When Hoopoes Go to Heaven

by Gaile Parkin

In the lounge, Mama lay asleep on one of the couches. Scattered on the floor around her were a number of crumpled tissues.

  Eh! Had Mama been crying? Tears stung the back of his own eyes.

  Tiptoeing closer, he saw an open magazine on the coffee table. Without making a sound, he scooped it up and moved away with it to the dining table. Mama had been looking at the story about a very special wedding where they used to live on account of Baba’s last job, and the beautiful cake that Mama had baked for it. Looking at the photographs had made Mama sad, and Benedict knew that she was sad because her business was so slow now.

  Feeling bad, he closed the magazine and put it with Mama’s two other magazines on top of the bookshelf, next to the basket where Baba kept the keys to the red Microbus and the Corolla from his work. He slipped it underneath the other two magazines, hoping that Mama might forget. On top of it was the magazine with pictures of road signs that Mama had used for getting ready to learn how to drive, and on top of that was the magazine that a friend had sent her from Ghana in West Africa. Was it safe for that to be on top, or was there anything in it that could make her sad?

  He moved with it to the dining table, and sat down to flip through it. It had stories about artists and craftspeople in Ghana, with lots of photographs. One of the stories was about a group of ladies who were printing designs on cloth that other ladies could use to make dresses. It looked a bit like the kind of cloth for the dresses at the special wedding in Mama’s other magazine. Eh! This magazine could upset her, too.

  He was about to close it when another story caught his attention. It had photographs of people making the most beautiful caskets. The story said that if a person was a car salesman before he became late, he could have a casket that was carved into the shape of a Mercedes Benz. And if he was a musician, he could be buried in a casket that looked like a guitar. Or a fisherman could have a casket shaped like a fish. All the caskets were painted so that the Mercedes, the guitar and the fish looked real.

  They were even more special than the beautiful one that Jabulani had made for Benedict’s hoopoe.

  Jabulani would love them!

  Eh!

  Benedict opened his mouth and breathed in quickly.

  Maybe caskets like these were the edge for Ubuntu Funerals that he had asked for in his prayer at the hoopoe’s grave. In that same prayer, he had asked for customers for Mama’s business. Maybe if Mama showed these caskets to Jabulani and Zodwa, they would be so grateful for the edge that they’d send each and every one of their customers to Mama for cakes.

  Eh!

  He went to the couch with the magazine and shook Mama’s shoulder.

  ‘Mama!’ he whispered excitedly. ‘Mama! I’ve found an edge!’

  SIX

  SITTING ON THE COLD EDGE OF THE STEP OUTSIDE her room, Mavis pulled her blanket more tightly around her, tucking her knees closer to her body and rocking gently while she waited for Madam’s drops to do their work inside her body. Whatever it was that had wrenched her from her sleep tonight had left her sweaty and shaky and needing air.

  As usual, the buildings on the hillside lay in darkness. But Mavis knew that if she were to walk round to the other side of the main house, the side where Madam and Doctor’s bedroom opened onto the garden, she might see a tiny red light glowing at the window of the downstairs bedroom that was for visitors.

  Visitors weren’t allowed to smoke inside the house. Madam said it wasn’t healthy around the children and Doctor said it was a bad example. Mavis knew from jobs she’d had before that cigarettes made a smell and a mess. Tiny flecks of ash fell everywhere, and an ashtray was a very unpleasant thing to clean. And, eish, the smell on the clothes as her hands had washed them!

  Mavis tutted loudly on the edge of the step, sure that Lungi – fast asleep on the other side of the door – would not hear her. Sure, too, that in the morning she would find herself cleaning the dark smudge off a dishcloth that smelled of smoke. Gogo Levine had not been staying long, but already she had a routine. During the chaos of the children’s breakfast at the big table in the kitchen that seemed almost as big as the whole house at one of Mavis’s old jobs, Gogo Levine would quietly take Mavis’s dishcloth – damp from washing the morning teacups – and go to her room, where she would wipe from the outside windowsill any mess from stubbing out her cigarettes at the open window in the night. Then she would put the cloth back next to the sink as if she thought that Mavis was a bad cleaner who wouldn’t see the dirt on it or smell that it wasn’t clean.

