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

by Alexandra Fuller

  Mum’s world becomes increasingly the world she sees in the reflection of the window at night when the lights are humming, high and low in tune to the throb of the generator, and Roger Whittaker is playing on the record player. Mum’s towel slips lower over her full-of-milk breasts. I hear her crying in the bathroom when she’s squeezing them empty. Milk for no one, down the plug. Her towel hangs open at her bottom, where her thighs are blood-smeared from the tail end of childbirth. She seems to be grieving for the loss of this new baby in every way a body can grieve; with her mind (which is unhinged) and her body (which is alarming and leaking).

  While Mum sways damply in the insect, hot-singing night, crooning with Roger, “Ahm gonna leave ole London town,” Dad sits in the corner, under the lightbulb, ducking the moths and rose beetles that come in search of the light. He reads to himself, eyebrows raised in distant absorption, and smokes quietly. He is stretching a brandy and Coke into the night, sipping at it as if it were a delicate treat, although it has long since gone warm and flat. The dogs lie flattened on the concrete floor, their ears pressed to their heads, eyebrows anxiously raised.

  That night I go into Vanessa’s room after the generator has been switched off.

  “Van.”

  “Ja?”

  “Are you awake?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “What do you think?”

  She still doesn’t answer.

  “Why won’t you talk to me?”

  “You’re asking stupid questions.”

  I grope my way to the end of her bed and lower myself next to the rising, bony hump of her feet.

  “What do you think about Mum?”

  “What about Mum?”

  “Well . . .”

  Silence.

  “Don’t you think?”

  Vanessa sighs and turns over. She’s fourteen now. I can feel the suddenly heavier, womanly shift of her. The bed sags under her newfound weight. She smells different, too—not dusty and metallic and sharp like puppy pee, but soft and secret and of tea and her new deodorant which comes in a white bottle with a blue label and which I covet. It’s called Shield. She says, “If Mum and Dad catch you out of bed you’ll be in the dwang.”

  “They won’t catch me.”

  Vanessa knows I’m right. She says, “I’m trying to sleep. You’re bugging me.”

  Suddenly, surprisingly, I’m crying; mewing my sadness. Vanessa sits up and puts her arms awkwardly over me. “It’s okay, hey.”

  “What’s going on, man?”

  Vanessa rocks me. “Shhhh.”

  “Why is everyone so crazy?”

  “It’s not everyone.”

  “It feels like it.”

  Vanessa says, “If you promise to go to sleep, I’ll make a plan, okay?”

  I sniff and wipe my nose on the back of my arm.

  “Sis, man. I’ve told you about that.”

  “I don’t have any bog roll.”

  “Well get some. Blow your nose. Then go to bed.”

  The next morning when I wake up, later than usual, with the sun eight o’clock high and hot in the dust-flung pale sky, Vanessa is already dressed. She has been arranging for the family’s healing; she has collected our fishing rods and hats and has packed a cardboard box with reels, fishing line, boiled eggs, beer, brandy, a cheap bottle of red wine, a loaf of bread, biltong, thin-skinned and bitter wild bananas, oranges.

  “I’ve made a plan to go to the dam,” she announces at breakfast. “Let’s go fishing for catfish.”

  Dad looks up from his porridge, surprised.

  “I really think we should go fishing.”

  “Mum hates fishing,” I say. “She isn’t even up yet.” Mum is having tea in her room.

  Vanessa glares at me and then stares at Dad intently. “We need to go for a picnic.”

  Dad says, “I have work. . . .”

  “And we’ll take our fishing rods so you don’t get bored.”

  Dad looks as though he’s about to protest further. He opens his mouth to speak but Vanessa gets up, pushes her hair out of her eyes, and says, “I’ve packed the lunch. I’ll go and get Mum.” She cocks her head. “Why don’t we ask that visitor chappy to come along?”

  There is a young law student from South Africa staying on the ranch. His grandfather had been one of the original homesteaders of Devuli Ranch. Vanessa and I have been watching him hungrily through the binoculars since he arrived a few days earlier. He has a mass, like a wig, of curly blond hair. He’s been staying with the ranch managers, with whom we have been unofficially at war since Mum’s nervous breakdown. Vanessa and I met the visitor (we had stalked him) at the workshop and I grilled him unabashedly—who was he, what was he doing here, how long was he staying—until Vanessa dragged me off by the wrist and hissed at me, “You’re so embarrassing.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “What did I do now?”

