A Child Called Happiness

by Stephan Collishaw

  It wasn’t long before the trouble started between Zindonga and Drew.

  20

  Roy began his counter-attack almost immediately. Going to his office at the side of the house he made some telephone calls and before dark a steady stream of visitors began to arrive at the farm. The Land Rovers and jeeps pulled up off the driveway onto the grass verges and the men gathered in the house. Many of them were farmers, men who Natalie had met at Boyle’s farm, but there were black faces too, men Natalie had not been introduced to. She had been hoping that Janet would come, but Boyle told her when he arrived, that she had flown down to Johannesburg to stay with relatives for a few days.

  Natalie helped Kristine to ensure that beers were handed out and that important guests were made to feel comfortable.

  ‘That’s James Chiripanyanga,’ Kristine said, indicating a tall, smartly dressed man. ‘He’s a provincial judge. And that is Ruben Nyamabi, the MDC candidate for this ward.’

  ‘Listen Roy,’ Nyamabi said later, as they gathered around the table, ‘this one is coming from the top. It’s no secret that General Muchina has had his eye on the farm for a while. This is Mugabe’s favour to him for the attacks on MDC members in this area.’

  There were nods around the table.

  ‘That doesn’t mean there is nothing that cannot or shouldn’t be done,’ James Chiripanyanga said. He had a deep, clearly articulated voice and spoke slowly and precisely. ‘Are we saying that we agree there is no longer the rule of law in Zimbabwe?’

  ‘I wasn’t saying that Roy should give up. Far from it.’

  ‘You need to appeal against the notice of the acquisition,’ Chiripanyanga continued, nodding vaguely at Nyamabi. ‘They’ve served the papers on Friday, and that’s deliberate, as I’m sure you’re aware.’ He took a sip of his beer. ‘You won’t be able to appeal until Monday morning. If I was you, I would be expecting something to happen this weekend.’

  The judge leaned back in his chair and wiped his hand slowly across his forehead. The white farmers drank in silence. Nyamabi leaned forward again; his hands shook a little so that he spilled some beer on the table.

  ‘Judge Chiripanyanga is right,’ he said. ‘The War Veterans will be up here this weekend without a doubt, you’re going to need a plan to deal with them.’

  Some of the white farmers stayed that night. Roy walked back to the cottage with Natalie and sat in the chair on the veranda nursing a beer in his hands.

  ‘I’ll take you into Harare tomorrow, Natalie. We can get you on a flight back to England this weekend.’

  Natalie looked at her uncle. His face seemed to have aged in the time she had been there, the tough lined skin looked tired and pale and his eyes were dull and hard.

  ‘I’m staying.’

  Roy shook his head. ‘Your mother would never forgive me if something happened to you. You came out here for a holiday, for a rest… ’ He glanced up at Natalie. ‘I spoke to your mother,’ he said.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘She said she was worried about you.’

  Natalie shrugged. It had been a while since she had spoken to her mother; in fact she had not spoken to her at all since she had broken up with Lawrence. Since it all fell apart. That had been one of the reasons she had left England. She did not want to listen to her mother’s quiet, sensible advice. She did not want to listen to sense. There was no sense to be found in the whole dark mess.

  ‘Not about this,’ Roy said, sweeping his hand out towards the darkness. ‘She was worried about what happened to you.’

  Roy eyed her and she wondered how much her mother had said.

  ‘She was concerned that you seemed to be blocking everybody out.’

  Natalie turned away from him. She walked over to the desk and sat down. The photograph of Lawrence and herself was stood up against the line of books. She blushed and would have turned it down against the table but she knew her uncle was watching her.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ she said.

  ‘It’s none of my business,’ Roy said, his hands rising defensively. ‘I don’t know what happened and I’m not sure that your mother knows it all either.’ His eyes flicked up and lingered for a moment on the photograph. ‘But your mother was concerned for you.’