  But Mavis would never say anything to Madam. What would that be for? Gogo Levine was Madam’s mother.

  Madam had too much luck, she was able to be a mother meanwhile she had delivered no child. Mavis would never be a mother herself, and she would never meet a man like Doctor who wouldn’t mind. Doctor had been out in the world, he had schooled in South Africa, he didn’t mind that Madam wasn’t a Swazi and she couldn’t deliver. Mavis would certainly never meet a man as rich as Doctor. Eish, he had too many cows!

  But her mind was going to dangerous places. If she thought about cows she might think about Petros, and if she thought about Petros just after she had thought about never being a mother, then she would have to think about how Petros was so like her own boy would have been, and that would be too hard.

  Rising from the step, she pulled her blanket around her. The little gaps in each crocheted square made it not the best blanket for wrapping up in against the cold night air, but her mother had made it for her, and that was what made it warm. This year there would be a good sum of money to take home to her mother: the Cobra floor-polish tin under her bed was filling up nice-nice.

  She felt calmer now, but she had woken up sweaty, and it wouldn’t be nice to go back to her bed without first having a wash. The door to their bathroom creaked a little, but it never woke Lungi. Eish, she envied Lungi her sleep! The room on the other side of the bathroom was used for storing things, so Mavis didn’t need to worry about waking a gardener or any other worker sleeping in there. She was glad that the bathroom was for her and Lungi only. She wouldn’t want to share it with a man who might not keep it clean – though Lungi wouldn’t have minded if Samson lived in. On the days when Samson came to work, if Madam was out, Lungi sometimes asked Mavis to make sure that none of the children came near the outside room.

  Lungi was already a widow, though she was young, just twenty-six. Mavis was five years older, but she looked younger because she was small next to Lungi. When Lungi had lost her husband an uncle of his had wanted to take her, but Lungi’s family had pretended that she was sick, and when that didn’t work they gave back the cows that his family had paid for her. They didn’t have to give back the lobola, it wasn’t like Lungi hadn’t been able to conceive – she had just never had the chance because her husband was always away at his job in the mine in South Africa, and then he was late when part of the mine fell down on him. Anyway, the uncle accepted the cows in Lungi’s place, and now Lungi was free.

  The neon light in the bathroom was so bright after the darkness, Mavis had to close her eyes for a few seconds. When she opened them, she saw that one side of her shoulder-length relaxed hair was standing straight up, pushed there by lying on her side as she slept. She was always asleep before Lungi in the first part of the night and it was always Lungi who woke her in the morning. But most nights something else woke her in between. It had been happening for years – almost seventeen years – and she had had plenty of time to grow used to it. It really didn’t matter at all, especially now that she had found a way to use her time awake to earn some extra money to support her mother. She would get back to her crocheting as soon as she had washed.

  The bathroom had hot and cold water, but only one at a time. That made a shower a very difficult thing to have, so neither Mavis nor Lungi used it. Instead, a big, red plastic tub lived on the floor of the shower, and with the plastic curtain drawn so that the water didn’t splash, they would fill it with first one and then the other, like a bath
. Mavis was just small enough to sit right inside the tub, but it was much easier to wash standing up in it. Tonight, though, she would have just a small wash at the basin.

  The main house had the same problem of not having hot and cold at the same time. Doctor said it was to do with the geysers and the water-tanks from the dam, and there was nothing to do to fix it, so when they had added the new upstairs for the children’s bedrooms, they didn’t waste money putting a shower in the upstairs bathroom. Mavis was glad of that: nobody ever used the downstairs shower, but the small tiles in the floor of it took a long time to clean nice-nice. The one-at-a-time water wasn’t a problem, they must just always put cold before hot in the baths so a child could never climb in to a bath of water so hot it could hurt them.

