The Cry of the Go-Away Bird

by Andrea Eames

  I sat still. The radios crackled every few minutes. A farm manager, checking in. Nothing from Mr Cooper.

  ‘I can’t believe he’s still hiding in the generator shed,’ said Mum.

  The sun set over the granite hills and the sky turned pink. A hyena whooped in the distance. Ian’s dog barked back, standing on trembling legs, ready to run away if his bravado produced any results. Mosquitoes started to bite our ankles. Ian’s wife closed the fly-screens on the windows and doors, but it did not help much. It was too hot to close the doors and windows properly, and the air smelled of night-time, faint wafts of it blowing away the hot, dusty smell of day.

  When the first stars spilled like grains of sugar, Lettuce appeared again. ‘They have gone, sah,’ he said to Ian.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes, sah.’

  Mr Cooper’s voice crackled over the radio. He was out of hiding. He laughed a static laugh. Everyone in the lounge straightened up and stretched. My foot was asleep. I did not realise it, but I had been sitting in the same position for hours. My toes tingled into life. Everyone else seemed to have the same problem, because there were groans when they stood up. I looked at my nails and saw that one of them was bitten right down to the half-moon.

  Steve drove us home. ‘We’re going to stay in Harare for a while,’ he said.

  As we passed through the big iron gates of Cooper Farms, I saw something out of the corner of my eye. A dark mass, like a cloud too heavy for the sky, hovering over the farm. When I turned my head, however, it was gone.

  Steve drove us to Harare in the dark. I watched the pools of light from the streetlamps flare and fade.

  ‘Are you going to work tomorrow?’ I asked Mum and Steve.

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘They won’t come back?’

  ‘We’ll see what happens tomorrow, hey.’

  We drove under the Independence Arch. In the dark it was a white fish leaping over the road.

  We stayed in a hotel room in Harare. The air was clean and dry; the weather was mild; the sky thin and pale. I hardly ever saw an ant. My dishes and clothes were cleaned by a machine rather than black hands. It felt like leaving Chinhoyi all over again. Even the sun was not as hot there; by the time it got past all those buildings it was tired out, and we only had a little patch of grass to soak it up. There was no smell of hot earth, manure and cooking fires. Instead, everything smelled of petrol and cut grass.

  ‘How long do we have to stay here?’ I asked Mum.

  ‘Agh, not long. Just until this blows over.’

  The men at the farm were tall, blond and strong. They came into Mum’s office and stood with their legs far apart, pulling their broad-brimmed hats off and wiping their foreheads with them. Whenever there were parties at the farm, everyone got splendidly, spectacularly drunk. It was a point of pride to wake up somewhere incongruous, like face-down in a paddock, or leaning up against a banana tree, or at the wheel of your car. They kept in constant touch by radio. They carried guns in their car. I could not imagine them being beaten by the War Vets. I remembered my uncle as he looked to me when I was young – a man as tall and solid as a baobab, unbreakable. A man who could kill a kudu and a snake, who commanded hundreds of men and could shoot a can clean off the wall with one shot from a BB gun. These men were indestructible. I could not imagine them being cowed.

  ‘Bluddy Kaffirs,’ said Ian the following night. He had invited the farm managers and their families to drinks at his house. We sat on his verandah looking out over the granite kopje, sipping drinks with ice. The maid was clearing plates as he said this. We all flicked our eyes from him to her and back again, but said nothing. Ian looked drunk. He swayed in his seat and his eyes were bloodshot.

  ‘Tell you what I’m going to do,’ he said suddenly, sitting up. ‘I’m going to pack up everything and leave, and before I go I’m going to stuff this house full of explosives. Then I’m going to hang the Rhodesian flag on the roof and set up a radio to play the Rhodesian national anthem over and over. Then when the bluddy War Vets come to possess the land they’ll fire at the house and blow themselves up.’ He cackles. ‘Bang! Bits of black everywhere.’

  ‘Ian,’ murmured his wife.

