by Robyn Scott
If we’d stopped beside one of her beloved koppies, Mum could become lost indefinitely in her raptures. “…Now look at that amazing rock-climbing fig. .Ficis abutifolia… exquisite…absolutely exquisite…and the colour of those rocks in this light…so beautiful…Robbie, Mel, come stand over here so you can appreciate it properly…”
If you didn’t daily witness such rapid changes, they could be disconcerting.
Melaney would stare, amazed, as Mum – plastic bags in one hand, shading her eyes with the other – froze mid step and stared reverently up at the koppie. I would then have to point to the tree in question, its magnificent roots dripping over the large balancing boulders like icing on a Christmas cake.
Having marvelled at the tree, at how its flaking powdery bark gleamed silver in the sunlight, Mum would probably move on to eulogising the vast rocks, and then, quite possibly, shift gear suddenly again, seizing the opportunity for a quick geology lesson.
In the highly unlikely event that Mum did bring up the subject of the horse show, she would tell us how pointless it was to obsess about winning, and how we should expend our energy on more important things. Anyway, if you win, everyone else must lose. Any attempt to argue that winning was fun would be met by another lecture, sometime during which Mum would make the point that she hoped her children would grow up to not be too competitive. To which I would retort, defiantly, that I loved competition, and would always be very competitive. And Melaney would giggle as Mum eyed me with her one-day-you-will-know-better look and then quickly changed the subject.
If we were with Mum, going to Francistown, it would probably be to visit the plant nursery. On the journey back, we’d have in store for us an uncomfortable ride, packed in between a prickly selection of citrus trees and indigenous seedlings that Mum and Dad hadn’t succeeded in finding in the bush.
Never, with Mum, would we have been going shopping for clothes.
Which was why, standing in the spacious changing room and clutching the pile of fashionable shorts handed to me by Lyn, I was so confused. My experience with changing rooms was nil. Before then, I’d only been to PEP Stores and one of the factory shops in the Phikwe industrial area, which had been built with the help of FAP subsidies. In neither of these had I ever tried on clothes, as Mum, who ‘hated shopping with a passion’, always wanted to leave as quickly as possible. “I’m afraid I’ll just never be sartorially minded,” Mum would say, if I complained. “Thank goodness we’ve got Granny Joan making sure our wardrobes stay respectable.”
I turned over the plastic disc, examining the hole in the top and the number 5 stencilled into it. The identical number 5 on the other side provided no further clues. I decided the bored-looking Motswana shop assistant must have mistakenly handed it to me with the clothes. I gave it back to her.
“Ah, no,” she said, handing it back. She gestured towards the cubicle. “Take it with you.”
“What for?” I asked, bewildered.
But before she’d a chance to explain, Melaney, who had been standing silently behind me, erupted in giggles. “You don’t know what that’s for?” she asked, making no effort to hide a smirk. “God, Mum’ll never believe it.”
On hearing about my blunder, Lyn did indeed raise her neatly plucked eyebrows higher than usual. I looked at the floor and blushed. Knowing what it was for, I felt even sillier for not working it out.
I was the Bushman in The Gods Must Be Crazy, who’d tried to hand back the unfamiliar and troublesome Coke bottle to the man he mistook for a god.
That night, lying in the spare bed in Melaney’s bedroom, still smarting from humiliation, I felt increasingly resentful of Mum, Dad, and of the fringe in general. At times like this, I couldn’t believe Mum was actually writing a book that would spell out in detail exactly how different our family was. Enough people knew already. It was unkind to her children.
“You asleep, Mel?”
“Almost.”
“1 wish I had your mum,” I said, not sure what such a declaration would achieve.
Silence.
“You asleep?”
“Thinking.”
“Tell me.”
“Your Mum’s pretty wise,” said Melaney. “And you get to not go to school. And not have homework. Or exams.”
“I like homework and exams.”
Mel sighed. “God, you’re so weird sometimes.” She turned over and stuck her head under her pillow.