  It was the same at the kwerekwere house. Titi told her that sometimes an insect or something would come into the bath with the cold water and then the girls would be afraid. Probably there weren’t insects in their own country; the eldest boy certainly looked at them like he had never seen them before. Mavis had once watched him in the garden from an upstairs window, squatting down and staring for a very long time at something that was crawling in the grass.

  Patting herself dry with her towel, she thought about how different that boy was, for his age. He was like Vusi, serious and wanting to learn. He always came to the house with questions that needed answering, meanwhile his brothers came to play with Fortune and his sisters came to play with Innocence. Titi said he liked to read books and to be quiet by himself outside. Petros also liked to be by himself outside.

  Eish!

  Now she was thinking about him again.

  Sighing deeply, she pulled her nightgown back on over her head, wrapped her blanket around her again, and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. Maybe she should stop trying to keep him out of her head. Maybe she should just let him walk around in there and then maybe he would go out of it again.

  Petros was a good boy. He was mature, responsible, already earning his own money. He didn’t need anybody. But in the late afternoons when she heard the cows beginning to make their way down past the house towards the milking shed, if she didn’t have a child clinging to her or one in the bath or a mess to tidy or clean, and if nobody was watching, she would take some leftover food from the fridge – something nice that he might not cook for himself – and she would go out to meet him on his way home with the cows. He would take the food and thank her politely, then he would chat for just a minute or two, always watching the cows, always making sure that his dog didn’t jump at her.

  Such a good boy!

  She always felt disappointed when the cows came past with somebody else instead of Petros. Then she would pretend to be picking some vegetables in Madam’s garden, and she would act like the supermarket bag with Petros’s food in it was for the cabbage or the carrots or the onions that she was choosing. The food was for Petros, she didn’t want to give it to anybody else.

  When she had talked to him recently he had coughed and coughed, and after he had continued on his way with the cows, Mavis had seen that his spit on the ground was red with blood. She had told Madam, and Madam had taken him to a doctor for some pills, so he was going to be better soon. But just to make sure, Mavis had taken the small jar of Vicks from the house and given it to Petros to rub on his chest. Here, he had asked her, patting his chest with one hand as he took the jar with the other. Yes, there, she had told him, longing to rub it there for him, longing for him to be her own boy so that she could do that for him. But her hand had made a circle in the air instead, and he had thanked her politely and continued down the hill with his dog and the cows.

  She had watched him go, knowing he had no mother to go to, no family anywhere, and hoping that he would turn and come back up the hill to her, holding out the jar and saying to her, here, show me, please, take care of me. But he hadn’t turned, not even to wave, and on Saturday she had bought a new jar of Vicks at the supermarket, putting it in the cupboard before anybody had noticed that the other one was gone.

  Petros’s cough would go much sooner if he didn’t smoke. Really, he was too young to smoke! If he was her boy, she would tell him to stop. Eish, the smoke and the cows and his dog made him smell very bad. She so wanted to wash his clothes for him! She never had, but if she ever did, while she was doing it she would want him to lie in a bath of nice warm water; she would make it smell lovely with one of Madam’s special oils.

  Did he have a nice thick blanket to keep him warm at night? She would love to crochet one for him like the one her mother had made for her. But when she had been clearing up at the end of the birthday party that Madam and Doctor had made for the dairy manager, she had heard the dairy manager telling Doctor about Petros. Give him something, the dairy manager had said, and he gives it away to somebody who needs it more. The two men had laughed about him giving things away like a rich man who already had everything he needed. But Mavis hadn’t wanted to laugh, her heart had swelled with pride.

  Such a nice boy!

  But if she made a special blanket for him, she wouldn’t want him giving it away to somebody else.

  Wrapping her own blanket more tightly around her, she left the bathroom. She would get back into her bed and crochet until sleep came back to her.

