‘Cheeky little buggers,’ Grandpa remarked, and continued rifling through Oscar’s hair. Oscar seemed oblivious to the infestation and thought he was receiving a rather long, if a bit uncomfortable, tummy rub.
Oscar Wilde had grown up with Mum and me in the city. Several people had suggested canine protection for a single mother and her infant daughter, and a strong Rhodesian ridgeback as a guard dog seemed to fit the bill. However, the way Oscar greeted all strangers with a warm lick on the legs made him more of a cuddly companion than a protector. His friendly nature had worked against him in the past. During a farm visit three years ago, Grandpa took Oscar Wilde along for a walk as he inspected the crops. While Grandpa was talking to one of the workers, Oscar ran off into a neighbouring farm. When Grandpa found him he was inside a cattle field, blood leaking out of his mouth, having received a hoof to the face. As a result of this accident his front teeth jutted out at an angle and his jaw protruded, causing him to dribble on you whenever he decided to rest his big head in your lap. Mum often joked that unless someone was strongly deterred by doggy-saliva, Oscar Wilde wouldn’t be saving us from anyone.
‘Good boy,’ cooed Grandpa as he removed the final tick from Oscar Wilde’s body. Somehow sensing the session had come to an end, Oscar stood up, shook himself and bounded over to the double garage. There, among boxes and boxes of Nana and Grandpa’s stuff from the farm, sat a metal cage housing their two budgies. Grandpa forfeited his favourite, and very expensive, four-man camping tent so he could fit Bip and Bop in the truck. Naturally Oscar found them terribly exciting; a noteworthy change from the brown sparrows that he chased – but never caught – up and down the driveway. Believing these caged birds would behave like the ones on the road, Oscar would run up to them, bark, then run from the garage all the way to the electric fence, despite them remaining flightless on their wooden rod.
‘Here,’ Grandpa said, as he handed me the silver tweezers, now tipped with tick-blood. ‘Wash those off and don’t tell your mum.’
When I returned to the lounge room, after rinsing off Mum’s tweezers and placing them back in her make-up drawer, I saw the adults were drinking tea again, a sunflower tea-cosy keeping the pot warm as they spoke.
‘On the Botha farm, they just torched the place – torched it to the ground,’ Grandpa was saying. ‘Didn’t give them a warning, didn’t tell them to leave, nothing. Just climbed up onto the thatch roof’ – he made a sweeping gesture with his hands – ‘struck a match.’
‘Dad …’ Mum said, as she noticed me walking towards the dining-room table.
‘What? Hannah knows what’s going on. Hell, the Bothas had their own grandkids at Bishopslea – probably in her class. C’mon. It’s happening everywhere.’ Grandpa took a sip of his tea. ‘They won’t stop until it’s all theirs again. And they say they’re helping their own! They say they’re helping the black folk, but they’re not. They’re not. Ephraim, Jackson, Rukodzo, Tapiwa, all the workers, they loved it there on the farm. They said to me – I’ll tell you what they said to me – they said: “Boss, if those buggers take over the farm, we’re dead.” What do the War Vets know about running a farm? Nothing. Those blokes I had working for me, they’re going to starve to death. Starve. They won’t be making money from the crops. These War Vets aren’t heroes. They’re useless, hopped up on drugs and god-knows-what, set to kill in the name of Mugabe. Hell, I—’
‘That’s enough,’ Nana interrupted, placing her hand on top of Grandpa’s, which had formed a vice-like grip around his mug of tea. He relaxed his hands, letting one slip into Nana’s grasp, before placing the other on top and, for the first time in my life, I saw my grandpa cry. It wasn’t a big cry, like when Mum got off the phone after a fight with Dad, or even when I fell from the avocado tree. It was less than a handful of tears, maybe two from each eye, which he wiped away with closed fists. But it was the saddest I had ever seen someone look.
While my grandparents and my mother continued to Make a Plan, I was ordered to go outside and play. Relieved from her kettle-boiling duties, Gogo was instructed to keep an eye on me. I could see that Grandpa and Nana’s eviction from the farm was hard for her too. She’d got her daughter Beauty’s fiancé a job on that farm, and now the steady income stream for her future son-in-law, and maybe even future father of her grandchildren, was ripped away from her.
