Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (24 page)

We lie on the beach reading, we swim and drink and try out our new-fledged flirting skills on our friends’ brothers, who are either kind and ignore us, or are cruel and take us to heart. All day, there is a sting of petrol in the air from the speedboats that periodically cut drunkenly out across the ripple-free lake, towing the swinging stick figure of a water-skier behind them or bumping the ecstatic bodies of children on their bows. And there is the soft, rotten smell of humid heat and there is the periodic piercing burn of a freshly lit cigarette (“Can I have one?”) and the underlying, constant persistence of smoked fish.

When the dugout canoes come in from the lake, the fishermen bowed silver-backed in the lowering sun as they paddle for shore, we stretch sun-and-sweat-salted bodies, crush out our cigarettes in the sand, and saunter down to greet them. We haggle for their fresh catch, carefully scratching the scales of the fish and sniffing to check for freshness (we want just-caught fish, not fish from the morning that have been recently splashed to make them appear just-caught). We take our fish back up to the various ribbons of blue smoke over which cooks are bending and into which cooks are blowing, sending roaring orange flames into crackling wood. We eat fish and rice and drink local gin, slapping mosquitoes off our ankles and sweating into our tin plates.

After supper, we build bonfires on the beach and sit with toes dug into blood-warm sand, watching the moon’s reflection on the lake as it rises over the hills behind us. We smoke and talk, tired from all-day beer-and-sun. Gradually bodies roll back to camp and shack and caravan. The singeing smoke of mosquito coils curls in the air. Some nights, we drag mattresses down to the beach and shake out mosquito nets under trees, hunching sunburnt shoulders to each other, and we sleep next to the silver-edged, moon-and-star-speckled lake, from which there comes an occasional, mysterious splash.

It is the beginning of the rains and the Spy takes leave in order to return to his village, where he will plant a new year’s crop on his small patch of farm and plant a new year’s baby into his mournful young wife’s belly. Doud is too old for babies, he tells us. His sons have taken over his small farm now. He tells us he will stay for Christmas. He makes daily attempts at hot mince pies, which are stomach-heavy in the steaming heat but which we swallow dutifully, along with equally unrefreshing mulled wine. There are no fir trees or Christmas decorations, so we decorate a dusty, droughted pine with the cutout golden stars and globes of old Benson & Hedges cigarette boxes.

The rains are rhythmic, coming religiously in the afternoons (after lunch has been eaten but before tea, so that the nights are washed clean-black with bright pinpoints of silver starlight hanging over a restless, grateful earth). The rains are gray solid sheets of water, slamming into the mock-Spanish house with sudden sideways ferocity and soaking everything, slashing through the window louvers and damping beds and curtains until everything seems heavy and turning-green with moisture. Laundry, which until now has hung behind the cookhouse (and is returned to us fragrant with wood smoke), is never quite dry. It hangs, steaming over Doud’s head, from a wire running over the woodstove and now (when it is returned to us) our clothes and sheets and towels smell of the dogs’ boiling fish-head stew.

The pet guinea fowl crouch damp and miserable under the dripping trees’ inadequate shelter and the chickens stop laying all but the most deformed eggs (from which hatch sickly, one-legged or wingless chicks). Snakes slide onto our veranda, slithering from flooded holes. Frogs breed energetically in the pool and in the fishpond, where the toads grow so fat and large we suspect them of having eaten the last of the goldfish (which were plagued with unsightly growths anyway); monitor lizards are washed from their swamps and one of these six-foot lizards even wanders into the sitting room where I am legs-tucked-up-in-a-chair reading a book.

When we peer (lifting tired eyes from books and games of cards) into the gray rain and over the grass fence, we can see the tenants’ children run, knees high through puddles, mahogany-colored arms shaking into the air, heads thrown back, pink mouths open. The very little children are shining-naked. They look polished and ecstatic and I am jealous of them.

The daily rains mean that we can no longer camp at the lake and so now our weeks lump ahead of us in a dreary patternless marathon of tobacco planting, trays of tea, card games, beer drinking, rain gazing. Weeks pass. The rains have set in and their generosity is assured. It will be a wet year, and now we all long for one or two days’ reprieve. The rains are no longer a cause of daily celebration and relief, as they were a month ago. Even the tenants’ children have stopped playing when the heavens burst upon us. Now comes the playless, earnest task of ensuring that all the crops are in before the fields become too wet. And now the flush of weeds, which have sprung up like tufts of unruly hair, must be snatched from the earth before they sap precious food from tobacco and maize. Through the gray, hanging afternoons, tenants and their children are bent over freshly turned fields pressing raw, startled tobacco seedlings into ridges and dropping maize pips into tiny raised mounds of hot, damp, welcoming earth.

