Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (18 page)

My bum and mouth are raw and both begin to bleed.

Dad says, “We should have packed some Cokes.”

“And loo paper,” says Vanessa. She licks her finger and wipes the edges of my mouth with her moist fingertip. I loll back against her arm. She says, “Hold on, Chookies.” She strokes sweat-wet hair off my forehead and rocks me. “Hold on,” she tells me.

We have a radio in the Land Rover. Dad drives up to the top of a small rise overlooking the river and calls headquarters. The radio hisses and cackles.

“Devuli HQ, Devuli HQ, this is Devuli mobile. Do you read? Over.”

The radio squeaks, swoops,
“Wee-arrr-ooo.”

Dad calls again, but there is no answer.

Dad comes back to camp. “We’ll have to try again at seven, when they’re waiting for us.” We have been checking in every evening at seven to see if Mum has had the baby.

He says, “I’ll mix up some rehydration salts.” He stirs two level teaspoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of salt into a liter of boiled water. Vanessa holds up my head, and Dad feeds teaspoons of the liquid into my mouth. I start to retch; bile dribbles, bitter and stinging, down my chin.

At seven, Dad drives the Land Rover back up to the rise and radios again. “Bobo’s sick; vomiting and diarrhea. She’s too sick to move. If we try and move her . . . she won’t make it back. Any advice? Over.”

The ranch manager’s wife comes onto the radio. “Have her sip some salt, sugar, and water. You know the amounts? Over.”

“Affirmative. We’ve tried that. No go. Over.”

The manager’s wife is quiet. At last she replies, “Don’t know what to say, Tim.”

Dad slumps over the radio.

The next day Dad stays in camp with me instead of going out to herd wild cattle. I am feeling light-headed, losing the feeling of my body. When Dad pinches the skin on my arm, it stays puckered up in a tiny tent of skin. My feet are starting to swell. He tells Vanessa to keep on trying to feed me the rehydration salts. I keep vomiting. By late the next afternoon, I am too tired to keep my eyes open. Vanessa goes into the old ammunition box and finds a wrinkled orange, the last saved piece of fresh food in our store. She slices it open and comes back into the tent. “Here”—she presses a quarter of orange between my teeth—“suck on this.”

Dad says, “I don’t think she should eat fruit.”

Vanessa looks at him.

Dad hunches miserably. He lights a cigarette. “You’re right,” he says. “Might as well, hey. Try it.”

The orange juice trickles down my throat and falls into my empty, air-blown belly. It stays.

That night Dad feeds me a bowl of soft, watery sadza. He says, “Eat this. If this doesn’t plug you up, I don’t know what will.”

The mealie porridge sticks against my teeth and slides into my belly.

“One more bite.”

I swallow and take one more bite, then I say “Enough” and lie back on my cot and shut my eyes.

I can hear the men around the campfire singing softly, taking it in turns to pick up a tune, the rhythm as strong as blood in a body. The firelight flickers off the blue and orange tent in pale, dancing shapes and there is the sweet smell of the African bush, wood smoke, dust, sweat. My bones are so sharp and thin against the sleeping bag that they hurt me and I must cover my hip bones with my hands.

I make a vow never to leave Africa.

Meat

RANCH WORK

We’re running out of water again: the second tank of brackish, throat-clinging water from the river has nearly run out. Our tea has started to taste like the bottom of the water tank, metallic and singeing. It’s so hot, the bush feels narrow, slender, barely-hanging-on. Everything is still. We drive past impala and they barely flinch, shoulders hunched under the thin, fluttering shadows of thorn scrub. The only things moving are their little, alarm-flashing tails. Even the wild cattle are subdued by the heat. Dad has them in the kraal. They bleat weakly; their sound is dry and wispy, evaporating into the dust. There is a wood fire in which there are four branding irons, getting hot. And a kettle in which Dad is boiling water for tea.

Dad tells the men to push the cattle through the chases. They make a run at the cows. The cows stir; dust rises and is a blinding, blond mist. They begin to cry like foghorns. Dad says, “Bloody idiots.” And then “Stop!” These are lowveldt men, who have never herded cattle before. They are bush men. They can make fire by rubbing two sticks together and they can kill impala with a spear. They can snare rabbits and live off stagnant river wells. They can tell their way from one end of the ranch to the other in the dark by reading stars, but they cannot herd cattle.

They are herding cattle the way they would herd impala into a baobab-rope net. Waving arms, coming at a run, “Wooo-ooop!”

“Stop!”