When I was little, Gogo used to push me on the tyre swing that Grandpa crafted. She’d pull up one of the white plastic garden chairs, place it behind the swing and would push me with her foot.
But I was too old for swings now. Instead, Gogo and I sat on the grass as I told her about the presents I got for my birthday. She listened intently, saying how nice they sounded and how much of a lucky girl I was.
‘Oh, and Dad’s getting me a computer game from South Africa.’
‘Very nice,’ Gogo said.
We sat there in silence for a while. I listened to her humming a tune that went nowhere while watching the adults talking inside, mugs and pens in hands, brows furrowed.
9
Mum told me i could skip the first day back at school and join her as she ran errands instead. I was pleased, eager for any opportunity to bunk. There was a special thrill about being out and about during the day when I was meant to be in school.
We set off, and even passed by the Bishopslea gates, and I thought of everyone huddled over their desks, staring at tiresome maths equations, while I was going on an adventure with Mum.
I turned to look over at her, clad in a navy Daniel Hechter dress, hair straightened into submission. It was only when we went camping or up to the farm for a long time that her hair would gradually twirl back in on itself, becoming shorter yet wider at the same time.
‘You’re going to have to keep straightening your hair for a while,’ I said to Mum.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because we don’t have the farm to go to anymore.’
‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.’ She took her hand off the gearstick to brush my hair away from my face. I resisted the urge to immediately push it back the other way because she looked like she needed me to leave it.
‘We won’t be long at the office, two hours tops. Then we can go get lunch somewhere nice.’
On the way into the city, we were forced to stop for Mugabe’s motorcade, which was not an unfamiliar occurrence, and more of a nuisance than a cause for fear. A warning police motorbike would go ahead, ushering cars out of the way. We would pull over to the side of the road and wait for the president’s cavalry to come through. A few more police motorbikes, almost in a V formation, like birds flying south for the winter. A fleet of police sedans. Three black BMWs. More police cars flanked by motorbikes, and an ambulance, siren blaring, at the end. Most people thought that Mugabe would be seated in one of the luxurious Beemers, but Mum reckoned that he was more likely to be in the back of one of the dingy police cars. A red herring, guaranteeing any assassination attempts would fail. But I thought that if he really, really didn’t want people to target him then he would just drive in a normal car without the motorcade, sporting sunglasses and a ratty jacket.
‘Do you think he knows people hate him?’ I asked.
‘No, I don’t think he does know. Sometimes I think people can have such inflated egos that they don’t even realise other people do not think of them the way they think of themselves.’
‘His ego has a high inflation rate too then,’ I said.
‘Did you hear that on a TV show or something?’ Mum asked.
‘Huh? No? Why?’
‘Oh, nothing. It’s just clever. You’re very clever, my little pumpkin.’
We arrived at Mum’s workplace, the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange in downtown Harare. When I was younger, the parking garage was as exciting as an amusement park. We would loop round and round and round in circles until we reached the top, but the best part was going back down the spiral a
nd the way it made my tummy tickle.
Inside the office, Mum handed me a pile of scrap paper, with all sorts of rows of text and graphs and charts printed on the back.
‘I don’t have any colouring pens, but here you go,’ she said, piling a handful of Stabilo highlighters into my hand, along with one of those bulky biro pens that host not only black, but red and green and blue ink too.
I sat down on the carpet, savouring the unique smell of the office – a mix of disinfectant, hot printer paper and cold cups of coffee – as I watched Mum type with her index fingers only. Every so often, she’d slip her heels back on and leave the room to collect overflowing lever-arch files or borrow a stapler.
After a while I needed her to show me the way to the toilet. As Mum accompanied me back from the bathroom to her office, we were met in the corridor by a large man with thick glasses in a grey pinstripe suit.
‘Derrick, hi. This is my daughter, Hannah.’ A beat. ‘Hannah, this is Mr Kazembe.’