Vanessa rescues a rain-sick, one-legged chick from the coop. She keeps it in a shoe box near her bed and spends most of her day trying to tempt lumps of Pronutro porridge down its sickly beak until the porridge oozes out of its nostrils and the creature suffocates. Vanessa wears a black scarf to the sodden funeral in the garden and after that she won’t be coaxed from her room except for beer and cards in the evening. Nor will she allow Doud to clean away the deceased chick’s shit-smelling shoe box. The house takes on the smell of Vanessa’s dead project.

It is too wet for me to get the motorbike through the vlei which cuts through the middle of the farm. I walk the farm for days, but the wet is persistent and soul-rotting. I give up and read my way through Mum’s library.

Mum presses herself into gumboots and spends her mornings hovering over the tobacco seedbeds watching the limp-necked plantlings as they are loaded onto the trailers and taken to the tenants’ fields. But when the seedlings have all been transported and planted, there is nothing left for her to do except wait and hope that most of them survive the ordeal. She comes home and we lie on her bed and read books.

I dye Mum’s hair a streaky, porcupine blond and shave my legs just to see if I need to.

Vanessa experiments with eye shadow and looks as if she has been punched.

I try and make meringues and the resulting glue is eaten with clench-jawed dutifulness by my family. Mum encourages me not to waste precious eggs on any more cooking projects.

Mum—hair job

I learn what I hope are the words to Bizet’s
Carmen
and sing the entire opera to the dogs.

Vanessa paints a picture of a girl with long blond hair. The picture depicts the girl drowning and screaming, her hair spread out around her. She calls it
The Scream—Mgodi.

Mum rinses her hair in purple wash and her porcupine blond streaks turn silver.

Dad teaches me to drive the old truck. I have to balance on the edge of the seat to reach the pedals, and the steering is so loose that it bucks my thin arms into the air when we jolt over a bump.

I smoke in front of the mirror and try to look like a hardened sex goddess.

Vanessa declares, hopelessly, that she is thinking of running away from home. I stare out at the nothingness into which she would run and say, “I’ll come with you.”

Mum says, “Me too.”

So Dad takes a gang of men from the farm and in one weekend they erect an open-air hut out of mud, poles, and thatch on our plot at the lake. Its walls reach to my knees, and its primitive thatch hangs down like too-long hair, stopping just above our heads so that any breeze off the lake is free to press through the hut, through the stifling, humid-thick air, to the back of the hut where Dad has fashioned crude slat beds from rough wood. Each bed has a thin foam mattress and a pair of locally made sheets (rough, raw-to-the-toes cotton) and is misted with a mosquito net. He splashes whitewash on the mud hut and covers the mud floor with raked beach sand.

He comes home and declares (in the presence of the Spy, who has lately returned from his village) that we can now escape the farm at weekends. “Room for everyone,” he declares. “We built a bloody palace.”

On Friday, we load the pickup. Mum brings last year’s unsellable tobacco scraps and sweepings from Mgodi’s grading shed to dig into the clay-tight, black soil. She has ripped up runners from the garden to plant a lawn of thick-leaved buffalo grass (which will spread green, quick, grateful fingers over bare soil) and bags of cuttings from the poinsettias, bougainvillea, and snowball bushes. She has jars of fledgling mango and avocado (coaxed to life on the windowsill in the kitchen) pressed up against the burlap sacks of grass. Dad and I struggle under the weight of a real flush toilet (brought from the hardware store at Zomba) on which Vanessa triumphantly balances herself for the drive (and from which she waves victoriously to shrieking children all the way to the lake). We pile up dry firewood (the lake area has been picked clean of kindling) and sacks of mealie meal for the watchman who has been stationed to keep an eye on our new palace. We whistle up the dogs and climb into the truck. I am holding on to a cage, made of bush sticks and bark, from which a cockerel is glaring. He is Marcus, and Mum insists that he is necessary to eat the ants that crawl out of the floor and cover the bush poles with their red, crusty tunnels.

All the expats-like-us bring a servant down to the lake to cook, clean, and run to “Stephen’s Bar” for the daily supply of beer. But we are loaded to the gunwales and are forced to leave the Spy behind. “Worthless bugger that he is,” Dad says. “Anyway, the watchman can make a fire for us and clean up.”

“And I’ll help cook,” I say, exuberant with escape.

Vanessa retches theatrically.

