Sam's Best Shot

by James Best

  I thought to myself that it was a bloody long way to walk. ‘Why do you think she does it?’

  ‘It tends to happen when she’s stressed. Maybe it’s a release.’

  Sam, Godfrey and I reached the community centre, a small open-walled hut where a village woman cooked over a makeshift fire. A friend held the woman’s one-year-old baby, and the two women chatted while she cooked. Skinny dogs slept on the dusty roads, chickens followed by their chicks scratched under the thickets and thorn bushes nearby. Rectangular mud huts, some with doors and windows, some not, but all with thatched roofs, stood here and there. African music floated over the village from speakers somewhere distant.

  Sam was wary of the food. Our cook prepared okra, eggplant and tomato, and ground peanut with rape, all to go with the cornmeal pup. It looked and smelt good to me, but even though Sam might have managed some of this in a more familiar environment I knew it wasn’t going to happen today so I didn’t push.

  Godfrey chatted to the women in Tonga. I heard Sam’s name mentioned and computers and teachers. He explained he’d been telling the ladies how Sam, even though he was like Manga, had still taught the teachers some computer skills. There was an unmistakable note of defiance and pride in his voice.

  As we headed back to the canoes after lunch one of the men in the village shouted across a cow field to Godfrey, pointing at the river. On the far bank was a hippo with a gaping wound in its leg, likely from a croc or another hippo. Our canoe was about fifty metres from the wounded beast. Godfrey manoeuvred carefully, keeping a close eye on the animal, but we were safe.

  The next day—after the hippos fortunately had a quieter night—we headed back to Livingstone and Jollyboys. Our last day in the city was spent trying to catch up with schoolwork and neuroplasticity exercises. Sam’s table tennis had improved markedly throughout the week and he was chuffed with himself. He had stopped seeing it as a chore and actually asked to extend our game a little at the end, which in turn made me feel chuffed.

  CHAPTER 17

  Two wazungu

  It was time to leave the city of Livingstone and head north. As Livingstone had said, ‘I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward.’ And forward we went. We caught the Mazhandu Family Bus Service No. 3 to Zambia’s capital, Lusaka. The road and the railway, both in pretty good nick, flirted with each other as they headed east. Mopane scrub became baobab and Zambezi teak, which became sugar cane, which became cattle farms interspersed with the Miombo woodlands, with the red saplings maturing into yellow and green canopies.

  The rollicking blue bus picked up passengers from towns on and near the highway, and soon filled up. There were towns that seemed to exist only for the business from the buses. Dogs slept in the sun. Women balanced sacks of grain or trays of tomatoes, carrots, okra, capsicums, eggplants and oranges. Men hawked green bananas through the bus windows. A yellow plastic booth sold mobile phone data vouchers. Streets were lined with wooden and tin booths, second-hand clothes laid out on the pavement.

  A Seventh Day Adventist church was surrounded by abandoned brick buildings, where a gander pecked at the rubbish. A sky blue herbal clinic, a mustard-coloured auto shop with PRAISE THE LORD written on the wall, an empty superette. A minivan passed that was so full one passenger balanced outside the window with his legs inside and his fingers gripping the window’s frame. THANK GOD was scrawled across the van’s rear. Leaving one town, our impatient driver nearly collected a woman who was a bit slow getting off the bitumen. Thank God, indeed.

  We stopped for a ten-minute lunch break under a towering grain silo by the railway. It was the usual roadside diner with greasy and dirty toilets, for the use of which you had to pay the cleaner. I encouraged Sam to read some Harry Potter.

  ‘I don’t think so. I would like to decline your offer,’ he said.

  Where the heck did that come from? We negotiated a different challenge; he was to write a summary of me, written in the form of a letter to Harry Potter.

  Dear Daniel Radcliffe the actor of Harry Potter,

  Let me tell you about my father.

  My father is 49 years old, his name is James Andrew Best. We call him Jabber. He takes me to the Africa trip up to 7 months. Dad has seen the 50 billion dollar note in Zimbabwe.

  It is now just over 2 months since dad had start of the trip.

  He is a Doctor. He has white short beard around his face. He is a little bit tough and sometimes angry and has wine and beer and coffee.

