by Robyn Scott
Mum, who loved impractical, overnight, career-changing, continent-shifting decisions as much as Dad, said, “When do you want to leave?”
Dad said, “As soon as possible.”
Two months later we were on a plane to Botswana, leaving, forever, to live in a place where the sun always shone and the enormous sky was always blue; where there were snakes in the shower, lions outside your tent, and endless infinitely dangerous creatures lurking everywhere – according to Dad, at least, who before our departure had stirred me, Lulu, and Damien, into a frenzy of excitement.
Mum, too, had talked excitedly of Botswana. But for her, the lure of the place lay in her parents, Granny Joan and Grandpa Terry, who were already familiar figures after their two lengthy visits to New Zealand. Dad longed for Botswana itself, for all its warmth and space and for the opportunity to reinvent himself. He never mentioned Grandpa Ivor, a mythic figure in this mythic country, as reason to return.
But then, the day we arrived, Dad heard about the death of Dr. Meyer.
The more he considered the idea, the more it became irresistible – the closest he could ever hope to come to his teenage dream. As a flying bush doctor, he told himself, he might at last enjoy medicine.
So Dad remained a doctor, and suddenly, accidentally, Grandpa Ivor became crucial to the new plan. For as well as retraining Dad as a pilot, until Dad got his licence, Grandpa would fly Dad to the distant, inaccessible bush clinics.
And so, contrary to all our intentions, instead of building a new house by a river, or buying one of the modern houses in nearby Phikwe, we did what was, according to Mum and Dad, the obvious thing to do, and moved into the cowshed next door to Grandpa Ivor.
Moving into a cowshed wasn’t the first time Mum and Dad had surprised our extended family and friends. Becoming on-and-off vegetarians, ardently taking up alternative medicine, and resolving to homeschool their children – all rooted in what would become lasting family philosophies – were among innumerable decisions that had been met with raised eyebrows.
From the moment we arrived, Lulu, Damien, and I were caught in the crossfire – beginning with my birth, when Dad delivered me at home on a snowy January day in England. To ease the pain of an all-night labour, Dad gave Mum acupuncture. Granny Joan, who’d flown over from Botswana for the birth, was horrified. At first, she bravely watched as her naked daughter staggered around the room, Dad following, flicking needle after needle into Mum’s ears, bottom, and the tops of her feet. But when Dad pulled out a cigarette lighter and began warming the ends of the needles, it was too much. Granny Joan left the room and didn’t appear again until I did.
Eighteen months later, newly settled in a bare rented house in Auckland, Mum and Dad took turns sitting on the single chair provided by the concerned landlady and placing bets as to whether Damien or the furniture shipped from England would appear first. Damien did, but, undaunted, they went ahead with a home birth, Mum delivering him on a mattress, which was then the only other piece of furniture in the house.
Exactly two years on, by which time we were living in a wooden house that Dad had built on a biodynamic farm, it was the turn of our paternal grandmother to brave the unconventional appearance of her grandchild. Granny Mavis couldn’t take it either. She passed the duration of Lulu’s birth giving our pet ducklings an extra long daily bath. That was the day of my earliest memory, which was not of my baby sister but of her shiny red placenta, which was put in the washing-up bowl until Dad buried it under a specially planted pohutakowa tree in the garden. For Maori good luck, and fertilizer.
It wasn’t often, though, that Mum and Dad managed to surprise each other.
Dad’s decision to drink a glass of his own urine every day for a week was one such occasion. But even then, Mum was shocked only that Dad could bring himself to swallow pee, not that the old ayurvedic practice might have medicinal benefits.
The floor of the cowshed was another.
“Brown paper, Lin?” Dad’s lips twitched, and he scratched his head. “Areyou sure?”
“Varnished brown paper,” said Mum. “The DIY book says the effect is fantastic. Faux flagstone.”
Dad shrugged. “You know best, Lin.”
