Little Stones

by Kuiper, Elizabeth;

  ‘But you were …’ I paused, and subtracted my age from my dad’s current age to figure out roughly how old he would’ve been around the time. ‘You were fifty, which is a lot older. Maybe it was your fault?’

  ‘Forty-nine. But it doesn’t work like that. Daddies can make babies at any time – no matter how old they are.’ This was, again, brand-new information I was receiving about the child-making process.

  ‘Do you think you might have another baby one day?’ I asked. I expected Dad to say no straight away, but he considered my question for a while. He said he probably wouldn’t, no. It was weird – I had wanted him to say no, and I got what I wanted, but the way he said he probably wouldn’t seemed like less of a no to any future child and more of an expression of regret for the one sat across the couch from him.

  Of course, when I broached the topic with Mum for the second time, she added a different dimension to the story that Dad had given.

  ‘Why did Dad think you would blame the baby dying on him?’ I asked, after she’d collected me from his house and we were driving back home.

  ‘Oh, flip, Hannah. Did you talk to him about this?’

  Obviously I had, but she’d never explicitly asked me not to – unlike her request to abstain from telling people about Ms Pratt’s sexuality – so I figured it was fair game.

  ‘Why do you think he would say that?’ I asked again.

  ‘Do you really want to hear all this? I think you might be too young.’

  ‘I’m not too young,’ I said, lowering my voice to seem more adult.

  ‘The day it happened … we were walking laps around the tennis courts, getting some exercise. This was after you were born and I was pregnant again. We were walking because he said I had gained a lot of weight during the pregnancy and he was embarrassed to show up with his “fat wife” to events. That’s a whole other story. Anyway, as we walked, I spoke to him about wanting to buy this toy for you. It was basically a little plastic frame with rattles and toys hanging off it that babies lie underneath. He thought it was an extravagant purchase. It wasn’t. And I tried to tell him about the child psychology books I had read, which clearly stated these sorts of toys and visual stimulation were imperative for cognitive development …’

  Mum pulled into our driveway, and turned off the engine, swivelling in her seat to face me. She spoke slower now, her eyes caught in the memory.

  ‘We had just walked past the stone steps, the ones that lead down to the courts. And I felt it. Or maybe I saw it first. Blood. I was bleeding. Your dad drove me to Harare Central, the hospital, but by then it was too late. I had to give birth to the baby, but she’d come too early … she was already dead before she came out of me.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was a girl.’

  ‘Anyway, there had been a lot of stress. Which is normal, after any pregnancy. But it was also complicated. I needed to go back to work, at least part-time. I’d only just started at the stock exchange, which your father wasn’t thrilled about to begin with. He wanted me to be at home with you. Which, of course, I wanted to. But it was complicated. His housekeeper – Maria – didn’t want to help out with the baby, so I hired Gogo to come in and take care of you … Who your dad didn’t like, for whatever reason, and Gogo was taking on a role that I was supposed to be doing … the whole thing was just … I think it was the stress.’

  ‘Dad said it was because you were too old to have another baby.’

  Mum laughed at this. ‘I was only thirty-four. Not even – it happened before my birthday. But, hey, maybe it was a combination of things. I don’t know. It was a long time ago. And I’m sure your dad has his own reasons for thinking the way he does. Look, I’ve probably talked too much. This isn’t the sort of thing you should be hearing. Sometimes I forget just how young you are.’

  I sat on the loo, reflecting on what Mum and Dad had both said about the miscarriage. I knew that they were divorced before I was able to walk, but I wondered if the miscarriage was the catalyst for it all. I decided I had asked them both enough, and maybe it wasn’t that important, and maybe I didn’t even want to know the answers to my questions. Maybe Mum was right, and I didn’t want to hear all of this. Despite being on the cusp of teenage-hood, I suddenly felt very young.

  I stood and turned to flush the toilet. I pressed the silver knob down, but only a splattering of water flowed through the back of the bowl. I pressed it again and the flow seized up completely. I realised there had been another water cut. I removed the tank lid of the toilet and placed it down on the edge of the bath, which, thankfully, Gogo had the foresight to fill with water two nights before. I picked up the little red bucket that used to live in my sandpit and scooped water from the bath into the tank until it was full again. I replaced the lid and pressed the handle down, satisfied when the water gushed out again. That was one good thing that came out of the divorce: Gogo. If I had to live in a house with the ever-scowling Maria and her flavourless fish fillets, I would’ve been miserable.

  12

  Every friday morning bishopslea students attended a service in the school chapel. In previous years, chapel was a treat – a glorified extension of music class where we’d sing hymns to our hearts’ content. However, now we were Grade 6s, the reverend was eager to introduce us to passages of the Bible for our theological consideration. Most of the time his words went over our heads, and his calls for us to help dissect the verses were left unmet. Today, the session focused on the story of Moses and the Egyptians. I had The Prince of Egypt on video, so I considered myself somewhat of an expert on the topic. But as ‘the rev’ began to read in his agonising monotone, I found it hard to concentrate.

  ‘… The Lord is slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations.’ The reverend coughed. ‘Now who can tell me what all that means?’