  Natalie sighed. Roy stared off into the darkness outside the window. The night was loud with the noise of the cicadas and the frogs; the air was stuffy and heavy. He rolled his beer bottle between the palms of his hands, then lifted it up and drained it and set it down on the table. For a moment Natalie was tempted to tell Roy, to let it all out. To tell him what had happened with Lawrence and to explain about the child. The bubble welled up from her gut and forced its way painfully up into her throat. She turned away and placed the photograph face down on the table.

  ‘It was nothing,’ she said, finally, her voice tight. ‘I just needed to get away for a while.’

  From somewhere down the road someone was shouting. Roy cocked his head, trying to interpret the sounds, but nothing was discernible.

  ‘Well,’ he said then, ‘we’ll take you into Harare in the morning. I promised your mother.’

  Natalie sat on the edge of the bed. The light was off and it was dark in the room. The curtains were open but the moon had been obscured by thick cloud that had rolled in as the sun set. The heat prickled her skin. She tried to imagine being back in England. She tried to imagine the cold weather, looking for a teaching job. She tried to imagine, but couldn’t. The thought of England summoned up only the image of Lawrence and what was not and that filled her with emptiness.

  She pictured Lawrence as she had last seen him, when she had gone to speak to him. It had been a cold night and she was wrapped up in a large coat, a scarf hiding her chin.

  ‘This is not about you,’ she had said.

  He had gazed back at her, his eyes clear and blue. She would not go into his apartment, but stood on the landing at the top of the stairs as though she wanted to keep the option open to run.

  ‘This is about us, Natalie,’ he said. ‘Us.’

  She could not stand the beseeching look on his face. She could not deal with his sorrow.

  She shook her head. ‘No, Lawrie. This is about me.’

  Natalie slept fitfully, waking every half hour and checking her watch. The noise of the frogs and the cicadas pulsed through her. Towards dawn it grew suddenly quiet, and she fell into a deeper sleep then.

  She heard the sound of crying. Pushing through the bush, she climbed up onto a large granite boulder. The sun was just beginning to rise and the air was strangely luminous.

  ‘What is it?’ Roy shouted.

  She glanced around, knowing that she had climbed up to look for something. And then Lawrence was there, the baby in his arms. He held it up to her and laughed. And it was Memories’ voice that spoke to her.

  ‘It’s your son.’

  She woke with a start. The sun was up and the temperature in the room was rising. Her throat was parched.

  21

  ‘Kare kare.’ This was how my mother always started whenever she spoke of Zindonga; as though it was a story, a fairy tale. Long, long ago. She nursed my hatred. She fanned the flames from the smouldering embers, ensured that the hatred swelled. And it was she too, that told me of Tafara, of Nehanda, of the days when this land was ours, when our cattle roamed these fields and we worshipped our ancestors who had lived in this valley, among these hills for centuries. She ensured that the stories were passed down; that it was not forgotten to whom this land belonged, and that promise – ‘My bones will rise’ – was passed down. The land would be ours again.

  ‘Kare kare, when you were no more than a child,’ my mother intoned as I lay drowsing in the one bed, ‘your father began to organise the workers in the mines in the valley.’

  The main mine was in Bindura, a growing town at the head of the valley. There Zindonga unionised the workers and began to organise those in other industries too, those building the roads and the railways.

 
‘United we are a force to be reckoned with,’ Zindonga told them.

  It wasn’t just the books that Grace and Robert had given him that convinced him of the need for the workers to unite; he had seen the general strike in 1948 when they came back to Zimbabwe. He had seen the fear in the white man’s eyes when the black workers rose up. Power, Zindonga surmised, lay not in guns or in money and privilege; power was a psychological state, and it was not hard to calculate how many blacks there were to whites, and how dependant the whites were on black labour.

  ‘They are so few,’ he told the groups of workers that gathered at the house in the evenings. ‘And we are so many. Without us they have nothing. It is we who have the power. It is we who have the strength if only we believe it.’

  Father O’Leary, as he grew older, remained a close friend to Zindonga and often would come around to the small house in the evening to talk. Though my mother, Grace, was devoutly Catholic, Zindonga had lost the faith he was brought up in. Occasionally Father O’Leary spoke to him of faith, but more often than not, the two of them spoke about the condition of the workers and of injustices meted out upon the black population.