The men stop. The dust settles. The cows are jittery now, ready to startle.

Dad says, “
Pole, pole,
eh?”

“Boss?”

“Slowly, slowly, catch a monkey.”

The men looked confused.

“Come on, Vanessa. Bobo. Let’s show them how to herd cows.”

We come at the cows slowly. “Dip-dip-dip-dip-dip,” we sing. The cows start to move forward. The herd leader—an old, scarred bull with a mean slant to his horns—is anxious. He looks over his shoulder and makes a sweeping, half-threatening gesture at Dad that could also be a halfhearted attempt to shoo a fly. Dad has him cornered. “Dip-dip-dip-dip.” Dad lowers his eyes, sticks a shoulder out and down: “Dip-dip-dip-dip.” The old bull begins to make his way into the races.

Dad won’t allow sticks, shouting. He won’t allow the cows to run. “Stress them, and they’ll drop their babies too early. They’ll lose weight. They’ll sicken and die.” Dad comes from the side, showing the cow his shoulders. He whistles gently. The cows stop looking panicked and they begin to move calmly toward the race. They have dumb cow faces on now, they will go anywhere. “Treat your cows nicely and they’ll treat you nicely,” says Dad.

Leopard skin—Devuli

CHARLIE CHILVERS

Dad knocks on the door. “Tea’s ready!” It’s still dark, not quite four o’clock. Dad has lit a candle in the bathroom and there is a paraffin lamp hissing bluely on the dining room table where Thompson has laid out tea. He has already put a basket in the car with our breakfast: boiled eggs; small twists of newspaper containing pinches of salt; slices of buttered bread; bananas; and a thermos flask of black coffee. The milk is in a small, separate plastic bottle.

Before five, we pile into the Land Rover and head for Mutare. Dad likes to get to town by nine in the morning, when the shops are just starting to open. Dad shops like a man who hates the exercise, spinning in and striding the aisles, paying with scribbled checks, and hurrying out, buckling and overladen with baked beans, candles, soap, oil, yeast, flour, engine oil, toilet paper enough to last a month or two. The young grocery clerks, who run from the stores in their aprons, anxious to help with the bags and boxes and earn a tip, are growled away. Vanessa and I are not allowed in the stores with Dad; we have to guard the car.

We eat lunch in the car, waiting for Dad while he flies around in Duly Motors or the Farmers’ Co-op yelling his orders, shouting his hellos and good-byes, waving over the back of his head as he leaves, and then we drive home so that we are back at seven or eight, in time for a warm beer and hot supper.

Today, the mourning dove is just starting to call as Dad starts the Land Rover.
“Wuwu-woo. Wuwu-woo.”
His lament is drowned out by the rattle of the Land Rover on the pitted, spiny road. We drive out of HQ (the sleepwalking watchman opens the gate for us and salutes blearily to a cloud of swallowing dust) and turn left into the faint glimmer of a sunrise, crawling over the bridge spanning the Devure River. Vanessa and I bump sleepily next to Dad. The Land Rover makes such a roar it is impossible to talk. My mind is empty of everything but the road ahead; the flashing baobabs; the droppings on the road which I silently acknowledge as having been left by impala, kudu, hyena (bright white, like bones on the road). At nine o’clock Dad shouts above the noise the engine is making, “Anyone hungry?” We nod together.

Dad pulls up under a baobab tree and switches off the engine. The sounds of the bush suddenly flood in on us. Hot, crackling, dry-bush sounds: crickets, doves, grasshoppers. Vanessa unpacks the picnic basket while I run around trying to find intact baobab pods so that we can crack open their hairy shells and suck the sour white powder off the seeds. The baboons have beaten me to it.

We each find a rock to sit on and a patch of shade to sit under. The cover of the baobab’s leafless branches is sparse. We eat quietly, dipping our peeled boiled eggs into the twists of salt and biting off hunks of buttered bread. Dad pours the coffee and hands us each a tin cup. The coffee is sweet and strong. We eat and drink without talking and then silently pack up the debris of our picnic before the mopane bees and wasps and ants are attracted. Dad lights a cigarette and Vanessa and I breathe deeply to catch the first, fresh breath of newly fired tobacco. He sits back down on his rock. Vanessa and I sit next to him. Vanessa is mindlessly drawing designs in the sand, tracing patterns. I lean my chin on my knees and watch ants bump against my bare toes, scuttle across the tops of my feet. I stroke a small stick in their path to watch them jolt out of their busy line, the line leading toward the few spare crumbs dropped on our picnic. I sigh happily.