  “Oh, God. Where do I start?”

  Our captured guest (whom I have gloated over victoriously since his arrest, which took place in the ranch manager’s compound: “Come fishing with us. Please,” and then, not wanting to scare him off with my eagerness, “If you’d like”) has the unsettling, potentially unhealing name of Richard. But he’s young and cheerful and appears innocent of our recent and past traumas and Mum has responded to him, to his freshness, with the first true, unwobbly smile since she came back empty-armed from the hospital.

  Vanessa and I make room in the back of the Land Rover for Richard, who swings up onto the little metal bench over the wheel with long-legged ease. I stare at him intently and smile fiercely. Vanessa nudges me hard in the ribs. She is looking nonchalantly out of her side of the Land Rover, aloof, composed. She has stopped wearing her hair in braids. Now it falls across her face in a blond sheet, so that she has scraped it around the back of her neck and is holding it against the slap of wind. She closes her eyes and lifts her face to the sun. I resume my hopeful, maniacal grinning, fixed on Richard.

  It’s pointless trying to start a conversation with our captive, although I am tempted to warn him (to be fair) that Mum is crazy. The Land Rover rocks and swings and plunges, its engine roaring with the effort of off-off road. We have long since left the rib-shattering relative speed of the main dirt road (where the short wheelbase smacks the corrugations in the road at just the right interval to wind us) and we are beyond the barely made tracks which are really nothing more than an indication—some telltale wear—that someone else has come this way in the past. (In the thin, brittle soil, barely held together by the soft, burnt-up weight of grass, tracks from a single vehicle, covering the ground a single time, can show for years.) Now we are plunging between buffalo thorn and skirting anthills and we, in the back, are forced to swing forward (our hands tucked under us to prevent them from being raked by thorns) and duck.

  We pass, without comment or surprise, small, rain-ready herds of impala. The ewes are swollen with impending babies, but the babies will come only with the first rain. Dad stops to let a pair of warthog charge fatly in front of us, round-bottomed and heads held high. A kudu bull stares us down—the perfect white “V” on his nose a hunter’s target. He is sniffing the air and then, with a magnificent leap, his horns laid across his back like medieval weapons, he is gone, plunging grayly into the crosshatched bush.

  It is late morning by the time we get to the dam, and the sun has settled into the shallow, blanched mid-sky. The dam is shrinking, muddy, warm; its waters have receded, leaving a damp swath of cracking mud and strong smells of frog sperm and rotting algae. Egrets are poking along the edge of the dam. They rise when the dogs come flopping toward them, and settle, just beyond reach. Busy weavers chatter and fly, darting back and forth from their watertight, snake-savvy nests with pieces of grass trailing from their mouths.

  It is the wrong time of year to be here. The sun has scorched the shade off all the trees, whose limbs now stretch, thin and hungry, into the arid, smoky sky. The ground is glitte
ringly hot. Vanessa pulls out some cushions and a deck chair and sets the chair up for Mum under the lacy protection of a buffalo thorn. Mum pours herself some tea from the thermos and, with the remote distraction she has maintained since the baby died, begins to read.

  She smiles at Richard—“This is nice, isn’t it?”—and I want to sing wildly and shout for joy because it is such a normal thing to say, even though it is a lie. I want everyone to notice what a normal thing to say this is. I want to ask Richard, “Don’t you think she sounds normal?”

  Dad and I find logs near the edge of the dam and begin to fish for barbel, whiskered fish that bury themselves into the mud in the drought years and reemerge only after the first rains. They are like vampire fish, coming back to life with a creepy insistence, year after year—even after years that have left a trail of skeletons in their wake. These fish are very hard to kill. We bash them brutally, headfirst, on rocks; still they thrash and squeal. They don’t seem fragile or fishlike at all. Dad and I take turns to jump on them, but they slither out from underfoot. Then we wrestle them to the ground (they are black and muscular, and slip easily from our grip) and one of us holds them down while the other smashes rocks on their heads. We leave their battered bodies in a net, suspended in the water so that they won’t rot in the heat.