  He did the head dance. He has been to Africa without me in 1970s or 1980s.

  He is kind usually. Overall, he was born in May 10th 1966.

  Cheers Samuel Best

  When I sent it to Benison, I assured her I was occasionally drinking beverages other than wine, beer and coffee.

  As we approached the capital, traffic thickened, on roads being widened and upgraded by the Chinese. Crossing the railway, teeming with pedestrians on the tracks, we entered the city. A billboard from a church announced a CITY WIDE MIRACLE CRUSADE. THEME: JESUS.

  Lusaka, with its jammed roads, jostling sidewalks and medium-scale high rise, is the sort of place where you don’t carry a bag that could be potentially stolen unless you have to and you don’t go out at night alone unless you’re desperate. It was a relief to get behind the hostel’s electric fence. Fortunately, we were only overnighting here before heading across the border into Malawi. I noticed as we travelled further towards the centre of Africa that white people, referred to by the Swahili term mzungu, were fewer and fewer. Sam and I were the only wazungu—the plural—in the hostel. The word literally translates as ‘aimless wanderer’ and was first used to describe European explorers from the eighteenth century who had a disconcerting propensity for getting lost. I considered it a very apt term for the two of us.

  As I organised dinner while Sam lazed in the room, I was approached by a couple of guys playing pool and asked if I wanted to join them. I’d been feeling fairly out of place so I appreciated and accepted the kind offer. Kelvin and Mdala, a refrigeration technician and scientist-turned-car-salesman respectively, were locals who used the hostel as a safe watering hole. They were intrigued to learn about the trip and Sam and me.

  ‘So where is Sam now?’ Mdala asked.

  ‘Here he comes,’ I said. Sam bounded down into the open lounge area and loudly said, ‘We are the only white people here!’ Kelvin and Mdala and several others in the bar cracked up.

  ‘Yes, Sam, that’s true,’ Kelvin said.

  Sam turned and pointed to Mdala. ‘Are you poor?’

  Yikes!

  ‘No, I am not, Sam. Are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m glad you’re not poor.’ Sam bought himself a Sprite and rushed back to the room shouting, ‘They are not poor!’

  Mdala and I swapped email addresses and I headed back to the room, shaking my head. I decided on my own version of ‘This Is Africa’: This Is Autism.

  The next day was a catch-up day of school, shopping and running repairs. On Skype, Benison laughed about Sam’s description of me, so I decided to get her back. Sam was given the challenge of describing her to Hermione and Ron.

  This is the description of my mum called Benison Anne O’Reilly. She has bushy multibrown hair like Hermione. She likes Reading, watching shows like Tuders [sic] and Miss Fishers.

  She dislikes eels, messy rooms and camp in the rain. She gets cross at Matthew Best sometimes. She also dislikes dog poo, anacondas and Tricky* stealing Charlie’s food. She goes to work at North Sydney. She makes books about autism.

  Benison’s joke name is called medicine. She also likes tidiness, Lulu the cat and emails. She is kind and makes house tidy but not as tidy as Singapore and organises homework that I have to do. Her brother and sister are called Cameron and Roslyn and her parents are called Gran and Grandad. Gran and Grandad are old but healthy and their bodies are well.

  Overall she is lovely and makes her house clean.

  Cheers Sam.

  *Our dog. She and S
am get along just fine.

  Well, at least I was not a neat freak. I did, however, agree she was lovely.

  I left the bar early and read my Kindle in the room while Sam played on his DS: it was another quiet evening in a concrete cell-like room behind electric fences and security guards. The next day was going to be a big one.

  3.15 a.m. The phone alarm sounded.

  3.50 a.m. We scrambled our packs together and left the room. At the gate, the sleeping security guard awoke with a jolt and demanded our room receipt, which I couldn’t find. We were five minutes late for the taxi. Would it still be waiting? I still couldn’t find the receipt. Would the room key do? It was in the door. Packs down. ‘Stay here, Sam.’ I ran back to get the key.

  The security guard, finally satisfied he had fulfilled his duties, opened the large metal gate. No taxi. We walked with our packs down the murky deserted Lusaka street. At the nearest intersection, we found a taxi, its driver asleep. He woke on our approach.

