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

by Alexandra Fuller

  Mum pours out the tea into the two chipped mugs. Their handles are greasy.

  “I hope the prisoners haven’t drunk out of these cups.”

  “I’m sure they have their own plastic mugs.”

  “What about the other Affies?” I mean the black policemen, the police station’s maid.

  “I’m sure they are not allowed to drink out of the same mugs as us.”

  “Good.” I dip my Marie Biscuit into my tea and watch crumbs float on the hot, greasy surface.

  When we have drunk our tea, Mum reads to me. I lie on the cot under the army alphabet chart. She reads C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lucy is in the land where it will never be summer, snow crunches underfoot. The sultry afternoon, pale with light-washing sun and the faint hum of traffic from the road that passes the police station all wash into the background. I am transported to a cool snowy world with fawns and witches and Peter and Susan and Edmund and Aslan. I shut my eyes and spread myself out so that my sweating skin can cool; the world of Narnia is more real and wonderful than the world I am alive in.

  “Olé!” Mum sings at the club on Saturday night. “I’m a bandit. I’m a bandit from Brazil. I’m the quickest on the trigger. When I shoot I shoot to kill. . . .” She cocks her hip when she sings and sometimes she climbs up onto the bar and dances and shrugs her shoulders, slow-sexy, eyes half-mast, and sometimes she falls off the bar again. But she can’t shoot straight. At target practice she shuts her eyes and her mouth goes worm-bottom tight and she once put a round in the swimming pool wall and another time she shot a pattern, like beads on a string, across the bark of the flamboyant tree at the bottom of the garden. But she has never shot the target in the head or the heart where you are supposed to shoot it.

  She taught the horses not to be scared of guns. She burst paper bags at their feet for a whole morning. She popped balloons all afternoon. And the next day she shot guns right by their heads until they only swished their tails and jerked their heads at the sound, as if trying to get rid of a biting fly. So the horses lazily ignore gunshot when we’re out riding, but they still bolt if there’s a rustle in the bushes, or if a cow surprises them, or if they see a monkey or a snake, or if a troop of baboons startles out of the bush with their warning cry, “Wa-hu!”

  Dad and Pippin

  DOG RESCUE

  Although Mum actually shot an Egyptian spitting cobra once, and killed it. But that was for real, when her dogs were threatened, which is more serious than target practice.

  We are sitting at the breakfast table eating oat porridge. Mum is ignoring my string of questions. She is reading a book and the radio is on. Sally Donaldson hosts Forces Requests and plays songs sent in by loved ones for the boys in the bush.

  “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away,” I sing along.

  Mum says, irritably, “Shhh,” and turns the radio down.

  If I peer around the huge stone-wall flower bed Mum has erected to stop bombs and bullets from coming in the dining room window, I can see that Flywell has brought the horses up for our morning ride. I look at Mum. She is absorbed in her book. We won’t get out for a ride until it’s too hot and then we’ll ride until the afternoon, riding through lunch, past the time when my stomach turns and knots with hunger and my throat is burning with thirst and the sun will burn the back of our necks. I will complain of thirst and Mum will say, “You should have had more tea at breakfast.”

  I kick the legs of my chair. Mum says, without looking up, “Don’t.” And then, “Eat up.”

  But I’ve already eaten up. “Can I have some more?”

  “Ask July.”

  But before I can get to the kitchen to ask July if there’s more porridge, there is a scramble of dogs from under the dining room table, claws scrabbling on the cement floor before they find purchase and race yapping into the pantry, which is between the kitchen and dining room. Mum looks up from her book. “What have you got?” she asks the dogs.

  Three of the dogs retreat sheepishly from the pantry and suddenly Mum says, “Oh hell,” because she can see from their faces and from the sound of their voices that they’re barking at a snake. And then the maid starts to shout, “Madam! Madam!” from the kitchen door and pointing. She has her hand over her mouth, “Madam! Nyuka!”

  Mum and I stand at the entrance to the pantry and stare in at the snake. Its neck is caped, as wide as a fan, and it’s swaying and tall.

