by Robyn Scott
We began to clamber out onto the wall. Except for Damien, who didn’t move.
“I just have to go back and do something.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He dug his paddle into the water, swinging his small canoe around.
“It’s dark.”
“I’ll be quick,” said Damien. And then the splashing of paddles, and his little red canoe, black in the gloom, disappeared around the bend in the river.
“Watch out for crocs.”
“And hippos.”
Five minutes later, Damien paddled back out from the darkness. He carried nothing. He refused to explain ‘what he’d gone to do.
It took all four of us hours to coax it out of him.
“There was a drowning moth,” he said sheepishly. “I went to rescue it.”
Lulu and I grinned, speechless with delight and admiration.
“Was just a moth.” Damien blushed. “Was nothing.”
About school, Damien and I did agree on one thing. It was boring.
Not all the time; maybe just a few hours a day. Not enough to ruin the good parts. But often it was, without doubt, boring.
And this was a novelty. In a decade of homeschooling, we’d never known boredom, and never noticed its absence, until it became part of daily routine. Only now, back together, and lost once more in perpetually engaging hours, did I first become conscious of the privilege of never being bored.
Some of the time, as ever, we occupied ourselves, with our own things: riding, tearing apart engines, reading for hours in the gazebo, lost in great books.
But the best hours, as they’d always been, were together.
For under Muni’s gentle stewardship, Lulu, Damien, and I had become skilled professionals in the art of being endlessly thrilled. Now, even as teenagers, we quickly remixed the cocktail of imagination and invention that had given us ten years of shared amusement and adventures.
On this intoxicating brew, we’d travelled far and wide and with ceaseless variety.
Even when we’d left the Space Game behind in Selebi, the mix of machines, animals, and bush, albeit in a lower fantasy form, had continued to dominate our days. Arriving in the Tuli Block, we all at once learned to drive the ancient, virtually brake-less Land Cruiser, giving us our greatest group mobility to date. Taking turns at the wheel, Lulu’s head barely reaching over the dashboard, we’d hurtle around the farm roads with nominal objectives like looking for poachers or game viewing or checking on the horses. But mainly, as ever, we just enjoyed being out together in the vast, varied bush, talking and arguing and never knowing upon what we might stumble.
Back together on the farm, in the Cruiser, steaming down the Limpopo road, it ‘was comforting to know that nothing had really changed.
“I told you, Rob,” yelled Damien. “Quick with the clutch when you release.”
The Cruiser’s broken synchromesh ground horribly.
“I was quick,” I shouted back, accelerating with a jolt.
Damien sat in the passenger seat, his arm crooked casually on the window. Lulu perched between us. On her lap, she clutched Nike the Jack Russell – Nike because of the kinked tick shape made by her tail – who snapped at insects hurtling through the frame of the glassless windscreen.
A hundred metres in front of us, an impala dashed across the road.
Nike howled. “Watch out,” screamed Lulu.
I braked savagely, and stalled. “Lulu, man. It’s miles away.”
“Chill, Lu,” said Damien. “Chill, Rob.”
Now, watched eagerly by Lulu and Damien, turning the key, coaxing the erratic ignition, I felt the same mild performance panic I used to feel in Selebi turning the key in the 50cc Honda Melody scooter. Damien had unearthed the scooter in Grandpa Ivor’s shed, languishing there since the days when he and his pilots used to ride it to the airport. Having taken it to pieces, Damien managed to get it more or less working. But the carburettor was rusted open at full throttle, so we had to drive it with one hand on the key, alternating, terrifyingly, between on and off full throttle.
The Land Cruiser was a less scary, equally temperamental reincarnation of the Melody.
Restarting, I reground the gears.
“Jees, Rob,” said Lulu, “even I can double declutch perfectly now.”
“I’m out of practice,” I snapped. “I can’t drive in Bulawayo.”
Damien said, “I’m out of practice too. Hasn’t affected me.”
“Yeah, Rob,” said Lulu.
I said, “Anyway, you’re the one who nearly drove it into the river.”