I couldn’t believe it. Either way, I was damned: weird for not being normal; weird, too, for wanting to be normal. I lay awake, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the town: a cacophony of dog barks reverberating along the street as someone strolled past; a furious neighbour yelling at the howling dogs; a car driving past, blasting loud Botswana pop music, engine revving and wheels screeching as it turned the corner and disappeared onto the main road. A frog croaked from someone’s fishpond, or swimming pool. From somewhere, far away, came the distant thumping of a late-night party.
I missed the bush, and I felt bad, and then terrible, about wanting to trade in Mum. I wondered if she’d guess my traitorous thoughts, and I resolved to beg Melaney to keep quiet. Sobered by guilt, I knew that the penalties of having my parents did not, probably, in the wider scheme of things, exceed what I liked about them. But penalties there were. And while some – not knowing about changing rooms, painfully wholesome sandwiches, opera on long car journeys – I knew I’d soon forget, others would persist. Old scabs, grotesque in the harsh light of normality, waiting to be picked at.
Like my saddle, which was for me the nadir of my generally pretty outlandish riding equipment. Donated by friends who’d had horses for generations, the deeply scooped seat was, for a start, much too big for me. To accommodate the old-fashioned shape, and to give Feste some padding, Mum had sewn a special foam numnah, which she covered in bright blue cotton. “It matches the riding hat,” she said reassuringly. Unfortunately, while the blue did indeed match the homemade sun hat – strapped, at Mum’s insistence, over my riding helmet – no one ever got beyond the mesmerising clash with the enormous saddle, which was a kind of vomit-orange colour, topped off with a patchwork of dark splits in the leather.
And when I eventually fell asleep, it was tormented by these thoughts of my saddle – every fault magnified by the wild unforgiving imagination of the late-night mind.
∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧
Fifteen
Christmas
“I need a new saddle.”
Mum said, “Do you need one? Or do you want one?”
“Need!”
Dad said, “Yours is a perfectly effective saddle. It’s what you do on it that counts.”
“Well, I really want one, then. What about for Christmas?”
“It’s a very big expense.”
“For Christmas and my birthday?” My ninth of January birthday meant I often got combined presents. Which I usually discouraged, resenting the inevitable discount of one big present versus two quite big ones.
“Even so, Robbie.”
“All right,” said Dad, “I have a deal for you. If you find a way to make some money and contribute, I will buy you your saddle.”
I stared at Dad, momentarily elated, then worried. “How do I earn money?”
“Not with coffins,” said Dad. “And certainly not with Ivor. Use your brain. That’s what it’s there for.”
“Mum?”
“Dad’s right. The idea is part of the challenge. I’m sure there’re plenty of things. Start small. You could grow something in the vegetable garden, bake something, ask Matthews to teach you how to do wood carving…”
“I can’t think,” I mumbled. “Lyn would never ask Mel to do this.”
“Course you can think. And we are asking you.”
“Come on,” said Mum. “Give it a few days’ thought. Try to think of something people use all the time. Something you could sell in Phikwe. Something that might not be easy to get hold of.”
♦
&
nbsp; Free-range eggs.
We were in the kitchen when the idea dawned on me. Mum was lamenting disgraceful intensive farming practices.
“Laid by chickens that live packed in tiny wire cages,” she muttered, banging an egg against the side of the pan. “They never see the light of day, you know. Stufted full of antibiotics, because they get sick from the stress. Then slaughtered the moment thev slow down…”
By which time I had cancelled my order for an omelette.
“What if I sold free-range eggs? You can’t buy them in Phikwe.”
Mum and Dad endorsed the plan immediately. As long as I ran it like a proper business, they would help me get started. As I munched my way through a bowl of muesli, it was quickly decided that my combined Christmas and tenth birthday present would be twenty chickens, a fully equipped chicken run, and a six-month supply of chicken food.
“Well,” said Dad, as we cleared away the dishes, “it’s December already. If you want them in time, we’d better get cracking.”
One of the conditions of the present was that I would help Dad with the preparation.
