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

  “What will you do with Libby?” She can’t be dead. This can’t be the end of her life. Just like that. There hasn’t been a bomb or a gun or a terrorist-under-the-bed. She was alive in the morning. She is still supposed to be alive.

  “She’s dead,” says Aunty Rena, and pulls a sheet up over Olivia’s head.

  I say, “Let me feel.” I press my fingers against Olivia’s wrist, as I have seen Aunty Rena do, and hold my breath. “I think I feel something,” I say hopefully.

  Aunty Rena looks away. “Take Bobo to the house,” she says again.

  Duncan takes me to his room and shows me his comic books. Desperate Dan, Minnie the Minx, Roger the Artful Dodger. I say, “I just want Olivia back.”

  He says, “She’s dead.”

  “I want her back,” I insist.

  “She’s well and truly dead.” He knows about death because of his kitten-killing experiments. He has drowned and burnt and buried kittens before. That way, he says, he’ll know what it’s like when his turn comes to be drowned or burnt. He says, “Drowning is better than a cat in the fire.”

  I say, “Maybe she’ll get better.”

  “You don’t get better from being dead.”

  I cry violently into Duncan’s pillow until he sighs and fetches me some loo paper. “Here,” he says, handing me the paper, “blow your nose.”

  I wipe my nose on my arm. “My brother also died,” I tell him, screwing the paper into a damp ball in my fist.

  “You don’t have a brother.”

  “Ja, but he’s dead. Before I was born, he died.”

  “Then he wasn’t really your brother.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “Not if he’s a dead brother. Dead before you were alive, I mean.”

  “He was still in our family. Then he died. If he didn’t die he would still be in our family.”

  “How’ d he die?” he asks, challenging me.

  “Because Mum and Dad took Vanessa for lunch when he was in the hospital.”

  “You don’t die from that.”

  “He did.” I start to cry again.

  Duncan says, “Stop crying.”

  I cry harder.

  He says, “I’ll read to you.”

  I keep crying.

  “I’ll read to you only if you stop crying.” And then, his voice rising with impatience and edged with panic, “Stop crying, hey.” He puts his arms awkwardly around my skinny, worm-swollen frame. “Please, Bobo. Please stop crying.”

  “Okay.” I sniff and push Duncan away. I scrub my face vigorously with the back of my arm. “There,” I say, “I’ve stopped crying.”

  I sit with Duncan for a long time. He reads his comic books to me, trying to do all the voices. I can’t hear what he’s saying but I can hear cars and grown-up voices outside and the Staffordshire terriers barking. I can hear the cook going on about his happy, normal day in the kitchen, counting eggs, making bread, cooking supper. Then Duncan’s sisters come and they say to me, “You have to be brave.”

  I nod.

  The sisters take me outside to a car and someone drives me to the Dickinsons’ farm which is next door to our farm but no one tells me why we are going there. I say, “Where are Mum and Dad?”

  Someone says, “They’re coming.”

  I shrink my head into my chin. “They’re going to kill me,” I say.

  “What? They won’t kill you.”

  I nod and start crying again. “I let Olivia drown.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  I look out of the window at the spiky-topped fields of pineapples that the Dickinsons grow. The pineapple fields have dissolved into orange and green blurs through my tears. It was my fault. It was definitely my fault. I kick the seat in front of me out of sheer, trapped misery. I wish it was me lying dead, instead. I am going to be in trouble for the rest of my life.

  Olivia is lying on the spare bed at the Dickinsons’ house. Someone has washed all the duck shit off her face and has combed her dark curls where the algae had been clinging. Her hair has never had comb marks in it, in life. In life her hair was a soft, brushable halo. Mum used to brush out the brown-shining curls with a light-bristled blue brush. I think, Then she’s really dead.

  There are some flowers from Cierina Dickinson’s garden on the pillow by her head. I stare and stare at her face. I wanted her to be alive. I was the one who prayed her into life that day with the missionaries. Now it is my fault she was dead. I had looked the other way and Olivia’s life flew out of her body because I wasn’t taking care of it. Here she is, her skin a blue-gray pallor, lying on the Dickinsons’ spare bed with summer violets around her head and she is not breathing.