A few months before, Lulu had started the Land Cruiser, in a panic, on a bank by the Limpopo. Keller had just jumped into the deep water, and Lulu was hoping the sound of the engine would lure her out. Instead, because the brakes didn’t work, as soon as she took it out of neutral – forgetting to put stones behind the wheels – the bakkie rolled backwards, avoiding hitting Mum and plunging into the river only because of a fortuitously placed molope tree.
Lulu said, “I forgot about the brakes.”
“Well, I forgot about the clutch.”
We bickered amicably until we reached the dam wall. Then we parked the Cruiser and ‘walked to the bank to check for crocs. The Limpopo was now flowing strongly with the late end-of-year rains, and soil-laden water splashed noisily over the two-metre wall, swirling and churning at the base.
We were in luck.
Towards the middle of the wall, on the downstream side, a small croc clung to one of the sloping concrete buttresses. The foot-wide buttress rose against the wall at a 60-degree angle, and the croc faced upwards, its mouth gaping into the water that poured over the top. It was the laziest, cleverest fishing imaginable. We watched in admiration as two glinting fish flopped over the wall and into the crocodile’s open jaws.
After about ten minutes, the croc slid backwards off the wall and disappeared in the orange foam. There was no sign of any others. The mid-morning sun, glinting blindingly off the water, was starting to make the air uncomfortably warm and sticky.
“It’s too hot. Let’s go back.”
“Let’s hypnotise Lu,” suggested Damien as we clambered back up the bank.
“Noo,” said Lulu. “You just want to laugh at me.”
Damien grinned. “So. Anyway, you like it.”
“You can drive back,” I offered.
Lulu thought about it for a moment. “Okay.”
♦
Mum liked to tell people, “I attribute my kids’ ability to amuse themselves, to a large extent, to not having a TV…by the time we eventually got a TV, you know, they were all older. They understood the value of getting out and doing stuff. Trying things themselves. Being creative. Rather than just vegetating in front of that terrible box.”
I was thirteen when we’d eventually got a TV.
At the end of the hypnotist’s show, it said on the screen: “Do not attempt anything you have Men during thui show at home.”
Damien said, “Let’s try it.”
Our cousin Michael, Henry’s son, was visiting from Cape Town.
“Kif, man,” he said. He leapt to his feet. “Betyou can’t do me.”
A few days after he’d arrived, Michael already had a big bandage on his hand. Damien had been showing him how to build a tennis ball cannon out of empty tin cans welded on top of each other. In the thrill of firing the first ball, Michael had forgotten Damien’s instructions; setting off the cannon with the apparatus pointing sideways instead of upwards, and in the process blowing off part of his thumb.
Selecting Lulu’s double bed for the experimental site, we took turns swinging her necklaces in front of each other’s eyes, giggling and feigning collapse.
“Your eyes are getting heavier and heavier,” we said, imitating the slow, seductive voice of the hypnotist.
“Your eyelids are starting to feel like lead,” I said to Lulu. “You are so tired,” I repeated, for the fifth time, getting bored. My own eyes wander
ed to the crimson-breasted shrikes hopping in the branches outside. “You’re so tired, Lu. You’re feeling very, very relaxed.”
Lulu nestled back into her pillow, smiled, and rolled her eyeballs to the top of her head. Then she closed her eyes.
“Ha, ha, Lu. Very funny.”
“Lu?”
Grinning beatifically at the ceiling, Lulu didn’t stir.
Michael and Damien stopped talking. Michael poked her. “Hey, Lu?”
Nothing. Inspired by a scene from the hypnotist show I told Lulu that she was now a tiny baby again. She immediately curled up and started making funny half sucking, half gulping noises, almost like she was drowning.
I said, “I’m getting Mum and Dad.”
I found them upstairs.
“I think Lu’s hypnotised,” I panted. “We were watching this hypnotist show and then we tried it out and then she rolled her eyes when I was swinging the necklace…now she thinks she’s a baby and she’s doing something really weird.”
“Really?” said Dad calmly. “Well, let’s take a look.”
