The Cry of the Go-Away Bird

by Andrea Eames

  ‘That was very good,’ said Beauty.

  ‘Yes.’

  We sat there for over an hour. Beauty slept for most of that time. I think I slept too, for a few minutes, because I brought my head up with a jerk and felt frightened, for a second, at the time I had lost.

  Beauty rolled her head towards me, and smiled.

  ‘Do you remember my aunt?’ she said. ‘The one who was cursed?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘I think I have been cursed.’

  ‘No.’ I rested my hand on hers. ‘You could not be.’

  ‘The N’anga said you were cursed too,’ she said.

  I nodded. I did not know what to say.

  ‘Our ancestors always bring justice,’ she said and closed her eyes.

  ‘Do you forgive me?’ I said after a while.

  ‘For what?’

  And I did not know what I was apologising for. But I knew from the ache in my stomach that there was something, something unforgivable, that was my fault.

  The night before we left, I dreamed that I hunted a tokoloshe one more time. I was back on the farm. I climbed out of bed and walked barefoot through our empty house.

  The house was empty, but that was because the ghosts were all outside, under the pockmarked moon. I saw Sean sitting on the back doorstep, small and hunched. I saw my uncle wandering at the end of the garden, eternally lost, tapping his compass. I heard Mr Cooper’s voice saying something in Shona that I could not understand. I saw Jonah stooping to tend the flowerbeds, Susan and Jane playing Catch around the vegetable patch, Mercy hanging out the clothes on a washing line which glinted silver in the dark, Beauty kneeling to scrub the front steps. I saw Archie chasing phantom flying ants and the ghosts of moths. I smelled cigarette smoke.

  We left so much behind. But the ghosts came with us.

  I heard crickets. An owl. A faint crackle of wind in the top branches of the flamboyant tree. Sleepy clucking from the henhouse, where something had obviously disturbed them. Something running in the thick hedges. The rubbery flap of a bat above my head. The ground was dew-wet already, and I knew that thousands of insects were beneath my toes in the grass and in the earth. The air was full of night; of the shrilling of crickets, the sharp, tinny taste of blood, the sense that something is watching you.

  I walked to the bottom of the garden, by the compost heap where the shrews and mongooses lived, under the tallest avocado tree. I stood on the overripe fruit that had fallen to the ground and I felt it squish between my toes. As I walked I knew the avocado meat was picking up bark, leaves, dirt and grass, coating my feet, and I was glad.

  I stopped right at the end of the garden. This was where a tokoloshe would live. Quiet. Away from people. Near water. I wanted to see one before we left. I wanted to tell it why I was going, why I didn’t have a choice. I knew it would not care or understand, that it lived in a different, older time with different, older rules that were as inescapable as gravity. It would not care what this white, maggoty creature thought. This interloper. This outsider. But I wanted to tell it anyway.

  I wanted to tell it all the things I knew.

  How I was exchanging the harsh, blood-red real world for something safer.

  How, although I was white and bred for cold, I was as African as the chittering mongoose that lives in a world of snakes.

  How I did not think I could live anywhere else.

  I sat under the avocado tree and stared into its branches. I felt the world slow down and the air thicken. I heard the mosquitoes stop their shrill whine. I could hear the tokoloshe breathing, and I knew it was coming.

  Acknowledgements

  A book is a collaborative effort, really – I may have written it, but it would not be in this solid and bookish form without the help and support of many other people, to whom I am hugely grateful.

  Vivien Green of Sheil Land Associates, my wonderful agent, for taking a chance on me and being an invaluable source of support and encouragement.

  The team at Harvill Secker, particularly Liz Foley and Ellie Steel.

  Professor Patrick Evans and the MFA programme at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, who read the book as I wrote it and encouraged me along the way.

  Rachael King, who has been my mentor and guide through the thick undergrowth of the publishing process.

  Readers of my blog and ‘real-life’ friends for ongoing support online and off.

  My parents, family and Zimbabwean friends (especially my darling Caroline!) for being so generous with their memories.

  My husband David, who kept me sane.

  About the Author

  Andrea Eames was born in 1985. She was brought up in Zimbabwe, where she attended a Jewish school for six years, a Hindu school for one, a Catholic convent school for two and a half, and then the American International School in Harare for two years. Andrea’s family moved to New Zealand in 2002. Andrea has worked as a bookseller and editor and lives in Christchurch with her husband. The Cry of the Go-Away Bird is her first novel.