  Then Rena’s two daughters, Anne and Ronelle, appear. Ronelle takes me by the shoulders and says, “That’s enough,” and she and Anne take me for a walk.

  Anne says, “You won’t see her again. She’s gone to Jesus.”

  Which is a lie. She has not gone to Jesus. Her body is still on that bed. Jesus has not suffered her to come unto Him. I press my lips together. My throat hurts because there will never be enough crying to get rid of the sorrow inside.

  Mum and Dad come back from town and I run down the driveway where I have been walking with the Viljoen sisters to meet them. Dad catches me in his arms. He is crying silently, both his cheeks are wet, and his face is drawn and gray. He dries his tears on my neck and says, “You’re so brave, Chookies.”

  But I feel as if he won’t say that once he finds out that Olivia is dead because of me. She’s dead because I haven’t been paying attention. I think, He’ll probably hate me then. But I don’t tell him what has happened. The lump in my throat makes it hurt to swallow.

  That night Vanessa and I sleep in Mum and Dad’s room, except none of us sleep. It is the first time in my life that I have lain awake all night from beginning to end. I listen to Mum’s soft, drugged sobs. Aunty Rena has given her some pills: “You need to take these to help you sleep.” Dad is a hump in the dark, perched up against the wall. He smokes one cigarette after another, the red glows of their cherries traveling steadily to his lips. Vanessa is very quiet next to me on the floor, very still. I know she has gone deep and still and inside herself. I whisper her name into the acrid-smoke-smelling density of our collective grief, but she won’t answer.

  She knows, I think to myself. She knows I killed Olivia and she hates me now.

  And she’ll hate me forever.

  The next morning I go into Olivia’s room and look in the cot. The bed is still rumpled from her body from the morning before. Her toys are spread about on top of her sheets. Her pajamas are folded up on her pillow. Mum has buried her face in Olivia’s bedclothes and when I come in, she looks up at me. She says, in a smothered voice, “It still smells of baby.”

  For a long time after that, Mum was very quiet most of the time. The Burma Valley farmers pool their money and write us a check so that we can go on holiday, maybe to South Africa to the beach, they say. But Dad won’t cash the check. He says, “We’re all hard up. They’re hard up, too.” He frames the check and hangs it in the sitting room. He says, “Let’s drive around Rhodesia for a holiday. We’ll take tins of food and sleeping bags. It won’t cost much.”

  So we bury Olivia in a little baby-sized coffin in the cemetery where the old white settlers are lying in their big, proud graves with moss-covered white gravestones and permanent pots of flowering plants and careful, exclusive fences which are there for show and do nothing to stop the monkeys running onto the graves. And after Olivia is buried, we drive to the nearest house; all the families in the Burma Valley in their most careful, sad clothes driving in a long segmented snake of sad-slow cars to an Afrikaner’s house, and we eat the sweet greasy koeksisters and pound cake and scones that the Afrikaner women have been baking all morning and we drink sweet milky tea until someone finds a bottle of brandy and some beers and starts to hand those around. Which gives us the courage to have a small church service in the only way we know how a
s a community: drunk and maudlin. Alf Sutcliffe pulls out his guitar. He doesn’t know church songs, so we sing “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille” and “Love me tender” until even the grown men, even the tough old Boer farmers, are wiping away tears with the backs of their hands.

  A few days after the funeral, we pack ourselves into the green Peugeot station wagon and drive up and out of the valley. But we couldn’t drive away from the memories of the baby who lay under the soft, silent pile of red-fertile soil cut into a barely contained cemetery against the edge of the valley floor where mostly old people lie rotting gently in the rains and drying to dust in the dry season.

  No one ever came right out and said in the broad light of day that I was responsible for Olivia’s death and that Olivia’s death made Mum go from being a fun drunk to a crazy, sad drunk and so I am also responsible for Mum’s madness. No one ever came right out and said it in words and with pointing fingers. They didn’t have to.

  Mum

  AFTERWARD

  My life is sliced in half.

  The first half is the happy years, before Olivia dies.