  ‘I’m not bluddy going to, don’t worry.’ He sank back into his chair and sighed noisily.

  The War Vets did not return. A week later, it felt like nothing had happened at all. I went to the farm with Mum every day – somehow it felt safer to stay together.

  It was still day, but the light had the flattened, pastel look of early evening.

  ‘You ready to go?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Ja.’ I started packing up.

  There was a crackle on the radio, and a voice. Mum picked it up. ‘Ja?’

  She listened. ‘Okay. Yes, we’ll go now.’ She turned to me. ‘Leave that stuff. We’ve got to head off now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘War Vets,’ she said briefly.

  ‘Are they coming here?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’ Mum swung her handbag on to her shoulder, picked up her keys. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t you think so?’ I did not move.

  ‘We would have heard something.’

  ‘But they just told you.’

  Mum sighed. ‘Look, they’re just on the road. Don’t make a big fuss, okay? We’ll be fine. We just need to get going.’

  She seemed calm. Exasperated, but calm. I followed her out of the door and into the car.

  ‘Here, hold this.’ She gave me the radio; a black brick with a long aerial that telescoped in and out.

  ‘What do I do with it?’

  ‘Nothing, just hold it.’

  I rested it on my legs as Mum ground the car into gear. We set off down the dirt road.

  ‘Anything from the radio?’ Mum asked.

  ‘No.’ Just the odd bit of static, like someone tearing open a bag of crisps in the cinema.

  The shadows from the blue gum trees lengthened. We were almost at the main road. My head had been hurting since we left the office and intensified until there were little dancing tadpoles in front of my eyes. The sky became purple and warped.

  Everything around us blurred, but I saw the pebbles on the road in sharp focus.

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, what is it now?’

  ‘Mum, stop. Pull over.’

  ‘No. I told you, we need to get moving.’

  ‘Mum!’ I tried the door handle. My fingers felt fatter than normal. I could not get it open.

  ‘What the bluddy yell are you doing?’ Mum pulls over. ‘What’s the matter?’

  The pain in my head became a throb. When it pulsed, the sky changed colour. ‘Please Mum, just stop for a bit.’

  ‘Fine.’ Mum switched off the engine, and we sat in silence until my head calmed down.

  ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  ‘You okay now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right.’ She switched the engine on and pulled out into the road in a cloud of dust. We reached the intersection with the main road and were about to turn right when Mum stopped.

  ‘God. What’s that?’

  A crowd of fifty or sixty people, men and women, carrying placards and singing. Heading towards the next farm over.

  A crackle from the radio. ‘War Vets on the airport road.’

  ‘Ja, thanks,’ said Mum. ‘Good timing.’

  We watched the crowd move further away. If we had driven out five minutes earlier, we would have been right in the middle of them. My stomach seemed to drop out of my body when I realised this.

  ‘Well,’ said Mum, ‘that was lucky.’

  We turned into the road, and played the radio as loud as we could, all the way back to town.

  Mum got a phone call the next morning. Her hand on the receiver was white, and it took her two attempts to replace it. ‘I’m not going in to work today,’ was all she said.

  ‘Why?’

  Mum walked through into the kitchen.


  ‘Why, Mum?’

  She leaned on the kitchen counter.

  ‘What happened, Mum?’

  She turned around and spoke normally. ‘You know the de Bruijns?’

  ‘Yes.’ The family on the neighbouring farm. I had not met them, but I knew they were good friends of the Coopers.

  ‘Well, their farm was invaded yesterday.’

  I waited. I knew there was more. Mum teetered on the edge of it for a minute, then left the room. I was left with her half-said sentence hanging in the air like a breath.

  Mum and Steve talked in their room later, once I had gone to bed. I sneaked down the corridor a little way, just enough to hear.

  ‘Raped . . . kids watched, apparently.’

  ‘And the dogs?’

  ‘They think it was done with a bhadza.’