  “We’ll take them home for the muntus,” says Dad.

  “What do they taste of?”

  “Mud. They taste like the smell of this,” says Dad, digging his toe into the visceral dirt.

  “Yuck.”

  “Ja, but a muntu will eat anything.”

  Vanessa has walked to the other side of the dam, where she can see Mum and where she can be seen by Richard, who has stationed himself, precariously, on a log that overreaches into the dam. He is straddling the log, head bowed exposing white neck to hostile sun, and is threading a worm onto his hook. His back is to Dad and me; his neck is already turning stung pink. The dogs nose around, always keeping one anxious, faithful eye on Mum, who looks unmovable, unmoving, unreading. In spite of her stillness, she is the one who seems most restless; her energy is snaking out of her like heat waves, dancing across the water to us, hot and insistent. Or perhaps it is my anxious energy dancing toward Mum: I’m like one of the dogs, trying to read her mood, her happiness, her next move.

  Suddenly, Mum gets out of her chair and walks across the damp patch of smelly sticky mud toward the water, kicking mud off her toes as she walks, girlish in the gesture. Vanessa lifts her head—as if sniffing the air—and puts down her fishing rod. She has been watching Mum out of the corner of her eye all this time, but now that Mum has moved, Vanessa is riveted with indecision. Dad and I have propped our rods against rocks and have been crouched, haunches hanging, waiting for another bite. Dad shifts when Mum gets up, almost rising himself. The dogs come bounding back from where they have been exploring, mixing and stirring at Mum’s feet, suddenly playful. Only Richard is unaware of the un-drama unfolding at the water’s edge.

  Like a woman hoping to drown, Mum is walking into the dam, fully clothed. She walks softly, shimmering behind the veil of heat.

  “What the hell’s she doing?” Dad gets to his feet.

  “Mum!” Vanessa starts to run toward her.

  Mum continues to wade. Her shirt has floated up and is spread out on top of the water, blue and dry, briefly, until the muddy weight of the dam sucks it down. Mum can swim—poorly—but we all know that she has the willpower, the leaden weight of heartsickness, not to swim if she chose to let the murky water swallow over her head.

  Vanessa is lumping awkwardly, slow-motion-panic, through the mud. “Mum!” Her voice is made sluggish with the dense heat.

  The water is up to Mum’s chest now. She raises her arm, and it is only then that I notice she is holding a beer. “Cheers!” she shouts. Then, “It’s not very deep.”

  For a moment we’re all too stunned to react.

  Then, “Is it nice?” I shout.

  “Nicer than outside.”

  Vanessa pokes one toe into the water and then, with sudden resolution, wades out to Mum.

  “Why don’t you bring a beer in, Tim?”

  By the time Richard dives off his log and swims toward us, we are all up to our chins in the water, sipping beer.

  “Get yourself a drink, Richard.”

  “The beers are a bit warm, I’m afraid.”

  Mum says, “There’s nothing worse than warm beer”—she pauses—“except no beer.”

  And we laugh and laugh. I am deliciously, carelessly drunk. I throw my empty bottle to the shore and declare my intention to swim to the log. I soon discover that the dam is shallow enough for me to wade chest-deep the whole way. The dogs swim circles around me.

  We eat lunch in the dam. Then Dad opens the wine, and we pass the bottle around. “We need a table,” he says.

  “And a roof,” I say.

  “A lodge on stilts,” says Vanessa.

  “A butler,” says Mum.

  Richard is smiling. “This is very civilized,” he says.

  “It seemed the only sane thing to do,” says Mum.

  That night when we get home, our skins shining with sun, our eyes stinging with sun’s reflection on the water, Richard comes in for supper and Mum gets drunk but she doesn’t dance alone in front of the window, sad and mourning. She dances with Richard. We roll up the rug, push the sofa aside, and put the “Ipi Tombi” record on the player. We all dance wildly—hips sideways, wiggle-wiggle, shuffling feet, shaking breasts and breastbones—the way we imagine Zulu warriors to dance, up and down the sitting room. “Ay ya! Ay ya! Ay-ya, oh in-tombi-um. Ipi in-tombi-um. In-tombi-um!”

