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

by Alexandra Fuller

  I can’t see his face. He’s wearing a polo helmet with a face guard. He is crouched on the front of his saddle and is light in the saddle, easy with the horse, casual in pursuit of the ball.

  “Who is that?”

  An American, it turns out, running a safari company in Zambia, whitewater and canoe safaris on the Zambezi River.

  I ask if he needs a cook for one of his camps.

  He asks if I’ll come down to the bush with him on an exploratory safari.

  Everyone warns him, “Her dad isn’t called Shotgun Tim for nothing.”

  Dad is not going to have two daughters pregnant out of wedlock if he has anything to do with it. Dad has told me, “You’re not allowed within six feet of a man before the bishop has blessed the union.” He has set a watchman up outside the cottage in which I now sleep. The watchman has a panga and a plow-disk of fire with which to discourage visitors. Although any visitor would also have to brave the trip down to the farm on the ever-disintegrating roads. Anyway, since Vanessa left home and married, the torrent of men that used to gush to our door from all over the country has dwindled to a drought-stricken trickle.

  Charlie tells his river manager to make up a romantic meal for the wonderful woman he is bringing to the bush with him. Rob knows me. He snorts, “That little sprog. She’s your idea of a beautiful woman?”

  Rob knew me when I was tearing around the farm on a motorbike, worm-bellied and mud-splattered. He saw me the first time I got drunk and had to go behind the Gymkhana Club to throw up in the bougainvillea. He knew me before I was officially allowed to smoke. He used to look the other way while I sneaked cigarettes from his pack on top of the bar.

  Charlie and I leave the gorge under hot sun and float in canoes into the open area of the lower Zambezi. At lunch we are charged by an elephant. I run up an anthill. Charlie stands his ground. When we resume the float, several crocodiles fling themselves with unsettling speed and agility into the water, where I imagine them surging under our crafts. We disturb land-grazing hippos, who crash back onto the river, sending violent waves toward us. When we get to the island on which Rob (coming down earlier by speedboat) has left tents and a cold box, Charlie disturbs a snake, which comes chasing out of long grass at me.

  We set up the tent, make a fire, and then open the cold box to reveal Rob’s idea of a romantic meal for a beautiful woman: one beer and a pork chop on top of a lump of swimming ice.

  That night there are lion in camp. They are so close we can smell them, their raw-breath and hot-cat-urine scent. A leopard coughs, a single rasping cough, and then is silent. A leopard on the hunt is silent. Hyenas laugh and woo-ooop! They are following the lion pride, waiting for a kill, restless and hungry and running. Neither of us sleeps that night. We lie awake listening to the predators, to each other breathing.

  The next weekend I take Charlie back to Mkushi with me to introduce him to Mum and Dad.

  Dad is standing in front of the fireplace when we arrive. It’s a cool winter day and now the fire is lit at teatime. Mum is all smiles, great overcompensating smiles to make up for the scowls coming from Dad.

  She says, “Tea?”

  We drink tea. The dogs leap up and curl on any available lap. The dog on Charlie’s lap begins to scratch, spraying fleas. Then it licks, legs flopped open. Charlie pushes the dog to the floor, where it lands with astonishment and glares at him.

  Dad and Bo

  Dad says, “I understand you took Bobo camping.”

  “That’s right,” says Charlie pleasantly. He is tall and lean, with a thick beard and tousled, dark hair. He is too tall to see into the mirror in African bathrooms, he told me. So he has no idea how his hair looks. It looks like the hair of a passionate man. A man of lust.

  Dad puts down his teacup and lights a cigarette, eyeing Charlie through the smoke. He says, “And how many tents, exactly, were there?”

  “One,” says Charlie, blindsided by the question.

  Dad clears his throat, inhales a deep breath of smoke. “One tent,” he says.

  “That’s right.”

  “I see.”

  There is a pause, during which the dogs get into a scrap over a saucer of milk and the malonda comes noisily around the back of the house to stoke the Rhodesian boiler with wood, so that there will be hot water for the baths tonight.

