When Hoopoes Go to Heaven (2 page)

Good. This one was still alive.

‘I need the jar,’ he said to Grace, who went to fetch the special one from the kitchen, the one with the red nail-polish X on its lid and another on its side so that it could never,
ever be confused with any other empty jar in the kitchen cupboard. He half-filled it from the cold tap at the basin, then bent to scoop up the tadpole in the special blue plastic sieve that could
never, ever be confused with either of the larger metal sieves that Mama used for making her cakes. As he tipped the tadpole from the sieve into the jar, Faith let out a little scream, and Grace
let out another as he handed her the dripping sieve.

Eh!
Girls? Uh-uh, he thought, tightening the lid on the jar.

He was a little taller now than Faith, whose solid, chubby body reminded him just slightly – and only sometimes – of a baby hippopotamus, while Grace, tall and long like a young
giraffe, towered over him. They were always screaming for him to come and save them from something harmless that wriggled or scuttled or slithered. But he didn’t mind, really. It made him
feel big and important, and he didn’t know what else could make him feel important when his age put him right in the middle of five siblings, or what else could make him feel big when he had
two older sisters who more or less ignored him.

It had been different before, back when he, Grace and Moses were still living with their first mama and baba in Mwanza, and even when they had first started living with Mama and Baba in Dar.
Grace had spent more time with him back then, back when she was still his only big sister. But ever since the two families had joined and Faith and Daniel had also come to stay, his two big sisters
only had time for each other. Neither of them really bothered with him much, except at times like this.

Rescuing gave him a special part to play in the family: if anybody ever needed rescuing, Benedict was their man. Okay, he was their boy – he was only just ten – but he felt like a
man when he was rescuing them. Sometimes he imagined himself in the special uniform of a rescuer, like a fireman or a paramedic, running towards his family in slow motion like on TV, saving them
from a huge natural disaster or a war or an evil, man-eating monster.

He showed the tadpole to Mama.

‘Well done,
shujaa wangu!
’ she said, calling him her hero in Swahili, the language they spoke when they were at home in Tanzania.

He beamed. Mama gave him her smile that said she was proud of him but he mustn’t bring what he had any closer.

She was sitting at the far end of the large dining table, putting the finishing touches to a cake for one of the ladies who worked with Baba at the ministry. That lady’s brothers and
sisters lived scattered throughout all four of Swaziland’s regions, and every Easter they all got together. This Easter it was the turn of Baba’s colleague to have them at her house in
Mbabane, here in the Hhohho region.

Mama’s cake for them looked like a big, round basket woven in strips of blue and green, filled with Easter eggs in a mix of brilliant colours.

‘It’s beautiful, Mama! Many more orders are going to come.’

Mama was piping bright patterns on to the eggs. ‘
Eh!
I hope so.’

‘When they see it, Mama! When they taste it!’

The sigh that came out of Mama was almost as loud as the sigh of steam that Benedict could hear from Titi’s iron in the kitchen. Putting down her icing syringe, Mama pulled at the neck of
her T-shirt to reach for one of the tissues that she kept tucked into her underwear, then she took off her glasses and began to polish the lenses. ‘When the first order came, that was what we
said.’ She shook her head as she spoke. ‘We said people will see how beautiful my cakes are. We said people will taste how delicious they are, and the orders will come.’ She put
her glasses back on and picked up her syringe again. ‘But that was a long time ago, Benedict. Three months! And this is only order number five.’

Putting his tadpole jar down on the table, Benedict pulled out one of the chairs and perched on the edge of it. ‘It will get better, Mama. When we first came here and we were worried about
making new friends, remember, Mama?’

‘Uh-huh.’ Mama piped some bright pink on to chocolate brown.

‘You and Baba, you told us all just give it time. And we gave it time, and now we have friends. All of us, Mama, even me. If you just give it some time, your business will get
customers.’

Mama stopped piping and looked up at him with a smile. Then she saw the tadpole jar on the table. ‘
Eh!
Benedict!’

Scrambling to his feet, he scooped up the jar. ‘Sorry, Mama.’