  4.10 a.m. Out of the cab at the bus depot, we threw our packs into the baggage compartment underneath the bus, hoisted our daypacks onto the above-head luggage shelf, and plonked onto the blue velvet seats with relief. Sam broke out the DS.

  The host checked my ticket. ‘Can you come with me please, sir?’

  Wrong ticket, wrong bus. The bus to our destination, Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, wouldn’t leave until 2 p.m.

  ‘This bus only goes to the border town of Chipata,’ we were informed. ‘You will have to change there, get a taxi to the border, cross, and then get another taxi and bus to Lilongwe. Here is a one hundred kwacha refund.’ Great.

  I seethed in my velvet seat. Hawkers roamed the aisle spruiking headsets, memory cards, phone chargers, power packs and crisps.

  5 a.m. Why hadn’t we left yet? More hawkers: sweets, crisps, gloves and underwear.

  5.20 a.m. More hawkers: mobile phone vouchers, lottery tickets and socks. People were still getting on. We were meant to have left nearly an hour earlier! Somebody thumped the side of the bus, I don’t know why. And then finally the wheels on the bus went round and round.

  And round and round. The road seemed to be being repaired all the way from Lusaka to Chipata. Every time we veered off what remained of the bitumen onto yet another dirt-road detour, the bus would fill with the rust-coloured dust and the passengers would all cough. I would dust off the screen of my Kindle and Sam would dust off the screen of his DS.

  The bus was full to capacity, and not only with passengers; it seemed some locals travelled with half a houseful of possessions. The aisle of the bus was an obstacle course of wheeled suitcases, vacuum-compressed bags of clothes and taped cardboard boxes, all now covered with dust. Occasionally we’d stop to let a passenger on or off, who would have to negotiate the obstacle course. Rather than find a way down the aisle, one guy just jumped out the window.

  Mid morning the bus pulled to a halt at a small village with a few old shops. I asked the fellow next to me if this was a toilet stop. He nodded. I negotiated the obstacle course and ran off to the rear of the shops where there was a toilet block with no actual toilet inside, just, well, an area that didn’t smell so good. As I did my business, I heard the bus start up. Shit!

  I sprinted back. The bus was just pulling out as I approached; the driver braked and let me on. I wondered what would have happened if I had missed it. I hoped Sam would have yelled out something. I reached my seat with relief.

  The landscape of south-east Zambia was semi-arid scrub. We ascended and crossed a ridgeline. With the appearance of greener vegetation, clumps of sugar cane and banana trees and fruit on the trays on the heads of women in the villages, I realised we had left the central African plateau. We were approaching the physical feature of the planet most visible from space, the Great Rift Valley.

  Named by British explorer John Gregory in 1892, the system of valleys extends from the Middle East, down the Red Sea, through the great lakes of eastern Africa, and branches to Madagascar and the Indian Ocean. In east Africa, including Malawi, a tectonic plate under the Horn of Africa is splitting away from the rest of the continent, creating a giant split in the earth’s crust, leading to vast deep valleys and lakes.

  Anthropologist Richard Leakey has also described the Rift Valley as ‘an ideal setting for evolutionary change’, and indeed this is where the oldest origins of man have been found. The abundant flora and fauna and varied ecosystems provided fertile grounds for new species to develop. This was where we all came from.

  As the afternoon sun beat down, we finally approached the border town of Chipata. Sam was sitting a few seats away from me. He yelled across the aisle, ‘Are there going to be any white people, Dad?’ Difficult though it was in a sea of dark faces, I tried to pretend he wasn’t my son.

  A taxi driver approached me as we got off the bus. ‘Hey, I remember you guys! I took you to a hostel a few days ago.’ I tried desperately to place him. By the time I had figured out he had just made that up to get our attention, he had our bags in the back of his taxi. I realised where Sam got his naivety from. Oh well, whatever; we needed a taxi anyway.