  “There’s a very good bishop,” Dad says suddenly, “up in the Copperbelt. The Right Reverend Clement H. Shaba. Anglican chap.”

  It takes Charlie a moment or two for the implications of this statement to sink in. He says, “Huh.”

  “My God, Dad!”

  “One tent,” says Dad and puts down his teacup with crashing finality.

  Mum says, “I think we’d all better have a drink, don’t you?”

  “Dad!”

  “End of story,” says Dad. “One tent. Hm?”

  We are married in the horses’ paddock eleven months after we first meet. Bishop the Right Reverend Clement H. Shaba presiding. Mum is wearing a vibrant skirt suit of tiny flowers on a black background, with hat to match. Vanessa is billowing and mauve, pregnant with her second son. Trevor, her first son, is in a sailor suit. Dad is dignified in a navy blue suit, beautifully cut. He could be anywhere. He comes to fetch me in a Mercedes-Benz borrowed from the neighbors, where I have spent the night before the wedding. He says, “All right, Chooks?”

  I’ve had a dose of hard-to-shake-off malaria for the last two weeks. “A bit queasy,” I tell him.

  It’s ten-thirty in the morning. Dad says, “A gin and tonic might buck you up.” He has brought a gin and tonic on ice with a slice of lemon in a thick glass tumbler from the farm. It’s in a cardboard box on the passenger side of the car.

  “Cheers.” I drink.

  “Cheers,” he says, and lights a cigarette, shaking a spare stick to the surface of the packet. “Want one?”

  “I quit. Remember?”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “ ‘S okay.”

  We drive together in silence for a while. It’s June, midwinter: a cool, high, clear day.

  “Pierre’s cattle are holding up nicely,” my father says.

  “Nice and fat.”

  “Wonder what he’s feeding?”

  “Cottonseed cake, I bet.”

  “Hm.”

  We slow down to allow a man on a bike, carrying a woman and child over the handlebars, to wobble up and over the railway tracks.

  “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do . . .”

  Dad looks at me and laughs. Now we’re close to the farm.

  “Oh, God,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Nerves.”

  “You’ll be all right,” says Dad.

  “I know.”

  “He’s a good one.”

  “I know.”

  I pull down the mirror on the passenger side and fiddle with the flower arrangement on my head. “I think this flowery thing looks silly, don’t you?”

  “Nope.”

  “You sure?”

  “You’re not bad-looking once they scrape the mud off you and put you in a dress.”

  I make a face at him.

  “All right, Chooks.” He leans over and squeezes my hand. “Drink up, we’re almost there.”

  I swallow the rest of my gin and tonic as we rock up the uneven driveway, and there is the sea of faces waiting for me. They turn to see Dad and me climb out of the car. There are farmers from the Burma Valley and Malawi, in too-short brown nylon suits. There are farmers’ wives in shoulder-biting sundresses, already pink-faced from drinking. Children are running in and out of the hay bales that have been set up for the congregation. Old friends from high school wave and laugh at me. Farm laborers stand; they are quiet and respectful.

  Bobo’s wedding. It is a big day for all the farm. Dad has brought drums and drums of beer to the compound, enough for a huge farm-wide celebration after the wedding. We feed hundreds of people; the entire front lawn is converted into a massive walk-through braai p
lace.

  Charlie and Mum

  The wedding party carries on for three days after Charlie and I leave for our honeymoon safari in South Luangwa National Park. Adamson, who has given me a small carved wooden box for a wedding present, has stopped trying to go home. He sleeps under the ironing table and reemerges periodically to drink beer, smoke marijuana, and cook for the surviving guests. Mum takes them on rides around the farm, for extended drunken picnics. Several are last seen slipping wearily from the saddle and are found afterward by the groom asleep on the sandy road or under the gum trees. They sleep in shifts on any available space: bed, sofa, carpet. Dad keeps the champagne and beer and brandy flowing, which is lucky because the water runs out when the pump is exhausted. The gardener runs up from the dam with buckets of water and guests are instructed to rest the plumbing and use the long-drop, dug especially for the wedding, in the back of the garden. Dad fries eggs and bacon and bananas and tomatoes and serves breakfast for thirty while Adamson snores softly under the table with the dogs.