She was telling him to put his shoes on before he dealt with the tadpole when her cell-phone rang. Adjusting her glasses, she looked at the small screen.

‘Oh, please let this be a customer,’ she said, half to herself and half to Benedict. It was what she always said these days when she didn’t recognise the number. Shooing him
away with her hand, she pressed the button to answer and put the phone to her ear, saying in her most professional voice, ‘Good afternoon, Angel Tungaraza speaking.’

Briefly showing the tadpole to Titi as she ironed one of his sisters’ school uniforms, Benedict left the house through the kitchen door, sitting on the step to slip his bare feet into his
old pair of shoes that he kept out there. As he began to push his way through the trees and bushes on his way up the slope of the hill, he held the jar containing the tadpole in one hand and
crossed the fingers of the other, hoping that the person who had phoned Mama was indeed a customer. He couldn’t help feeling that it was his fault that her cake business wasn’t doing so
well here.

Okay, it wasn’t
all
his fault; there were other reasons, too. Number one, Swaziland wasn’t like Rwanda where there had been lots of business for Mama. Here there were quite a
few shops that sold cakes, and Swazis were already used to buying their cakes from there. Number two, not so many people knew about Mama’s cakes because she had to make them in secret. The
law said that if you were married to somebody who had come from outside Swaziland to work here, you weren’t allowed to work here yourself.

Reason number three was something Benedict already knew about from school. If you came here from another country in Africa, you were called a
shangaan
or a
kwerekwere
, and those
weren’t nice things to be because it meant that you were going to steal jobs from Swazis. Lots of people didn’t want to order a cake from a
shangaan
or a
kwerekwere
; they
wanted to give their money to Swazis instead.

But it was reason number four that ate at him. The house where they were living, which Baba had found for them when he had flown here for two weeks before going back home to Tanzania to bring
the family in the red Microbus with the trailer behind; this house that Benedict loved so much on account of its garden full of birds and butterflies, its forest on the slope above and its dairy
cows on the slope below; this house Baba had chosen especially for him. And this house was out of the way – very close to Mbabane, the capital city where Baba worked, but on the slopes of the
Malagwane Hill that led down from the capital towards the Ezulwini Valley, and off the highway on a small road that buses or taxis never needed to take. So if you didn’t have your own car or
bicycle, or if you were too lazy for a long walk, it wasn’t easy for you to get to the house to order a cake from Mama.

Baba had told the family that he had chosen the house because it was better not to live right in Mbabane, where there was a lot of crime because people didn’t have jobs. But when nobody
else was listening, Baba had told Benedict that he had chosen the house especially for him.

Benedict uncrossed the fingers that were hoping for a customer for Mama, and used that hand to balance himself against the big silver water-tank for the Tungarazas’ house as he stepped
over the pipe that connected it to the water-tank for the other house. Then he followed another pipe where it snaked up the hill through the undergrowth, all the way up to where the trees gave way
to grasses and the ground flattened out onto a plateau.

The minute he emerged from the trees, the sounds of the traffic on the Malagwane Hill reached him: trucks heavy with logs from pine forest plantations shifting gears and applying brakes on the
steep slope down into the valley; buses heavy with people straining to make it up the steep slope to the capital. People said that the hill was much safer now on account of the brand new highway
that had two lanes for going up and another two for coming down. They said that before, when there used to be just one lane in each direction, there were so many accidents that the
Guinness Book
of World Records
had called the Malagwane Hill the most dangerous stretch of road in the whole entire world. Mama said it was because drivers were impatient, but Baba said it was because
drivers were drunk.

The ground near the edge of the plateau was wet and muddy. The small dam there that supplied water to the two houses was where the dairy cows came to drink when they were grazing on the pasture
just the beyond the clump of trees, and Benedict could see that they had been drinking at this edge of the dam earlier that day: the mud that was now sucking at his shoes was patterned with
hoof-prints and splattered with large rounds of fresh
kinyezi.