  It was late on a Friday evening when Drew knocked loudly on the door of Father O’Leary’s house. He had been at a meeting of the United Party and was on the way back to the farm in his old pick-up truck when he passed the church.

  He found O’Leary in the office behind the church. O’Leary received Drew politely, showing him to a threadbare armchair close to the window and asking the maid to bring in tea. Drew was dressed in a black suit and his flaming red hair had been cut short and slicked back darkly. He was beginning to bald, but his thin, wiry frame had lost none of its pugnaciousness.

  ‘Now then, O’Leary,’ Drew began before the maid had even shut the door, ‘About this young agitator you’re employing down at the school.’

  Drew’s Scottish accent had hardly softened in the years he had been in Africa. He had been brought up a Presbyterian, but attended church now only because it was expected of him and because the wife that he had acquired insisted upon it; the tone he took when he spoke to Father O’Leary showed little trace of respect.

  Father O’Leary paused by the window and gazed out across the lawn. He did not respond, but Drew carried on anyway.

  ‘I’m not having it, do you hear O’Leary? Either you control the munt, or sack him. I’m not having him causing trouble round here.’

  Father O’Leary flinched at the farm owner’s casual racism. He drew himself up tall and tapped his fingers against the window frame. The maid entered the room with a tray of tea and biscuits and placed them down on the low coffee table. She was about to pour, but Father O’Leary smiled and thanked her.

  ‘It’s all right, Prudence, you can leave.’

  He took his time pouring the tea, making sure his hand was steady. He even managed a smile as he handed the cup to Drew.

  ‘Zindonga has done nothing that would make his position St Xavier’s untenable,’ he said, settling himself on a wooden, straight-backed chair close to the fireplace.

  ‘Nothing?’ Drew’s eyebrows shot up, wrinkling his freckled forehead. ‘He’s a radical, a trouble-causing rabble riser! He’s been organising the local workers into unions and encouraging them to strike. To rebel. I’m warning you O’Leary -’

  ‘You have no authority to come warning me, Reginald,’ Father O’Leary cut in.

  Drew paused, the tea cup not quite at his thin lips. He placed it back in its saucer and put it down on the table. Standing, he towered over Father O’Leary. Looking up, the priest saw the muscled physique, the body hardened by years of labour, saw the stony look in his eyes and knew that Drew was capable of violence and that many a man would have reason to fear him.

  ‘You should know whose side you’re on, O’Leary,’ Drew spat at him after a few moments. ‘These kaffirs or ours. You can’t be on both.’

  Father O’Leary lifted his cup to his lips and sipped the tea, suppressing the tremor of rage that ran through him.

  ‘I don’t appreciate you using that language,’ he began finally, but it was too late. Drew placed the tea cup on the mantelpiece with a crash and stormed over to the door. He turned as he opened it and cast a dark glare at the priest. Father O’Leary rose to his feet, but Drew turned from him and strode out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Father O’Leary summoned Zindonga to his office the following evening. Zindonga was tall and slim, with a handsome physique. He was a popular teacher at the school; the young students looked up to him and he was intelligent and taught with passion. When Zindonga appeared at the door of his office, he welcomed him in with a smile.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Father O’Leary said, indicating the chair by the fireplace. For most of the year the fire stood empty. Prudence had swept it clean and put a vase of fresh flowers in the hearth. Father O’Leary liked the fireplace; it reminded him of home and the small hut in rural Ireland where he had been raised.

  Zindonga shook his head. Beneath his arm he had a pile of books and a folder bulging with papers. Father O’Leary eyed it. He took his pipe from the mantelpiece and stuffed it carefully and deliberately.

  ‘Reginald Drew was around here last night,’ he said finally. He put the pipe in his mouth, clamping it between his teeth while he took out a matchbox and extracted a redheaded match. For a moment he held it; the red head and the flame suddenly reminded him of Drew and he grimaced.

  Zindonga nodded slowly.

  ‘He was concerned about your influence on the workers around here.’