He and Mum came downstairs and examined Lulu, who was still curled up, sucking and gulping. Dad scratched his chin thoughtfully.
“You’re right, Robbie,” he said. “She’s definitely hypnotised. That’s exactly how it was when she was feeding, as Mum had so much milk. You all had to gulp more than suck. Very impressive. No one could ever do me, you know.”
“She looks so happy,” said Mum. “Really takes me back. But I suppose you should wake her up.”
Eyes gleaming, Michael and Damien protested. Dad gave them a warning look, and I crouched down beside Lulu.
“You are not a baby any more,” I said, returning to a solemn, though now wavering, voice. “You’ve had a lovely sleep. But now you’re going to wake up again…slowly, very slowly, your eyes are going to open…”
Lulu shifted, uncurled herself, and blinked, her big brown eyes wide with sleepy wonder.
“That was nice,” she said. “Can I go again?”
“No,” said Mum. “Not yet, at least.” She turned to me. “Robbie, come with me.”
I followed her up to the study, where she dug around in the large ‘alternative’ section of the bookshelves and retrieved a book on hypnosis. She handed it to me. “When you understand a bit more about it,” she said, “then you can have another go.”
I finished the book in a day. It was fascinating: what you can do; what you can’t; how to build in safeguards; the theory of hypnosis, in which the critical logical left side of the brain is temporarily suspended; and the long and sometimes venerable history of the technique, which, in the nineteenth century, when the early anaesthetics first came out, was seen as conventional anaesthesia, while the new chemical anaesthetics were sometimes viewed with suspicion.
Then I began to practise on Lulu, who eagerly volunteered as a guinea pig. Damien, now that I’d succeeded once, didn’t want me to go near him. He also resented me for having managed to put Lulu under, where he had not, and he came to observe the first session with a look of sulky indifference.
By the end of it, he was grinning. “Bossy and determined,” he announced, “that’s all it is. That’s why you’re so good at it, Rob.”
Based on the book, I devised a self-imposed code of good hypnotic practice: always briefing Lulu on what I was going to do, always building in a trigger so she would wake up if something upset her. With that in place, we tried out all the hypnotist tricks, and spent hours aching with laughter at the extraordinary effects of selectively numbed consciousness.
“The number seven has gone from your vocabulary. Gone from your mind.”
Lulu nodded.
“Seven is utterly gone. Okay.”
Another nod.
“Okay. Now count your fingers.”
Making two fists, Lulu obediently lifted her fingers. “One, two, three, four, five, six, eight, nine, ten…eleven.” She frowned, uncertainly. “Eleven?…No!”
“Count each hand and then add them up.”
She counted, and added. “Ten. Weird! That’s so weird,” she mused, half frowning, half smiling.
The permutations were endless, and Lulu was a willing, if bemused, marionette.
It was sorely tempting to overstep ethical boundaries.
“No, Didge,” I said, again and again, as Damien grinned mischievously at his suggestions. “We have to do this properly. This is not a joke,” I’d add gravely.
But once, when I went to the loo in the middle of a long session, Damien fetched a piece of biltong – chewy salted strips of dried meat that Dad occasionally made from the kudu or impala he shot, mainly to feed our staff, once every few months.
“Delicious,” Damien said to Lulu as she lay on the couch. “You love biltong. Here, have some.”
Lulu said, “No. I’m a vegetarian. You know I don’t eat biltong. Go away.”
Then she sat up suddenly, crying at the memory of such a close encounter with flesh.
When I came back, Damien was white. “I’ll never do it again,” he was promising a distraught Lulu. “Don’t cry. You didn’t even eat any anyway. But sorry I tried to make you. I’ll never do it again…but I just thought you might like it if you tried it…and it wasn’t a cow. A kudu. Shot humanely in the wild, so not so bad…”
Dad said, “Willyou three keep it down in the back! We’re not far from Pikfontein. I can take you there instead.”
Lulu immediately howled with laughter. Shaking uncontrollably, she gently thudded her forehead against the back of Dad’s headrest.
Our intended destination was Johannesburg, where Damien was getting a flight back to school for the start of the January term.
