by Andrea Eames
She looked at me. Her face was grey. ‘They shot them,’ she said. ‘Shot them and hung them on the fence as a warning. We took them down before Hennie got home from school and told him we had given them to a neighbour.’
Those beautiful dogs. The little black spaniel, the big golden retriever. Friendly animals with names and personalities and warm breath. Dogs and cats, horses, pets of all kinds were being killed.
‘Don’t tell your cousin, okay?’ she said, and I nodded.
They left in the grey concrete light of morning, just as the sun was hardening in the sky.
Steve drove them to the airport. There was not enough room in the car for Mum and me to come too, so we waved them off at the gate. Their luggage weighed down the car so much that it barely scraped over the speed bumps.
Mum let me have a cup of coffee that morning. It was bitter and gritty, and the milk swam in pale, scaly puddles on its surface.
‘Are they going to come back?’ I asked.
Mum smiled. ‘Maybe.’ She reached out and smoothed the hair off my forehead with a dry hand, as if I were five years old again. For a second I imagined I could smell the stale, furry air of an airport, hear the roar of planes. I would hate to leave, but part of me wished I was going with them.
We got a call from my grandparents two days later – quavering, elderly voices that sounded far away. Hennie came on the line too, to tell me about playing football with the local boys on muddy fields, and to tell me about snow.
‘It didn’t settle,’ he said, ‘but we saw it falling.’
‘Cool,’ I said.
We started keeping a suitcase packed and ready to go in the corner of Mum and Steve’s bedroom. It was called a Grab Bag, and every white had one – just in case we had to fly out in the middle of the night, like Auntie Mary and Uncle Pieter, or drive to Beitbridge or the Mozambique border. We were meant to fill it up with all the essentials and leave it alone, but we could not seem to stop packing it. Passports and important paperwork were in a box under lock and key in Mum’s cupboard, also ready to grab in the middle of the night.
This suitcase was for things we could not bear to leave behind. It started sensibly – photo albums, some precious jewellery – and then became steadily less so. Mum’s ancient teddy bear, who was missing an eye and most of his nose, went in. My stuffed toy cat went in and out on a daily basis. In the mornings I put him in the suitcase, since I could not bear the thought of accidentally leaving him behind, and at night I took him back out because I felt sorry for him, alone in the dark. In the morning, back he went.
Mum was relentlessly cheerful, even more than usual. She jollied Steve and me along. She created meals out of whatever we were able to buy that week. She bought us chocolate from the petrol station whenever there was any for sale.
I managed to go to school almost every day that week. A friend’s mother dropped me back home one evening.
‘Mum? Mum!’ I slammed the door and heard it echo through the house. I knew Steve was out that night, but Mum should have been there.
‘Mum!’
The lights were all off. I switched them on as I went – the switches snicked, and the fizz and crackle of the fluorescent bulbs settled down into a steady hum.
I heard something from the lounge. ‘Mum?’ I could suddenly see in sharp focus, and the hairs on my arms rose up. I pulled a walking stick out of the tub by the front door and walked through to the lounge. There was a shape in one of the chairs. I flicked the light on. ‘Mum?’
Mum was sitting in her bathrobe, surrounded by crumpled tissues, a glass, and a half-empty bottle of Scotch. She was pale and waxy, her nose a bright red spot in the middle of her face.
She turned her head to look at me. She was not wearing her glasses, and her eyes had a naked, unseeing look. ‘Oh, hello, darling.’ Her voice sounded thick.
‘What’s the matter, Mum?’
Mum waved her hand. ‘Oh, I’m fine.’
I touched her shoulder. ‘Have you had anything to eat?’
‘No. But I’m not hungry.’
I went into the kitchen. I did not know how to cook – I never had to learn – but it could not be too difficult to heat up a can of beans and frankfurters. I opened the tin and poured the orange gloop into a pan.