  The party ends when the electricity fails and Dad sets himself alight, as a human torch, for the common good.

  The flowers for the wedding have been done by a drunken homosexual from the Copperbelt. His flower arrangements, his way of life, his entire philosophy, everything about the man is centered upon the theme of disguise. My wedding bouquet is made from wild African weeds, not flowers. The stagnant green pool is hidden with brightly colored balloons. White building sand covers the cow and horse shit in the paddock where Charlie and I exchange vows. The trees (bare-limbed in midwinter) are festooned with crepe-paper-covered hula hoops.

  Dad puts all the hula hoops over his body, one on top of the other. He says, “You miserable buggers want light. I bring you the Timothy Donald Fuller Electricity Supply Commission.” He lights a match and sets himself on fire.

  Mum, singing and arms raised in triumph, shouts, “Olé!”

  Dad is extinguished with a bottle of champagne by an alert, alarmed American guest.

  I couldn’t be more thoroughly married.

  Natasya and her father—

  Zambia, 2001

  NOW

  Mum has been diagnosed with manic depression.

  She says, “All of us are mad,” and then adds, smiling, “But I’m the only one with a certificate to prove it.”

  She went to what she calls the loony bin in Harare after a particularly manic phase.

  Birds started to talk to her. And she listened to their advice.

  She couldn’t sleep and wouldn’t eat and didn’t speak except in a mad voice, not her own. Her eyes went pale yellow, the color of a lion’s eyes.

  She began to try and be drunk by breakfast, so that the voices, the noise, the buzz in her head weren’t so loud.

  She forgot to bathe or change her clothes or walk the dogs.

  Then one night, she was found by a nice middle-class Zambian couple on Leopards Hill Road. She was, she told them, running away from home. Dad was in bed at Oribi Ridge with all the dogs and only realized she was gone when the neighborhood watch appeared in their pickup and with two-way radios crackling to tell Dad that Mum had been last seen with a nice Zambian couple and what did he want to do about it.

  The nice Zambian couple had picked Mum up and driven her to their house, where they tried to get her to tell them who she was and what she was doing. But Mum wouldn’t talk. They made her a cup of tea and radioed the neighborhood watch and while they were distracted by the radio communication, Mum ran out the back door, climbed their fence, and kept running.

  She ran to the small private clinic where she remembered the nurses had been kind when she had gone in a year earlier for an emergency operation on her stomach. She beat on the gate and shouted until the watchman woke up. “Let me in,” she was crying. “Fergodsake let me in.”

  The watchman opened the gate cautiously. He peered suspiciously around the gate.

  “Ah, but madam . . .”

  But Mum rushed into the yard, past the watchman, and into the clinic, where she surprised the night nurse. “Please,” she begged, sobbing with the effort of having run twelve miles in the dark in inappropriate shoes, “please, you have to help me.”

  The nurse was astonished.

  “I just need to sleep,” said Mum. “Put me to sleep.”

  Mum slept on and off—mostly on—for almost two years. Overtired from life.

  Dad took her down to the loony bin in Harare, through the border at Chirundu, where she now looked less like her passport photo than ever.

  They gave her so many drugs that she lay flattened on the sheets of her bed like a damp towel. Barely able to speak. Unable, for the first time in her well-read life, to lift a book.

  “It wasn’t so bad. I wasn’t really there,” says Mum. “I was just sort of floating. Not feeling. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad. It really wasn’t anything. Whenever anything like a feeling floated to the surface, they gave me more drugs and the feeling went away and I found I was so heavy and flat. . . . I just slept, mostly.”

  Then one morning a fellow patient let himself into Mum’s room, stood on her bed, pulled out his penis, and peed on her. Mum was too weak to react. She tried to scream.

  “I would have knocked the bloody fellow out,” says Mum. But her arms and legs and voice wouldn’t work.