  Like this: Vanessa and the older neighbor children are sitting with their feet dangling over the windscreen; their legs are speckled with nuggets of red mud. We are sitting behind the big brothers and sisters—we minor offspring—and we are using them as a shield against the slinging flicks of mud and the fat, humid wind, which grows colder as the evening comes.

  “Sing,” Dad shouts at us, threatening to catapult us from the roof by steering the car into a sliding halt, “sing!”

  We are hilarious with half-fright, half-delight, the way Dad drives. Olivia is on Mum’s lap in the front seat, screaming with excitement. Her sweet, baby happiness comes up to us on the roof in snatches.

  “He’s penga!” says one of the big brothers.

  And then someone starts, “Because we’ re”—pause—“all Rhodesians and we’ll fight through thickanthin!” and we all join in.

  And Dad shouts, “That’s better!” and presses the car forward, freckling the big brothers and sisters with newfound mud.

  We throw back our heads. “We’ll keep this land”—breathe—“a free land, stop the enemy comin’ in.” We’re shout-singing. We’ll be Rhodesian forever and ever on top of the roof driving through mud up the side of the mountain, through thick secret forests which may or may not be seething with terrorists, we’ll keep singing to keep the car going.

  “We’ll keep them north of the Zambezi till that river’s runnin’ dry! And this great land will prosper, ‘cos Rhodesians never die!”

  The spit flies from our mouths and dries in silver streaks along our cheeks. Our fingers have frozen around the roof rack, white as bones. We are ecstatic with fear-joy.

  The second half of my childhood is now. After Olivia dies.

  After Olivia dies, Mum and Dad’s joyful careless embrace of life is sucked away, like water swirling down a drain. The joy is gone. The love has trickled out.

  Sometimes Mum and Dad are terrifying now. They don’t seem to see Vanessa and me in the back seat. Or they have forgotten that we are on the roof of the car, and they drive too fast under low thorn trees and the look on their faces is grim.

  We are not supposed to drive after dark—there is a curfew—but the war and mosquitoes and land mines and ambushes don’t seem to matter to Mum and Dad after Olivia dies. Vanessa and I sit outside at the Club while Mum and Dad drink until they can hardly open the car door. We are on the tattered lawn, around the pond where Olivia drowned (fenced off now, and empty for good measure). Mosquitoes are in a cloud around our ankles, and Mum and Dad do not care about malaria. We are sunburnt and thirsty, bored. We lie back on the prickling grass and watch the sky turn from day to evening.

  Dad

  We drive home in the thick night through the black, secret, terrorist-hiding jungle on dirt roads and Dad has his window down and he is smoking. The gun is loaded across his lap.

  Vanessa and I have not had supper.

  So Mum and Dad buy us more Coke’ n’ chips for the drive and tell us to sit in the back seat with the dog, who has been forgotten about in the car all afternoon and who needs a pee.

  We let Shea out for a pee.

  Mum is fumbling-drunk and Dad, who is sharp-drunk, is getting angry.

  “Come on,” he says to Shea, aiming a kick at her, “in the bloody car now.”

  “Don’t kick her,” says Mum, indistinctly protective.

  “I wasn’t kicking her.”

  “You were, I saw you.”

  “Get in the bloody car, all of you!” shouts Dad.

  Vanessa and I quickly climb into the car and start to fight about where Shea should sit. “On my lap.”

  “No, mine.”

  “Mine. She’s my dog.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “Ja, she is. Mum, is Shea my dog or Bobo’ s?”

  “Shuddup or I’ll give both of you a bloody good hiding.”

  Vanessa smirks at me and pulls Shea onto her lap. I stick my tongue out at Vanessa.

  “Mum, Bobo pulled her tongue at me.”

  “I did not.”

  Mum turns around and slaps wildly at us. We shrink from her flailing hand. She’s too drunk and sad and half-mast to hit us.

  “Now another sound from either of you and I’ll have you both for bloody mutton chops,” says Dad.

  That’s that. Mutton chops is not what we want to be. We shut up.

  Vanessa and I eat our chips slowly, one at a time, dissolving them on our tongues, and the vinegar burns so we swallow Coke to wash down the sting. We each feed Shea three or four chips. She missed her supper too.