The world looks better when your belly is full, brighter and more hopeful.

After Dad has done all the shopping and we are sweaty, sticking to the seat where flesh meets vinyl, he says, “Let’s see how Mum’s doing, hm?” Which is what Vanessa and I have been hoping for.

Mum is in bed, looking pale, almost gray, and too old to be having a baby. There is a woman in the bed next to her who had a baby girl the day before and the little girl is covered from head to toe in thick black hair like a baboon.

Afterward, in the car, Vanessa says, “
Ohmygod,
all that hair!”

“It’s called lumbago. It’s normal,” I say.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. I read it in a medical book.”

Dad says, “Lumbago is what old men get.”

“See?”

“Or something like that. Anyway, it’ll fall out.”

“How do you know?”

“I read it.”

“Maybe the mother’ll shave it.”

“I promise you, it’ll fall out.”

Vanessa says, “I hope our baby isn’t a hairy baboon.”

Mum holds us close to her, a woman thirsty for her children, and breathes deeply, almost drinking us. And then she wrinkles her nose and says, “Whew! When was the last time you two washed your hair?”

Vanessa and I look at each other. Dad hates hospitals and he’s self-conscious about the woman with the new baby in the bed next to Mum’ s. He’s terrified she might start breast-feeding.

He says, “Grub all right in here, Tub?”

Mum says, “When was the last time the girls washed their hair?”

“I don’t know. They’re old enough to wash their own hair, aren’t they?”

“You have to supervise them.”

“In the bath?”

“Yes, Tim. In the bath. Or get Judith to stay late.” Mum sighs and presses herself back on her pillows.

Vanessa says, “It’s okay, Mum, really. We’ll wash our hair. Dad doesn’t need to watch.”

Vanessa has boobs now. She stands in front of the only mirror in our house, which is in the bathroom, and jumps up to catch fleeting, bopping glimpses of them. Once she stood on the washing basket, to get a glimpse of her boobs in the mirror without having to flop up and down, but the lid fell through before she could get a good look.

“They’re nice,” I assure her. “Quite big.”

She says scornfully, “What do
you
know?” She adds, “You have holes in your knickers.”

Which is true.

“And you don’t sit with your legs together, so everyone can see you have holes in your knickers. And they’re
grauby.
”

“What are
grauby
?”

“Your knickers. They’re all gray and holey.”

“Well . . .” I am close to tears. “They’re handed down from you,” I say, “that’s why. You get new knickers and I have to get your old knickers when you’ve
peed
in them for three years.”

“I don’t pee in my knickers.”

“Ja, ja.”

Vanessa shuts her eyes at me in exquisite pain and sighs deeply.

And then Mum notices our fingernails and says, “For heaven’s sake, Tim, no wonder Bobo got diarrhea.”

I say, “Mum, can I feel the baby?” I stretch out my hand, ready to put it on her belly.

“No,” says Mum irritably. She sighs again, like she’s on the edge of screaming or crying. “Have you been riding?”

“Every day when we haven’t been camping.”

“Good girl. Wear your riding hat.”

“I will.”

And then to Vanessa, “Are you drawing?”

Vanessa nods.

Mum closes her eyes. We kiss her cheek. “Have the baby soon,” I say.

Vanessa says, “I’ll get the baby’s room ready.”

Dad says, “Pecker up, Tub.”

We leave Mutare and now we’re on the strip road leading home. All of us miserable, lonely without Mum. We don’t want to wash our hair alone and have no one to tell us to cut our fingernails. We want Mum to come home. Our want floods the inside of the Land Rover and spills out behind us with the diesel fumes.

It’s past the place where Dad needs to pay attention to the road—there hasn’t been any other traffic for miles and miles—when we see the white woman hitchhiking.

“A hijacker!” says Vanessa.

“It’s a lady.”

“We can’t leave her there,” says Dad, stomping out his cigarette in the spilling ashtray above the gear stick. He pulls up. The woman, who has been bent over an ambitiously swollen backpack, looks up at us, pushes a fringe of clean blond hair out of her eyes, and smiles. “Hi,” she says, her voice flat with Australia (dust, boomerangs, kangaroos, convicts, eucalyptus, sheep), “I’m Charlie Chilvers.”

Dad says, “Budge up, kids.”

Vanessa and I squash together.

“Where are you going?”

