Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Map

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  TO MUM, DAD, AND VANESSA

  AND TO THE MEMORY OF ADRIAN, OLIVIA, AND RICHARD

  with love

  Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight,

  For mother will be there.

  —A. P. HERBERT

  Bobo loading the FN

  RHODESIA,

  1976

  Mum says, “Don’t come creeping into our room at night.”

  They sleep with loaded guns beside them on the bedside rugs. She says, “Don’t startle us when we’re sleeping.”

  “Why not?”

  “We might shoot you.”

  “Oh.”

  “By mistake.”

  “Okay.” As it is, there seems a good enough chance of getting shot on purpose. “Okay, I won’t.”

  So if I wake in the night and need Mum and Dad, I call Vanessa, because she isn’t armed. “Van! Van, hey!” I hiss across the room until she wakes up. And then Van has to light a candle and escort me to the loo, where I pee sleepily into the flickering yellow light and Van keeps the candle high, looking for snakes and scorpions and baboon spiders.

  Mum won’t kill snakes because she says they help to keep the rats down (but she rescued a nest of baby mice from the barns and left them to grow in my cupboard, where they ate holes in the family’s winter jerseys). Mum won’t kill scorpions either; she catches them and lets them go free in the pool and Vanessa and I have to rake the pool before we can swim. We fling the scorps as far as we can across the brown and withering lawn, chase the ducks and geese out, and then lower ourselves gingerly into the pool, whose sides wave green and long and soft and grasping with algae. And Mum won’t kill spiders because she says it will bring bad luck.

  I tell her, “I’d say we have pretty rotten luck as it is.”

  “Then think how much worse it would be if we killed spiders.”

  I have my feet off the floor when I pee.

  “Hurry up, man.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “It’s like Victoria Falls.”

  “I really had to go.”

  I have been holding my pee for a long, long time and staring out the window to try and guess how close it is to morning. Maybe I could hold it until morning. But then I notice that it is the deep-black-sky quiet time of night, which is the halfway time between the sun setting and the sun rising when even the night animals are quiet—as if they, like day animals, take a break in the middle of their work to rest. I can’t hear Vanessa breathing; she has gone into her deep middle-of-the-night silence. Dad is not snoring nor is he shouting in his sleep. The baby is still in her crib but the smell of her is warm and animal with wet nappy. It will be a long time until morning.

  Then Vanessa hands me the candle—“You keep boogies for me now”—and she pees.

  “See, you had to go, too.”

  “Only ‘cos you had to.”

  There is a hot breeze blowing through the window, the cold sinking night air shifting the heat of the day up. The breeze has trapped midday scents; the prevalent cloying of the leach field, the green soap which has spilled out from the laundry and landed on the patted-down red earth, the wood smoke from the fires that heat our water, the boiled-meat smell of dog food.

  We debate the merits of flushing the loo.

  “We shouldn’t waste the water.” Even when there isn’t a drought we can’t waste water, just in case one day there is a drought. Anyway, Dad has said, “Steady on with the loo paper, you kids. And don’t flush the bloody loo all the time. The leach field can’t handle it.”

  “But that’s two pees in there.”

  “So? It’s only pee.”

  “Agh sis, man, but it’ll be smelly by tomorrow. And you peed as much as a horse.”

  “It’s not my fault.”

  “You can flush.”

  “You’re taller.”

  “I’ll hold the candle.”

  Van holds the candle high. I lower the toilet lid, stand on it and lift up the block of hardwood that covers the cistern, and reach down for the chain. Mum has glued a girlie-magazine picture to this block of hardwood: a blond woman in few clothes, with breasts like naked cow udders, and she’s all arched in a strange pouty contortion, like she’s got backache. Which maybe she has, from the weight of the udders. The picture is from Scope magazine.

  We aren’t allowed to look at Scope magazine.

  “Why?”

  “Because we aren’t those sorts of people,” says Mum.

  “But we have a picture from Scope magazine on the loo lid.”

  “That’s a joke.”

  “Oh.” And then, “What sort of joke?”

  “Stop twittering on.”

  A pause. “What sort of people are we, then?”

  “We have breeding,” says Mum firmly.

  “Oh.” Like the dairy cows and our special expensive bulls (who are named Humani, Jack, and Bulawayo).

  “Which is better than having money,” she adds.

  I look at her sideways, considering for a moment. “I’d rather have money than breeding,” I say.

  Mum says, “Anyone can have money.” As if it’s something you might pick up from the public toilets in OK Bazaar Grocery Store in Umtali.

  “Ja, but we don’t.”

  Mum sighs. “I’m trying to read, Bobo.”

  “Can you read to me?”

  Mum sighs again. “All right,” she says, “just one chapter.” But it is teatime before we look up from The Prince and the Pauper.

  The loo gurgles and splutters, and then a torrent of water shakes down, spilling slightly over the bowl.

  “Sis, man,” says Vanessa.

  You never know what you’re going to get with this loo. Sometimes it refuses to flush at all and other times it’s like this, water on your feet.