  I was in the top reading group for my class, but I had no idea what he was trying to say.

  One of the Afrikaans girls in the class, Amy Blighnaught, offered a guess. ‘Is it saying, um, God wants us children to be kind and respectful to our parents or He will get angry?’

  ‘Not quite, Amy. But that was a good guess. Does anyone want to take another stab at it?’ he asked.

  To my surprise, Diana spoke up. ‘I think what he’s saying is more like, if your father or mother or someone in your family does something wrong, it is not just them who will be punished, but you’ll be punished too. The children of the Israelites were going to be punished, and made to work as shepherds, because they did not believe in Moses and God.’

  ‘That’s exactly right. Good job.’

  I knew Diana attended church every week, but I had no idea how clued up on Biblical verses she was. She gave me a humble shrug, like it was just a shot in the dark.

  After school, Diana came around to my house, and I asked her if she knew about miscarriages; that babies could die inside a woman’s stomach before they even had a chance to be born, and that sometimes women have to still go into labour, but when they push the child out, it’s already dead. Diana said she didn’t know that – but it sounded scary. She asked me why this stuff was on my mind, so I told her I saw something on a TV show I was watching and then realised I didn’t want to discuss it anymore. I asked her about the flying fox her dad had been trying to build in their backyard, at the request of her brothers, which she was happy to talk about in depth.

  ‘He’s tied one end to the tree by the trampoline and it goes over the swimming pool to another tree, but he’s tied it way too high up, so I have to jump off it. I dunno. I’ve still got the scar from when I fell off the ladder of the pool slide.’ She twisted her arm around to show me.

  ‘I’ve got this huge scar on my leg now,’ I said, offering it as a
condolence. ‘From the avocado tree.’ Her scar was smaller, but raised and purple, while mine was longer, but flat and white.

  ‘I’ll go on the flying fox if you go on it with me,’ Diana said.

  ‘Deal.’

  Whenever Diana came to visit, we would mess about and pretend we were potion-masters. With Diana’s dream of becoming a doctor, and my love of Harry Potter, this seemed like a natural extension of our passions. In the past, we had created a ‘beauty cream’, which was really just the dregs of Mum’s hand lotions and eye-creams, combined in a tupperware container with craft glitter and a spritz of vanilla air freshener. Today we were taking our cues from JK Rowling herself and creating a ‘polyjuice potion’: a potion that enabled the drinker to take on the form of someone else.

  I snipped a large chunk of Diana’s hair and placed it into the glass. She instinctively reached up to touch the end of the braid I had cut.

  ‘Don’t worry, you can’t even tell.’ Truth was, you could tell. The chosen braid was now significantly shorter than the others, but I was sure it would grow back. I took the scissors to my own locks but placed them a little further down my strands than I had on her. I pre-empted what she was going to say before she opened her mouth to say it.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how much we cut, it’ll still work the same way.’

  Diana nodded.

  I poured pineapple juice into the two glasses, watching my hair disappear into the liquid, while Diana’s bobbed above the surface. I had cut a lot off. I sprinkled some coconut shavings on top, while Diana grabbed a fistful of hundreds and thousands to drop inside. It was starting to look more potion-y.

  ‘In the book they use leeches, which we have, so it’s perfect.’ I reached for a packet of lychees and carefully plonked one in each glass, the yellow-brown mixture splashing against the sides.

  ‘Okay, are you ready?’ I asked. Diana nodded. We both clinked our glasses and linked our arms together as we raised the potion to our lips. I took in large, quick gulps and immediately started coughing. The wet, concentrated matt of Diana’s hair was becoming lodged in my throat. I rushed to the sink and tried to hack it up. Panicked, I reached a finger into my mouth and pulled the clump of hair out.

  ‘Hannah! Are you okay?’

  Of course I knew that the potion wasn’t going to work, and it was more of a silly exercise than anything else, but there was a small part of me that sincerely hoped it might.

  ‘I think it’s because I coughed it up and I cut too little of my own hair – it probably ruined it.’

  Diana agreed, but neither of us made a suggestion to repeat the experiment under better conditions. Instead we decided we would grab our bikes and ride up and down the driveway. Dad was wrong: there would’ve been plenty of room to ride a scooter at home if he had bought one for me.

  It was from the driveway that we heard the chime of cowbells moving down the street. Cowbells were rung by the Dairibord and Lyons Maid men who pedalled through the streets on bicycles with a cooler tub of ice-cream in tow. Diana and I gave each other a look and raced back inside the house. I sought Gogo’s permission to go outside the gate, which she granted, with the proviso she accompanied us both. I emptied out the contents of the swear jar I had created, which I figured would be enough spare change for two ice-creams. We ran back down the driveway and pressed the buzzer. When we got beyond the gate, we both breathed a sigh of relief: the Dairibord men were still there.

  ‘Hello, girls! What would you like today?’

  Diana and I climbed onto the fat tyres on either side of the cooler-box and peered inside. A rush of cold air hit my face as I was presented with a great array of treats. There were all the classic ice-creams: Nutty Squirrel, Monsta Moose, Green Giant and Super Split, as well as fruity ices like Tropica Punch and Lemon ’n’ Lime.