  SEVEN

  THERE WERE TWO REASONS WHY THE LAST FRIDAY in June was an exciting day for Benedict, and he thought about both of them as he bolted down his bread and tea at breakfast.

  The first was that it was his and Sifiso’s day to get a turn presenting their project in class. They had chosen bilharzia, dividing the topic in two so that Benedict could do the life cycle and Sifiso could talk about how not to get it and how to know you might have it. Bilharzia could make grown-ups too exhausted to work and it could make children find learning their subjects at school very difficult, so it was a very bad disease. It couldn’t really make you late, but still.

  After helping Sifiso to find a way to do his part without any words that would make him lisp, Benedict had spent many hours working on a big poster that showed bilharzia’s life cycle. Mrs Patel had given him a large cardboard box that she no longer needed, and he had flattened it out to make a piece of board as big as himself.

  He had drawn some pictures on the back of some used paper that Baba had brought home from the office, and then cut out what he had drawn and glued the pieces to the board. On either side there was a person and in the middle there were some snails, people and snails being the two co-hosts of the story of bilharzia.

  The person on the left was a man standing next to a river and using it as a toilet, with a dotted line arcing from below his waist into the water. Next to him was a group of little worms, with an arrow showing that the worms were inside the man and he had bilharzia. There were lots of little worm eggs in what he had sprayed into the water, with an arrow showing the eggs getting inside the snails that were in the water. Underneath the snails was a picture of the eggs hatching into worms, and an arrow showing that it happened inside the snails; then there were lots of little worms swimming towards the other person, a child who was swimming in the water. Then next to the child was a picture of lots of little worms, and an arrow showing that they were inside the child now and he had bilharzia.

  It was a story that interested Benedict on account of people not being able to give the disease to each other: a person could only give it to a snail, and another person could only get it from a snail. It was like malaria, which a mosquito got from one person and then gave to somebody else.

  Despite trying his best, he hadn’t been able to find any information about bilharzia that said if the snail got sick. Was a snail just fine when the eggs from a person hatched into worms inside it? People got really tired when the worms were inside them laying their eggs. Did the snails get tired too? And if a snail was too tired to swim, could it drown? People could avoid getting bilharzia by staying out of water that had snails in it. But how could a snail avoid getting it? Water was its home. It couldn’t ju
st leave if somebody used the water as a toilet.

  If a snail ever gave a presentation about bilharzia, what would it say? Maybe Uncle Enock would have an idea.

  The second reason for Benedict’s excitement was that Mama would soon be showing Zodwa the beautiful Ghanaian caskets in her magazine and suggesting them as an edge for Ubuntu Funerals.

  Zodwa had arranged to collect her cake that morning, and it waited for her now on the coffee table as the family ate their breakfast at the dining table. It looked like a very large, very thick version of Swaziland’s 20-cent coin with its wavy outline. Mama had baked two round vanilla sponges, one bright green, the other purple, and she had sandwiched them together with a layer of red icing. Benedict had suggested the colours himself, choosing them because they were the colours of the ligwalagwala, the purple-crested lourie that was Swaziland’s national bird. It was a truly beautiful bird with a shiny green head and neck, purple crest and wings, and a bright red eye that matched the flash of red under its wings when it flew.

  Mama had cut away at the perfect round edge to make the coin’s wavy outline, nibbling at the bits she had cut away as she worked. She had covered the whole cake with a smooth, light grey sugar-paste, and then set to work on another rolled-out piece of the same sugar-paste to make the design for on the top. Placing a real coin next to her on the table with the side facing down that said Swaziland and had a picture of King Mswati, she had looked very carefully at the other side and asked Benedict for some help, on account of that side having a picture of an elephant’s head.

  Elephants were important in Swaziland, the king’s mother being called Indlovukati, The Great She Elephant. Benedict liked that the king was a lion and his mother was an elephant; people really shouldn’t think of themselves as separate from all the other animals. There was a picture of Indlovukati’s head as a lady on the 1 lilangeni coin, and on the 20 cents there was the head of an elephant.