Little Stones

by Kuiper, Elizabeth;

  ‘What is this?’ she said, her voice terse as her grip on the card tightened.

  I knew I hadn’t done as well in maths this term as I usually did, but I was certain my scores for English and social studies were much better than last year and everything else was pretty consistent. We hadn’t received the last mark back for our Shona test though, and maybe that had dragged me down. But overall I was third, so I couldn’t have done that badly.

  Mum was still staring at the report card as though it were a cryptic crossword.

  ‘Hannah … did your father tell you anything important recently?’ she asked, her gaze stuck on the document in her hands. I shook my head. ‘He didn’t mention anything about your surname? Or his surname?’

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but clearly it wasn’t my Shona mark. Mum handed me the report card. I saw four A’s and a B-minus for maths. Hooray! I began to read Mrs Hicks’s comments along the bottom, where I immediately noticed what my mother meant. My teachers were referring to me as Hannah Clarke, not Hannah Reynolds. I glanced at the printed name in bold lettering at the top of the card, which was Clarke too.

  ‘Un-be-lie-vable.’ Mum groaned. ‘How does this happen? We both pay school fees. But I’m the one who drops you off at school each morning. I’m the one who takes you uniform shopping every year. Has he once come to a swimming gala? Or a school play? I bet he just stormed right in and caused a huge commotion, making everyone else feel uncomfortable, until he got his way, as bloody usual.’

  I didn’t want to say so, but I didn’t care about the name. I continued to read Mrs Hicks’s comments.

  Hannah Clarke is a well-rounded and proactive member of the 6H classroom. Her literacy skills are progressing well, and she shows great potential with her writing. Her social studies project on the First Matabele War was a delight to read and demonstrates how much Hannah can achieve when she is actively engaged in a subject. More work should be taken in certain areas to improve proficiency in numeracy. Hannah can sometimes cause a distraction to other classmates, particularly when she has finished work before others. Overall, she is a beneficial member of the 6H classroom, and we look forward to seeing her grow and improve in the following terms. ~ Mrs Hicks

  ‘What does she mean by cause a distraction?’ I asked Mum. ‘I don’t distract anyone.’

  ‘Huh? Look, Hannah, did Steve … Did your dad come into the school at all, or talk to you about changing your last name? From Reynolds to Clarke? Did you have to go to the headmaster’s office? Did you see Mr Webster? Anything like that?’

  I shook my head. None of that had happened. What did happen was that I moved up three places in the class since last term and I must have done well in my last Shona test to improve my average.

  ‘Bloody unbelievable.’ Mum moved towards the phone by the door, leaving me alone with the square piece of card containing Mrs Hicks’s words, wondering how much of a distraction I could be, if my own mother struggled to keep her attention on me.

  16

  The day before the big show, everyone in the house sprang into action. Grandpa was putting the finishing touches on some of the props he’d made. Mum was flitting around the house, talking on the phone and scribbling things down on her to-do list. I was helping Nana repackage bulk-bought boxes of chocolates and sweets into smaller plastic bags, which we would sell on the night to raise more money.

  ‘Ruth, could you pass me the scissors,’ Nana asked Gogo, and then used a blade to curl pieces of ribbon, which she’d hand to me to tie up the bags. As we worked with the confectionery, Gogo was busy repairing my ‘Under the Sea’ costume, stitching up one of the crab legs that had split during rehearsal and was leaking stuffing.

  ‘Hannah, do you remember that play you did … back when you were in nursery?’ Gogo asked as she pulled at the needle and thread. ‘I made you a sheep. You had big ears … and a tail. You were so happy. Then when you got on stage, you started to cry. A crying baby sheep! Your mum had to come and get you, but you were crying: I want Gogo! I want Gogo!’ Gogo laughed at the memory.

  ‘I remember the costume, and being on stage, but I don’t remember crying,’ I said, feeling embarrassed. ‘Did I ruin the play?’

  ‘Nooo,’ Gogo said. ‘No. Of course not. And you were such a good baby. Such a good baby. You just got scared. Scared little sheep. But now, now you are a crab.’ Gogo laughed some more, lifting the finished costume with both hands and staring at it with great amusement.

  When the big night arrived the small school theatre barely contained the full house, with many people opting to stand up the back. Mum was right: people were more likely to attend to see their friends – particularly if they weren’t the typical ‘performing’ type.

  A woman who worked with Mum at the stock exchange sang a throaty solo from Chicago, clad in a black sequined dress. Until then I’d mostly seen her staring blankly at a screen as she chewed gum, very occasionally tapping her nails on the keyboard. I did not think of her as the type to hold her own on stage, but she did so. Nurses from the hospital, including Stella, banded together to perform a number from Moulin Rouge in fishnet stockings and menacingly high heels.

  The audience laughed as Zayn pranced across the stage in his white dress singing about being unprepared for a world of men, followed by an exaggerated wink. I proclaimed that he needed someone older and wiser, and even more laughter erupted.

