by Robyn Scott
Beside me, I could hear Lulu and Nicky breathing, the dogs panting, the cluck of a roosting bird, a suspicious rustle in the flowerbed.
Then deafening gunshots tore through the night.
Three yelling figures sprinted away from the hut, dodging trees and crashing through bushes. As more gunshots exploded behind them, one of the boys dropped to the ground and began leopard-crawling.
Seconds later, John and Damien shot past us towards the brightly illuminated front of the house. “It’s the BDF,” yelled John, as they disappeared around the corner.
Peter, still leopard-crawling, reached us at the back door. Leaping to his feet, he seized the handle and pushed past us. “Run,” he yelled, oblivious to our strangled giggles. “Run for your life.”
A few minutes later, still shaken but desperate to escape our post-mortem, the three boys crept back out to the hut. Then and thereafter, apart from denying having being scared, they resisted all attempts to discuss the episode.
When I asked John why he’d thought it was the BDF, short for the Botswana Defence Force, he just shrugged.
“If you thought it was the BDF, why were you scared?”
“I wasn’t scared.”
Dad said it was probably because of his parents. “Classic Americans – posted to the most peaceful country in Africa and still expect a military coup at any moment.”
Mum, Lulu, and I all agreed it was by far Dad’s best practical joke to date. Dad said, “You must tell Ivor, he’d love it.” We did, running across the road early the next morning.
“Whaddoes ya father think he’s up to anyway,” Grandpa muttered, “disturbing the bloody peace.”
Granny Betty winked at us. “Grandpa didn’t even hear the shots,” she whispered. “He’s just jealous he wasn’t there.”
“What, Betty!” snapped Grandpa.
“Nothing, Ivor.”
“It was the best joke ever, Grandpa.”
“Well, go on then,” he said. “Tellyour Granny Betty all about it. I’m sure she’s interested.”
And so, keeping our voices loud enough for Grandpa to hear, we described the events of the night to Granny Betty. Grandpa stared out of the window and began, first to smile, then to snort with laughter. By the time we got to the bit where John screamed “BDF!” his shoulders were shaking, tears on his cheeks glinting in the sunlight flooding through the window.
After the first lew months – in a silence that would last more than a year – Dad and Grandpa not speaking began to seem entirely natural. But the less bothered we became by the standoff, the more worried was Mum.
“You do know this is not healthy,” she’d say. “It’s between the two of them. And I can’t change their minds. But I thoroughly disapprove.”
“But Grandpa’s impossible.”
“Maybe,” said Mum. But, she argued gently, even if one is in the right, withholding forgiveness takes much more energy than giving it. “Your father’s great strength is also a weakness.” Once Dad made a decision, said Mum, almost nothing could change his mind. And it was this energy and resolve and ability not to care what the world thought of him that took us from house to house and country to country, that kept us dangling on the fringes of life.
I said, “I like that.”
Mum said, “I do too. When I met your father, it was magnetic; he was so different. I couldn’t not be with him. Would’ve gone to the South Pole with him, if that’s where he’d wanted to go.” Mum paused, eyes drifting out of focus at the romantic notion. “But,” she said, “it doesn’t change the simple fact that life’s too short to stay angry, and you can’t solve problems simply by cutting them out of your life.”
But to Lulu, Damien, and me, Dad’s life and even Grandpa’s life seemed infinite. As long as we could see both, that it couldn’t be in the same room didn’t seem to matter. To us it was just another in a long line of eccentricities.
And although we always enjoyed listening to Mum’s soothing philosophising, where she was most effective was not in giving urgency to the bizarre fractures in the lives ol our seemingly so resilient human family, but in reconciling our lives to the loss ot lives of the beloved, endlessly varied creatures living around us in perpetual, demonstrable peril.
Lulu, who shared her bedroom with the snakes, checked on them as soon as she awoke with the first light of morning.
She shook me awake, in tears. “The baby’s gone.”
“How did it get out?” I asked, padding after her across the brown paper flagstones. “Haveyou looked for it?”
