Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (2 page)

Horses—Serioes

GETTING THERE:
ZAMBIA, 1987

To begin with, before Independence, I am at school with white children only. “A” schools, they are called: superior schools with the best teachers and facilities. The black children go to “C” schools. In-between children who are neither black nor white (Indian or a mixture of races) go to “B” schools.

The Indians and coloureds (who are neither completely this nor completely that) and blacks are allowed into my school the year I turn eleven, when the war is over. The blacks laugh at me when they see me stripped naked after swimming or tennis, when my shoulders and arms are angry sunburnt red.

“Argh! I smell roasting pork!” they shriek.

“Who fried the bacon?”

Bo and Kenneth

“Burning piggy!”

My God, I am the
wrong
color. The way I am burned by the sun, scorched by flinging sand, prickled by heat. The way my skin erupts in miniature volcanoes of protest in the presence of tsetse flies, mosquitoes, ticks. The way I stand out against the khaki bush like a large marshmallow to a gook with a gun. White. African. White-African.

“But what are you?” I am asked over and over again.

“Where are you from
originally
?”

I began then, embarking from a hot, dry boat.

Blinking bewildered from the sausage-gut of a train.

Arriving in Rhodesia, Africa. From Derbyshire, England. I was two years old, startled and speaking toddler English. Lungs shocked by thick, hot, humid air. Senses crushed under the weight of so many stimuli.

I say, “I’m African.” But not black.

And I say, “I was born in England,” by mistake.

But, “I have lived in Rhodesia (which is now Zimbabwe) and in Malawi (which used to be Nyasaland) and in Zambia (which used to be Northern Rhodesia).”

And I add, “Now I live in America,” through marriage.

And (full disclosure), “But my parents were born of Scottish and English parents.”

What does that make me?

Mum doesn’t know who she is, either.

She stayed up all night once listening to Scottish music and crying.

“This music”—her nose twitches—“is so beautiful. It makes me homesick.”

Mum has lived in Africa all but three years of her life.

“But this
is
your home.”

“But my heart”—Mum attempts to thump her chest—“is Scottish.”

Oh,
fergodsake.
“You hated England,” I point out.

Mum nods, her head swinging, like a chicken with a broken neck. “You’re right,” she says. “But I love Scotland.”

“What,” I ask, challenging, “do you love about Scotland?”

“Oh the . . . the . . .” Mum frowns at me, checks to see if I’m tricking her. “The music,” she says at last, and starts to weep again. Mum hates Scotland. She hates drunk-driving laws and the cold. The cold makes her cry, and then she comes down with malaria.

Her eyes are half-mast. That’s what my sister and I call it when Mum is drunk and her eyelids droop. Half-mast eyes. Like the flag at the post office whenever someone important dies, which in Zambia, with one thing and another, is every other week. Mum stares out at the home paddocks where the cattle are coming in for their evening water to the trough near the stables. The sun is full and heavy over the hills that describe the Zambia-Zaire border. “Have a drink with me, Bobo,” she offers. She tries to pat the chair next to hers, misses, and feebly slaps the air, her arm like a broken wing.

I shake my head. Ordinarily I don’t mind getting softly drunk next to the slowly collapsing heap that is Mum, but I have to go back to boarding school the next day, nine hours by pickup across the border to Zimbabwe. “I need to pack, Mum.”

That afternoon Mum had spent hours wrapping thirty feet of electric wire around the trees in the garden so that she could pick up the World Service of the BBC. The signature tune crackled over the syrup-yellow four o’clock light just as the sun was starting to hang above the top of the msasa trees. “ ‘Lillibulero,’ ” Mum said. “That’s Irish.”

“You’re not Irish,” I pointed out.

She said, “Never said I was.” And then, follow-on thought, “Where’s the whisky?”

We must have heard “Lillibulero” thousands of times. Maybe millions. Before and after every news broadcast. At the top of every hour. Spluttering with static over the garden at home; incongruous from the branches of acacia trees in campsites we have set up in the bush across the countryside; singing from the bathroom in the evening.

But you never know what will set Mum off. Maybe it was “Lillibulero” coinciding with the end of the afternoon, which is a rich, sweet, cooling, melancholy time of day.

“Your Dad was English originally,” I tell her, not liking the way this is going.

She said, “It doesn’t count. Scottish blood cancels English blood.”

By the time she has drunk a quarter of a bottle of whisky, we have lost reception from Bush House in London and the radio hisses to itself from under its fringe of bougainvillea. Mum has pulled out her old Scottish records. There are three of them. Three records of men in kilts playing bagpipes. The photographs show them marching blindly (how do they see under those dead-bear hats?) down misty Scottish cobbled streets, their faces completely blocked by their massive instruments. Mum turns the music up as loud as it will go, takes the whisky out to the veranda, and sits cross-legged on a picnic chair, humming and staring out at the night-blanketed farm.

This cross-leggedness is a hangover from the brief period in Mum’s life when she took up yoga from a book. Which was better than the brief period in her life in which she explored the possibility of converting to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And better than the time she bought a book on belly-dancing at a rummage sale and tried out her techniques on every bar north of the Limpopo River and south of the equator.

The horses shuffle restlessly in their stables. The night apes scream from the tops of the shimmering-leafed msasa trees. The dogs set up in a chorus of barking and will not stop until we put them inside, all except Mum’s faithful spaniel, who will not leave her side even when she’s throwing what Dad calls a wobbly. Which is what this is: a wobbly. The radio hisses and occasionally, drunkenly, bursts into snatches of song (Spanish or Portuguese) or chatters in German, in Afrikaans, or in an exaggerated American accent. “This is the Voice of America.” And then it swoops, “Beee-ooooeee!”