  I follow Vanessa back to the bedroom. The way candlelight falls, we’re walking into blackness, blinded by the flame of the candle, unable to see our feet. So at the same moment we get the creeps, the neck-prickling terrorist-under-the-bed creeps, and we abandon ourselves to fear. The candle blows out. We skid into our room and leap for the beds, our feet quickly tucked under us. We’re both panting, feeling foolish, trying to calm our breathing as if we weren’t scared at all.

  Vanessa says, “There’s a terrorist under your bed, I can see him.”

  “No you can’t, how can you see him? The candle
’s out.”

  “Struze fact.”

  And I start to cry.

  “Jeez, I’m only joking.”

  I cry harder.

  “Shhh, man. You’ll wake up Olivia. You’ll wake up Mum and Dad.”

  Which is what I’m trying to do, without being shot. I want everyone awake and noisy to chase away the terrorist-under-my-bed.

  “Here,” she says, “you can sleep with Fred if you stop crying.”

  So I stop crying and Vanessa pads over the bare cement floor and brings me the cat, fast asleep in a snail-circle on her arms. She puts him on the pillow and I put an arm over the vibrating, purring body. Fred finds my earlobe and starts to suck. He’s always sucked our earlobes. Our hair is sucked into thin, slimy, knotted ropes near the ears.

  Mum says, “No wonder you have worms all the time.”

  I lie with my arms over the cat, awake and waiting. African dawn, noisy with animals and the servants and Dad waking up and a tractor coughing into life somewhere down at the workshop, clutters into the room. The bantam hens start to crow and stretch, tumbling out of their roosts in the tree behind the bathroom to peck at the reflection of themselves in the window. Mum comes in smelling of Vicks VapoRub and tea and warm bed and scoops the sleeping baby up to her shoulder.

  I can hear July setting tea on the veranda and I can smell the first, fresh singe of Dad’s morning cigarette. I balance Fred on my shoulder and come out for tea: strong with no sugar, a splash of milk, the way Mum likes it. Fred has a saucer of milk.

  “Morning, Chookies,” says Dad, not looking at me, smoking. He is looking far off into the hills, where the border between Rhodesia and Mozambique melts blue-gray, even in the pre-hazy clear of early morning.

  “Morning, Dad.”

  “Sleep all right?”

  “Like a log,” I tell him. “You?”

  Dad grunts, stamps out his cigarette, drains his teacup, balances his bush hat on his head, and strides out into the yard to make the most of the little chill the night has left us with which to fight the gathering soupy heat of day.

  Horses—Serioes

  GETTING THERE:

  ZAMBIA, 1987

  To begin with, before Independence, I am at school with white children only. “A” schools, they are called: superior schools with the best teachers and facilities. The black children go to “C” schools. In-between children who are neither black nor white (Indian or a mixture of races) go to “B” schools.

  The Indians and coloureds (who are neither completely this nor completely that) and blacks are allowed into my school the year I turn eleven, when the war is over. The blacks laugh at me when they see me stripped naked after swimming or tennis, when my shoulders and arms are angry sunburnt red.

  “Argh! I smell roasting pork!” they shriek.

  “Who fried the bacon?”

  Bo and Kenneth

  “Burning piggy!”

  My God, I am the wrong color. The way I am burned by the sun, scorched by flinging sand, prickled by heat. The way my skin erupts in miniature volcanoes of protest in the presence of tsetse flies, mosquitoes, ticks. The way I stand out against the khaki bush like a large marshmallow to a gook with a gun. White. African. White-African.

  “But what are you?” I am asked over and over again.

  “Where are you from originally?”

  I began then, embarking from a hot, dry boat.

  Blinking bewildered from the sausage-gut of a train.

  Arriving in Rhodesia, Africa. From Derbyshire, England. I was two years old, startled and speaking toddler English. Lungs shocked by thick, hot, humid air. Senses crushed under the weight of so many stimuli.

  I say, “I’m African.” But not black.

  And I say, “I was born in England,” by mistake.

  But, “I have lived in Rhodesia (which is now Zimbabwe) and in Malawi (which used to be Nyasaland) and in Zambia (which used to be Northern Rhodesia).”

  And I add, “Now I live in America,” through marriage.

  And (full disclosure), “But my parents were born of Scottish and English parents.”

  What does that make me?

  Mum doesn’t know who she is, either.

  She stayed up all night once listening to Scottish music and crying.

  “This music”—her nose twitches—“is so beautiful. It makes me homesick.”

  Mum has lived in Africa all but three years of her life.

  “But this is your home.”

  “But my heart”—Mum attempts to thump her chest—“is Scottish.”

  Oh, fergodsake. “You hated England,” I point out.

  Mum nods, her head swinging, like a chicken with a broken neck. “You’re right,” she says. “But I love Scotland.”

  “What,” I ask, challenging, “do you love about Scotland?”

  “Oh the . . . the . . .” Mum frowns at me, checks to see if I’m tricking her. “The music,” she says at last, and starts to weep again. Mum hates Scotland. She hates drunk-driving laws and the cold. The cold makes her cry, and then she comes down with malaria.

