jackals starting to trot the perimeter of the security fence, yip-yipping. They have come for the weak, undernourished, diseased sheep and for the wobbly-legged lambs. A nightjar sings.

Mum is not eating, again. I haven’t seen her swallow a decent mouthful of food since the baby came, and went.

Suddenly Dad says, “I’ll go fishing for three days.”

“Can I come?”

“If the fishing is good, we’ll stay here and make a go of it. If the fishing is bad, we’ll leave.”

“Why?”

“We can’t live where the fishing’s lousy.”

“Leave to where?”

“Better fishing.”

“Can I come?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because then what if the fishing is good for you and bad for me? We can’t confuse the issue.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll leave sparrow’s fart tomorrow.”

The next morning, very early, Dad leaves with his coarse fishing rod, spinners, thick line, and weights. He has packed brandy, tins of baked beans, salt, boiled eggs, tea, powdered milk, and bread into his old ammunition box.

“You’re not going trout fishing?”

“No.”

Dad goes fishing for bass and bream and tiger. He’s never been much of a coarse fisherman.

I say to Mum, “We might as well start packing. Dad never catches anything if he isn’t using a fly.”

Mum is lying in bed staring at the ceiling, as if she doesn’t care.

“Should I bring you some tea?”

“That would be nice.”

Mum spends most of the day in bed. When she gets up, after tea, she is groggy, unsteady on her feet. She makes it as far as the sitting room and sinks into an armchair with a sigh. Her face is longer and older; there are sad lines by the sides of her mouth and under her eyes that didn’t used to be there. Her hair has grown out; the wings on her temples are gray.

She made the house cheerful and homely when we first came here. She made bright new curtains and cushions, she hung pictures and put ornaments on the mantelpiece. Judith/Loveness polished the floors until they shone like marble, and Thompson hammered drooping gauze tightly on the windows and whitewashed the walls inside and out. Mum wrote a list of chores to be done every day and pinned it to the kitchen door: dusting, sweeping, brushing, polishing, shining. Now Mum looks as if she doesn’t care. The list of chores has turned yellow and is splattered with fly shit and has begun to curl up at the edges, and the house is starting to look disheveled without Thompson. There is a population explosion of cockroaches in the kitchen, and the cats are finding rats everywhere. We see them crouched and crunching over their rodent carcasses and we trip over half-eaten remains.