“All my top staff are very devout,” Mum had told me. “Sundays are very depressing. Everyone goes creeping off to church and the farm is deadly silent except for the fish feeding. Any chaos I want I have to create for myself.”
It was with some authority that Mr. Chrissford reminded us all that farmers require no introduction to God. Farmers are God’s favorite children, because they are always asking for help. Hippos on the island off the bank gave a shout of agreement. We wiped our tears.
And finally, Hallelujah! Or the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah; we got to our feet, all of us, and did our best to sing that in his honor. Dad had performed in many pubs south of the equator, north of the Limpopo. It’s a song, I find, that rewards a confident delivery; definitely something more easily done while drunk. Then a wind suddenly picked up and waves whipped up the Zambezi River, and for a moment we’d all turned and watched the water.
“That’ll be Tim!” one of the old-timers shouted.
And it was over. Or it had just started. Or nothing had changed, but everything had begun again, without him. “Olé!” Mum shrieked. But for the first time in over half a century there was no answering echo. Mum put her arms up in the air. “Right,” she said. “Someone rectify this drought! Music, maestro, music!” She took to the dance floor, her dogs in a circle around her.
“She’s coping all right, isn’t she?” Vanessa said.
“Yes, she’s coping very well,” I said.
People coped in different ways, Dad always said. And some people had more to cope with than others. Coping was the brave thing to do. Mum was doing the very brave thing.
* * *
—
IT WAS THE SMALL HOURS by the time Mum was carried to bed, feet first. But shortly after dawn, the drapes and curtains shook and her arms appeared, clutching a limp and apologetic Duna. “Bobo? Are you there? I’m afraid we’ve had a little accident,” Mum said. I took the proffered puppy. “God, I feel rotten,” Mum said. “You were in bed nice and early. That’s lucky. You’ll have extra energy to fetch me tea.”
“And a couple of aspirin?” I offered.
“Mm,” Mum said. “Maybe. I’m having a bit of a religious experience this morning, as Dad would say.”
“Dad would be proud of you,” I said. “Very. You coped excessively well last night, I thought.”
“Mm,” Mum agreed modestly. “I did, didn’t I?”
* * *
—
MY FATHER DRANK IMMODERATELY, but unlike Mum, he didn’t drink immoderately only to cope. Nor did he drink wildly solely because he appreciated a decent thrash, although there was also that. Dad also occasionally drank to impressive excess because he said a proper hangover did wonders for the soul; it was one’s spiritual duty. “It leaves a person filled with remorse and self-recrimination,” Dad argued. “It’s the quickest path to contrition.”
My father suffered some monstrous hangovers in his time, obviously. He never hid the effects of a proper binge; he couldn’t. He’d awaken the morning after the night before wearing only a dinner jacket and a wig, for example. “Oh, dear,” he’d say. His lipstick would be smudged; there’d be bruises and injuries to the body.
“No, no, no,” he’d protest weakly, staggering onto the veranda to greet the other survivors. “It wasn’t me, it was my brother.” He’d look around, survey the damage, wipe his eyes a few times in disbelief. “Dear God, you all look awful,” he’d say. “Is there an official body count yet?”
Then he’d shave, dress in his working clothes, swallow a couple of aspirin with a cup of tea—his standard treatment for everything from a hangover to a heart attack—and reappear on the veranda, bleary but ready for the day’s duty. “Right,” he’d say, lighting a courageous cigarette. “That’s quite enough buggering about for the time being. I am in the throes of a transcendentally painful hangover and I intend to use it well.”
After that, he’d spend the day in the workshop, punishing himself under an old tractor, or welding the leak in a boiler. Or he’d go out on one of Mum’s horses most of the day, sweating, shaking up his liver, cursing his pounding head, but determinedly cheerful and fatalistic too, as if he found his own terrible discomfort a duty to be endured lightly, a welcome metaphysical overhaul.
“Instead of church,” he insisted. “A proper hangover makes you feel just as rotten as a good sermon should, but it saves a trip to town. It relieves the vicar from having to pretend he remembers you when it’s perfectly obvious he’d never set eyes on you before. And it saves the church roof from getting hit by lightning.”