  I went back to bed and wriggled my cold feet into a still-warm part of the bedclothes. Pictures hung in my mind like washing on a line. As I started to fall asleep, the washing line became real, and I could hear Saru humming as she lifted each image from the basket and pinned it on to the wire. The farmer’s wife with her skirt up around her hips and her thighs laid bare like peeled bananas. The dogs with their throats cut, oozing sluggish blood on to the brown grass.

  It was a slow, sick disintegration of a way of life. No one knew what to do. Not my teachers, not my parents. My grandparents called from England every night. Are you okay? Are you hanging in there? I knew they were asking us to come over. I could feel them wanting it down the phone line, but I did not want to go.

  Mum and Steve finished a whole bottle of gin that evening. They finished a whole bottle of gin almost every evening those days.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  When the War Veterans came back, they came officially and without any weapons that we could see. They came without warning, after another week of nothing at all. Smiling, they waved at the workers they passed. Some of the workers waved back. Some of them did not.

  Mum and I were on the farm when they arrived. Neither of us told Steve I was still coming to the farm. As far as he knew, I was at school. He left for the farm before sunrise each morning, and so he did not see Mum and I piling into the car at eight o’clock every day. Mum did not want me to leave the office, even just to sit outside, but she had given me my own cellphone now and reminded me to keep it charged and to carry it everywhere I went. Just in case.

  ‘Mum.’ I saw the War Vets out of the window.

  ‘It’s an official visit,’ said Mum. ‘There won’t be any trouble.’

  She carried on with her work. My hands felt cold and numb. We had seen these men so often on the news. My stomach and bowels seemed to melt into an oily mess, and I ran to the toilet and shut myself in, listening to the crackle of the radio next door.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Mum called.

  ‘Ja.’

  I did not have any control over my body. Everything that was inside rushed out, and left my legs trembling and my teeth chattering. I curled my legs up so I was sitting on the toilet with my arms around my knees and tried to stop my body spasms. Outside the little window I could hear voices, the rumble of tractors and the clank of machinery.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Mum called again.

  ‘Ja. I said I’m fine.’

  I flushed the toilet and watched the water whirlpool down. I knew exactly where it all went, to the septic tank just outside the offices which clogged up every other week. I wished it was that easy to get rid of my fear.

  ‘Come on, man,’ said Mum from outside the door. ‘They’re here.’

  I came back into the office and sat next to Mum. She clasped my hand and I could feel her bones underneath papery skin.

  One of the War Vets saw us through the window, and waved. His teeth flashed white in his face. I felt my stomach lurch again, shamefully, and something hot rushed out of me.

  ‘Shit.’

  Mum let go of my hand. ‘What?’

  I was too embarrassed to tell her.

  A bird flew into our house once. A thrush. It panicked and started banging against the walls and windows, trying to get out, and left a trail of sticky white-and-green behind it. I felt like that bird. But I did not want to admit that I was scared. We were all pretending that we could cope, that we would be fine. If anyone did say they were scared, they were called a bluddy sissy.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, and went back into the toilet. I took my pants off, rinsed them clean and threw them into the bin. I would just have to deal with it. Besides, there could not be anything left to come out.

  Mr Cooper called the farm managers together and met the War Vets in one of the offices. He looked relaxed in a white shirt and shorts, the kind of thing he would normally wear for a day on the farm.

  We watched the group of men walk in. They were not threatening us – not at the moment – but we knew that they were the most powerful people in the country. One of them nudged another and pointed to a piece of farm equipment, saying something in Shona. The other laughed. They seemed calm, and they were not hopped up on mbanje or dagga, drugs that fuelled bloodlust. Not yet.

  ‘Mum,’ I nudged her. ‘Is that Jonah?’

  She peered into the crowd. He was standing near the back, laughing with another man.

  ‘Ja.’

  Jonah looked up at the office window, and Mum and I ducked away. I had a superstitious fear that he had seen us somehow, that he had cursed us.

  One of the farm managers described it to us afterwards. The War Veterans reclined on their chairs, taking up as much space as they could. They spread their legs, rested their arms along the backs of the chairs, put their feet up on the tables, and yawned widely and without covering their mouths as if they were going to swallow up the whole room.