‘Do you want some tea, Mum?’ I called. There was an indistinct noise from the lounge which I chose to interpret as yes. I switched on the kettle. The beans started to bubble and I poured them into a bowl. They had crystallised at the bottom, but once I had stirred them around they looked pretty appetising – and Mum probably would not notice the difference.
I took through a tray and a cup of tea. She had tried to tidy herself up while I was in the kitchen – her hair was smoothed down and she was wearing her glasses again.
There was a white speck of tissue on the side of her nose.
‘Thanks, treasure.’ She sipped the tea. I perched on the arm of her chair.
After a while, ‘What’s the matter, Mum?’
‘Oh . . .’ She pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘It’s nothing, really, I’m just a little tired.’
I had never seen Mum cry properly before. For the first time, I looked at Mum and saw her as a person. I looked at her pale, freckled face and red-painted lips and saw her as someone else, removed from me. She was like any mother in Zimbabwe, in so many ways. She knew all the black-market places to buy forex and food. She could deal with snakes and spiders, even though they made her squeal. She did her best with the servants, she kept her sense of humour even in the worst situations, and she managed to get to her hair appointments even when there was rioting in the streets.
‘Come on, Mum.’ I wanted her to tell me.
Mum smiled and downed the rest of her tea. ‘I called your grandparents today, that’s all.’
‘What did they say?’
‘Oh, you know, the usual.’ Mum took a spoonful of my concoction, but the spoon hovered in the air and did not move towards her mouth. ‘They’re getting old, so they worry. And it’s so long since they lived here, they’ve forgotten what it’s like. I’ve told them not to worry about us.’
‘Okay.’
Sometimes I wanted to leave. There were lots of people who had gone already – to South Africa, England or even places as far away as Australia or New Zealand. ‘They’ve gapped it,’ or ‘Rats deserting a sinking ship,’ Steve said whenever we heard about someone else leaving. I did not want to be a rat, but if the ship was sinking I did not see any other option.
‘Thanks for the tea,’ said Mum. She looked like herself again, and I could almost forget the dark, silent shape in the chair.
‘That’s okay. Do you want me to run a bath? You can have it first.’
‘No thanks. I think I’ll just go to bed.’
‘Okay.’
I had a bath that night. I left the lights off, and sat in the hot water staring out of the window at the scudding clouds and the wild thrashing of the trees in the wind. I could hear the television from the bedroom – first the drums of ZBC, then the dramatic, film-score music of CNN and SKY, then the BBC. I saw myself from above, sitting in the cooling water, as if I was remembering myself from somewhere far in the future, safe on another shore.
I knew that Mum wanted to leave. ‘We can’t just sit here and wait to be killed,’ she said to me. ‘We have to make sure we have somewhere to go. We need to get the ball rolling. If I could just get over there, I could make a start.’ She did not say these things to Steve.
I heard her on the phone to my grandparents, when Steve was out. She half-covered the phone with one hand, as if her voice could escape and betray her. ‘I can’t,’ she said, and ‘Not just yet.’ I pretended I had not heard.
‘I’ve booked a ticket to England,’ she said at dinner one evening.
Steve looked up from his shepherd’s pie and chewed while he looked at her. He swallowed. ‘What?’
‘I’ve bought a ticket,’ she said. ‘Just to see Mum and Dad, and Pieter and Mary.�
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Steve picked up another forkful. ‘And when were you planning to tell me?’
‘I’m telling you now.’
‘Ja, well.’
‘I leave next Monday.’
‘What about work?’
‘I’ve already got time off.’
Steve stared at Mum, then pushed his chair back. ‘So Mark Cooper doesn’t mind?’
‘No.’
Steve took his plate into the kitchen. I looked at Mum. It felt strange. Mum had made plans that did not include me or Steve.
‘Is there anything you want me to bring back?’ asked Mum.
I knew that she would stay with my grandparents, and I thought that she would probably be investigating places for us to live. That was what we did. There was always a back-up plan, always an escape clause.
At the airport she looked young and excited. ‘I’ll phone you when I get there.’ She even smiled at the men with rifles who guarded the gate. One twitched his lips a little, but the other kept staring straight ahead.
