Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (8 page)

Van

VANESSA

Anyway, Vanessa will save us if we ever get attacked. She is the conversation-stopping beauty in our family. Some old men try and kiss her and ask about her boobs and one of them did to her what Fanie Vorster did to me, only it was worse. But Vanessa can take care of herself. The man was called Roly Swift and he lived with his wife in Umtali. Mum and Dad left us with Roly Swift one morning while they had work to do. Roly’s wife was with Mum and Dad who said, “Be good for Mr. Swift while we’re gone.”

Roly was drunk before lunch, and he started to follow Vanessa and me around the house and he kissed me and tried to squash me up against the passage wall. Vanessa said, “Leave my sister alone.” Roly laughed at Vanessa and then he tried to kiss her and put his hands under her skirt and Vanessa pushed him away but Roly only tried to hold her tighter. He was laughing although the look on his face was not happy and he was doing something under Vanessa’s skirt which made her face go red.

She said, “Leave me alone!” There were tears in her voice.

Roly pulled Vanessa into a bedroom from which I heard the sounds of scuffle, and then Vanessa emerged, her hair untidy and her clothes in disarray. She grabbed me by the hand. “Quickly, let’s run.”

We ran outside.

Vanessa said, “Come.”

“But what about Mr. Swift?”

“What about Mr. Swift? Nothing about Mr. Swift.”

She marched me across the road and knocked on the door of a little white neighboring house.

“We need to stay here,” she told the astonished lady who opened the door.

The astonished lady let us into her house reluctantly. I was holding Vanessa’s hand.

Vanessa cleared her throat and said in a big, brave voice, “We haven’t had lunch yet.”

We were fed lunch and allowed to stay in the white neighboring house until Mum and Dad came back and then we crept over to their car, which was parked in the Swifts’ driveway, keeping our heads down—as if we were under attack—so that Roly wouldn’t see us. Mum and Dad were talking to Roly in brightly natural voices as if Everything Was Normal even though Roly had to say that we had run next door and Everything Wasn’t Normal. But he didn’t say why we had run away.

“Ah,” said Dad, when he saw us suddenly appear in the car, “there you are.”

There we were. There was a bad taste in my mouth and a sick feeling in my stomach. We climbed into the car, we sullied goods, and Mum and Dad drove stiffly away, grinning at Roly like skeletons. Vanessa tried to tell Mum and Dad what had happened and they said, “Don’t exaggerate.” Vanessa has a way of looking far away when Mum and Dad won’t listen. She looks far away now, as if she doesn’t care about anything.

She has inherited our paternal grandmother’s enormous eyes; a pale, almost glassy blue and she can hood her eyes like a cat and go very still and deep and distant. She has very long, blond hair, which she wears in a wrist-thick braid down her back. She has full lips and a very proud, very African carriage (shoulders held back, languid steps, bordering on lazy) and she has stopped listening. Like an African.

Mum says, “Why don’t you bloody people listen?” to the cook and the maid and the groom and the gardener and they are silent and you can tell they are not listening even now.

Vanessa and I, like all the kids over the age of five in our valley, have to learn how to load an FN rifle magazine, strip and clean all the guns in the house, and, ultimately, shoot-to-kill. If we are attacked and Mum and Dad are injured or killed, Vanessa and I will have to know how to defend ourselves. Mum and Dad and all our friends say, “Vanessa’s a Dozy Arab.” But I know that they are wrong. Mum and Dad say that Vanessa won’t be able to shoot a gun. They say that she’s too placid. They don’t know Vanessa. She’s not a Dozy Arab. She’s a Quiet-Waiting-Alert Arab. She’s an Angry Arab.

I want to be like an army guy, so I clean and load my dad’s FN and my mum’s Uzi with enthusiasm, but the guns are too heavy for me to be anything but a stick insect dangling from the end of a chattering barrel. I have to prop the gun up against a wall to shoot it, or its kick will knock me over. I am allowed to shoot my mum’s pistol, but even that cracks my wrist, and my whole arm jolts with the shock of its report.

Vanessa has to be forced to strip and clean the gun. She is slow and unwilling even when Dad loses his temper and shouts at her and says, “
Fergodsake
don’t just stand there, do something! Bunch-of-bloody-women-in-the-house.”

Vanessa gets her cat-hooded, African deadpan, not-listening eyes.

“You have to learn how this thing is made,” says Dad. “Come on, take the bloody thing apart.”

Van

Vanessa moves slowly, reluctance personified.

“Now you must put it back together,” says Dad, looking at the gun.

Vanessa blinks at Dad. She says, “Bobo can do it.”

“No. You must learn.”

“I’ll do it. I’ll do it,” I say. I want to do it to show my dad that I’m as good as a boy. I don’t want to be a bunch-of-bloody-women-in-the-house.