  Mr Cooper had a translator who sat beside him and turned the rapid Shona into English, leaving out most of the insults and asides. Mr Cooper kept his face impassive as the War Vet leader talked, spurring him on to even greater obscenities. Then, after a Shona question was left hanging in the air, he opened his mouth and responded in fluent, perfect, colloquial Shona.

  After a moment of wide eyes and raised eyebrows, the leading War Vet started to laugh. So did the others. They laughed and smiled and clapped each other on the shoulders as if Mr Cooper were a great friend of theirs who had done some wonderful trick. For a moment the atmosphere in the room was almost warm. You could imagine them buying him a drink. But it dropped away, and the chief leaned across the table with a yellow grin.

  ‘You have ten days,’ he said, ‘and then we will be coming.’

  They left, but they did not go far. They camped in fields on the outskirts of the farm, near the ZANU PF camp that Cephas had joined. I wondered if he would be absorbed into the War Vets, or whether he had already escaped.

  ‘Is Mr Cooper going to leave?’ I asked Mum.

  Mum shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What about us?’

  ‘We follow the plan,’ said Mum.

  There were two photocopied sheets of A4 paper on the wall of Mum’s office. Someone had typed out ‘CRISIS SITUATION’ in big capital letters, and drawn a picture of a little man with his hands up in surrender.

  The first sheet was titled ‘Under Siege’. There were steps listed underneath. Phone task force member immediately. Inform the task force member who is in your house. Are they armed? How many are there? What is their attitude? Your task force will call the police. Inform the rest of the farm and call a code. Deploy task force and have other volunteers on stand-by.

  The second sheet of paper listed the different codes that could be called out over the radio. Code green meant ‘Everything is fine, stay put. Go back to normal. The situation has calmed down.’ It was a mint-green digestive tablet, soothing everything. Code yellow meant ‘Everyone on alert. Stay near the radio. Not sure of the situation and waiting for confirmation.’

  Code red was printed in red. It meant we must evacuate immediately and meet at the airport, because people were i
njured, a house was under siege, and the situation was life-threatening. There was a list of things to do: find out where the trouble is and take the safest route out; get your family to the airport; wait to find out what has happened and whether you can get back. There was also a note reminding us to take cash for the car park. I could imagine Mum calmly counting out notes from her purse before driving us both there.

  When Mum and I got back to Harare, Steve was furious. ‘This is what she’s missing school for?’ he said. ‘So she can go get killed by War Vets?’

  ‘We didn’t know they were coming today,’ said Mum.

  ‘Neither of you should be there.’

  ‘You’re there.’

  ‘That’s different. I can take care of myself.’

  Mum nodded, but her eyes were remote.

  ‘You need to leave. Tell Mark Cooper he can find someone else to do his bluddy books. It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Mum. ‘Everything is under control.’

  ‘These Kaffirs aren’t reasonable people,’ said Steve. ‘These bluddy War Vets don’t care about anything but getting the whites off the land. They’re high on dagga. They won’t care if you own the farm or not.’ He took a pinch of Mum’s skin, near the top of her arm. It went pink under his fingers. ‘You’re the wrong bluddy colour. That’s all that matters.’

  ‘The situation’s not bad enough to stop going there.’

  ‘So what do you want to happen? You’re waiting for someone to get killed?’

  ‘Of course not, Steve. We have to keep things running. Otherwise they’ve won, and we might as well give them the farm now.’

  ‘We? It’s not our bluddy farm. I’m not having my family killed so that Mark Cooper’s farm stays afloat.’

  ‘What about the workers, hey? They live on the farm. They have families to feed.’

  ‘You’re not going back there.’

  Mum left the room. We all knew she was going back. What’s more, we all knew I would go with her.

  Steve opened one of his old books. ‘Nothing changes, man,’ he said. ‘It’s time you learned that. You and your Mum. Mark Cooper isn’t indestructible, you know.’