When Hoopoes Go to Heaven (31 page)

‘Speaking of birds,’ said Vusi, ‘it looks like we’re going all the way up to Nyonyane.’

‘Execution rock?’

‘
Yebo
. Hold on tight, nè? This road is steep.’

Up at the top, they all got out and Uncle Enock pointed out Sheba’s Breasts. From there Benedict could see very clearly the two separate peaks that looked just like a lady’s breasts.
It was a much better view than the one Henry had said was perfect. He became aware that Uncle Enock was staring at him.

‘What?’

Uncle Enock smiled. ‘I’m waiting for you to ask about the gold.’

‘Is it—’

‘No! Long ago some tin was mined here on Execution Rock, but there’s no gold mine anywhere around.’

‘But the book said—’

‘It’s just a story, nè? Pius, come and tell your boy the difference between a story and the truth.’

Baba left the young ones looking at a pile of something’s
kinyezi
with Vusi and came to join them.

‘Baba, if it’s in a book, isn’t it true?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Even if it says it’s true?’

Baba shook his head. ‘That’s a warning sign right there. People can say something is true just to lead you into a pile of nonsense like that pile the boys are looking at.’ He
indicated the younger ones who were now watching Vusi sort through the
kinyezi
with a stick. ‘And if you trust the person who says it’s true, that person can mislead
you.’

‘Books can lie?’ asked Benedict, checking to see if he was understanding Baba correctly.

‘Anything can lie,’ said Baba.

Uncle Enock tried to help. ‘You know a stick insect, nè?’

Benedict nodded. ‘It looks just like a stick.’

‘It lies to you,’ said Uncle Enock. ‘It tells you it’s a stick, meanwhile it’s an insect.’

Benedict thought for a moment. God had made the stick insect like that to protect it from anything that might want to eat it. But if camouflage was a way of lying, was God saying it was okay to
lie? Surely not. He was about to ask, when he saw that Baba had the look on his face that said he wanted it to be time for news.

Then Baba looked as though he had just had a very good idea. ‘Food!’ he declared. ‘Time to eat?’

‘Tip top,’ said Uncle Enock. ‘Vusi, show the boys the crocodile, nè? Dr Tungaraza and I will get the picnic out.’

Vusi pointed to just behind Sheba’s Breasts, where the mountain made the shape of the huge face of a crocodile looking right at them. Benedict saw it at once, but the younger ones
struggled and needed help. Then Vusi pointed out the Mdzimba Mountains to the right of the Breasts, which were sacred on account of kings being buried there.

There was so much to eat! Titi had packed sandwiches and cupcakes for everybody, and Lungi had given them boiled eggs, cheese cut into little squares, and plenty of fruit. Baba and Uncle Enock
sat on the wooden bench to eat, while Fortune, Moses and Daniel ate as they walked around exploring.

Benedict sat with Vusi on a rock near the edge of the mountaintop. Perhaps it was the very place where the long-ago criminals had been pushed off. Benedict wondered if any of them, knowing that
they were going to be pushed, had chosen to jump instead. If somebody was going to make you late, maybe suiciding yourself like a scorpion was sometimes the only way to stop them.

Eh
, he didn’t like that his thoughts kept coming back to ideas like that these days. Sometimes he felt like something had knocked his mind from the place it had found to sit
comfortably, and now it was struggling to find its balance in a more difficult place. It was a place where Baba could be in an aeroplane and it could crash into a building without it even being an
accident, a place where his sisters might not always be safe, not even in a classroom. And it was a place where the idea of his first baba that he had carried inside him for ten whole years lay
torn at his feet.

Whatever it was that was going on inside him, it felt like something he wasn’t yet ready to understand. Maybe a grown-up or an older boy like Vusi would understand, but Benedict
didn’t want to say.

He began to peel the shell from a boiled egg.

‘Vusi, you know Nomsa?’

‘
Yebo
.’

‘Is she going to be a Mazibuko now?’

‘Looks like it. There’s nowhere else for her to go, so of course she can stay with us, be part of our family.’