“Sorry,” I said, as Lulu spluttered into silence.
In the backseat, we were hypnotising Lulu to pass the time on the five-hour drive. In the front, Mum and Dad had put on a CD of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, one of their favourites.
A few minutes later, Dad said, “Who wants to give me a shoulder massage?”
Another burst of giggles drowned the beautiful music. Lulu clutched her stomach. “I need to wee again,” she spluttered.
Mum turned to the back with a stern face. “Come on, now. This is really enough now.”
Lulu met Mum’s eyes, her lips trembling. Then her face cracked into an insane grin. She dissolved once more, choking and hiccupping and slapping her thighs. Mum tried not to laugh, contorting her face with the strain. She gave up, wiping her shining eyes and shaking her head helplessly.
I’d earlier whispered to Lulu that Mum and Dad were the two funniest people in the world; that nothing they said could fail to be anything but hysterically amusing.
Dad said, “Not you too now, Lin. About jolly time you kids left home – ”
But Lulu cut him short. Peals of high, sweet laughter filled the car. Mum, Damien, and I joined in, fuelling Lulu’s hysterics.
Dad reached for the volume and turned Beethoven full blast.
But we kept laughing. Then Dad’s shoulders shook too. In the rearview mirror I saw a tear run down his cheek, and his helpless wheezes soon joined the din.
Only when Dad pulled up under a tree for a ‘widdle stop’ did he successfully restore calm. I quickly unhypnotised Lulu, and we dashed into the scratchy bushes, shifting our bottoms uncomfortably and envying Damien and Dad.
Here, we didn’t even think to look for snakes. Ready, even as we widdled, to run for the car, we peeked above the grass and watched the passing cars for signs of slowing down.
We’d already passed the first national road sign reading, “WARNING! YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A HIGH-RISK AREA FOR HIJACKING.”
This was the higher-adrenaline South African equivalent of crossing the Zimbabwean border post. I felt a similar relief of safe passage as I jumped back in the car and locked the door. Dad said, “Why re you hurrying? No one’s ever going to hijack a hearse.”
Which was exactly what our new car looked like. It was a double-cab bakkie, with
extra darkly tinted windows for the bright Botswana sun. To carry his large medicine trunks, Dad had ordered an extra long canopy, to be made and fitted by a company in Johannesburg that normally converted expensive saloon cars into stretch limousines. When we’d arrived to collect our newly modified car, parked in a huge workshop amongst absurdly long Mercedes, we’d stopped dead in surprise at the effect. “Sherbet, Keith,” said Mum, “what an irony. Don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Dad said, “Well, at least its resale value will go up.”
♦
In Johannesburg, we had a day’s shopping before Damien’s flight.
Damien agreed solemnly to wear sun protection and take the vitamin pills that Mum bought him. In return, Mum reluctantly agreed to buy him a new pair of even bigger jeans. The moment he put his new jeans on, he grew cooler and gruntier again.
At the airport, Dad said, “They won’t let you on the plane like that, lad. Pull up your broekj.”
Damien shifted his trousers slightly. “Bye.”
We said good-bye awkwardly, still not used to good-byes.
Apart from Christmas and Easter, Damien and my holidays didn’t overlap, and we wouldn’t all be together again for months.
Lulu wept.
“Good luck with roller hockey, Didge,” I said. “Work hard.”
“Good luck with your business plan, Rob,” said Damien. “And please try to chill.”
∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧
Twenty-Four
Mum
Mum said, “Bernard is never going to forgive me for this one.”
It was now more than a year since I’d started school. On the way back up to Bulawayo for the beginning of the new term, Mum and I had stopped in Phikwe at Jean Kiekopf’s house. Jean, who was a good friend of Mum’s, lay on her back, on the bed, smiling peacefully. Hypnotised.
The curtains were closed to mute the sparkling mid-morning sun, but a few beams streamed through the gaps, illuminating the room in restful half-light. Mum and I perched on chairs beside the bed.
“Shhh, Mum,” I hissed. “Concentrate.”
