Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

by Alexandra Fuller

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know, maybe people lived here.”

  “Maybe they died here.”

  Suddenly Thompson was upon us. “What is it?” He was frowning into the gloom of our narrow cave.

  “Look!” I showed him two pieces of pottery, which put together made up part of a zigzag pattern. “It’s an old pot.”

  “Leave that stuff!” said Thompson. He had almost shouted, raised one prohibiting hand.

  I looked at him with astonishment. I had never been spoken to—ordered around—by an African before. My nannies had never dared speak to me so sharply. But Thompson was stumbling back, out of the cave, as if he had seen a snake’s hole.

  “I want to take it home to show Mum.”

  “You must not touch the things of the dead!”

  I had my head to one side and my mouth drawn up, to show I was skeptical, but still, I came out of the cave, as slow-casual as I could, holding the piece of pottery, and I said, “How do you know they are dead people’s things?”

  “Anyone can see these are graves,” said Thompson. “Don’t touch! You mustn’t touch.”

  I laughed. “It’s a bit late for that, Thompson.”

  “Please picanin madam.” Thompson looked as if he were about to fling himself backward off the bald head of the kopje.

  “Well, if the people are dead, they won’t mind.”

  “No, they will mind. They will think of you most terrible things.”

  “Thompson, don’t be so superstitious.” In an effort to rid myself of the tainted pottery and to still maintain my superiority, I tossed the pottery carelessly back into the cave and dusted my hands on my shorts. “There. Happy?” And then casually, “I didn’t really want it, anyway.”

  Thompson looked as if I had struck him, as if I’d thrown the pottery in his face. He said, “Oh, you should not have done that, picanin madam. You shouldn’t have thrown it like that.”

  Vanessa was ducking out of the cave behind me. Her face had changed, the way a shadow comes when a thin cloud scuds across the sun. She said, “Come on, Bobo, let’s go home.”

  “But we haven’t even eaten our picnic yet.”

  Thompson, his shoulders poking and bony out of the back of his thin cotton uniform, was already scuffling down the face of the boulder that made up the top of the kopje. He had the string bag of uneaten food over his shoulder.

  “Come on, you guys, I’m hungry. Let’s eat first.”

  Thompson didn’t even turn around, much less slow down.

  “Why are you frightened?” I had to quickly scuffle down on the seat of my shorts to keep up with Thompson and Vanessa.

  “You touched the things of the dead,” said Thompson. And I saw then that he was beyond scared, he was angry too.

  I remember the soft, silty, gritty feel of the grave pottery when I see Thompson, his eye split open like that. And then I think of Richard dead, and Mum gone crazy. And I think that if I hadn’t touched the things of the dead we wouldn’t be having all this bad, bad luck.

  And then Oscar, our Rhodesian ridgeback, is found lying on the road outside our house and he has been sliced up and down with a panga. Mum is screaming at the front door, holding his body in her arms. He is so weak from lack of blood he doesn’t even struggle. “Those bastards! Those bloody, bloody bastards.” I open the door and Mum staggers in, barely able to hold herself up with the dog pressed against her chest.

  “Is he still breathing?”

  Mum lays him down and covers him with blankets. “We need to get fluids into him.” She feeds him whole milk, with the cream, dry-season thin and pale, floating on the top. Oscar gags and the milk dribbles back out of his mouth. “He can’t even swallow,” says Mum, her hands slippery with the milk. She finds a vein in his back leg and punctures it with a needle, letting a bag of intravenous fluid seep into his body. She stays like that, crouched over the dog with the plastic bag of saline solution held up over her head, until Oscar begins to struggle. Then she pulls the needle out of his leg and sits back on her haunches, wiping sweat off her forehead.

  “Who did this?” I ask.

  Mum says in a hoarse whisper, “They did,” and lifts her eyes toward the ranch manager’s house.

  “Oh. The ranch managers did this?”

  Mum nods.

  I let this sink in for a moment. “Why?”