Benedict thought about being one of eight children as he swallowed his mouthful of boiled egg. ‘I don’t think Innocence likes her much.’

‘Maybe not.’ Vusi took a big bite of sandwich and chewed it slowly. ‘But she’ll get over it.’

‘What’s it like getting a new sister?’

‘Just...’ Vusi shrugged. ‘Normal. I mean, I was once the new brother everybody got used to. Innocence was once the new sister.
Eish
, now we all have
Gogo
Levine
to get used to, and she’s getting used to us. We’ve all been in that very same place.’

Benedict remembered getting used to Faith and Daniel. It hadn’t always been easy, especially when they preferred Grace and Moses. But they had all met one another before, there had been
photos of one another in their separate houses, it wasn’t like they were strangers.

Eh!
It was going to be very hard for Josephine.

‘At least Nomsa knows you from school,’ he said to Vusi.

‘
Yebo
.’ He began on another sandwich. ‘
Ag
, she’ll find a way to fit in.’

They ate their food quietly for a while as they watched a black-shouldered kite hover almost motionless in the air before it swooped down on something somewhere below where they could see. Then
Benedict asked Vusi what he was going to be, and he said a doctor.

‘A doctor for people?’ Benedict wasn’t entirely sure why doctors for people and doctors for other animals had to be so different.

‘
Yebo
. And you?’

Benedict sighed, fingering a square of cheese. ‘I want to do something with animals, but I don’t think I can be an animal doctor like Uncle Enock.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not clever. Mama says I am, and Baba says I’m clever in my own way, but when he looks at my school marks I can see that he’s disappointed. I’m not
scholarship-clever, that’s the problem. Baba can’t pay for university, we’re too many. We’re getting another sister, too.’

‘I heard. But you know? You don’t have to go to university to learn working with animals.’

‘No?’

‘No. You can train as a game ranger, a guide for visitors. A game park will teach you.’

‘
Eh!
’

How wonderful it would be to drive people around a place like this and tell them about all the animals and the birds! There were plenty of places he could do that back home in Tanzania.

‘Vusi?’ Uncle Enock called from the bench, pointing to some large birds circling slowly in the air far behind where they were sitting.

‘
Eish
,’ said Vusi. ‘Vultures. There’s been a kill.’

Afterwards, the girls were much more interested in telling Baba and the boys about their day than in hearing about fat hippos, hiding crocodiles and circling vultures.

‘Baba would never let
us
wear skirts that short!’

‘And nothing on top!
Nothing!
’

‘Uncle, those clothes are not polite.’

‘Rachel told us the king needs to see as much of each girl as possible, otherwise he can’t choose which one to marry.’

‘Not that he
has
to choose,’ said Baba.

‘But Pius, the colours were so beautiful! Tiny turquoise skirts dotted with buttons and silver studs, with little fringes of yellow beads at the bottom. And then a bright ribbon over one
shoulder and across to the waist, with big woollen tassels hanging off in yellow and pink and green and white and—’

‘And the princesses had red feathers sticking up in their hair.’

Benedict knew that those were feathers from the national bird, the
ligwalagwala
, which you weren’t allowed to wear unless you belonged to the royal family.

‘Show them Mrs Zikalala,’ Mama said to the girls. ‘Benedict, you remember her?’ Mama rolled her eyes and her voice went flat. ‘The white cake.’

Benedict nodded, remembering the lady who wanted her daughter to marry the king.

Standing next to each other, Grace and Faith put on their faces that said they were acting somebody else.

‘Look at my girl!’ said Grace, her voice high-pitched as she indicated Faith, who stood with her head down, her arms folded. ‘Isn’t she magnificent?’ Grace tutted
loudly as she pulled Faith’s arms down by her sides. Then, roughly, she raised Faith’s chin. ‘Queenie, let him see everything, nè? Where is your beautiful smile?’

Rolling her eyes, Faith gave a smile that made her look like a growling dog, and everybody laughed.