  Our old friend took us to the Zambia–Malawi border. After an uneventful border crossing we found our third taxi of the day, me in the front seat, Sam in the back. It was immediately apparent that the prices had dropped. As always, the taxi wouldn’t leave half full so we waited next to the dusty customs building for the next potential customers. Two women of what author Alexander McCall-Smith would describe as ‘traditional build’ approached. The driver helped them to load their copious baggage into the boot of the taxi. They wedged into the back seat on either side of Sam. In their bright floral dresses with matching head-wraps, resting wooden trunks on their laps, they looked like they were setting out on a Grand Tour.

  I could see Sam’s increasing irritation with the close quarters in the back seat as they chatted and giggled and shuffled on either side of him. I closed my eyes and waited for the inevitable.

  ‘You’re too fat,’ Sam said.

  Yep, there it was.

  They glanced at Sam but fortunately decided to ignore him, perhaps dismissing him as just another rude mzungu, then continued to chat in Chichewa all the way to our destination, the town of Mchinji.

  Sam and I were both over the day. Neither of us had slept a wink on the bus. But there was one more trip to go. In Mchinji, we had our first experience of an African minibus. You figure out which is yours by reading the hand-drawn signs on the front dashboard or hearing the driver yell out the destination. Given the thick accents, this can be tricky. Basically, they wait until they fill up and then they go.

  Seventeen passengers were tightly packed into our minibus for the two hours to the capital. The sun, and our spirits, sank lower. Sam and I both willed the capital to appear. Finally, we came to Lilongwe.

  The footpaths were mostly dirt tracks. Dishevelled shanty suburbs lined the dirty garbage-filled river. Lilongwe was no Windhoek. The minivan pulled into a chaotic ‘bus station’ where drivers negotiated who had right of way over the lumpy bumpy dirt by shouting and waving out the window.

  We snatched our packs and stumbled out of the bus in the twilight. A tut-tut driver bustled up to us and half-dragged us to his vehicle. A fight broke out between him and some taxi drivers. I had no idea what it was about. A turf war? Did he break protocol by grabbing us too early? I was too tired to care. There was lots of pushing and pulling and some of the taxi drivers kicked and thumped his tut-tut as we sat on the back seat.

  We landed at Mabuya Camp backpacker hostel after six trips over fifteen hours. There was a restaurant at the hostel where we could get a beef stew and rice. I had promised Sam pizza but I sure as hell didn’t want to head out in a taxi to a restaurant, and I didn’t want to figure out how to order pizza in, especially since I didn’t have a SIM card for Malawi and my computer battery was flat. I just wanted to eat and go to bed.

  But in the reception area, in front of ten people, Sam lost it completely
. ‘You changed your mind! You said pizza!’

  ‘I know but it is just too hard, Sam. We’ll have pizza tomorrow night.’

  ‘No! Fuck off! Give me pizza!’ He clamped his hands around my throat and growled at me. I hustled him up to the room, where we had a ten-minute shouting match, during which Sam threw the room key and water bottle at me and landed some reasonably effective punches to my shoulder. Teaching Sam boxing had come back to bite me.

  ‘I hate you! I want a new father!’

  I eventually left him to cool down but only after I had stupidly threatened all sorts of punishments that knew I wouldn’t implement, such as throwing out the precious DS. I was breaking all the rules of effective parenting. But I just wanted to eat and go to bed.

  Eventually he calmed and the restaurant managed to rustle up some buttered bread instead of the rice, which Sam accepted as a reasonable compromise. While I read my book he collapsed asleep on the bed. He had barely slept in thirty-six hours.

  The next day on Skype, Benison reminded me that:

  a) even typically developing teenage boys can have issues with anger management, and

  b) she would have wanted to strangle someone if she had gone thirty-six hours without sleep.

  True, true. It’s not always about autism.

  CHAPTER 18

  Mr Friendly

  I felt human again after a twelve-hour sleep. I hoped Sam did too. We went into town on a minibus to sort out SIMs and money. Once you got used to the minibus system, and getting up close and personal with your fellow passengers, it was kind of efficient and cool.

  I broke out the Lonely Planet and started booking accommodation for the next week or so. I tried to get Sam involved in the planning, even if only peripherally. We did have pizza for dinner, but that didn’t stop Sam having another blow-up in the evening. His scores for the last two days had been five and 5.5. I hoped things would turn around soon.