“Vanessa must learn.”

But Vanessa resolutely refuses to put the thing back together again. She has it in pieces on a sheet in the sitting room and she won’t make it right again. Dad gives up.

I say, “I’ll do it. I’ll do it.” Dad is as impatient with my overeagerness as he is with Vanessa’s undereagerness. We can’t win.

Dad says, “Go on, then.”

I am tongue-sticking-out and trying-to-do-it-right. I put the gun back together.

Set up at the end of the garden, on the other side of our scorpion-infested pool, is an enormous cardboard cutout of a crouched, running terrorist, kitted out in Russian-issue uniform and brandishing an AK-47; around his heart is a series of rings, like a diagram in a biology book. The baboons that steal the corn and run from the gong in the watchman’s hut look like this terrorist, with a long dog’s nose and a short, square forehead.

Dad shows Vanessa what to do. He crouches down to her height. “Lift the barrel of the gun onto the wall like this. Steady yourself, legs apart. Hold your chin away from the butt, squeeze the trigger—count one-Zambezi, two-Zambezi—release.” I hold my hands over my ears and shut my eyes. The sound of the gun cracks the air and hits me above the belly. That’s where gun sounds go, thumping the air out of you with their shout.

Dad hands Vanessa the gun. “The kick will knock your teeth out if you’re not careful,” he says. “Use the wall to hold the gun. All right? Don’t worry about hitting the target, just try not to put a hole in the swimming-pool wall.” We laugh.

I said, “
Ja,
Van, don’t shoot a scorp, hey. Ha, ha. Or a frog.”

Dad says, “That’s right. Let’s just see if you can fire off a round without falling backwards.”

Vanessa takes the gun and her eyes go surface-cold.

“No, not like that,” says Dad. “Here, use the wall.” He moves behind her to adjust her arms. He wants to get the gun onto the top of the wall, but before he can touch her Vanessa squeezes the trigger. Dad steps back, startled. The gun kicks up. Mum says, “The child will break her jaw.” Vanessa is not listening to us.

She shoots at the target again. She has shot the running baboon-terrorist once clean through the nose and once clean through the heart. She hands the gun back to Dad.

“Good shot, Van!” we are all shouting at the same time.

“Where did you learn to do that?” says Dad.

I am hopping up and down and pointing at the target. “You killed him! Look, you killed him!”

Vanessa’s expression stays flat and blank, but she looks at the target for a long time. And then she turns away from us with a slight frown and I want to hang on her hand but she shrugs me off, impatient.

I say, “
Jeez
man, Van. You donnered him. You killed him one time!”

Mum says, “Don’t say that, Bobo.”

“What?”

“Don’t say
‘donnered.’
It isn’t proper English. It’s slang.”

“Okay.” And then, “
Jeez
man, Van!”

Vanessa looks resigned and not at all triumphant. I wish she would smile and be pleased about shooting the terrorist.

I say, “Let me have a go, hey. Can I have a go? Look, Van, watch me.”

But she has turned away and is going inside. A couple of the dogs follow her.

Mum, Dad, and Bobo

MISSIONARIES,
1975

My second sister—my mother’s fourth child—was born on 28 August 1976.

Early in October 1975, when the first rains had already come but were still deciding what sort of season to create (overfull, with floods and swollen, dead cows in our river, or a sparse and teasing drought), a small plague of two missionaries descended upon us.

They had driven from Salisbury, through Umtali, and down to the valley, to the farthest house they could find with people in it in the whole of Rhodesia, which was Mum and me lying on her bed at two o’clock in the afternoon listening to Sally Donaldson on the radio. Dad is away in the bush, fighting gooks. Vanessa is at boarding school. Mum and I are waiting for
Women’s Hour
to come on.

It’s eyeball-burning hot. I lie on my belly and let my legs wag lazily back and forth, my head in the crook of my arms where my forehead is pressing a sweaty band into the skin. Mum is reading to herself. It is so hot that the flamboyant tree outside cracks to itself, as if already anticipating how it will feel to be on fire. The dogs are splayed on the floor, wherever they can find bare cement, panting and creating wet pools with their dripping tongues. Our throats are papered with the heat; we sip at cups of cold, milky tea just enough to make spit in our mouths. The sky and air are so thick with wildfire smoke that we can’t see the hills, they are distant, gauzy shapes, the same color as the haze, only denser. The color is hot, yellow-gray, a breathless, breath-sucking color. Swollen clouds scrape purple, fat bellies on the tops of the surrounding hills.

Suddenly, there is the claw-scrabbling alarm of dogs, raised from sodden, deep, two-o’clock-in-the-afternoon heat into full alarm. They rush outside, into the yard, kicking up a cloud of terra-cotta behind them, barking with their thirsty, hoarse summer voices.