Charlie Chilvers says, “Wherever you’re going, mister,” and she smiles again and her smile is such a smile. Just so. A smile with nothing behind it. And her face is without worry or anxiety or anger or loss. Her face is hopeful and open and hungry for experience.

Dad says, “Hell, you don’t want to go where we’re going.”

“Where’s that?”

“To the dogs,” says Dad, “to the bloody dogs.”

Charlie laughs and climbs in. “Hi, kids,” she says.

Dad says, “Mind if I smoke?” I’ve never heard him ask anyone’s permission before, and it makes me stare at Charlie harder. She’s crisp and sharp-sweet, like the white under the green skin of a Granny Smith apple.

Charlie says, “Hell, no,” and I am already in love with her.

That night Charlie helps Vanessa and me wash our hair. She has strong, smooth, brown, muscled arms. By breakfast the next morning, it feels as if Charlie has been with us for years.

She says, “Who wants to go riding today?”

“I do, I do.”

Even Vanessa says, “Maybe.”

Dad says, “I’ll see you girls later. Charlie, you all right here?”

“This is great,” says Charlie. “It’s a luxury to be sitting still for a while.”

Every night we go to the manager’s house to get the phone call from Mutare General Hospital and Vanessa and I have to sit on the manager’s wife’s dining room chairs while Dad shouts down the line at the nurse. And the news is always the same. Mum’s fine, no baby.

Then one night Dad says, “What? Say again?” and we sit up.

“What? Dad! What?”

“Hold on!” shouts Dad. He puts his hand over the receiver and shushes us. “I can hardly hear. The line . . .”

So we hold our breath.

“A boy.”

“Weee-oooop!”

Dad puts his hand over the receiver again and tells us, “Hey, keep it down, you two! I can’t hear a thing.”

Vanessa says, “Let’s call him Richard.”

“Steven,” I say.

“How about Richard Steven?”

“Richard Steven Fuller,” I agree.

But Dad looks worried, almost cross. “Shhh.” He frowns at the manager’s wife.

She takes us out of the room. She looks worried and cross, too. It isn’t the look most people have when a new baby has just been born. She says, “Would you girls like some Milo?”

“No, thanks.”

But she makes us wait in the long, dark corridor (in which there are photos of her and her son and her husband standing next to various shiny, fat cows and woolly sheep).

“You wait here.”

Her dogs—a German shepherd and a Chihuahua—follow her into the kitchen. Vanessa and I don’t look at each other, we look at the photos of the ranch managers and all their prize animals. The door to the dining room is shut. I can’t hear Dad’s voice. I try putting my ear to the door.

Vanessa says, “Don’t.”

“I want to hear.”

“Look at these photos.” She points to a photo of the wife standing next to a ram.

“They don’t take very good care of their sheep now,” I say. The ranch sheep live in a pen near our house and they’re always dying of starvation and malnutrition when they’re not crippled with foot-rot. Dad won’t let me rescue them. He says, “It’s not your problem.”

“Look at those balls,” says Vanessa, pointing to the swinging hammock of the ram’s testicles.

Which makes me snort.

“Shhh.”

The wife brings us two cups of cold milk in which floats a crunchy layer of undissolved chocolate granules. She shows us the sitting room and points to the sofa. “You sit there.” She has enormous bosoms, which seem to have a life independent of her own. They are like two great, pointy globes sailing across the room at us, armored in a tight 1950s cotton farm dress. She sits opposite us in an armchair, watching us, her strong rancher’ s-wife hands on her knees. The ranch manager is sipping a brandy and Coke. He doesn’t say anything, either. I hate both these people. I think,
Leopard killers.

When Dad comes out of the dining room he looks tired, as if he’s been up all night, and his face is red. If I thought my dad cried I would have said he had been crying.

The manager says, “Brandy?” But the drink is offered medicinally, not in the form of celebration.

The Milo is making me feel sick.

Dad says, “Okay. Thanks.”

The manager goes to the drinks trolley and pours Dad a brandy.

“If you need help with the girls . . .” says the wife. “I mean, while you . . .”

Dad shakes his head. “We’ve got a hitchhiker staying. An Australian girl.”

“Oh, I wondered who that was. . . .”

“She can keep an eye on the girls.”

“Oh, that’ll be nice. Won’t that be nice?” asks the wife, turning her bosom and beaming it onto Vanessa and me. We nod miserably.

“Well, it’s better than nothing,” says the manager’s wife, her voice laced with irritation. “We must all make do and be brave, mustn’t we?”

I scowled at her and thought,
What do
you
have to be brave about?