CHAPTER THREE
Routine: Nature’s Antidote to Disappointment
Six months before my father died, I’d taken my eldest child out to Zambia as a part of her twenty-first-birthday present. “Surviving your grandparents on their own turf,” I’d said. “It’s the ultimate rite of passage.”
Riot of passage, I’d been anticipating.
But from the moment they’d picked us up at the airport from the nine a.m. flight from Atlanta via O. R. Tambo, Mum and Dad had been on the best, most solicitous behavior of their lives.
“No, no, no,” Dad said to Sarah, waving over porters to pick up our luggage. “Don’t carry your own suitcases. You’ll give yourself a hernia. Do you also travel everywhere with a complete library? Your grandmother does. Come on, chaps, fuga moto,” he told the porters. “My granddaughter’s come all the way from America.” He returned his attention to Sarah. “Was it a terrible flight? Horribly bumpy? Crying babies? Cardboard eggs for breakfast? No champagne?”
“It was fine, Grandpa,” Sarah said.
“Rubbish,” Dad disagreed. “You have to sit with your knees around your ears. The pilots aren’t being paid enough to keep the damn thing airborne. And the airlines are very stingy with their hospitality these days; you have to marry the trolley dolly just to get a cup of tea. It’s certainly not the service someone of your stature and class deserves.” He bowed and scraped backward in front of Sarah like Mr. Nixon, to demonstrate the nonstingy hospitality he envisioned for her. “Perhaps you prefer grappa for breakfast, miss?” he said, in his best impression of an old English butler. “How about a little gunpowder in your tea? Of course you must have champagne, baths of it, fountains and rivers!”
We burst out of the clammy airport. It was the end of the rainy season. Lusaka was at its most generous; the floods had receded, the cholera clinics had closed for another year. The landscape was saturated, green, lush; there were white egrets everywhere. The trees were fruiting; mangos, papayas, guavas, like little loaves of ripening sunlight. Even Mum didn’t need to point out how glorious everything was; it sang its own praises.
“I parked as close as I could,” Dad said apologetically, mopping his brow, as the porters ferried our bags across the baking parking lot. “It’s very taxing, this climate,” Dad explained to Sarah. “For delicate people such as yourself. But don’t worry, you’ll be fine as soon as you have a couple of cold beers. Won’t she, Tub?”
“Absolutely,” Mum gushed, beaming. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Sarah since we’d come rushing through Customs and Immigration toward the elderly couple waving at us, as if still directing the plane toward the gate. “Such a beautiful girl,” Mum said. “Gorgeous eyes, skin like a peach. Don’t you think she looks just like Grace Kelly? I think you look like Grace Kelly, or that other one. Drew something, the American actress.”
Sarah blinked at me.
“You have wonderful bone structure,” Mum was continuing, pressing her fingers to her own cheeks. “You can’t pay a plastic surgeon for bones. That’s breeding.”
“And here we are,” Dad announced happily.
I looked around. I couldn’t see the farm vehicle. My heart sank. It was gone. It was nowhere I could see. It had been stolen and Dad was senile, obviously, dreaming that all was well when all was clearly lost. Mean
time, Mum was still grinning at Sarah like a fairy-story grandmother, by which I mean, hungrily.
“I don’t see the car,” I said.
“No, no, Bobo. Right here,” Dad said, laughing; he made a gesture like a French waiter uncorking a fine wine in front of a brand-new Ford pickup. “Your chariot awaits,” he said to Sarah. He opened the back door for Sarah, produced a cold, sweating beer from a cooler. “It’s essential you drink a lot,” Dad said. “But whatever you do, don’t touch the water. I did once.” He shook his head. “Bloody nearly fatal. Nasty stuff.”
The porters packed our suitcases in the very back and tied everything down with nylon ropes; blue frayed nylon ropes, those had been with us always. For once there was plenty of room; no generator bleeding oil under a tarpaulin, no fish food exuding a fishy stench that no amount of scrubbing with Omo could dint, and there was no farm shopping.