“What now?” says Mum. She slings her Uzi over her shoulder, checks that the safety latch is on (although she keeps her finger against the latch, prepared to change that setting at a moment’s notice), and scuffles her feet into the thick, black sandals, made from strips of used tractor tires, which we both wear. We call them
manutellas.
They are good farm shoes. There is not a thorn in Africa that can get through their soles, and they are cool in the heat and it doesn’t matter if they get wet, muddy, or covered in oil. Their only fault, as farm shoes, is that they leave our ankles and the tops of our feet exposed, the place where a snake is most likely to bite.

“Right before
Women’s Hour,
too,” says Mum.

The dogs are still barking. Especially Bubbles, who is an unfortunate mix, half Labrador and half Rhodesian ridgeback. He’s the color of a lion, with lion-yellow eyes and a mean, snaky way of walking, like a lion. Bubbles can kill baboons. He’s the only dog I know that can kill a baboon. Baboons are huge, as big as a small man when they stand on their back legs. And they have long, pointy teeth and they work in troops. They flip their prey onto its back and tear its stomach out. Bubbles runs away from us sometimes for a day or two and comes back leg-hanging exhausted and with scratches on his belly, but otherwise very pleased with himself. There are dead baboons in his wake.

The fox terrier, the dachshund, the German shepherd, the two black Labradors, and the springer spaniels come back into the house to see what is taking us so long. Bubbles alone keeps up a fierce rally of deep-throated barks outside.

Mum calls, “I’m coming, I’m coming. Who is it?”

I follow her outside. The dogs scramble for position behind me.

A vision: two men climbing out of a white station wagon. They are wearing button-down white shirts tucked neatly into pulled-up-high creased shorts, plus pulled-up socks and proper lace-up shoes. They have dark glasses but they are not wearing hats. I don’t know many men who wear dark glasses. The men I know squint into the sun. If they have sunglasses, they use them to chew on while they stare into the distance, into the hope-of-rain, or the threat-of-terrorists, or the possibility-of-a-kudu.

Mum shades her eyes from the sun and walks slowly, suspiciously, toward the car. I stay behind her. Mum’s finger plays lightly over the top of the safety catch on her gun. “Yes? Can I help you?” We can’t trust anyone anymore. Not even white men.

It is only then we see that both men are armed with thick shiny black Bibles.

Mum shuffles her gun behind her back. “Oh shit, Jesus creepers,” she mutters, and then, more loudly, “Hello.”

The men approach. Our pack of dogs growl, hackles raised, around their ankles, swarming. One of the men, blond and overweight (overweight for the heat, overweight for a war, overweight for a poor farm this far from the city), comes forward, his Bible outstretched, hand extended. He introduces himself and his partner: “And we’re here to tell you about the Lord.” He’s American. I start to giggle.

Mum sighs. “Well, come in for a cup of tea, anyway,” she says.

The other man is fat, too. As he turns to follow Mum into the house I see that his shorts have gathered into the crack of his bum; his legs extend baggy and gray and hairy like elephant’s legs from the too-pulled-up shorts. His shirt is stuck to his back with sweat, two wet rings extend from under his armpits. I giggle some more.

Mum says, “Bobo, go and ask July to make us a tray of tea, please.”

I find July asleep on the cool, damp patch of cement behind the laundry.

“There are some bosses from God,” I tell him, poking his rib with the toe of my
manutella,
“come all the way from town for tea.”

“Eh?” July jumps to his feet.

“Faga moto,”
I tell July. Which means, literally, “Put fire,” but figuratively, “Get moving.”

July glares at me. “You are too cheeky,” he tells me.

“Hurry! Hey! Hurry. They are waiting.” I am eager to make the most of our afternoon’s surprise. We don’t have fresh visitors very often. Especially not since the land mines and ambushes got worse.

“Tea’s coming,” I say, and sit on the floor with my back to the dead-ash-smelling fireplace where I can observe everyone well. The sitting room is stifling: the sofa and chairs breathe out heat; humid, heat-saturated air billows in the windows. The dogs start to pace restlessly in front of the missionaries, who are sitting in the dogs’ chairs. The fox terrier glares; the Labrador-ridgeback is growling softly, looking baboon-murderer indignant. The springer spaniels make repeated attempts to fling themselves up on the visitors’ laps, and the missionaries fight them off, in an offhand, I’m-not-really-pushing-your-dog-off-my-lap-I-love-dogs-really way.

The blond American says, “We’ve come to share the teachings of Christ with you.”

“How kind.” Mum pauses. “We’re Anglican.”

Which makes the missionaries glance at each other.

July brings the tea. He smells strongly of green laundry soap and of freshly smoked
gwayi
—a raw, coarsely chopped native tobacco. The cups are greasy and unmatched, and all but one are chipped. Mum hands out the chipped mugs to the guests and to me; she keeps the best mug for herself. On a plate are slabs of homemade bread with slices of curling butter and cucumbers balanced on them. The cucumbers have been liberally sprinkled with salt and they are beading water.