  Mum rolls her eyes and says in a soft voice, like she’s telling me a secret, “They want to kill me, too.”

  “They want to kill you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Why would they want to do that?”

  “Because I know about them.”

  “You know about them.”

  “They’re crooks and they’re poaching leopards.”

  “We all know they’re poaching leopards.”

  “Watch yourself,” says Mum. “Watch yourself.”

  A week later, Burma Boy contracts horse sickness, and he is barely recovered from that when he comes down with tetanus.

  Mum says, “We need to get fluids into him.”

  She fills a bucket with water and empties a bag of brown sugar into it. Burma Boy sucks at the water weakly to get to the sweet silt at the bottom of the bucket, and then he collapses. Mum puts blankets over him and lies with him in the garden for four nights. The dogs curl up next to her. Even Oscar, who has been allowed to sleep inside, on the sofa, during his convalescence, relinquishes his comfortable position and crawls onto the blanket under which the horse lies quivering with rigid spasms every time there is a loud noise.

  Thompson gives notice and goes back to the eastern highlands. He says, “This place is poisonous.”

  Dad says, “It’s time we moved on, too.”

  That night it is so hot that we sit outside in the dark with the windows to the living room open so that we can hear our records. We have managed to hide the Roger Whittaker album in a Chopin sleeve. Dad is playing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

  “Loud enough to scare the bloody elephants.”

  “There aren’t any elephants.”

  “That’s because we scared them with the 1812.”

  “Ha.”

  We eat a supper of impala steak, balancing plates on our laps. When we look up the sky is deep, lonely black. We can hear the jackals starting to trot the perimeter of the security fence, yip-yipping. They have come for the weak, undernourished, diseased sheep and for the wobbly-legged lambs. A nightjar sings.

  Mum is not eating, again. I haven’t seen her swallow a decent mouthful of food since the baby came, and went.

  Suddenly Dad says, “I’ll go fishing for three days.”

  “Can I come?”

  “If the fishing is good, we’ll stay here and make a go of it. If the fishing is bad, we’ll leave.”

  “Why?”

  “We can’t live where the fishing’s lousy.”

  “Leave to where?”

  “Better fishing.”

  “Can I come?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because then what if the fishing is good for you and bad for me? We can’t confuse the issue.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll leave sparrow’s fart tomorrow.”

  The next morning, very early, Dad leaves with his coarse fishing rod, spinners, thick line, and weights. He has packed brandy, tins of baked beans, salt, boiled eggs, tea, powdered milk, and bread into his old ammunition box.

  “You’re not going trout fishing?”

  “No.”

  Dad goes fishing for bass and bream and tiger. He’s never been much of a coarse fisherman.

  I say to Mum, “We might as well start packing. Dad never catches anything if he isn’t using a fly.”

  Mum is lying in bed staring at the ceiling, as if she doesn’t care.

  “Should I bring you some tea?”

  “That would be nice.”

  Mum spends most of the day in bed. When she gets up, after tea, she is grog
gy, unsteady on her feet. She makes it as far as the sitting room and sinks into an armchair with a sigh. Her face is longer and older; there are sad lines by the sides of her mouth and under her eyes that didn’t used to be there. Her hair has grown out; the wings on her temples are gray.

  She made the house cheerful and homely when we first came here. She made bright new curtains and cushions, she hung pictures and put ornaments on the mantelpiece. Judith/Loveness polished the floors until they shone like marble, and Thompson hammered drooping gauze tightly on the windows and whitewashed the walls inside and out. Mum wrote a list of chores to be done every day and pinned it to the kitchen door: dusting, sweeping, brushing, polishing, shining. Now Mum looks as if she doesn’t care. The list of chores has turned yellow and is splattered with fly shit and has begun to curl up at the edges, and the house is starting to look disheveled without Thompson. There is a population explosion of cockroaches in the kitchen, and the cats are finding rats everywhere. We see them crouched and crunching over their rodent carcasses and we trip over half-eaten remains.