Grace continued. ‘Turn around, Queenie!’ With a great show of not wanting to, Faith turned her back to the room. ‘Look at this!’ Grace grabbed one of Faith’s
buttocks. ‘Magnificent, nè?
Magnificent!
’

Mama was shaking her head, but at the same time she was laughing so much that tears came to her eyes, and she needed a tissue from inside her smart blouse.

‘This is the year, Mrs Tungaraza!’ Grace went on, pulling Faith’s shoulders back so that her chest leaped forward. ‘This is the year he will choose my Queenie!’

‘Oh, that poor girl,’ said Baba, but he couldn’t help smiling.

‘Auntie, did he choose already?’

‘I don’t know, Titi.’ They had left long before the end on account of Mama’s smart shoes hurting and Auntie Rachel wanting to get back to Nomsa and the little ones, who
were alone with Mrs Levine on account of Lungi and Mavis both being off.

‘There’s a story,’ said Baba, ‘but I don’t know how true it is. They say that when the king couldn’t attend the ceremony because he was still at school in
England, the elders sent him a video of it and he chose a girl from that.’

‘
Eh!
’

‘Did you see the king?’ asked Benedict. ‘Was he dressed as Ngwenyama the Lion?’

Maybe Mswati dressed up as a lion because a lion was the king of all the animals. Maybe King Solomon used to dress up as a lion; maybe that was how he was able to talk to birds and tell them
what to do. Benedict didn’t know if King Midas or King Martin Luther Junior ever dressed up.

‘No,’ said Mama, ‘today he just had a
kanga
round his waist and lots of beads. And the red feathers.’ Mama’s hand indicated feathers spiking up out of her
hair. ‘
Eh!
Talking of a
kanga
, I must get out of this skirt!’

When sleep tried to take Benedict that night, he pushed it away, too excited by the idea of becoming a game ranger. After his schooling he would go straight to a game reserve,
and they would teach him everything there was to know, everything in the whole entire world about any creature that wasn’t a person. Snakes, bugs, elephants, birds, he would know them all.
And he would earn money from showing them to people and telling them all about them. Okay, he would have to carry a gun like every other game ranger did, and Mama wouldn’t be happy with that
on account of it being a gun that had made his first baba late, but Mama and Baba would be so proud of him! It didn’t matter that he wasn’t scholarship-clever. People were going to pay
him money for doing exactly what he loved to do, and that was how he was going to help his family. Imagine!

But if King Solomon’s gold was real, and if he could find it, he could help them right now.

He hoped that Petros was going to come back soon. He didn’t know how long it took people to agree on
lobola
, but it seemed that Petros had been gone a long time. Maybe it was taking
long because Petros didn’t have any cows to pay with. Maybe his girlfriend’s family was insisting on cows, and then Petros would have to come back to Uncle Enock’s farm and work
for a very long time until he could afford. Or maybe the girl was saying no. Titi had said no to Henry. Benedict knew that Petros wouldn’t just smear the girl with red ochre and marry her
anyway. No. Petros was kind, he was polite.

Okay, he had gone to Nhlangano without saying goodbye to Benedict, even though he had called Benedict
bhuti.
But Petros was on his own, he didn’t live with brothers and sisters. He
didn’t know that when somebody is your brother then you tell him that you’re going away, and you tell him goodbye.

Benedict wondered if Petros would like to get used to being a new brother in the Tungaraza family. Baba could change Benedict’s bed for a double bunk like the one Moses and Daniel slept
in, and Petros could share their bedroom. Auntie Rachel could teach him more English to help him to fit in more easily.

Krishna would have to sleep outside, though. Mama and Baba didn’t want animals inside. It was nice for Krishna that Petros had arranged for her to stay with the dairy manager while he was
away: the farm was her home, she wouldn’t have felt as comfortable at the holiday home for pets behind Uncle Enock’s work.

If Petros joined their family, Benedict would do everything he could to make him feel at home.

Eh!
If Petros joined their family, Petros would be the eldest boy. That would mean that things wouldn’t weigh quite so heavily on Benedict’s shoulders, and he would be able to
relax a little.

Relaxing a little into that thought, he surrendered in his battle against sleep.