  I opted for a Nutty Squirrel (vanilla ice-cream coated in nuts and chocolate); Diana chose a Super Split (vanilla ice-cream covered in a cherry glaze). I gave the man the money in my hand, and he gave me back my change – enough to buy a whole other ice-cream!

  ‘Gogo, do you want an ice-cream?’ I asked.

  Gogo scrunched her nose and shook her head.

  ‘Why don’t we get one of the tub ones, that way we can share it?’ Diana suggested.

  I asked the man for a Jazzi chocolate tub, but he said it would cost more than the price of a single ice-cream stick.

  ‘Oh, okay. Thanks anyway,’ I said.

  The man started speaking to Gogo in Shona, and she replied with a ‘Mmm’, followed by a few more Shona words. The man pulled out the Jazzi tub, placed it in my hands and took my money. Then he pedalled off, waving his cowbell down the street.

  ‘What did the man say to Gogo?’ I asked Diana, once we were back inside again.

  ‘He said: “Murungu anokubata zvakanaka here?” Does the white man treat you well?’

  ‘What does that mean? There’s no man here.’

  Diana shrugged. ‘Well, she said yes, anyway.’

  I always had fun with Diana; she was a proper friend. When we were together, we just clicked. We could finish each other’s sentences, but most of the time we didn’t need to because we could say everything we needed to with a single look. Even when the years forced us apart, when we next saw each other, it was as though nothing had changed.

  Despite Diana being my closest friend, Dad had never suggested she stay over at his place with me. Instead he worked on cultivating a friendship between me and Michaela Parker. The Parkers lived in Glen Lorne, an affluent suburb in north-east Harare where the grounds of the houses were so large and sprawling that you’d need to go on a five-minute walk if you wanted to visit your neighbour. Their house was big, huge in fact, but its low ceilings, dim lighting and sheer volume of stuff that filled the space made it feel smaller than it was. Mounted on the walls were various game life, the spaces between the severed animal heads filled with framed family photographs. The living room featured a standalone bar and a zebra-skin rug. I once spilt a glass of water on that rug. This caused a great fuss, because apparently my accident stained the decorative floor covering, even though zebras get rained on all the time in the wild and their skin doesn’t stain from a little bit of water.

  On my next weekend at Dad’s, we went over to the Parkers’ house, where I was to have a sleepover with Michaela. Once there, our fathers sat at the gazebo while she and I swam and her mum, Karen, ran between the two groups with cool drinks and ice, and white-bread sandwiches with the crusts cut off. The men smoked cigars, blowing plumes of smoke that would hide their faces, before resting the thick stubs in a gorilla-hand ashtray. I asked Michaela if it was a real gorilla hand, but she was pretty sure it was just a fake. I wasn’t sure which I found more off-putting, the smoking or the paraphernalia. Despite Grandpa and Nana having a tobacco farm – or perhaps, because they had a tobacco farm – they had drilled the harms of smoking into my brain. ‘Only losers and gomtors smoke,’ Grandpa always told me.

  After the sun dipped below the horizon and our hands and toes had wrinkled, Michaela and I climbed out of the pool, taking a seat near our respective parents. Dad pulled me up onto his knees and asked for a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘No, Dad,’ I objected. ‘You smell stinky. Your breath is always so gross.’

  In one swift motion I was lifted off his lap. His left arm held me in place while his right hand struck my buttocks, stinging the cheeks covered by the thin fabric of the swimming costume. There was a brief delay as I tried to mentally process what had just occurred, but my tears soon came as I realised that my dad had hit me in front of other people, the humiliation spreading red across the cheeks of my face as well.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ Dad said to Michaela’s father. ‘She clearly doesn’t receive any discipline at home.’

  ‘No, look, we’ve all been there,’ he assured my father. ‘Just the other day I had to gi
ve Michaela a hiding in the middle of the supermarket. She and Zander were fighting, acting up. Sometimes it needs to be done.’

  Michaela’s dad then instructed us to go inside and get ready for bed. I left without turning back to say goodbye to my father.

  As Michaela flung her wet cossie into the corner of the room and pulled on her blue Tinker Bell nightie, I asked her how she felt when her dad hit her in public.

  ‘I have no idea what he’s talking about,’ she replied. ‘If he did, I didn’t feel it.’

  In the middle of the night I had to use the bathroom. I stumbled out of Michaela’s bedroom and felt my way down the hall. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I noticed all the other eyes watching me. The cold, dead stares of kudu and bushbuck, black and glistening. The house made me uncomfortable, but at least I didn’t have to go home with Dad.

  13

  Come late march, my birthday present from Dad still hadn’t arrived. Too wary of broaching the subject with him, I asked my mum where she thought it might be.

  ‘Maybe someone nicked it from the post office,’ she offered.

  ‘Why would anyone want a kid’s game?’

  Her lips moved into a defeated smile. ‘You know what, why don’t you ask Grandpa if he will take you to the shops and see if you can find it there. How does that sound?’

  ‘But what if it’s just taking ages to get here and then I have two copies?’

  Mum reached down and stroked my hair. ‘Then you can give one to a friend, as a present for their birthday.’