Mum asks me, “Will you hand out the sugar?”

The missionaries sit with their cups of tea balanced in mismatched saucers on their laps, where there is a good chance a zealous spaniel might, at any moment, send the cup flying. I offer them sugar and then a slice of salty cucumber and bread, which they are too polite to refuse and too polite to know how to eat. The bread is days old and crumbling; the dough for the bread was a mix of corn and wheat to make the flour last longer. The visitors are disarmed. They can’t get to their Bibles now, what with the tea and the dogs and the toppling bread.

The tea makes us sweat. Mum says that’s why tea is good for you. If you drink a cup of tea and eat something salty in the middle of the afternoon, you won’t get heat exhaustion. The sweat will cool us down. The sweat runs down the back of my legs, tickling. The salt will replace the salt we lose in sweat. I munch my bread; the dogs become more frantic in their efforts to climb onto our laps. They lick crumbs from my hands. I pour a little tea out in a saucer for the dachshund.

“I’ve never seen a dog drink tea,” says Elephant Bottom.

Mum fixes the man with cold surprise. “How extraordinary,” she says.

The missionaries wilt.

Mum finishes her tea. “Anyone for a second cup?”

The missionaries smile, shake their heads. The blond one clears his throat. He is starting to squirm on the sofa, like dogs when they’re rubbing worms out of their bum on a rug, or on the furniture, which we call sailing. “Oh, look, Mum, Shea’s sailing!” And Mum says, “I’ll have to worm the whole lot of them again.” The Elephant Bottom starts to writhe, too. They put down their cups of tea, disburden themselves of their pecked-at salty-cucumber bread, and stand up, as if to leave. Already. I am disappointed. I was hoping for battle. I was hoping to see these two men
fight the good fight.

“Well, thank you . . .” says Elephant Bottom, and makes for the door, followed by his partner. Mum and I notice, at the same time, that both men have pink welting fleabites down the backs of their soft, white, fatty legs. I start giggling again.

Mum has tried and tried to kill the fleas, but fleas are as tough as dirt. Fleas cling to dog hair until the last moment and drown like flecks of pepper in the scum on top of the milky poisonous wash that Mum mixes up in a drum in the backyard once a month. A few brave, knowing fleas jump onto Mum’s arms while she’s washing the dogs (holding them by the scruffs of their necks with her lips pressed together so that she won’t get any of the poison in her mouth when the dogs struggle and shake) but she crushes them between her nails and they pop and die, usually before they can bite her. I have fleabites up and down my arms and on my legs because of the dogs; they are small, familiar red bumps—almost friendly—and are less irritating than the swollen lumps from mosquitoes, or the burning place where a tick has bitten and which needs to be watched in case of infection. My fleabites are tiny, the kind of bites you get when you are used to fleas so they don’t bother you so much anymore. The missionaries’ bites—even new as they are—already look irritated and itchy and plaguing because these men are evidently not accustomed to fleas.

Mum says, “So nice of you to drop by.” And regrets it instantly because the missionaries seize on this: “Will you pray with us before we leave?”

So we gather in the red-dusty yard with the dogs, who are now restless for their afternoon walk, milling around at our feet. The missionaries hold out their hands. “Let’s hold hands,” says the blond one.

Mum looks icy, but she holds out her hands. She says, “Hold their hands, Bobo.”

I slouch with embarrassment, but take the offered hands reluctantly. We hardly ever hold hands in our family and we never hold hands with strangers.
Sis,
man. Mum is glaring at me fiercely. From my vantage point, I can see July and Violet and the gardener gathered under the kitchen door and peering out at us with undisguised amusement. Violet is giggling behind her hand.

The men start to pray. They pray and pray for ages. Our hands swap sweat, start slipping, and are reclutched. I cannot concentrate on the words the men are saying because I am thinking how slithering our hands have become. Elephant Bottom says, “Would you like to pray?” It is a few moments before I realize that he is talking to me.

“What?”

“You can ask God for anything you want.”

I speak quickly, before my chance to communicate directly with God is taken away. “A baby brother or sister,” I say. “I want a new baby in the family. Please.”

Everyone laughs uncomfortably except me.

At that moment Bubbles lifts his leg on the blond missionary’s leg and lets forth a thick yellow stream of alpha-male-dog pee and our prayer session direct-line-to-God is abruptly terminated.

Ten months later, Olivia Jane Fuller is born in the hospital in Umtali. Which goes to show, some prayers are answered. Olivia is my fault. She is the direct result of my prayer. I am secretly, ecstatically proud.

In January 1977, when Olivia is five months old, I join Vanessa at boarding school.