“Put your feet up, put your feet up,” Dad insisted. “What else can we offer you, Sarah?” Dad did a quick review of what he remembered of young people. It wasn’t much. “I expect you want to go to the disco,” he said at last.
The disco?
I shook my head at Sarah vehemently. Rashly, I’d taken my father up on that offer in Harare in the late 1980s, the year I’d been shipped off to secretarial college in the effort to make something useful of me. I’d been about the age Sarah was now. The disco was in Avondale, but beyond that I don’t remember much about the evening, except that I awoke the next morning grateful to be alive. “Oh no,” Dad had said, contrite too. “I don’t remember much either. Perhaps we should wear dark glasses until we’re sure the authorities aren’t looking for us.”
“No, really, Grandpa, thank you,” Sarah said now. “But I need peace and quiet. I have to write my thesis.”
That impressed my parents, I could tell.
“The-sis,” Mum repeated slowly and clearly, as if hoping someone might overhear.
“Peace and quiet,” my father mused uncertainly. They were new concepts to him, in a lot of ways, or reintroduced concepts. In any case, it wasn’t what he was expecting from a grandchild, especially not one he was doing his best to lead astray in her twenty-second year, as is the duty of any right-thinking grandparent, but he recovered quickly. “Anything for you, Sarah. For you, we killa da cockroach,” he said.
It was as if I’d been transported to a near replica of my parents’ lives, creepily off in ways only I could feel, but that would have been hard to explain. These were my wonderful, exuberant parents; this was their glorious, hilarious life; these were their basic personalities brought up to bright burnish, but where was the assuaging bad behavior? Where were the sharp edges of these people? Where was the steady stream of minor shocks, aftershocks?
“No, no, no! There will be no shocks,” Mum said, as if reading my mind, as usual. “Not with our most precious granddaughter here.” She smiled at Sarah with terrifying reassurance. “You’ll be fine. Grandpa’s put in lots of extra practice with the shotgun. Not that we need it; he likes to keep his eye sharp, that’s all.” Mum smiled with terrifying assurance again, this time at her ankles, as if they’d been in agreement with her. “It’s been simply ages since we had a rabid dog or anything, hasn’t it, Hon?”
“Oh, weeks,” Dad agreed.
Dad had only one eye, technically; or, only one working eye. He’d recently had laser eye surgery in Lusaka, but the whole thing had been so boring, and also expensive—“I had to show up sober as a judge first thing in the morning, and lie there without complaining or scratching my nose while they emptied the contents of my bank account,” Dad had said—that he’d refused to get the other eye done, vowing to train Harry as a seeing-eye dog before he’d subject himself to such horror again. “I have a pretty consistent routine,” he’d said. “Round the bananas, down to the pub, up to the fishponds. It’d be a piece of cake for Harry.”
We jolted out of the airport. Dad didn’t have his usual argument with the tollbooth keeper about the unmarked speed bumps, and about how they always took him by surprise and at his age surprises can be fatal; he did not want to die in the parking lot of Kenneth Kaunda International Airport. Nor did he go into the injustice to the public of the escalating cost of airport parking. “Does it look like I’m made of money?” he always wanted to know.
But now he did look as if he were made of money. He said so himself. “Don’t we look posh?” he asked the tollbooth keeper, handing him a fresh twenty-kwacha bill. “Keep the change. Don’t spend it all on women and wine. Spare some change to have a flutter on the game. Who’s your team? The Dynamos?”
“I’m for the Red Arrows, Bwana,” the tollbooth keeper said.
“Pamberi Red Arrows!” Dad agreed.
Then we swept off down the airport road. Chinese contractors had recently paved it over; it gleamed black and smooth. The flame trees lining the road were dropping fat red blooms. Cattle on either side of the road shone in belly-deep pasture. The pickup was white, there were no dents in it; the windscreen had not yet suffered the usual indignities of a Zambian vehicle. We were like the living embodiment of a William Carlos Williams poem.
“Special order,” Dad said proudly, thumping his fist on the steering wheel. “All the bells and whistles.” The pickup had manual locks, manual mirrors, crank windows, and air-conditioning. Dad had put a new blanket from the Chirundu market on the backseat; it still smelled of the bale it had arrived in from India. There wasn’t even a humiliated, vomiting dog on anyone’s lap.