The man knelt down, taking my hand in his and shaking it with a firmness that made me feel grown up.
‘Hello, Hannah. You won’t remember me, but I met you when you were just a baby.’ He stood up straight again, towering over Mum, even though she had her heels on. ‘Look how much you’ve grown.’
‘She’s smart too,’ Mum said. ‘Although it was only a few years ago she was telling all her friends that I worked at the Zimbabwe Stocking Change.’
‘Smart like her mother,’ he said, turning back to me. ‘Of course, we had our doubts when bringing her on board. Don’t get me wrong, we knew she was talented, but we were scared she would go off and get pregnant, leaving us in the lurch to pick up her slack. Which, well, she did. But she was back here three months later, ready for action. We shouldn’t have worried. Only now she’s bringing her kids into the workplace.’
Mum let out a sharp laugh, but as soon as she was inside her office once again and the door was closed, she muttered, ‘Bastard.’ I didn’t tell her that I thought Mr Kazembe seemed like a nice guy and I liked the way he shook my hand as though I were an adult.
The last errand we needed to complete was at the bank. The lines were as long as the queues for petrol, with bodies extending beyond the neat blue-and-green retractable barriers and onto the street outside. We inched along for an hour and a half, like drugged moths to the call of the curved coil of the Standard Chartered logo.
‘Hi. I was wondering if you could help me, I need to transfer … um … two trillion dollars into my parents’ account.’ Mum paused, to make sure that figure was right, and opted to write it down on a piece of paper with one of those pens affixed to the counter. I peered over her shoulder as she made twelve circles on the page. ‘It’s under my dad’s name, Graham Reynolds.’
‘I can’t let you transfer that amount, ma’am,’ the woman replied.
‘I used to work here. Tell me, is Keith Hunzwi still the manager of this branch?’
‘He is, ma’am.’
Mum requested to speak with him, and I could sense by the way her voice went an octave higher when he arrived that she was going to try her best to convince him to make the deposit.
‘Keith! You look well. How are you? It’s been so long.’
They proceeded to engage in pleasantries, condensing their respective life updates into a handful of sentences, insisting they should have a ‘proper catch-up’ sometime soon, until the real reason Mum was there became apparent.
‘It’s so good to see you, Jane, but I’m afraid we can’t process that amount of money. You should know that.’
‘It’s for my parents. They’ve just been … uh … they’ve just come into some financial trouble. I’m trying to help out in whatever way I can.’
‘The best I can offer you is one hundred million dollars,’ Mr Hunzwi said.
‘That’s the cost of a big grocery shop,’ Mum retorted. ‘I’m sorry, Keith. I get it, I do. I just …’
‘I can give it to you in cash, if that helps.’
Mum agreed to this, and when we were back at the car, I remarked at the weight of the bulging envelope containing all the banknotes.
‘It’s not enough. I need to pay Gogo in cash. This is certainly not enough for Nana and Grandpa. But we will make a plan.’ She explained how she had treasured Keith as a former colleague, and was annoyed with herself for finding his fair and even nature frustrating.
‘How long are Nana and Grandpa going to stay with us?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure. They will probably want their own place eventually. Maybe a couple of months.’
‘I like having them around. Why didn’t you properly tell the man what happened to them? Maybe he would’ve felt sorry for us.’
‘Because, Hannah, not everyone thinks about these things the same way.’
‘Do you think he is a ZANU-PF supporter?’ I asked.
‘No … no, it’s not that. Definitely not. It’s more like … Well, it’s a complicated subject. You know that English people stole this land from the Shona people. That they hurt them. And so … and so there needed to be reparations.’
I opened my mouth, but Mum pre-empted my question.
‘Reparations … as in, they needed to redress the wrongs they did. Make amends for all the harm they caused. That’s why so many people voted Mugabe in: they held high hopes for the future. It needed to happen. Just not like this.’
By that time it was two-thirty, and we settled for a late lunch at IB’s, the Italian Bakery, in the Avondale shopping complex. IB’s was a constantly bustling, grand cafe, where obtaining one of the coveted balcony tables was incredibly lucky.
