Day 328: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Mum says, ‘Don’t come creeping into our room at night.’
They sleep with loaded guns beside them on the bedside rugs. She says, ‘Don’t startle us when we’re sleeping.’
‘Why not?’
‘We might shoot you.’
‘Oh.’
‘By mistake.’
‘Okay.’ As it is, there seems a good enough chance of getting shot on purpose. ‘Okay, I won’t.’
So if I wake in the night and need Mum and Dad, I call Vanessa, because she isn’t armed. ‘Van! Van, hey!’ I hiss across the room until she wakes up. And then Van has to light a candle and escort me to the loo, where I pee sleepily into the flickering yellow light and Van keeps the candle high, looking for snakes and scorpions and baboon spiders.
Mum won’t kill snakes because she says they help to keep the rats down (but she rescued a nest of baby mice from the barns and left them to grow in my cupboard, where they ate holes in the family’s winter jerseys). Mum won’t kill scorpions either; she catches them and lets them go free in the pool and Vanessa and I have to rake the pool before we can swim. We fling the scorps as far as we can across the brown and withering lawn, chase the ducks and geese out, and then lower ourselves gingerly into the pool, whose sides wave green and long and soft and grasping with algae. And Mum won’t kill spiders because she says it will bring bad luck.
I tell her, ‘I’d say we have pretty rotten luck as it is.’
‘Then think how much worse it would be if we killed spiders.’
I have my feet off the floor when I pee.
‘Hurry up, man.’
‘Okay, okay.’
‘It’s like Victoria Falls.’
‘I really had to go.’
I have been holding my pee for a long, long time and staring out of the window to try and guess how close it is to morning. Maybe I could hold it until morning. But then I notice that it is the deep-black-sky quiet time of night, which is the halfway time between the sun setting and the sun rising when even the night animals are quiet—as if they, like day animals, take a break in the middle of their work to rest. I can’t hear Vanessa breathing; she has gone into her deep middle-of-the-night silence. Dad is not snoring nor is he shouting in his sleep. The baby is still in her crib but the smell of her is warm and animal with wet nappy. It will be a long time until morning.
Then Vanessa hands me the candle—‘You keep boogies for me now’—and she pees.
‘See, you had to go, too.’
‘Only ‘cos you had to go.’
There is a hot breeze blowing through the window, the cold sinking night air shifting the heat of the day up. The breeze has trapped midday scents; the prevalent cloying of the leach field, the green soap which has spilled out from the laundry and landed on the patted-down red earth, the wood smoke from the fires that heat our water, the boiled-meat smell of dog food.
We debate the merits of flushing the loo.
‘We shouldn’t waste the water.’ Even when there isn’t a drought we can’t waste water, just in case one day there is a drought. Anyway, Dad has said, ‘Steady on with the loo paper, you kids. And don’t flush the bloody loo all the time. The leach field can’t handle it.’
‘But that’s two pees in there.’
‘So? It’s only pee.’
‘Agh sis, man, but it’ll be smelly by tomorrow. And you peed as much as a horse.’
‘It’s not my fault.’
‘You can flush.’
‘You’re taller.’
‘I’ll hold the candle.’
Van holds the candle high. I lower the toilet lid, stand on it and lift up the block of hardwood that covers the cistern, and reach down for the chain. Mum has glued a girlie-magazine picture to this block of hardwood: a blond woman in few clothes, with breasts like naked cow udders, and she’s all arched in a strange pouty contortion, like she’s got backache. Which maybe she has, from the weight of the udders. The picture is from Scope magazine.
We aren’t allowed to look at Scope magazine.
‘Why?’
‘Because we aren’t those sorts of people,’ says Mum.
‘But we have a picture from Scope magazine on the loo lid.’
‘That’s a joke.’
‘Oh.’ And then, ‘What sort of joke?’
...
Mum says, ‘The happiest day of my life was the day I held that little baby in my arms.’ She means Rhodesia, 1968. She means the day her son, Adrian, was born.
Mum is Chapter Two, weeping into her beer. It’s a sad story. It’s especially sad if you haven’t heard it a hundred times. I’ve heard one version or other of the story more than a hundred times. It’s a Family Theme and it always ends badly. To begin with Mum is happy. She is freshly married, they are white (a ruling colour in Rhodesia), and she has two babies, a girl and a boy. Her children are the picture-perfect match of each other: beautiful, blond, and blue-eyed.