We’d found the tiny brown house snake just a few days earlier. It was exquisite: the length and width of a pencil, the texture of polished thick-grained wood. It was also, we hoped, a different sex to the two big snakes, who’d shown no sign of procreating.
Lulu snivelled. “I think it’s been eaten.”
“By what?”
“Look.”
She stopped in front of the twig-and-leaf-filled glass vivarium and pointed inside. The bigger of the two snakes was, unmistakably, bigger.
Both in tears, we ran to Mum and Dad’s room.
“The baby snake’s been eaten.”
Mum groaned and rolled over.
“Mum! We killed it. The big snake ate it. We should’ve fed it more.”
“Lordy,” said Mum, rubbing her eyes. “Oh dear. Come on, hop into bed.” We crawled under the sheets, lying side by side in the dent left by Dad. Dad’s side of the bed always smelled of Timotei herbal shampoo; Mum’s of the tangy tea tree oil that she dabbed onto her face before she went to bed. Mum maintained that the pungent tea tree oil was why the mouse that had chewed off a patch of Dad’s hair during the night had left her alone. Dad said it was because he washed his hair more frequently.
Mum waited till our sobs subsided.
“You mustn’t blame yourselves,” she said, gently. “You couldn’t have known they were capable of cannibalism. Tragedies happen when you have pets.” She continued to talk, at first groggily, but quickly slipping into her gentle, everything-will-be-all-right voice. “It was such a tiny snake. It probably wouldn’t have survived in the wild anyway.” She pointed out of the window, where the first morning sun glinted through the bougainvillea creepers. “Imagine how many things out there want to eat it.”
“But we should have fed them more.”
“Yes, perhaps,” she said. “But just think – you’ll never make the same mistake.”
“I’ll never have another brown house snake,” I sniffed. “We’ll have to let them go.”
Mum went on, talking about life and death and forgiveness, drawing lessons from the innumerable, previous casualties, most recently the baby shrews that we’d fed hot milk and Pronutro every three hours, all through the night, and which had died after a week, and the tiny weaver babies, blown out of their nest, that, despite regular feeding and endless homeopathic mixtures, had lived for just two days.
Fuelled by a steaming cup of rooiboj tea, and with Damien joining us, Mum soon extended the remit of her talk.
Treat every problem as an opportunity to learn…
Every loss of life, as a reminder to savour life…
Live every day as if it were your last…
Only Mum could turn the death of a juvenile brown house snake into an exhilarating philosophical lecture. Her words sent shivers down my spine, and slowly the guilt and sadness dissipated. She finally rounded off the epic discussion over breakfast with a recital of Rudyard Kipling’s If.
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it…
“Now,” she said, snapping us back to the rapidly warming morning and the unpleasant impending decision. “What are you going to do about these snakes?”
Feeding the snakes – horrible from the beginning – had, with every gruesome gecko meal, only got harder. Deposited into the vivarium, the two unfortunate geckos would at once se
nse trouble. Even if the snakes were out of sight amongst the mopane leaves or tucked behind a rock, the doomed pair would instantly freeze as we dropped them onto the sandy floor. After a seconds pause, they’d dash frantically up the glass walls, often clambering right to the top before their tiny sucker pads gave way and they slid helplessly back down.
After at least five minutes of feigned lack of interest, one of the snakes would slither, casually, to a better striking position. Looping the tip of its tail around a slim branch, it would wait patiently here for a panicking gecko to scamper within reach.
The strike, always accurate, was so quick that the gecko seemed to start thrashing before the snake had even moved. Mostly, the snake would have struck side on, near the gecko head. With its prey pinned down, the snake would then edge its jaws towards the gecko’s nose and wildly revolving conical eyes. Positioned, at last, for consumption proper, it would now engulf the nose, and proceed, in small, leisurely chomps, towards the tail.
The unfed snake would have meanwhile done little more than swivel a curious eye in the direction of the uneaten gecko. Only once the first gecko had been reduced to a disappearing tail between distended jaws would snake two begin to slither into action. The second gecko was always a much easier catch. By now exhausted, it would mostly just crouch pathetically – paralysed but for a heaving belly, rising and falling beneath loosely fitting skin – panting and waiting, hopelessly, to be eaten.