Grace and Faith didn’t know about the cows and their
kinyezi
, and Benedict wasn’t going to tell. It was part of Titi’s job of helping Mama with the house and the
children to make sure that every drop of water they drank had been boiled for long enough to kill any germs, so nobody was going to get sick. But if his sisters ever found out that cows and
cow
-kinyezi
had been in their bathwater, there would be a lot more screaming than Benedict could ever rescue the family from.

As he squatted at the edge of the water and emptied the tadpole out of the jar, he wondered how long it was going to take Grace and Faith to understand that a tadpole was a baby frog that
hadn’t yet lost its tail and grown its legs, and to realise that if a tadpole sometimes slipped into the pipe that led to the water-tank that led to the house, it had to mean that they were
sharing their bathwater with frogs.
Eh
, the frogs made so much noise at night! Where did his sisters think the frogs lived?

On the plateau, the pipes leading to the two water-tanks were covered over by cement to protect them from the cows’ hooves, until they met in a thicker pipe that travelled under the water
towards the centre of the dam, where there was a pump for just in case. Just in case hadn’t happened yet on account of good rains, but if it did happen, there was a narrow wooden bridge that
led to the pump, and a person could walk to the end of that bridge and switch the pump on.

Benedict had wanted to walk to the end himself, but much to his shame, he hadn’t been able to manage even a single step. There were gaps between the planks of wood, small gaps, gaps big
enough for only a finger to slip through, but gaps that Benedict could imagine his whole body slipping through and being lost forever.
Eh!
He knew it was impossible, he knew that imagining
such a thing made him seem such a very small boy, but still his stomach knotted itself in fear whenever he thought of trying again.

Right at the bottom of the hill, where the long driveway began at the dairy farm buildings before winding its way up towards the other house and the Tungarazas’, there was a cattle-grid
across the ground – smooth metal strips with gaps in between – that the cows were afraid to cross. Benedict didn’t know if they worried that they might fall through the gaps, but
it kept them from wandering off the property and into the road where they might get an accident. What he did know, without even trying, was that it would keep him on the property, too: while going
over it in a vehicle held no fear for him, he wouldn’t be able to cross it on foot.

Perhaps the gaps in the bridge to the middle of the dam were to keep the cows off it, too.

A low rumble of distant thunder made something move in the long grass far to the right of the dam, and he saw a skinny young man stand up. He must have been squatting there all the time, so
quiet and still that Benedict hadn’t noticed him. It was Petros, who helped with the cows and lived at the dairy below the other house. The Tungaraza children weren’t supposed to talk
to Petros because he smoked a lot – cigarettes with a funny smell that he made for himself – and people said that he wasn’t quite right in his head.

Benedict had never spoken to Petros, but he liked him anyway. He liked the way Petros could be still enough to make himself invisible. He had once seen him standing next to the cowshed –
only, even though he had been looking right at the cowshed, he hadn’t seen him at all. Not until Petros had raised his hand to give a small wave of hello. Petros had a way of blending in to
wherever he was so that nobody noticed him, just like a chameleon did, and that was something that Benedict sometimes tried to do himself. If you blended in, nobody noticed that you didn’t
belong.

Petros gave him a small wave now, and Benedict stood up from the water’s edge to return it. Then Petros made a loud, whooping, whistling noise that brought his dog and a number of cows
from the field beyond the trees. Benedict watched as the cows ambled slowly towards Petros’s repeated call, their udders heavy with milk, speeding up only as a louder, closer clap of thunder
rumbled through the darkening sky. When Petros was sure that the full count of cows was there, he gave Benedict another small wave before taking the cows to the far end of the clearing and leading
them, with his dog, along their well-trodden path through the trees to the shed below the other house.

Benedict headed home himself, down his own path. Mama didn’t want the children to be out when a storm was on its way, and Benedict knew that she was right to worry. Daniel and Moses, his
two younger brothers, were in the same class at school, and a girl in their class had lost her mother and her baby sister to lightning just last month. The mother had been carrying her baby on her
back when lightning had struck them, and now they were both late, and the girl from his brothers’ class had never had a father, so now she’d gone to live in Siteki with her uncle.