Mum says, “It’s just this once, Vanessa. We can survive.”

We edge out of the yard, teetering dangerously on top of our heavy load of supplies, and wave to the Spy.

And then the Spy outdid himself.

Because of Christmas and New Year’ s, more than two weeks pass before we can return to our palace at the lake. This time we bring the Spy. We arrive to find an excited gaggle of expats-like-us who report that a Presidential Inquiry was sent to the lake the previous weekend. The Inquiry had apparently come to investigate reports that “Tim Fuller has built himself a palace at the lake with His Excellency’s money.”

The entourage, bad-tempered after an uncomfortable, steamy journey from Lilongwe (which not even a ride in an air-conditioned Mercedes-Benz could cushion), had arrived at Cape Maclear and demanded to know where Tim Fuller’s palace was.

The expats-like-us show them the raw, mud hut.

“This!” The chief government investigator was scandalized; his mouth moved in silent protest until indignation could find words. “This is not a palace! This is nothing but a goat shed.”

The Spy creeps to the back of the hut and makes a fire. He looks furtively at the expats-like-us and then, with obvious dismay, at the hut.

Dad finds a piece of driftwood flattened by water and rock, and Vanessa uses a hot rod of metal, fresh from the fire, to burn the goat shed into it. We hang the sign from one of the hut’s poles.

Dugout canoes—Lake Malawi

FEDERAL FULLERS

Vanessa and I are sunbathing on the cluster of rocks at the far south of the beach, where fishermen from the local villages sometimes suddenly appear, as if organically rising from the deep, clear water, their ancient, finger-smoothed canoes smoke-smelling and fish heavy. They try to sell us marijuana (which they will also exchange for cigarettes or fishing line), fish, or sometimes baskets and beads.

I said, “I’ll pay you two kwacha for a ride in your canoe.”

“Three kwacha.”

I hesitate.

“Okay, okay, two kwacha.”

Vanessa sits up and shades her eyes from the sun. “Don’t go too far, hey.”

I scud down the rock, gripping on a narrow ledge, toes stretching toward the canoe.

“Hands first,” says the paddler, holding the canoe steady against the rock.

“How can I put my hands first?”

“Ah, but you must.”

“It’ll be all right. You just keep the thing still.” I make a clumsy lurch for the canoe, there is a brief vision of the paddler’s dismayed face, and then we are all over, upside down, the water around me suddenly lively with paddles, dead fish, grasping nets, despondent soggy cigarettes.

Vanessa peers over the edge of her perch. “You’re going to have to pay him for everything you’ve sunk.”

“I will. I will.” I cling to the upturned canoe. “Sorry,” I pant to the fisherman. But he is too busy recovering his goods to respond. I clear myself from the debris, from the leg-heavy fishing nets which threaten to pull me down, and thrash back to the beach, where I lie on my belly staring at the glassy sand and coughing. The fisherman is still hanging on to his upturned canoe, saving cigarettes, which he is placing in a row on the canoe’s sky-facing bottom.

He kicks the canoe to shore. He has lost his day’s catch. He does not look at me as he lays out his life on the beach. He has lost not only his catch, but also his knife, a basket, a plastic bag in which he had an old wine bottle filled with cooking oil, and a tin bowl containing a fistful of dry cornmeal for nshima. I watch the muscles hop on his angry back and dig my toes into the sand. “I’m sorry.”

He does not answer.

“I’ll pay you. How many kwacha?” But even those usually magic words fail to elicit a response.

He turns his canoe upright and pushes out into the lake, balancing briefly, as lightly as a cat, on the gunwale before lowering himself into the canoe, bent like a dancer, from where he digs into the water with his paddle and slides out into the glare of the bright afternoon sun.

I pick my way back up to the top of the rock, where Vanessa’s pink shoulders are beginning to hum a more urgent shade of red.

“You’re burning,” I tell her.

“That’s so typical,” she says.

“Put your shirt on.”

“You’re so annoying.”

I sit, contrite, next to Vanessa. “He wouldn’t let me pay him.”

“No wonder no one will snog you.”

I light a cigarette.

Vanessa scratches under her chin, her jaw thrust out. She is looking far out into the water, as if reading it for further insights into my shortcomings. “Everything you do is a disaster.”

The cigarette is bitter on my tongue. Tears sting behind my eyelids and make a hard painful lump in the back of my throat.

“You’re fourteen years old and you haven’t even been kissed.”

I shrug. “Who says I want to be?”

She pushes out her lips at me. “Can’t you be just a little less . . .? Can’t you? I mean, can’t you just be
normal
?”