Biting my lip as I watched, I’d wait for Lulu’s inevitable protest.
“Let’s get him out, Rob.”
Then making, as always, a token effort to be pragmatic, “We can’t, Lu. The other snake’ll starve’.”
“But we can’t let him die. Look at him. He’s so scared, Rob. Please.”
“No.”
“Please.”
I always gave in.
“Okay, just this time though.”
Starving snakes, it turned out, looked no different than well-fed snakes, and it had been easy enough for Lulu and me to convince ourselves that we were doing no great harm.
No longer though, with the poor baby snake being digested as we spoke.
Reluctantly, we agreed that we’d have to let our beloved pets go. We retrieved the two cool creatures for a final cuddle, marvelling at their beautiful dark eyes, their smooth, slightly embossed skin, the wonderful sensation as their slim muscled bodies flexed against our hands.
Even Damien, who wasn’t normally interested in the snakes, held one and slowly poured it from hand to hand. He stared up at the ceiling where the usual four or five geckos lurked. “Why don’t you just feed them gecko tails?” he asked.
When a gecko was frightened, the tail would sometimes detach, continuing to wriggle for several minutes.
“We’ll never catch enough.”
“What if you shot them down?”
“What?”
“The geckos.”
“We don’t want to kill them. That’s the whole point.”
“Not kill them.” Damien’s eyes gleamed. “Just stun them.”
The snakes were returned to the vivarium; the morning was devoted to the construction of a stun gun. The design pursued, to begin with, involved a basic catapult. Bullets were launched using a heavy-duty rubber band, hooked onto a nail at the front end of a foot-long piece of wood, which was drawn back along the length of the wood. Ammunition tested included marbles (much too heavy and certainly lethal to geckos), ball bearings (still too heavy and possibly lethal), dried Grewia berries (too light and difficult to shoot straight); and peanuts (same problem).
After several hours, we’d chipped holes in the wall plaster and fired hundreds of berries that hadn’t even made it to the wall, vanishing beneath bookshelves and sofas. The design that eventually triumphed, in which the rubber band was both the propulsion and the bullet, was even simpler. Stretched slowly and parallel with the wood, the band, when released, would thwack the wall accurately: powerful enough to detach a gecko, soft enough to do so without injury.
The first gecko Damien hit plummeted towards the sofa. It landed upside down, stubby legs still, but soft white belly expanding and contracting. I grabbed it and dangled it from its tail, just above the floor. After a few seconds, it started to wriggle, and with a few gentle shakes, it ejected its tail, dropped to the floor, and dashed back towards the wall.
Like a small fish on a riverbank, the detached tail flapped backwards and forwards on the vivarium floor. Grains of sand stuck to the raw, auto-severed end. The unfed snake gulped down the wriggling morsel, sand and all, in less than a minute. It consumed a second with similar enthusiasm before happily settling back in a loosely knotted embrace with its still-bloated companion.
The problem was solved. The snakes would stay; we could feed them with moral impunity. Almost. Lulu was still worried about traumatising the geckos. We consulted Mum, who’d retreated to her typewriter.
“Mmm.” Mum didn’t look up.
“Mum, does it hurt them to lose tails?”
“I’m sure not.”
“See, Lu.”
“It looks sore,” whined Lulu.
“I’m sure it’s just fright,” said Mum, distractedly. “Give them some Rescue Remedy.”
By dusk, when we crossed the road to Granny and Grandpa’s, we had the system perfected. Damien would shoot down the gecko, I’d grab it by the tail, and in the few seconds before it came to, Lulu would ease its jaw slightly open, insert the end of the glass dropper, and eject a single alcoholic drop of Rescue Remedy.
Grandpa watched, eyes gleaming. He clapped loudly as the stumpy-tailed gecko scampered back up to the ceiling. “I’ll be damned. How’s that for ingenuity, Betty? Whaddid I tell you? These kids are geniuses.” He grinned and tapped his head. “Chip off the old block.”
“Indeed’,” said Granny.