  I watch Mum carefully. She hardly bothers to blink. It’s as if she’s a fish in the dry season, in the dried-up bottom of a cracking riverbed, waiting for rain to come and bring her to life.

  Vanessa says, “Leave her alone, she’s depressed.”

  Vanessa seems a bit depressed herself.

  I say, “Anyone hungry?”

  Mum pours herself another brandy.

  “Aside from me?”

  Since Thompson left, Judith/Loveness has been the only help in the house, but she can’t clean very well and she really can’t cook. I tell her to open a tin of baked beans and cook some bread on the wood fire to make toast for supper.

  “With some boiled eggs,” I add.

  When supper arrives I lay the table and shout, “Grub’s up!” but Mum doesn’t want to eat, and Vanessa pushes a few beans around on her plate before going back to her room. I am left to eat toast, an entire tin of baked beans, and three boiled eggs on my own.

  Mum goes into the bathroom, where she wallows around in a humid steam for some time before emerging stupefied and reeling, wrapped in a towel. I have been entertaining myself, feeding the dogs the leftover supper one baked bean at a time.

  Mum stands in front of the window in the living room, without music, swaying to nothing. I put the supper dishes on the floor for the dogs to lick and fish the Roger Whittaker record out of the Chopin sleeve. It seems better if Mum is swaying to music, even if the music is Roger Whittaker, than if she is swaying into the deep, animal-scampering, cricket-calling, moth-bashing silence.

  “Ahm gonna leave ole London town, Ahm gonna leave ole London town. . . .”

  I stand in front of her, in an effort to distract her. Her eyes slide glassily past me.

  “Mum!”

  She says in a low whisper, “You know they tried to kill Oscar.”

  I say, “I know. You told me already.”

  Mum looks over her shoulder and leans forward, almost overbalancing. “They think I’m unstable.”

  “Do they?”

  Mum smiles, but it isn’t an alive, happy smile, it’s a slipping and damp thing she’s doing with her lips which looks as much as if she’s lost control of her mouth as anything else. “They think I’m crazy.”

  “Really?”

  “But I’m not, I’m not at all.”

  “No.”

  “It was a warning.”

  “What was a warning?”

  “First Thompson, then Oscar, then Burma Boy . . .”

  “But Burma Boy got horse sickness and tetanus. The managers had nothing to do with that.”

  Mum’s eyes quiver. Her towel is slipping. “I’m next, you know.”

  “For what?”

  “But it doesn’t scare me.”

  “No.”

  The towel falls off completely. I retrieve it, and Mum clutches it over her breasts. “I know what they’re up to.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “No, it’s not good.”

  “No.”

  “A leopard a week. I see them. They think I’m crazy, but I see them. It’s illegal, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Leopard are Royal Game. You have to have a permit.”

  “I know.”

  “They could go to jail.”

  “I know.”

  Vanessa comes out of her room; she turns off the record player and takes Mum by the elbow. “Why don’t you go to bed, Mum? I’ll bring you some hot milk.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Cold milk.”

  “Yuck.”

  “How about some tea?”

  Mum allows herself to be led to the bedroom. Vanessa dresses her and puts her into bed. “Stay there, okay, Mum?” As she leaves the room she hisses at me, “Don’t let Mum get out of bed.”

  “Right.” I sit on the edge of the bed, pinning down the bedclothes, and watch Mum, who is staring at the ceiling. “They invited me to a party,” she says in a dreamy voice.

  “Who?”

  “The managers. They had houseguests from town.”

  “When?”

  “You were away at school.”

  “Was it fun?”

  “They tried to poison me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Then when I was in the bathroom trying to throw up the poison, one of their guests tried to . . . to assault me.”

  Mum suddenly sits up and I am scared of her, the way I would be scared of a ghost. I draw back, suppressing an urge to run away. She is behaving supernaturally. She is pale and drawn and there is sweat on her forehead and a thin mustache of sweat clings to her top lip. Her eyes are shining like marbles, cold and hard and glittering. She says, “You watch out for yourself.”