  “That’s when I knew that the only thing worse than being crazy was being like this . . . like a lump.”

  Mum and Dad have a fish farm now, on the Lower Zambezi. For a couple of years after Mum’s major nervous breakdown, they lived in a thatched hut. Their dining room was a table under a tree. Their kitchen was a fire under another tree. The bath was a tin tub under the stars, surrounded by a grass fence. I could look up from my tub and stare at the black, deep sky pinpricked with silver stars. The toilet was a ridiculously narrow hole in the ground, a long-drop the size of which, when I was visiting from America, I protested against.

  Dad said, “We don’t make long-drops in stretch-limo size out here. We Africans don’t need supersized holes.”

  They split their time between the cottage at Oribi Ridge and the farm in Chirundu. Once their new house is finished, they will live full time at Chirundu. Their nearest European neighbors are some Italian nuns who run a hospital for local villagers and a family who run a fishing lodge. The local villagers have traditionally made their living through poaching wildlife, fishing the perilously crocodile-thick waters, and chopping down slow-growing hardwood trees to make charcoal, which they sell in Lusaka. Chirundu is one of the least healthy, most malarial, hot, disagreeable places in Zambia. But it is, as Dad says, “far from the madding crowd.”

  “Because even the madding crowd aren’t mad enough to live there,” I point out.

  “Yup.” Dad pauses to fiddle with his pipe. “But we have hippo in the garden.”

  As if that can make up for the thick clouds of mosquitoes, the isolation, the insufferable, deadening heat, the lack of rain.

  Mum takes little white pills every day now. She says, “They’re just enough to keep my brain quiet, but not so much to knock me out.”

  She repeats her stories. They said that would be a side effect.

  I say, “You’ve always repeated stories.”

  She has twenty feet of copper wire hanging from the trees, attached to shortwave radio. She is reading, planting a garden, listening to the radio, talking to her dogs, supervising lunch, and trying to write a letter all at the same time. She is gently manic, in a pottering sort of way.

  Vanessa left her first husband, and has remarried and now lives a few hours up the road from Mum and Dad in a house facetiously called the rock palace, a beautiful, fanciful settlement frequented by snakes. She has just had her fourth baby.

  A letter to me in America, from Mum in Zambia, dated 12 December 2000, reads, in part,

  When we get water, then I’m going mad on the garden and lawn. I keep putting trees in, which the staff resent because they’ve got to haul water from a well
to water them, and the beastly Madam crawls from plant to plant and bird table to bird bath the minute I get there from Oribi Ridge—the birds down there are wonderful!

  Our house is coming along—sitting room plain, high rectangular—needs ceiling when we can afford it, and slates, tiles—something—for the floor which is still cement. Bedroom walls up—such an odd shape—Dad insisted on different shape and drew something out with a stick on the ground—then the builder said “How do we put the roof on?” and Bwana didn’t know—but Madam, of course, came up with a brain wave—but we’ll see if it works first.

  Thatch house leaks, had low ceiling of black seedbed sheets which sagged and trapped frantic lizards who can only get rescued when Madam went down (from Oribi Ridge). No, this was a sweat box—a torment chamber of note—in that heat I could not stand it—now Banda [Dad’s longtime right-hand man] had to crawl around and tuck plastic against the thatch as a neat lining—NOT his plan of sticking plastic over the roof—can you imagine—more like township squalor every day.

  Poor Van going mad with depression and pain and waiting (for the baby to come). They’ve moved into Dunc and Nicollet Hawkesworth’s house (closer to the clinic). . . .

  That’s enough waffling for now!

  All our love and thoughts will be with you at Christmas. . . .

  Lots of love, Mum and Dad.

  Vanessa’s baby came the day after Christmas. She named her Natasya Isabelle Jayne.

  Jayne in memory of the baby none of us will ever forget, Olivia Jane Fuller.

  This is not a full circle. It’s Life carrying on. It’s the next breath we all take. It’s the choice we make to get on with it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and the Fullers later lived in Malawi and Zambia. Fuller received a B.A. in English literature from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, and now lives in Wyoming.