Vanessa, signature tackie lips (lips that are rosebud full), a mass of fairy-white hair, toddling cheerfully, with that overbalancing, tripping step of the small child. And tottering after her, the little boy who could be her twin. In the background, a black nanny called Tabatha, in white apron and white cap, strong, shining arms outstretched laughing, waiting to scoop them up; she is half-shyly looking into the camera. Mum is looking on from the veranda. Dad is taking the photograph.
Then Adrian dies before he is old enough to talk. Mum is not yet twenty-four and her picture-perfect life is shattered.
She says, ‘The nurse at the hospital in Salisbury told us we could either go and get something to eat or watch our baby die.’
Mum and Dad take Vanessa to get some lunch and when they come back to the hospital their baby son, who was very sick with meningitis an hour earlier, is now dead. Cold, blond ash.
The story changes depending on what Mum is drinking. If she is very drunk on wine, then the story is a bit different than if she is very drunk on gin. The worst is if she is very drunk on everything she can find in the house. But the end is always the same. Adrian is dead. That’s an awful ending no matter what she’s been drinking.
I am eight, maybe younger, the first time Mum sits down in front of me, squiffy in her chair, leaning and keening and needing to talk. The Leaning Tower of Pissed, I say to Vanessa when I am older and Mum is drunk again. Ha ha.
Mum tells me about Adrian. I understand, through the power of her emotion, her tears, the way she is dissolving like soap left too long in the bath, that this has been the greatest tragedy of our lives. It is my tragedy, too, even though I was not born when it happened.
Usually, on nights when Mum is sober, and we are kissing her good night, she turns her face away from us and puckers her lips sideways, offering us a cheek stretched like dead-chicken skin. Now that she is drunk and telling me about Adrian she is wet all over me. Arms clasped over my shoulders, she is hanging around my neck, and I can feel her face crying into the damp patch on my shoulder. She says, ‘You were the baby we made when Adrian died.’
I know all about making babies, being the daughter of a farmer. I have already put my hand up a cow’s bum, scraped out the sloppy, warm, green-grass pile of shit and felt beyond that, for the thick lining of her womb. If the womb is swollen with a foetus I can touch the shape of it, pressing against the womb wall. A curved back, usually, or the hump of a rear, the bony fineness of a tiny head. I know about conception. Cows that don’t conceive have their tails cut to differentiate them from the fertile cows, whose tails are left long. The short-tailed cows are pulled from the herd and put on a lorry and sent into Umtali where they become ground meat, sausages, glue. They become Colcom’s Steak Pie.
The next morning Mum, who usually eats nothing for breakfast, has two fried eggs, fried bananas, tomatoes. A slice of toast with marmalade and butter. She swallows a pot of tea and then has a cup of coffee. She usually does not drink coffee. The coffee tastes bad because there are sanctionson, which means no one will sell Rhodesia anything and Rhodesia can’t sell anything to anyone else, so our coffee is made from chicory and burnt maize and tastes like charcoal.
All morning, Mum is more bad-tempered than usual in spite of her enormous breakfast. She yells at the cook and the maid and the dogs. She tells me to ‘stop twittering on’. I shut up. That afternoon, she sleeps for three hours while I sit quietly at the end of her bed with the dogs. We’re afraid to wake her, although the dogs are ready for their walk and I am ready for a cup of tea. I am watching her sleep. Her face has fallen away into peace. The dogs sit prick-eared and watchful for a long time and then they lie with their heads in their paws and worried eyes. They are depressed.
Adrian is buried in the cemetery in Salisbury.
Mum and Dad leave Rhodesia. They leave the small anonymous hump of their son-child in the huge cemetery opposite the tobacco-auction floors in town. They go to England, via Victoria Falls, conceiving me in the sixties hotel next to the grand, historic, turn-of-the-century Victoria Falls Hotel.
I am conceived in the hotel (with the casino in it) next to the thundering roar of the place where the Zambezi River plunges a hundred metres into a black-sided gorge. The following March, I am born into the tame, drizzling English town of Glossop.
The plunging roar of the Zambezi in my ears at conception. Incongruous, contradictory in Derbyshire at birth.

~~Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood -by- Alexandra Fuller