  Mum is glowing, twisting, beautiful again. Her face is pink with sun and wine.

  Dad is laughing, “Let’s have a par-ty!” in his signature, singsong way.

  Vanessa is trying to avoid permanent humiliation, but she dances anyway, edging her way around Mum and Richard, “Uh, uh, uh!”

  I am dancing with the dog, her feet caught up in my hands, crouched low; she teeters around for a few steps before her feet slip on the floor. “Look at Shea dance! Look!”

  We dance until the generator dies. And then we sit outside in deck chairs, under the silver moon, and drink Irish coffees. Dad tells stories about the time he went hunting for a zebra and got lost, the time he was chased by a rhino and had to jump fourteen feet into a dry riverbed, the time he saw a man get downwind of buffalo bean.

  Beyond the gate I can hear the jackals laughing, their quick, high voices traveling sharply through the dense night.

  It’s almost midnight by the time Richard leaves and we all climb into bed.

  Dad with President Banda

  MALAWI

  North of Zimbabwe (but not bordering it), there is a skinny slice of a country, over one fifth of which is a lake boasting the largest population of freshwater tropical fish in the world. Its highlands are speckled with rivers and lakes that were stocked with Scottish trout before the Second World War and whose waters are still rich with the trouts’ descendants. The air almost anywhere you go in Malawi is salty and rich with the scent of smoked fish.

  To reach Malawi we can go the short, dangerous way, or we can go the long, less dangerous way. We can choose to drive this way: first, west out of Zimbabwe at Chirundu, then north through Zambia, following the spiny Great East Road to Chipata and finally into Malawi—a journey of four or five days on increasingly deteriorating roads, but without war and with few bandits. Or we can choose to drive east through the Tete corridor in Mozambique and be in Malawi in a matter of hours, a full day perhaps.

  In any normal situation, the journey through Tete would be the more sensible choice. But this is Africa, so hardly anything is normal. If we go through Mozambique, we will have to elude land mines, Renamo rebels, bandits, and roads so decayed they are worse than the tracks that army lorries and trucks have worn beside them.

  For once, my parents are prudent. Dad flies up to Malawi from Zimbabwe, his plane (taki
ng the shortest route) breathlessly flying over the Tete corridor while the passengers anxiously drink Carlsberg lager and peer out of the windows. Mozambique slides into, and then out of, view, the years of savage warfare and burnt villages and raped women and child soldiers and no schools and no hospitals and battle-bred malnutrition felt as only a temporary dip of unrelated turbulence. The plane lands in Blantyre—a strangely Scottish-feeling, African-smelling city—and Dad is met at the airport by an unusually tall, unusually dark African who, it turns out, is not Malawian, but from Zambia. Malawians tend to have a reddish complexion and tidy features. Dad’s driver stands out, tall and rangy and black, like a palm tree in a mopane forest.

  Mum drives the long way around to Malawi, through Zambia, in the Land Rover, with the dogs, the cats, and all our worldly goods. Oscar falls out of the Land Rover somewhere near the Kafue River and is never seen again even though Mum spends two days walking along the river calling for him. At last she gives a schoolteacher in a nearby village some money and says, “If you find my dog, will you look after him for me?”

  “He probably bought beer with the money,” says Dad afterward.

  “You never know.”

  “You should know by now.”

  Malawi was formerly the Nyasaland Protectorate. When we arrive in the country in 1982, it is being run by a lilliputian dictator, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda. He is shrunken and very old, although no one is supposed to know exactly how old. His birthday is an official state secret but it is generally agreed that he may have been born as early as 1898 or as late as 1906. Some careless people joke, behind their hands, in quick nervous whispers, that Kamuzu Banda is actually dead. That his body is battery-run by remote control. After all, they point out, he does little in the way of official state business anymore, except wave a zebra-tail fly whisk from the steps leading up to his private jet or personal helicopter.

  But most people are careful to keep their mouths shut. Mum says, “Never say anything derogatory about the government or the President.”