Mum bought every sheet of heavy-duty brown paper in the Phikwe stationers. She deposited the enormous pile and a bucket of wallpaper paste on the concrete floor in the lounge. On her direction. Lulu squatted beside the bucket and stirred the thick colourless paste while Damien and I ripped the huge sheets into the rough shape of stone tiles. Mum examined each piece and, if accepted as sufficiently realistic, pasted it onto the floor, overlapping the last one. Once the ‘tile’ was in place, we all helped smooth it down, squeezing any air bubbles out under the edges.
After four long, glue-covered days of ripping, pasting, and varnishing with four polyurethane layers, Mum at last pronounced the job complete.
“See, I told you, Keith,” she said, hands on hips, smiling at the gleaming floors, “it’s impossible to tell.”
“Impossible.” Dad nodded. “All the best flagstones have air bubbles.”
But Mum was too pleased to be upset.
“Don’t be so critical,” she replied, smiling. “Anyway, there re only a couple…and they give character.”
When Mum had covered the whole cowshed floor in varnished brown paper and Dad had finished fixing up the bathroom and kitchen, they turned their attention to the veranda. And I became toolbox assistant, fetching bolts and sandpaper and drill bits.
“Cottage, Robbie!” Mum frowned down at me from the wobbling stool. “Don’t keep calling it a cowshed.”
“But it still smells of cow poo,” I said, determined not to enjoy any part of the cowshed too obviously.
“Nonsense. Well, hardly. Pass me another nail…two, actually.”
I fished in the toolbox and handed her the nails. Mum put one between her teeth, grabbed the flap of shade cloth, and with a loud thwack drove the other nail through the cloth and into the wooden upright. Taut green gauze now covered nearly the whole front of the newly painted veranda-cum-dimng room.
I ‘walked a few paces backwards to properly admire the effect, hopping over the unshaded patches of sun-scorched sand.
Mum swayed precariously. “Hold the jolly thing still, Robbie,” she mumbled through her nail. “Looks good, hey?”
“It’s okay.” I shrugged. I went back to my position.
“Come on, admit you like it.”
I said nothing, and turned to watch Grandpa Ivor.
He had just arrived on one of his daily visits to give advice and was leaning against the doorway to the veranda, peering over Dad’s shoulder. Only after several minutes of pointed sighing had failed to provoke a reaction did he speak.
“You’re wasting your money with that lock.”
“Hmm.” Dad didn’t look up. He was screwing a new door handle into the front door, which led into the kitchen. The key to the old lock had long since been lost.
“The whole place is charmed. No one will touch it.”
“What?” I let go of the stool. “How come?”
Grandpa leaned back against the wall, crossed his legs, and squinted down at me.
“Well,” he said slowly. “You see that field over there?” He swung his arm towards the tree-cleared section bet-ween his house and the boundary fence. Tree stumps, spindlyyellow grass, and thornbushes covered most of it. The only thing of interest was a red termite mound, curving graciously above the thorny scrub at the far end.
“Years ago a witch doctor paid me a visit – told me there were special herbs growing there. Asked if he could pick them to make his mud.” Grandpa drew out the last word and stared at me, widening his eyes until there was more red-veined white than bright blue middles.
“What did you say?”
“Whaddaya think I said?” He sounded staggered by my ignorance. “I said, ‘Of course! Take as many as you want! Go wild!’” He lowered his voice. “You don’t want to mess with witch doctors.”
>
“What will happen?”
“Anything could happen,” Grandpa whispered. “Never underestimate the power of these healers out here in the bush.”
Dad rolled his eyes at me.
“Anyway, the old bugger was delighted.” In exchange for the herbs, Grandpa explained, the witch doctor had made a charm that would protect the whole place for as long as he lived. “Still comes to pick them…”
I glanced at the field, half expecting to see a little hunched man in skins and feathers, not really sure what to expect. There was nothing but bleak grass and bushes, wobbling behind layers of heat waves that rose off the sand. I shuddered.
“Never locked a door since,” continued Grandpa, shading his eyes and peering reverently towards his herbs. “Never had a thing stolen.”