Dad and I go to bed with half the dogs. The other half of the pack set themselves up on the chairs in the sitting room. Dad’s half deaf, from when he blew his eardrums out in the war eight years ago in what was then Rhodesia. Now Zimbabwe. I put a pillow over my head. I can hear Mum’s voice, high and inexact, trembling on the high notes: “Speed, bonny boat, / Like a bird on the wing, / Over the sea to Skye,” and then she runs out of words and starts to sing, loudly to make up for the loss of words, “La, la la laaaa!” In the other room, at the end of the hall, Dad is snoring.

In the morning, Mum is still on the veranda. The records are silent. The housegirl sweeps the floor around her. The radio is in the tree and has sobered up, with a film of shining dew over its silver face, and is telling us the news in clipped English tones. “This is London,” it says with a straight face, as the milking cows are brought in to the dairy and the night apes curl up overhead to sleep and the Cape turtledoves begin to call, “Work-hard-er, work-hard-er.” An all-day call, which I nevertheless associate with morning and which makes me long for a cup of tea. The bells of Big Ben sound from distant, steely-gray-dawn London, where commuters will soon be spilling sensibly out of Underground stations or red double-decker buses. It is five o’clock Greenwich Mean Time.

When I was younger I used to believe it was called “Mean” time because it was English time. I used to believe that African time was “Kind” time.

The dogs are lying in exhausted heaps on the furniture in the sitting room, with their paws over their ears. They look up at Dad and me as we come through for our early morning cup of tea, which we usually take on the veranda but which the cook has set in the sitting room on account of the fact that Mum is lying with her forehead on the picnic table where he would usually put the tray. Still cross-legged. Still singing. I bet hardly anyone in yoga can do
that.

We wedge Mum into the back of the pickup along with my suitcase and satchel and books and the spare tires, next to the half-built generator we are taking into Lusaka to be fixed. She is humming “Flower of Scotland.” And then Dad and I climb into the front of the pickup and set off down the farm road. I am going to start crying. There go the horses, two white faces and one black peering over the stable doors, waiting for Banda to bring them their breakfasts. And here come the dogs running, ear-flapping hopeful after the pickup, willing us to stop and let them ride along in the back. And there goes the old cook, hunched and massive, his bony shoulders poking out of the top of his threadworn khaki uniform. He is almost seventy and has just sired another baby; he looks exhausted. He’s sitting in the kitchen doorway with a joint the size of a sausage hanging from his bottom lip, a fragrant pillow of blue marijuana smoke hangs above his head. Marijuana grows well behind the stables, where it thrives on horseshit, cow dung, pilfered fertilizer intended for Dad’s soybean crop. Adamson raises one old hand in salute. The gardener stands to attention on his bush-broom, with which he is sweeping leaves from the dusty driveway. “Miss Bobo,” he mouths, and raises his fist in a black power salute.

Mum leans over the rim of the pickup briefly, precariously, to blow the dogs a kiss. She waves at the staff for a moment, royally, and then collapses back into the folds of the tarpaulin.

Dad offers me a cigarette. “Better have one while you still can,” he says.

“Thanks.” We smoke together for a while.

Dad says, “It’s tough when you can’t smoke.”

I nod.

“Don’t smoke at school.”

“I won’t.”

“They won’t like it.”

“They don’t.”

It’s past seven in the morning by the time we leave the farm. I have to be at school by five-thirty that evening to make it in time for sign-in and supper. That leaves us half an hour for business and lunch in Lusaka and an hour to get through the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia.

I say, “Better be polite to the blokes at the border today. We don’t have time for silly buggers.”

“Bloody baboons,” mutters Dad.

When we get to Lusaka, Dad and I drop off the generator at the Indian’s workshop on Ben Bella Road.

“Hello, Mr. Fuller,” says the Indian, head bobbling like a bobbin of thread on a sewing machine. “Come in, come in, for tea? Coffee? I have something for you to look at.”

“Not today,” says Dad, waving the man away. “Big hurry with my daughter, you see.” He talks between clenched teeth.

He gets in the pickup. Lights a cigarette. “Bloody Indians,” he mutters as he reverses out of the yard, “always up to something.”

We buy boiled eggs and slabs of white cornbread from a kiosk on the side of Cha Cha Cha Road, near the roundabout that leads to Kafue, the Gymkhana Club, or home, depending on where you get off. We wave some food at Mum, but she isn’t moving. She has some oil on her face from the generator, which has been leaking thick, black engine blood. Otherwise she is very white, bordering on pale green.

We stop before Chirundu, the small hot nothing town on the Zambezi River which marks the border crossing into Zimbabwe, to make sure she is still alive. Dad says, “We’ll get into trouble if we try and take a dead body over the border.”

Mum has undone the tarpaulin which was meant to keep the dust out of my school clothes, and has wrapped herself up in it. She is asleep with a small smile on her lips.

Dad puts his forefinger under her nose to feel for breath. “Still alive,” Dad announces, “although she looks nothing like her passport photo now.”

From the back, as we ease into the melting hot, tarmac-shining car park in front of the customs building (broken windows like thin ice in the white sun) we can hear Mum shuffling back into life. She eases herself into a sitting position, the vast tarpaulin over her shoulders like a voluminous plastic operatic cloak in spite of the oven-breath heat. She is singing “Olé, I Am a Bandit.”