I sat with him as he drew up a shopping list. Ten metres of plywood, two tins of creosote, thirty metres of chicken mesh. All of which could be bought at the Phikwe hard-ware store. The automatic water and grain feeders, he’d have to get in Johannesburg, the next time he went to collect medicines.
I had never imagined that a few chickens would involve quite so much effort and expenditure. I apologised to Dad.
“If you want to run a good business, you’ve got to do things properly.”
“Isn’t it a lot of money?”
“Don’t worry about the money.”
“Then why,” I asked, suddenly irritated, “can’t you just buy me a saddle for my birthday?”
“Because this is good experience and a good responsibility, Robbie.”
“And keeping accounts will be wonderful for your maths,” added Mum.
“My maths is fine,” I snapped, resenting having my birthday present used to make Mum feel good about homeschooling. “Anyway, I don’t care about that.”
But I did – as Mum well knew – care about animals dying.
So when she then suggested that instead of getting young chicks, I could save and rehabilitate year-old ‘end-of-lay’ battery chickens destined for slaughter, she had me: the combination of bona fide farmer, businesswoman, and death-row chicken deliverer was irresistible. I embraced it without further question. And over the following weeks, while Lulu and Damien combed the bush for the traditional Scott thorn-tree Christmas tree, I reneged on my annual duties and instead hovered beside Dad at the workbench.
To begin with, I could do little more than hand him nails or hold down the wood while he sawed. But once the cosy, half-oval hutch had been erected, and the twenty spacious nesting boxes installed at the back, I was able to help properly, taking a paintbrush to the raw golden plywood and plastering on thick, tar-smelling creosote to protect it from termites.
It soon became a painting extravaganza. A few metres from the hutch, which we were creosoting on the bare concrete around the shed, Mum helped Lulu and Damien do the Christmas painting. Second only to presents, the search for and spray-painting of the dead, two-metre-tall thorn tree was the most exciting part of Christmas. Watching the transformation of bare spiky brown branches into exquisite gnarls and needles of shining silver was like watching magic. As was the evolution of the tree decorations: beautiful seedpods, which we spray-painted gold, making glinting spirals, spiky round baubles, and long golden pendulums – and, in the messy process, getting gold on our clothes, gold on our skin, gold on the dogs, and, this year, even a few gold splotches on the black chicken hutch.
On Christmas Eve morning, we added the final touch to the tree: a string of flashing lights, wound in between the golden seed-pods and incongruous blobs of cotton wool. The cotton wool was there at Lulu’s insistence: an attempt to bring to our baking hot Christmas day some essence of the white, snowy Christmases enjoyed by the northern hemisphere children in our favourite books. The overall effect, if bizarre, was beautiful, and we kept the lounge curtains shut throughout the day to properly admire the flashing, eye-wateringly bright creation in the corner of the room.
Late in the afternoon, the Christmas carols guests arrived from Phikwe. Granny Joan and Grandpa Terry came first, followed shortly afterwards by their two best friends, Alan and Ellie Lowther, their daughter, Sarah, and her two sons. The Lowthers also had a son Mum’s age, who Granny and Grandpa had once hoped would be their son-in-law. Fifteen years after Dad had stymied this plan, they had a new strategy for joining the two families, and I frequently overheard infuriating comments like, “Don’t the grandchildren play so well together?” Wink, wink. “Wouldn’t it be funny if Robbie or Lulu ended up with Mark or David?”
“I will never end up with anyone,” I’d retort haughtily. To which the two sets of grandparents would smile knowingly. “You say that now, but one day you’ll be ‘walking down the aisle on your father’s arm’.”
Dad said, “I should be so lucky. No one’s ever going to take Robbie off my hands.”
“Good,” I replied.
“Keith, how can you say that about your own daughter?”
“Objective analysis.”
“Oh, nonsense.”
As soon as the Christmas tree had been properly appreciated, and before it got dark, I insisted that everyone follow me into the bush to admire my present in progress. Beneath a silver-barked Commiphora tree a few metres from the house, the big black hutch stood facing a long, half-finished chicken run. Hands on hips, I explained my brilliant business venture. Which, as I pointed out, had the dual benefit of making happy chickens and happy customers, who would no longer, as they munched their scrambled eggs, have to think about fluorescent-lit cages full of stressed, antibiotic-filled chickens, unable to move, and desperately pecking at each other.