“You’ve never had much worth stealing,” said Dad.
“Nonsense, these people will steal anything.”
Dad snorted.
“Just wait, Keith,” said Grandpa, “till you watch a witch doctor’s curse kill a healthy man.”
♦
Witch doctors sucked blood. That was the only fact I knew about them. And starting from that basis, cursing people to death didn’t seem an entirely implausible leap.
Dad had first learned about the blood sucking at his clinic, when a woman came to see him with a bad cough and an infected coin-sized wound on her chest. Asked about the cause, she had stared silently at the floor, and ignored repetitions of the question. After a few attempts, Dad had given up trying to get an answer, cleaned and dressed the wound, and sent her for an X-ray.
It was called scarification, Dad’s nurse, Maria, later informed him, a technique used to cleanse bad blood. With a blunt razor, the witch doctor scrapes away a patch of skin until blood wells up in the wound. Then he turns away from the bleeding patient, grabs a handful of live grubs, worms, or insects, and surreptitiously pops them into his mouth. Returning to his client, he puts his mouth over the bleeding wound and sucks energetically. Finally, in a splendid conclusion to the cleansing operation, he spits the vile mixture of blood and grubs out into a waiting dish for inspection by his client.
Dad said, “That’s just quackery. Bloody unhygienic quackery. But nothing more sinister.”
“What about curses?”
Mum and Dad both assured us, several times, that Grandpa was exaggerating; that the only power witch doctors possessed was to scare people into believing they had power. But it was hard to forget Grandpa’s story.
“You think it might be true?” I asked Damien.
“Dunno. Maybe.”
“Let’s go and look in the field.”
“Okay.”
“Can I come?” asked Lulu.
“You’re too young.”
At the edge of the field, where bare dirt became bush, Damien and I stared at each other.
“You go first.”
“You’re older.”
“Let’s get Lu.”
We told Lulu she could come along, provided she went first.
Lulu obediently trotted off in front of us, her head only just above the bushes. Thorns tore at our legs. Every lew steps we had to stop and pick the round spiky duwweltjie thorns out of our feet, shoes forgotten in the thrill of the reconnaissance plans.
“Watch out for snakes, Lu.”
“Watch out for witch doctors!”
“Blood suckers!”
Further on, the bushes grew taller and thicker. We made our way towards the termite mound near the end of the field and climbed up the gently sloping skirt at the bottom. The smooth base was thorn-free, but painfully hot after more than half a day of beating sun. “Ow! Ow!” I hopped from foot to foot, swapping the heat. Every time I felt the concrete-hard walls of a termite mound, I thought about termites spitting. Termite mounds, many taller even than Dad, were built entirely out of termite spit and sand.
“Which do you think are the mud herbs?”
I studied the few wilted plants bet-ween the clumps of grass and larger bushes. There were several different kinds – all different shades of grey-green and dust-covered, some folded up in the midday heat. None looked like they’d make very effective medicine.
“Maybe he’s picked them all.”
“Let’s look for footprints.”
Something rustled, and we all froze.
The two houses looked much further away than the termite mound had looked from the houses. The drawn-out gwaab-gwaah-gwaaah of a go-away bird sounded unfriendly, not talking-bird funny, like it usually did. None of us called ‘Go away’ back.
“There’s nothing here. Let’s go.”
We walked a few paces, and then broke into a run. Out here, surrounded by bush, the huge blue sky loomed above us, bigger than ever, like it might swallow us up. Soon we were running as fast as we could, oblivious to the thorns and the clawing branches.
Damien and I collapsed, panting, beside each other on Grandpa’s driveway. We were almost breathing normally by the time Lulu came out of the bushes, looking miserable.
“Why did you leave me?” she spluttered.
“We didn’t. There’s nothing there anyway.”
“So why did you run?”
“It was a race.”
“I’m telling Mum.”
“Then I’ll tell her you didn’t wear a hat.”
“I’m sure I saw something.”