We arrived just as a couple of diners were leaving and snagged the prime location, placing orders for two cheese-and-spinach quiches. Mum also ordered a cappuccino and, as usual, let me scoop the frothy bit sprinkled with chocolate off with a teaspoon.
We sat there in the sun, talking and eating and watching the action unfolding around the car park below. To the right, women were stationed at their stalls in the flea market. Employees of the supermarket chain, Bon Marché, were collecting shopping trolleys, running then jumping onto them, skating along on their momentum. Vendors were selling fruit out of trucks: great bundles of oranges, bursting through the red string. You could never just buy a couple of oranges at a time, so Gogo would have to come up with creative ways to get through the hordes of fruit. Freshly squeezed orange juice for breakfast, oranges in my lunchbox for break and lunch, fruit salad for dinner, jelly orange slices to bring to my hockey games.
‘Maybe we can ask Dino if I can put up a few flyers for the charity show in here,’ Mum said.
Dino was the owner of IB’s, a charming Italian man with milk-white hair who would come to check our meals were delizioso every time we dined there. We were often at IB’s, partly because it was the best place to get coffee and partly because you’d always bump into a friend when you were there. A result of our continued patronage was the fact that Mum and I got to know Dino really well.
As he did the rounds today, hopping from table to table, he recognised us and exclaimed how happy he was to see his favourite ‘sisters’ dining.
‘Oh, please,’ Mum said in response. ‘I need to sort out the greys, pronto.’
‘Ah, Jane, I cannot see any grey hairs. This,’ Dino said, as he combed back his white mop, ‘this is grey hairs. No?’
‘But they look so much better on you,’ Mum gushed, and I wondered if this was what my dad meant when he said my mum was a flirt. She asked about the flyers, and he said he was more than happy for her to advertise in his cafe.
‘Mum, were you flirting with Dino before?’ I asked when he left the table, causing her to almost choke on her forkful of quiche.
‘Hannah, honey, he’s in his eighties. He’s also married.’
‘Dad’s almost sixty,’ I said, not thinking it was that big
of a leap, but the shocked look on Mum’s face told me that it was.
‘So you weren’t flirting?’ I tried to clarify.
‘No. Well, sometimes flirting is just being nice to someone and giving them compliments – it doesn’t have to mean something.’
I asked Mum about the boyfriends she’d had before Dad. I was always thrilled when she took the time to tell me these stories and shared some of her past with me.
‘I only really had two serious boyfriends before your father. One was James Van der Linden: he was my on-and-off-again high-school boyfriend and would sneak me out of the boarding house so we could go to Dairy Queen. Then there was David Schmitt, who I dated during varsity. You met him and his wife, Laura.’
‘Who was your favourite?’ I asked.
‘My favourite?’ Mum said, placing her knife and fork together on the plate and leaning back in her chair.
I copied her as I’d forgotten to do the same, even though I had finished eating a while ago.
‘David and I became close, but he was preparing to join the Royal Air Force. He asked me to come with him to the UK, but I was too young and still needed to finish my degree.’
‘And then you met Dad?’
‘Quite a few years later, yes. I started working at Standard Chartered and that’s where I met your dad.’
Bunking school, lunch at IB’s, and Mum telling me about her boyfriends – what a great day!
10
I was seeing my dad for the first time since I turned eleven, and also since Nana and Grandpa had to leave the farm. We were sitting outside, in what Dad referred to as the Spanish garden. It was a walled courtyard that ran parallel to the tennis courts at the bottom of the property. A wrought-iron gate took you inside, to a semi-paved area filled with plants. There was a guava and a nectarine tree that provided dappled shade over the low bench, and lemon plants in terracotta pots scattered around the perimeter. Traditionally a long pond or water channel would be created within the space, but Dad had a narrow plunge pool with ocean-blue tiles stretching from end to end. He enjoyed speaking about the garden, as well as the style of the house, which had been built a great number of years ago for the British colonials.
Little Stones Page 6