By the look on the visitors’ faces, this was not something they had previously considered while eating their scrambled eggs.
Mum smiled proudly.
I said, “I’m taking advance orders. Two pula fifty for half a dozen happy eggs. Only fifty thebe more than cruel eggs.”
Mark and David stared at me, mouths open.
Dad smiled. “See what I mean about Robbie?”
Silence.
Broken by the grandmothers, who each hurriedly pledged to buy several dozen eggs, and, for the moment at least, avoided further speculation on who might end up with who.
♦
‘Carols by Candlelight’ had always been a misleading term for the annual Christmas Eve fireside gathering. And this evening was no different.
There was candlelight – cast by the candles clasped by everyone except Mum, who was holding the guitar. And we did begin with ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Away in a Manger’. But Mum, the musical director, had only a small repertoire of songs she could both play well and liked playing. None of these were carols, and she rapidly moved to a less festive-season programme – which, she argued, when anyone protested in favour of tradition, was only in keeping with a spray-painted thorn bush for a Christmas tree.
The non-carols began, as always, with Mum’s favourite, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’. Folio-wed by ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘Jamaica Farewell’, ‘Oh My Darling Clementine’, ‘The Gypsy Rover’, and ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’. With every song, often matched one-for-one with rounds of drinks, the singing grew louder. After a break for dinner, by which time the adults had drunk enough to no longer care that we weren’t singing carols, Grandpa Terry was suggesting his favourite Irish songs and Mum was improvising wildly – and with variable success – to ‘Cockles and Mussels’ and ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’, which Grandpa sang in a strong Irish accent.
It was not long before midnight when Mum said “Enough.” Her fingers were aching; she still had to wrap some of our presents. But as she lowered her guitar into its felt-lined case, Lulu, Damien, and I begged her to
sing our adaptation of ‘English Country Garden’. Mum, who could never resist an opportunity to show off a product of homeschooling, smiled. “If you insist,” she said, plucking at the strings, and humming the tune to herself. “Just once, though.”
It turned out to be several times. We’d rewritten the old song on a musically focused day and Mum, as usual, had encouraged us to be as creative as possible. The result was that we’d stuck in all our favourite bush trees and birds, with little regard to how they sounded. So it took several renditions before everyone else learned the words, and sang with enough gusto to fudge their way through the bits that didn’t quite work.
When they eventually did, though, it was a rousing, splendid finale to the night, and the words rang far across the quiet bush, serenading all around us:
How many wild birds fly to and fro
In a Big Botswana Garden?
We’ll tell you now of dome that we know
And those we miss you’ll surely pardon
Cuckooshrike, barbet and owl
Hammerkop and oriole
Babbler, lark, thrush and guinea fowl
There is joy in the spring
When the birds begin to sing
In a Big Botswana Garden!
How many kinds of wild trees grow
In a Big Botswana Garden?
We’ll tell you now of some that we know
And those we miss you’ll surely pardon
Mopane, leadwood, and guarri
Manila and fever tree
Baobab, knob-thorn and large molope
Aloe, spekboom, ficus,
Mashatu and sjambok pod
In a Big Botswana Garden!
“Such a lovely evening,” said Mum, as we helped clear away the glasses around the fire. “Such a pity Ivor wasn’t with us on his harmonica,” she added, looking meaningfully at Dad.
Dad said, “Ivor doesn’t care about Christmas. Hardly ever gave us presents.”
“That of course,” said Mum, “is not the point.” Dad shrugged. “He can come here if he wants.” Mum said that would be a bit awkward, seeing that Dad wasn’t talking to him. And Dad said it was Ivor who wouldn’t talk to him. At which Mum shook her head, stuck out her chin, and began humming ‘Silent Night’’ as she swung the flashlight around the glowing embers of the nearly dead fire.