“Do you have enough room back there?” Mum asked Sarah; she sounded genuinely anxious, perhaps because she’d made such an ostentatious fuss of cranking her seat so far forward she was now mere inches from the pickup’s passenger airbag. “Are you comfortable?” she asked. “Is the wind too much?”
Is the wind too much?
I shook my head at Sarah in disbelief. “Never,” I said. “It was never like this when I was a kid.” In the end I decided Sarah was being rewarded because she, like Megan, the other poster grandchild, was everything Mum had wished for in her own children. “You have such lovely manners,” Mum told Sarah. “You’re so kind.” Mum said, “So kind,” like the queen, sew koind. “Did you also have to get your teeth all wired up? Americans have to wire up their teeth, don’t they?”
“Yes,” Sarah said.
“Well, you can’t tell,” Mum said approvingly. And it was clear that Mum was pleased that although Sarah was of childbearing age, she’d managed, unlike Vanessa’s second son, to remain childless. Mum brought that up a couple of times too, casually slotting it into conversation. “Yes, your cousin does seem to have gotten off the mark rather hotfoot.” And, “I do think it makes sense to travel while you’re still young. Before you have children.” Also, “It’s not fashionable to have children until you’re at least thirty these days, is it?”
We stopped at the Rock on the way down, as usual. Mr. Nixon scurried out from the kitchen to offer us tea. “Tell the madam we’re here,” Mum said, as she always did. Mr. Nixon backed off the veranda one limb at a time, smiling graciously. I’d tried to explain my family’s culture to my children; I’d written books about my childhood and my mother’s in part because I wasn’t sure how else they’d ever know their Zambian-resident grandparents, their Anglo-Zambian aunt. “It’s like a mash-up of a whole lot of Meryl Streep movies,” I’d said at last. “‘A dingo’s got my baby’ and Out of Africa, except with more cats.”
After a while, Mr. Nixon returned with a tray of tea, and then Vanessa wafted out of her bedroom onto the veranda with a Persian under each arm. She was wearing dark glasses. “Migraine,” she explained, distributing exhausted air kisses all round. “Rich was snoring all night.” Then she’d turned her attention to Sarah. “Are you sure you want to go to the farm?” she said. “Nastasya was nearly decapitated in the library a few years ago.”
* * *
—
BUT THIS
WASN’T THAT VISIT: My parents had done up the guest cottage especially for Sarah. Shade cloth had been pinned under the tin roof to help mitigate the heat and insects, a couple of floor fans from the Chirundu market stirred the warmth about a bit. “Quite safe,” Mum boasted. “You’d need to wrench off the grille and stick your head in the blades to do yourself any harm with a fan like this. Made in China too, so it’s probably quite feeble. I mean if it was your whole head versus one little floor fan.”
“Mum!” I said.
“I’m just saying,” Mum said. “After all the fuss Vanessa’s made about Nastasya and the library fan. It didn’t nearly decapitate her. She was in the room and it plopped out of the ceiling. No one was hurt. Not even a dog, and they’re everywhere.”
There were signs that the undergrowth had been recently thinned, the jungle hacked back a bit. “I went through the whole place with a fine-tooth comb,” Mum said, showing Sarah to her room. “And I had a long conversation with all the creatures I met, explaining you’re American. I asked them to behave, or to leave the premises. For your maximum, tip-top, worry-free enjoyment.” She smiled ingratiatingly at Sarah, expectantly, like a hotel porter awaiting a tip.
“Thank you so much, Granny,” Sarah said. “It’s perfect.”
“Do you really think so?” Mum said. She looked around the guest cottage with pride, as if seeing it for the first time, its delights and wonders. “I put the finishing touches to it myself,” she said.
She pointed out the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner taken from hotels long ago and saved for a very special occasion; those were in the bathroom. “There’s only cold water,” Mum said. “I can’t get your grandfather to stretch to hot water for the guests, he thinks that might encourage riffraff.”
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