  Her eyes are half-mast. That’s what my sister and I call it when Mum is drunk and her eyelids droop. Half-mast eyes. Like the flag at the post office whenever someone important dies, which in Zambia, with one thing and another, is every other week. Mum stares out at the home paddocks where the cattle are coming in for their evening water to the trough near the stables. The sun is full and heavy over the hills that describe the Zambia-Zaire border. “Have a drink with me, Bobo,” she offers. She tries to pat the chair next to hers, misses, and feebly slaps the air, her arm like a broken wing.

  I shake my head. Ordinarily I don’t mind getting softly drunk next to the slowly collapsing heap that is Mum, but I have to go back to boarding school the next day, nine hours by pickup across the border to Zimbabwe. “I need to pack, Mum.”

  That afternoon Mum had spent hours wrapping thirty feet of electric wire around the trees in the garden so that she could pick up the World Service of the BBC. The signature tune crackled over the syrup-yellow four o’clock light just as the sun was starting to hang above the top of the msasa trees. “ ‘Lillibulero,’ ” Mum said. “That’s Irish.”

  “You’re not Irish,” I pointed out.

  She said, “Never said I was.” And then, follow-on thought, “Where’s the whisky?”

  We must have heard “Lillibulero” thousands of times. Maybe millions. Before and after every news broadcast. At the top of every hour. Spluttering with static over the garden at home; incongruous from the branches of acacia trees in campsites we have set up in the bush across the countryside; singing from the bathroom in the evening.

  But you never know what will set Mum off. Maybe it was “Lillibulero” coinciding with the end of the afternoon, which is a rich, sweet, cooling, melancholy time of day.

  “Your Dad was English originally,” I tell her, not liking the way this is going.

  She said, “It doesn’t count. Scottish blood cancels English blood.”

  By the time she has drunk a quarter of a bottle of whisky, we have lost reception from Bush House in London and the radio hisses to itself from under its fringe of bougainvillea. Mum has pulled out her old Scottish records. There are three of them. Three records of men in kilts playing bagpipes. The photographs show them marching blindly (how do they see under those dead-bear hats?) down misty Scottish cobbled streets, their faces completely blocked by their massive instruments. Mum turns the music up as loud as it will go, takes the whisky out to the veranda, and sits cross-legged on a picnic chair, humming and staring out at the night-blanketed farm.

  This cross-leggedness is a hangover from the brief period in Mum’s life when she took up yoga from a book. Which was better than the brief period in her life in which she explored the possibility of converting to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And better than the time she bought a book on belly-dancing at a rummage sale and tried out her techniques on every bar north of the Limpopo River and south of the
equator.

  The horses shuffle restlessly in their stables. The night apes scream from the tops of the shimmering-leafed msasa trees. The dogs set up in a chorus of barking and will not stop until we put them inside, all except Mum’s faithful spaniel, who will not leave her side even when she’s throwing what Dad calls a wobbly. Which is what this is: a wobbly. The radio hisses and occasionally, drunkenly, bursts into snatches of song (Spanish or Portuguese) or chatters in German, in Afrikaans, or in an exaggerated American accent. “This is the Voice of America.” And then it swoops, “Beee-ooooeee!”

  Dad and I go to bed with half the dogs. The other half of the pack set themselves up on the chairs in the sitting room. Dad’s half deaf, from when he blew his eardrums out in the war eight years ago in what was then Rhodesia. Now Zimbabwe. I put a pillow over my head. I can hear Mum’s voice, high and inexact, trembling on the high notes: “Speed, bonny boat, / Like a bird on the wing, / Over the sea to Skye,” and then she runs out of words and starts to sing, loudly to make up for the loss of words, “La, la la laaaa!” In the other room, at the end of the hall, Dad is snoring.

  In the morning, Mum is still on the veranda. The records are silent. The housegirl sweeps the floor around her. The radio is in the tree and has sobered up, with a film of shining dew over its silver face, and is telling us the news in clipped English tones. “This is London,” it says with a straight face, as the milking cows are brought in to the dairy and the night apes curl up overhead to sleep and the Cape turtledoves begin to call, “Work-hard-er, work-hard-er.” An all-day call, which I nevertheless associate with morning and which makes me long for a cup of tea. The bells of Big Ben sound from distant, steely-gray-dawn London, where commuters will soon be spilling sensibly out of Underground stations or red double-decker buses. It is five o’clock Greenwich Mean Time.

  When I was younger I used to believe it was called “Mean” time because it was English time. I used to believe that African time was “Kind” time.

  The dogs are lying in exhausted heaps on the furniture in the sitting room, with their paws over their ears. They look up at Dad and me as we come through for our early morning cup of tea, which we usually take on the veranda but which the cook has set in the sitting room on account of the fact that Mum is lying with her forehead on the picnic table where he would usually put the tray. Still cross-legged. Still singing. I bet hardly anyone in yoga can do that.