As we hugged I smelled her perfume.
‘Bye, treasure.’
‘Bye, Mum.’
She walked through the gate. She was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved sweater, even though it was thirty degrees, so that she would be warm when she stepped into winter on the other side.
Steve and I went up to the observation deck to watch. The plastic chairs were scaly and on the table in front of me was a white plastic cup ringed with old lipstick. Everything smelled of cigarettes.
‘Look.’ Steve pointed. ‘There she goes.’
The Air Zimbabwe plane pointed its nose up and took off. Out of the country.
‘Come on.’
We went back downstairs. The airport looked even dirtier and shabbier. And outside, the sun made everything flat and hard.
On the way home, we passed groups of black people walking or resting by the side of the road. War Vets? Or workers leaving the farms? They looked too tired and defeated to be War Veterans, but it was difficult to tell.
Steve grunted as if he were about to say something, but when I looked at him he was staring straight ahead. Steve and I had never been alone before, and Mum would be gone for two weeks.
That night I dreamed of tobacco. I was walking through a field of giant plants, their smooth, blade-like leaves arching over me and blocking out the sky. I felt a terrible heat and saw flames tearing through the leaves. I smelled burning. I smelled cigarette smoke.
I woke up to a warm rush of liquid which quickly turned clammy, and a rich, yeasty smell. I reached my hand down between my legs and felt the dampness. I could not believe it. I had wet the bed.
I turned on my bedside light and stripped back the blankets. They were damp and embarrassing. I could not let Steve see this. I changed my pyjamas, took off the bedclothes in one damp, ungainly bundle and threw them into the washing machine.
Would Steve wake up if I turned it on? I had to risk it.
Back in the bedroom, I remade the bed. The red light of my clock blinked at me – half past four in the morning. Just two more hours of sleep before school.
Steve and I had long-distance, crackly conversations with Mum. She called us, not the other way around, because phone calls were so expensive. We heard about how pretty it was in England, how clean, how easy.
‘The supermarket shelves are full,’ said Mum. ‘And there’s petrol at every station. And no queues.’
‘Ja, well,’ said Steve.
‘Mum and Dad don’t even lock the doors when they go out,’ Mum said.
‘That’s a stupid idea,’ said Steve.
‘The point is, Steve, that it’s a safe place.’
‘Too many bluddy people,’ said Steve, which was strange, because there were millions and millions of people here, swarming like worker ants in the cities. I thought Steve meant there were too many bluddy white people. I wondered what it would be like to be just another white person, rather than a White with a capital W.
We picked up Mum from the airport. She hugged us and said she was happy to see us, but I could tell that she was sad to be back. She smelled different, of English washing powder and new perfume.
She brought out a picture of the house she was planning to buy for us in England. It was a grey box against a grey sky. ‘It’s lovely inside,’ she said.
We watched BBC World and saw the War Vets taking over another farm. The chief War Vet pounded his fist against his palm, shouting so loudly at the old white farmer that little globs of spittle flew on to the camera. But the old man said nothing. He was nothing special – he could have been anyone, someone we knew. His face was blank as he listened to the shouting, his head tilted to one side.
Some of the farm workers defended their Baas and Medem against the War Vets and got beaten for their pains. Mum and Steve would not let me look at the pictures on the international news channels, but I saw some of them anyway – heads with blood and flesh blossoming like roses from their temples, faces that were all bruise. The foreign journalists came in for a kicking as well.
I thought of the dark glow of the floor that Saru polished every day, rain thundering on the roof, the sharp smell of morning and the blue bowl of the sky overhead. Was living here worth the danger?
‘We’re not going,’ Steve kept saying. ‘Not yet.’
Chapter Twenty-three
We followed the plan. The plan had been stuck up on the walls of the offices for months, complete with numbers to call, places to hide and supplies to bring. There were even little diagrams of how the farm managers were meant to deploy themselves. It was like a miniature campaign map.
Although no one really thought we would have to use it.