  The smoke was oily and heavy and the smell of it filled the small room. Zindonga watched the priest passively.

  ‘He wanted me to get rid of you,’ Father O’Leary said then, candidly.

  ‘And what did you say?’ Zindonga said. Despite himself he felt his heart thud a little harder. He thought of Grace and the child that she was expecting. He wondered how she would react if he lost his job. They would have to move. It would be difficult with her being pregnant; they had little enough money as it was and nothing saved.

  ‘I said that he had no right to ask such things,’ Father O’Leary said.

  As Zindonga looked at him he noticed suddenly how much the priest had aged. He had begun to stoop a little and his hair was thinning and his skin seemed sallow and hung from him loosely. He had a sudden sharp image of the priest when he was young, not long after he had come to serve at the church. He had taken all of the boys out to the river. He hadn’t swum himself, but he remembered the young priest lifting up one of the boys and tossing him into the water. He remembered the laughter and the companionship of those days. Of the belief that the young priest had shown in him as a student.

  ‘Drew doesn’t scare me,’ Zindonga said. ‘I’ve seen how he can behave, I’ve seen him beat men with his bare hands when I was a child on his farm, but he doesn’t scare me.’

  ‘Never-the-less,’ said Father O’Leary, tilting his head, holding his pipe in his left hand as he leaned against the mantelpiece.

  But Zindonga wasn’t listening to him either. He shuffled the books and papers from under one arm to the other and turned towards the door.

  ‘Was that it?’

  Father O’Leary gazed at him for a moment and then nodded.

  ‘Yes, that was it.’

  22

  Saturday morning. The farm was quiet. Natalie turned on her bed and glanced at her watch, it was half past six. The sun was up and the heat was beginning to rise; she pushed away the thin cotton sheet and turned on her back staring up at the ceiling. It wouldn’t be long before the farm began to stir and then Roy would come for her. A quick breakfast and then into the Land Rover and onto the road to Harare. The flight to London left mid-morning. She worked it out in her head. Zimbabwe was two hours ahead of London. A ten hour flight. She would be back in London in time for last orders.

  She sat up and walked over to the shower. The water was beautifully cool and she turned it right down until
it was almost too cold to bear and she was gasping for breath. When she had towelled herself dry, she went to sit in the chair by the window, drawing the curtains back so she could see down across the lawn towards the trees.

  Lawrence would be a telephone call away. How would he respond if she called? What would she say to him? What was there left to say?

  She was dressed when she heard the soft knock at her door. She opened it quickly. Roy stood outside, dressed in a khaki shirt and jeans, a worn leather cowboy hat pulled down onto his head, the brim shading his eyes.

  ‘You ready?’ Roy said, glancing over her shoulder into the room.

  ‘I’m not going, Roy.’

  Roy looked at her. She felt the blue eyes boring into her and her cheeks flushed but she did not look away.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ Roy said, indicating for Natalie to step back.

  Natalie followed him into the room and closed the door. Roy took off his hat and ran his finger around the inside of it. Then threw it on the bed.

  ‘You know what is likely to happen this weekend?’

  Natalie nodded. ‘I was at Boyle’s farm.’

  Roy nodded as if considering this. ‘You never can tell how these things are going to pan out,’ he said. ‘Up at Boyle’s it didn’t turn out badly the other night, but you should know that it can get ugly, if they decide. There have been plenty of farmers who have ended up with a beating. There are those who have ended worse. We’ve lost some.’

  ‘Roy,’ Natalie said. ‘I’ve got nothing to go back to England for at the moment. I thought about it this morning – being back there tonight in South-East London, down at the pub. Looking for a job on Monday. I can’t do it. Not now, not at the moment.’

  Roy eyed her, then shook his head.

  ‘We have friends in Harare. We can take you there to stay for a few days. Just till we see how things go. Get through the weekend. See how we can push the lawyers on Monday.’

  ‘Is Kristine going?’

  ‘Kristine’s staying,’ Roy said slowly. ‘This is her home. It would break her up to leave it. Thirty-five years we’ve been here, after we inherited it from old man Drew. It’s a good chunk of your life.’