“I am normal.”

Vanessa closes her eyes. We have been taking it in turns spraying a bottle of Sun-In into our hair. It has streaked Vanessa silver-blond and has turned my hair orange, in unsightly blocks. She runs her fingers through her hair and turns her face to the sun.

I have had my hair cut, in an unflattering pudding bowl, by an African hairdresser in Blantyre. My fringe is very short and crooked. I look like a grasshopper wearing a wig. I hang my head on my knees and sigh. Tears roll down my cheeks and splash onto my legs.

“Geoffrey might snog you,” says Vanessa at last.

He looks like a small, greasy weasel. “Thanks.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

Which is how I come to be snogged, at the next New Year’s party, by the rodent-faced Geoffrey, whose tongue takes me by such surprise that my teeth clamp down on it in a startled reflex.

“Well, what were you expecting?” says Vanessa.

I shrug. “Not his tongue.”

“What did you think snogging
was
?”

“Not tongues.”

Vanessa rolls her eyes. “You can’t say I didn’t try,” she says.

“I know, I know. I didn’t.”

Vanessa considers. “Geoffrey was your best bet,” she says at last.

There are few expats-like-us, which translates to very few snoggable sons. I say, “I’ll be okay.”

“It’s not healthy.”

“What isn’t?”

Vanessa looks at me, at a loss for words, and waves at me. “You,” she says at last. “Your whole . . . everything.”

I press my lips together to prevent tears from coming.

“I hope Geoffrey didn’t tell
everyone
that you bit him.”

But he had.

Which is why it is a relief when Dad announces that he will not be renewing his two-year contract with the President for Life as manager of Mgodi Estates.

“We’re moving,” he announces.

Our choices are Papua New Guinea, Mozambique, and Zambia. It is 1983.

Papua New Guinea is floating anonymously off the tip of Australia. I read that it is mostly covered with forest. It is famous for its mineral reserves and cannibals.

Mozambique is seven years into a civil war, which follows on from its ten-year war of independence against the Portuguese. It is widely acknowledged to be the most miserable nation on earth. It is famous for its land mines and child soldiers.

Zambia is recovering from belly-rocking, land-sucking drought. It is famous for its mineral reserves and political corruption.

I am keen to move to Papua New Guinea, which is as far from Geoffrey’s injured tongue as we can get without actually falling off the planet.

Dad thinks Mozambique might have a future.

“In what?” Vanessa wants to know.

“A future,” Dad insists. “Everything has a future.”

“Not if you’re dead,” I mutter.

Vanessa looks away. “Are there any other . . . people there?” she asks.

Dad says, “That’s the best part. There’s
no one
there.”

No snoggable sons.

The Germans for whom we would farm in Zambia have clothing factories there. They make a tremendous profit manufacturing uniforms for the various and numerous armies of Africa (no shipment of uniforms without payment). Their seven-thousand-acre farm is a tax ruse but they still want the place to run at a profit. They have found their last three farm managers to be incompetent, dishonest, and drunk (usually in combination).

The Germans have offered to buy Mum horses if Dad will agree to work on their farm. They will pay for Vanessa and me to attend our private schools (in Zimbabwe, where Vanessa is now at secretarial college) and they will buy us tickets to and from Zambia so that we can fly back home during the holidays.

So Mum and Dad go to Zambia and take a look at the farm. There are virgin forests and three dams, two rivers and passable roads. There is a large main house and a guest cottage, and a total of three flush loos at our disposal (if you count the loo in the guest cottage). There is more or less full-time electricity (when the Zambian Electricity Supply Commission can compete with summer storms). There is a schoolhouse and a building for a clinic for the farm staff (neither have operated for some years). There are whitewashed stables and a dairy, an old, dry orchard (“But it might revive with some water and fertilizer”), and a swimming pool (“A bit green and slimy, but that’s all right”).

There is a farming community of twenty or thirty families in Mkushi district (where the farm sits), not far from the border with Zaire. If Zambia were a butterfly, our farm is situated right where Zambia’s wings would meet.

If we move to Mkushi, we will neighbor Yugoslavs, Afrikaners, Englishmen, Zambians, Indians, Greeks, Czechs.

“Too many people,” complains Dad.

“You don’t have to
socialize
with them.”

“It’s the bloody League of Nations.”

“So?”

Dad mutters something.

Mum says, “If we move to Zambia, then we will have lived in every country in the former Federation.”

And the symmetry of this fact seems to be enough to seal the decision. We will move to Zambia in January, too late to catch even the tail end of the planting season.