I came with Mum to work most days now, as school was often cancelled or it was too dangerous to drive into town. I was filing invoices in the office when we heard a crackle on the radio.
‘Come on,’ said Mum, picking up her handbag and a file bulging with papers.
‘What’s happening?’
‘War Vets on the farm.’
My hands and feet felt suddenly cold. The tip of Mum’s nose turned white. We packed up our papers and Mum drove the car up the dirt road to Ian’s house. Ian was one of the farm managers and his house had been chosen as the Safe House because it was so far away from everything, up on the kopje. It was surrounded by granite rocks that looked like the great bald heads of gods, with long grass making comical tufts over their stone ears.
‘Hello, hello, howzit,’ said Ian when we arrived, ushering us in. He had his rifle slung over his shoulder and a Castle Lager baseball cap on his head. His wife was inside, laying out trays of sandwiches. The atmosphere was brittle, fear shimmering in the air like a heat haze. Mum went straight to Steve, who stood looking out of the window.
‘Oh good, you’re here,’ he said when he saw us.
‘Have you heard anything?’ asked Mum.
‘Just that they’re heading up to the farmhouse,’ said Steve. He had a grin on his face that did not seem to belong there. It hovered like a pale moth in front of his sun-reddened skin.
The wives and children of the farm managers were inside the house, as well as the other female office workers. The children played in the corner while the adults stood around the food table with drinks in their hands and talked in low voices. Whenever there was the crackle of a radio, everyone fell silent, even the babies.
‘Where’s Mark?’ someone asked.
‘At the homestead, I think,’ said Ian. ‘He knows they’re coming.’
We had all heard the stories of what the War Vets did when they came to ‘talk’. Mr Cooper’s perfect Shona and easy smile would not help him then. I looked out of the window. The trees up on the kopje were blackened and scarred. Lightning was attracted to granite, and this was the highest point on the farm.
After about an hour, we heard the sound of an engine coming up the hill. Ian went to the door with his gun.
‘It’s just Lettuce,’ he said. The room relaxed. Ia
n went to meet Lettuce, who was riding his motorbike barefoot.
‘The Vets are going up to the Coopers’ place,’ said Ian when he came back in. ‘But Mark has hidden. He’s not going to meet with them today.’
‘Good,’ said several people.
‘Where is he hiding?’ asked Mum.
‘In the generator shed,’ said Ian.
We all imagined Mr Cooper crouched down in that hot metal shed, his ears filled with the thrumming of the generator. How ridiculous if they found him. He would have to crawl out of there into the crowd of War Vets, blinking in the sunlight, shading his eyes with his hand. And no one knew what they would do to him if they found him. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they beat the farmers up. You could never be sure.
‘I did find this skellem wandering around the farm, though,’ said Ian, pushing Sean into the room. There was a rush of relieved conversation as everyone tried to touch Sean and ask if he was all right.
He shrugged them off. ‘Leave me alone, sha.’
‘Sean!’ I waved to him, and he came over. ‘You all right?’
‘Ja man, of course.’
‘You weren’t at home?’
‘No, I was out on the bike till Lettuce told me everyone was here.’ He sat down on the floor and folded in on himself, drawing his knees up to his chest.
‘Have you seen your dad?’
‘Nah.’ He picked at a scab on his leg. ‘But he’ll be fine, hey.’
Conversation died down, and we sat in silence. Dozens of whites in the thatched house on the kopje, pale and waiting. After a while the novelty wore off. I wanted to go home. I was almost willing to risk the War Vets just to end the tedium, and I could see Mum thinking the same thing.
When Lettuce toiled up the hill again, he told us that the War Vets were angry that no one came to talk to them. The workers refused to tell them where the farm managers were hiding.
I started to worry. ‘Mum, what if we can’t get home tonight?’
‘We will.’
‘But what if we can’t?’
‘It’ll be fine.’
‘But what if it isn’t?’
‘For Christ’s sake.’ Mum was exasperated. ‘It’ll be fine, all right?’