  “I will.”

  Vanessa comes in with the tea. “Go and bath, Bobo.” I flee, relieved.

  Afterward Vanessa comes into my room and says, “You mustn’t pay too much attention to Mum. She’s just having a nervous breakdown.”

  I have an arrow, confiscated from a poacher, hanging on my otherwise bare walls.

  Vanessa frowns at it. “It’s about time you had some pictures in your room.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll get morbid, looking at that thing all the time.”

  “I like it.”

  “Ja, but it’s not normal.”

  “Nothing’s normal anymore, hey. Everything’s wrong.”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “Why are the managers trying to kill Mum?”

  “No, they aren’t.”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “They aren’t, okay?”

  “They tried to kill Oscar.”

  “Maybe that was the Africans.”

  “And they beat up Thompson.”

  “That was the Africans.”

  “Mum said they tried to poison her.”

  “Ignore her. I told you already, she’s just having a nervous breakdown.”

  “Then why are there so many bad-luck things at once?”

  “Bad-luck things happen. That’s just the way it is. They happen all the time. It doesn’t mean anything, Bobo. It doesn’t mean that the bad-luck things have anything to do with each other. If you start thinking that bad luck comes all together on purpose or that it has to do with the managers or with you or with anything else, you’ll go bonkers.”

  “Mum’s already bonkers.”

  “Which is why she thinks all the bad-luck things are to do with the managers.”

  I wipe my nose on my arm.

  “You’ve really got to stop doing that,” says Vanessa.

  Dad comes back from fishing. He has had one bite in three days, and has caught nothing.

  “We’ll move to a place where we can catch a fish just by yawning in the right direction,” he tells us.

  I look at Mum and wonder how we’re ever going to move her anywhere.

  “What do you think, Tub?”

  Mum gives Dad her gl
azed smile and says, “Sounds fine.” Her voice is blurred.

  “Mum hates fishing,” I point out.

  “Yeah,” says Mum, laughing in a wobbly unhappy way, “I hate fishing.”

  “See?”

  “Well, we can’t stay here,” says Dad.

  “Come back for my body in the dry season,” says Mum.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  I say to Dad, “I don’t think Mum’s well enough to go anywhere.”

  “The change’ll do her good. She’ll be fine once we’re in a new place.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we’ve done it before. It’s no good wallowing around in the same place too long. Too much . . . too many . . . It makes you morbid.”

  “Vanessa says I’m morbid.”

  “See?”

  I stroke the dogs with my foot. “What about Oscar and Shea? And the cats?”

  “We’ll bring everyone with us.”

  “And the horses?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Dad

  MOVING ON

  Mum is living with the ghosts of her dead children. She begins to look ghostly herself. She is moving slowly, grief so heavy around her that it settles, like smoke, into her hair and clothes and stings her eyes. Her green eyes go so pale they look yellow. The color of a lioness’s eyes through grass in the dry season.

  Her sentences and thoughts are interrupted by the cries of her dead babies.

  Only Olivia has had a proper funeral. Richard and Adrian are in unmarked graves. They float and hover, un-pressed-down. For them, there is no weight of dignity such as is afforded the dead by a proper funeral. There is no dampness of tears on earth, shed during the ceremony of grieving. There is no myth of closure.

  All people know that in one way or the other the dead must be laid to rest properly: burnt, scattered, prayed over, laid out, sung upon. Earth must be thrown upon the coffins of the dead by the living hands of those who knew or loved them. Or ashes of the dead must be scattered into the wind.

  “We have offended against thy holy laws, / we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, / and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; / And there is no health in us.”

  It doesn’t take an African to tell you that to leave a child in an unmarked grave is asking for trouble. The child will come back to haunt you and wrap itself around you until your own breathing stops under the damp weight of its tiny, ghostly persistence.