  Mum shouts, “Stand behind the table!” She calls the dogs. Shea and Jacko, Best Beloved Among Dogs, are still barking at the snake. “Come!” shouts Mum. She’s loading the magazine. I hear the bullets go in, clicka-click. “Come here!” Suddenly the snake rears back and snaps forward and sets out into the air a thin mist of poisonous spray and the dogs come reeling back out of the pantry, yelping and blind, staggering from the pain. Mum lifts the gun to her shoulder. She squeezes her eyes shut and eases back on the trigger. There’s an explosion of glasses and bottles and tins and a wild chattering of bullets. Mum has the Uzi on automatic. She empties an entire magazine toward the snake and then there is dust, the splintering of still-falling glass, the whimpering dogs. Violet, July, and I cautiously creep up behind Mum. The snake is splattered in a red mosaic on the back wall of the pantry along with sprayed beer, and the lumpy contents of tinned beef, tomato sauce, peas. Flour has exploded and has settled peacefully onto the chaos in a fine lacy shroud.

  “Madam,” says July admiringly, “but you got him one time!”

  By now Shea and Jacko’s eyes have swollen up like tennis balls. Mum screams for milk and July brings the jug from the paraffin fridge in the kitchen. She pours the milk into the dogs’ eyes and they yelp in pain. Mum says, “We have to take them in to Uncle Bill.”

  We are not supposed to leave the valley without an armed escort because there are land mines in the road on the way to Umtali and terrorist ambushes and Dad is on patrol, so we are women-without-men, which is supposed to be a weakened state of affairs. But this is an emergency. We put the dogs in the car and drive as fast as we can out of the valley, up the escarpment to the dusty wasteland of the Tribal Trust Land and round the snake-body road which clings to the mountain and spits us out at the paper factory (which smells pungent and rotten and warm) so that when we drive past it as a family Vanessa holds her nose and sings, “Bobo farted.”

  “Did not.”

  “Bo-bo fart-ed.”

  Until I am in tears and then Mum says, “Shuddup both of you or you’ll both get a hiding.”

  And now we race past the petrol station that marks the entrance into town and we tear past the gaudy string of Indian stores in the Second Class district where we don’t shop. We bump through the tunnel under the railway line which advertises cigarettes, “People say Players, Please,” and hurry through the center of town, the First Class district, where we do shop. Uncle Bill’s veterinary practice is on the other side of town, past the high school. The dogs are crying softly to themselves. Shea is on Mum’s lap and Jacko is on the passenger seat with me.

  Uncle Bill says, “You drove in alone?” He sounds angry.

  “What else could I do?”

  He glances at me, presses his lips shut, and says, “All right. Let me have a look.”

  Aunty Sheila says, “Bobo, would you like to come with me?”

  I wouldn’t like to go with Aunty Sheila. She has rock-hard bosoms encased in twin-set sweaters. She has hair like a gray paper wasps’ nest.

  Mum says, “What do you say, Bobo,” in a warning voice.

  So I say, “Yes please, Aunty Sheila,” and she takes me into her perfect sitting room, which leads off the waiting room of the surgery. She tells me to sit-there-and-wait-and-don’t-touch-anything and she goes into the kitchen and comes back with a tray of tea and a plate of food, for which I am grateful, having missed lunch. I am not allowed to eat on the chairs, which are carefully kept clean, with crocheted doilies on their arms. I must sit on the polished floor with the china plate on my lap. Aun
ty Sheila says, “I don’t have children, I have dogs.”

  She has a rash of small spoiled dogs, who are allowed on her beautiful armchairs (unlike me), and some larger dogs who live outside.

  I finish my tea and the plate of biscuits and stare at my empty plate meaningfully until Aunty Sheila says, “Would you like another . . .”

  And I say yes, quickly, before she can change her mind.

  “You’re a hungry little girl,” she says, hardly able to disguise her distaste.

  “It’s because I have worms in my bum,” I say, helping myself to a pink vanilla wafer.

  We can’t take the dogs home that night. They have to stay with Uncle Bill. When we fetch them a few days later (coming into town in a proper convoy this time), only Jacko is still a little bit blind in one eye.

  When Dad comes back from patrol, Mum shows him the pantry and tells him about the snake.

  Dad frowns at the shot-up chaos of the pantry, and he says to me, “My God, your mother’s a lousy shot.”

  But he wasn’t there to see how wide the snake’s neck was, how it swayed and wove and how its head snapped forward toward the dogs. “I think she’s a jolly good shot,” I say loyally.

  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.”<
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  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.