“No you didn’t.”
But none of us wanted to go back to the field to check.
In the end, we consulted Matthews – the new gardener, and authority on all things to do with Botswana.
Matthews said he was fourteen, but he looked much younger, especially in his work clothes, which were, invariably, a too-small holey T-shirt that said ‘Coke – Can’t beat the feeling’, grey suit trousers cut off at the knee, and old, oversized steel-capped boots at the end of long, skinny legs. Matthews had explanations for everything, and generally different ones from Mum and Dad’s. He’d left school when he was twelve and lived in a hut in a nearby cattle post. Besides several neighbouring huts, the only things at his cattle post were a kraal for the cows and goats, and a tiny general store that sold essentials like mealie meal, paraffin, and Sunlight soap, as well as Simba crisps, boiled sweets, and a wide range of fizzy drinks and beer.
The cattle post was a twenty-minute walk away along one of the hundreds of dirt paths that crisscrossed the bush around us, and every morning at eight o’clock Matthews strolled out of the mopane bush to begin work for Mum and Dad, and to become a non-stop source of information for us.
“Did a witch doctor really put a charm on this place?”
“Ah!” Matthews’s smile disappeared. He scraped his boot on the sand and stared at his feet. Usually he only looked uncomfortable when Mum or Dad, or other adults, asked him questions.
“Grandpa said a witch doctor comes to pick herbs.”
“It’s true,” he muttered, after a pause.
“How do you know?”
“Everyone knows.”
“Do people die from curses?”
“Sometimes. Ah, ah, I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Have you been to a witch doctor?”
“Ah. Gake itje.”
End of that conversation.
Ga ke itse: conversational brick wall of Botswana. When you hear ‘Ga ke itse’ and see downcast Motswana eyes, you give up asking questions. It means ‘I don’t know’. But it’s frequently used to mean ‘I do know, but I don’t want to answer any more questions’, which happens often when Europeans ask more questions than are welcome.
The too-many-questions threshold is low.
“I’m going to ban that bloody expression,” announced Dad, once, in a long-day-at-the-clinic, exasperated voice.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Mum looked appalled. “It’s cultural. You can’t ban people speaking their own language.”
“I can if I’m paying their salaries.”
“I’ll have nothing to do with it.”
/> “Fine. It’s the only ‘way I’ll ever get a straight answer.”
So Dad ordered his nurses, and Matthews, and Ruth, our maid, not to say ‘Ga ke itse’ in his presence.
“It’s wonderful,” he said, after the end of the first ga ke itie – free day. “I just wish I could ban my patients from saying it too.”
By the end of the week, though, the ban had been lifted.
“I can’t bear the silence.”
“Serves you right for being such an autocrat, Keith.”
Sometimes we also learned things about Setswana, the local language, just from listening to Batswana people speak English.
Like the -word please, which was rarely said.
“Robbie,” Ruth would order, “call your mummy for me.” Or Matthews would say, “Tell the doctor I want to speak to him,” or “I want a glass of water.”
It was surprising, at first; jarring to ears used to polite English formalities.
“There’s no equivalent word forpleaje,” explained Grandpa.
“No word?”
“Well there is, but it’s hardly said. It’s implied already. Think about it. What’s the point oi please, really?”
In Botswana, if someone wanted something, it was asked for with no frills. And if you said no, that wasn’t rude either, but accepted gracefully, without grudges.
“Sensible, if you ask me,” said Grandpa.
We still had to say please, though.
We soon grew tired of speculating about the witch doctor. As Mum pointed out, charms or no charms, if he did still come to pick herbs, he wouldn’t want to upset Grandpa Ivor by doing anything unpleasant to us.
Anyway, Matthews made sure there were other things to worry about.
As soon as we’d moved into the cowshed, work began on the garden. Under Mum’s direction, Matthews spread the cow dung that had been removed from the back room in a metre-wide band around the house, and together they lugged and lined up football-sized stones to make borders for the new flowerbeds.