“Homeopathic geckos,” continued Grandpa. “Almost vegetarian snakes! And the first gecko tail farm in the world. A sustainable resource. It’s all bloody marvellous!” He shook his head incredulously. “And that reminds me. Haven’t fed my moths. Who wants to help?”
We all nodded. Grandpa was convinced the moths preferred their fruit juice laced with alcohol – as too did we. He fetched us each a glass, and for the next half an hour, as the delighted moths fluttered from mouth to mouth, we sat in the growing darkness, heads tilted back, dribbling fruit juice and wine onto our T-shirts and getting slowly and softly intoxicated.
“You guys are not normal,” Melaney Nevill enjoyed reminding me. Melaney was my best friend from Phikwe and a regular visitor to the Selebi cottage, which she called ‘The Shack’.
Her occasional ridicule was, however, well worth the benefits of having a friend who really knew what life was like in Selebi; who understood what I was up against, when I left the cocoon of madness and tried desperately to blend in. Because living on the fringe was great, provided everyone around you was on it too. Otherwise it could be agony.
Melaney lived in a spacious modern house in Phikwe. Her dad, Geoff, worked on the mine, played golf and squash, and at least once a year took the whole family up to Chobe Game Reserve on a fishing holiday. Her younger brother Glenn, who, despite almost blowing himself up with Damien, was not unnaturally obsessed with explosives, played cricket and fished with his dad. Her mother, Lyn, worked for PIMP, which, thanks to her, sponsored the horse shows in addition to random events like the Sunbeams’ boat race. Lyn permed her hair, wore makeup and perfume, and never bought clothes at PEP Stores in the Phikwe Mall, where Botswana pop music blared out of the loudspeakers and you could find two-pula T-shirts in big bargain bins. Instead, Lyn took Melaney on shopping trips to Francistown, where there was a big clean Woolworths, where most of the expatriates in Phikwe shopped.
In Lyn’s car, even the drive to Francistown was an entirely new, more pleasant experience. The car, which smelled of Lyn’s perfume, was cooled by an astoundinghy quiet and effective air conditioner. And instead of the serious rousing opera I was used to,
we were surrounded by the lighthearted sounds of Jive Bunny, Fleetwood Mac, and a variety of other bands, whose names I ‘was generally too embarrassed to enquire about. From such a comfortable vantage point, even the dry scrub whizzing past us seemed less harsh and bleak.
The only exception to the generally superior experience was the veterinary post. And feeling miffed about the kind of everyday pleasures I was missing, I took some comfort in the fact that, without the doctor’s sticker, the two veterinary men insisted on searching the whole car. Eventually, Lyn gave them each a cold Coke and we zoomed on, pulling up shortly afterwards at one of the many rest areas with the standard small concrete table, two concrete benches, and a rubbish bin beneath a tree.
Melaney and I made our way behind a large syringa tree to wee, looking out tor snakes and taking care to avoid all the other toilet points marked with little bunches of white tissues.
When we emerged, Lyn had scraped the table and seats free of dead leaves and pip-filled baboon poo, and laid out cans of Coke and Fanta and packets of bright red Simba crisps and Hula Hoops. With strains of Michael Jackson pouring from the open window, we sat sipping Coke and talking about the upcoming horse show, discussing which events we should enter and who might win and how we might win.
Sucking a salty dissolving crisp, I considered what we’d be doing if we ‘were instead having a loo break on a journey with Mum.
The drinks would be pure fruit juice; the food, cottage cheese and lettuce whole-wheat bread sandwiches, followed by dried fruit and nuts. The music would be off, so we could appreciate the sounds of the bush. Melaney and I would probably have fetched the food from the car, because Mum would have got distracted, striding around the clearing and picking up plastic bags.
“How can people do this?” she’d mutter, tossing a new handful into the rubbish bin. “With a bin right here? It’s disgraceful…”
Then at some stage – generally mid-sentence, and with barely a second’s pause – tone, subject, and expression would all change as Mum whipped out her lens of optimism. Finding beauty in a cluster of trees, an aloe plant, a butterfly, She would suddenly be marvelling at the Wonders of nature, oblivious to the rubbish that, moments before, had pained her so much.