  Dad drives wildly, but it’s not children-on-the-roof-wild which is fun and scary all at the same time and we’re singing and the saliva is stringing from our mouths in thin silver ribbons. This is the way a man drives when he hopes he will slam into a tree and there will be silence afterward and he won’t have to think anymore. Now we are only scared.

  Mum has gone to sleep. She is softly, deeply drunk. When Dad slows down to take a corner, she sags forward and hits her forehead damply on the dashboard and is startled, briefly, awake. The car is strong with the smell of cigarette smoke and stale beer. Burped-and-farted beer. Breathed-out beer. In the dark we watch the bright red cherry from Dad’s cigarette. It lights his face and the lines on his face are old and angry. Vanessa and I have finished our Coke’ n’ chips. Our tummies are full-of-nothing-aching-hungry. Shea is asleep on Vanessa’s lap.

  If we crash and all of us die it will be my fault because Olivia died and that made Mum and Dad crazy.

  That’s how it is after Olivia dies.

  Bus stop

  VACATION

  The house is more than we can stand without Olivia. The emptiness of life without her is loud and bright and sore, like being in the full anger of the sun without a piece of shade to hide under.

  Dad has said we’ll go on holiday.

  “To where?”

  “Anywhere. Anywhere that isn’t here.”

  So we drive recklessly through war-ravaged Rhodesia.

  A green Peugeot rattling along the desolate black strips of tar with toilet paper flying victoriously from the back windows (where Vanessa and I were seeing how long it could go before it tore off and lay behind us on the road like a fat, white run-over snake, twisting in agony). As the roads of Rhodesia uncurled in front of our new, hungry sorrow, we sang, “One man went to mow, / Wenttomowameadow,” and “One hundred baboons playing on a minefield. And if one baboon should accidentally explode, there’ll be ninety-nine baboons playing on a minefield.”

  And when we stop singing, Dad shouts, “Sing!”

  So we sing, “Because we’ re”—pause—“all Rhodesians and we’ll fight through thickanthin, / We’ll keep this land a free land, stop the enemy comin’ in. / We’ll keep them north of the Zambezi till that river’s runnin’ dry / And this great land will prosper ‘cos Rhodesians never die.�
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  And we sing, “Ag pleez, Daddy won’t you take us to the drive-in? / All six, seven of us eight, nine, ten.”

  Until Mum says, “Please, Tim, can’t we just have some quiet? Hey? Some peace and quiet.”

  Mum is quietly, steadily drinking out of a flask that contains coffee and brandy. She is softly, sadly drunk.

  Dad says, “Okay, kids, that’s enoughofthat.”

  So we sit on each side of the back seat with the big hole in the middle where Olivia should be and watch Mum’s eyes go half-mast.

  We are driving through a dreamscape. The war has cast a ghastly magic, like the spell on Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Everything is dormant or is holding its breath against triggering a land mine. Everything is waiting and watchful and suspicious. Bushes might suddenly explode with bristling AK-47s and we’ll be rattled with machine-gun fire and be lipless and earless on the road in front of the burned-out smoldering plastic and singed metal of our melting car.

  The only living creatures to celebrate our war are the plants, which spill and knot and twist victoriously around buildings and closed-down schools in the Tribal Trust Lands, or wrap themselves around the feet of empty kraals. Rhodesia’s war has turned the place back on itself, giving the land back to the vegetation with which it had once been swallowed before people. And before the trappings of people: crops and cattle and goats and houses and business.

  And then, through deep-quiet, long-stretching-road boredom and quite suddenly, and as surprising as the Prince battling madly through briars to reach a sleeping woman he has never met, two white figures appear on the road. They aren’t princes. Even from afar we can tell they aren’t princes. They look stained gray-brown in filthy travelers’ clothes with unruly hair sticking up with grease and dirt. They aren’t Rhodesians either, we can tell, because they are walking along the road and white Rhodesians don’t walk anywhere on a road because that’s what Africans do and it is therefore counted among the things white people do not do to distinguish themselves from black people (don’t pick your nose in public or listen to muntu music or cement-mix in your mouth or wear your shoes hanging off at the heel). One of the walking white men sticks out his thumb as we approach.