  The show closed with Mum, centre stage, recycling Zayn’s outfit from earlier, singing ‘Send in the Clowns’ with Ms Pratt’s girlfriend as her musical accompaniment. I had suggested she dress up in a clown-suit for the solo (I’d found a pair of oversized shoes and a red nose backstage that would’ve worked well), but she decided to go another route.

  I must’ve known it before, on some level, but that was the first time that I looked at my mother and realised how truly beautiful she was. She always hated smiling for photos because her ‘vampire teeth’ would show. But on stage, you couldn’t see the points of her canines, or the laughter lines that marked her face, or the grey hairs she would ask me to scan for on her scalp. I remember wishing back then that I could be just like her when I grew up. Later on, I realised I didn’t merely want to be like Mum because she was pretty; it was her strength I admired – the way that she remained stable and constant, unfaltering, no matter where we were, or what was happening. Whatever life threw our way, she would always be a source of reassurance. ‘Don’t worry,’ she’d tell me. ‘That’s my job. We will make a plan.’

  On the drive home, Nana and Grandpa were full of praise for the show that was Mum’s brainchild.

  ‘That was so fabulous, Jane. Really,’ Nana gushed. ‘And it was packed – did you see that? Don’t know how you pulled it together, all in your spare time!’

  ‘What did you think of The Sound of Music bit, Dad?’ Mum asked, testing him, with a smile on her lips.

  ‘I think that Zayn chap wore that dress better than you, Jane,’ he quipped back.

  17

  two months had passed since Nana and Grandpa had left the farm in Karoi and come to live with us in Harare. Grandpa had run out of projects to do around the house, stopping short of stripping the floors and repanelling them. Nana had been knocked back from another two interviews. Our school-holiday camping trip to Mana Pools couldn’t come soon enough.

  My mother’s friends Stella and John, who also lived in Alexandra Park, just a few streets away, lent us all the camping gear that my grandparents had been forced to leave behind at the farm.

  When they dropped off tents, cooler-boxes and various other equipment, including a small fishing boat, Stella and John joined us for tea and a cheesecake, procured from IB’s, as a thank you. The six of us sat outside, overlooking the pool, with Stella chain-smoking, intermittently resting her hand on the arm of the plastic chair and flicking the ash of her cigarette onto the grass.

  When I was in Grade 2, we made ashtray
s in art class but I couldn’t give the one I made to my non-smoking mother, so I gave it to Stella instead. When I discovered she was still using an old black ashtray, and not the blue-and-pink one I’d made for her, I was hurt. ‘Oh, sweetie. I keep that in my bedroom, on my dresser,’ she explained. ‘It’s far too precious for me to ash in.’ I figured she was just being nice and didn’t like my artistic project, until she took me by the hand and showed me; there it was, holding a cluster of gold rings. When I was older, she told me how much something I thought was so small had meant to her – as she’d never had children of her own, it was the first time she’d received such a present and she cherished it dearly.

  The adults around the poolside table deconstructed the show, which had raised over twenty billion dollars. John spoke about the renovations at his house that Grandpa had been helping him with. There was some chatter about the wheat crisis. Inevitably, at some point after the cheesecake was eaten and while the second pot of tea was brewing, the farm came up.

  ‘How are you folks holding up?’ John asked.

  ‘Oh, you know. We’ll be fine,’ Nana replied with a nonchalance that fooled no-one. ‘It’ll be nice to get away camping for a while.’

  Grandpa laid the three mattresses down in the back of his truck, one queen-size and two singles, all covered in the same dated floral pattern, squeezing the suitcases and cooler-boxes in the gaps around them, before affixing the canopy overhead. I couldn’t think of anything more luxurious than lying in the back of the truck atop multiple mattresses and pillows and being chauffeured across the country. Mum and Nana took turns riding in the back with me, swapping over at every pit stop.

  That was probably my favourite part of travelling: the pit stops. Every few hours, Grandpa would pull over and the four of us would sit on a cluster of large rocks and gorge ourselves on a great feast – boiled eggs, chicken-and-mayonnaise finger sandwiches, leftover boerewors, and perhaps a brown bag of biltong sourced from a butcher along the way.

  I made sure to bring my Biltong Briefcase with me for the trip. The Biltong Briefcase was a present from Dad for my ninth birthday – a hand-me-down of one of his old leather briefcases. Back then, I didn’t know what to use the briefcase for, so I simply packed it with all the things I liked: colouring books, a game of snakes and ladders, and a packet of biltong. When Grandpa had asked me what was inside the briefcase I had been guarding fiercely, and I pulled out the biltong, he’d laughed so hard he had to wipe the tears away from his eyes. After that, it became something of a running joke.

  This time around, at our first pit stop, Grandpa turned to ask me solemnly: ‘Hannah, have you brought the Biltong Briefcase?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said, as I reached into the back of the truck and pulled it out, resting it on my lap to unclip the buckles, and retrieving the biltong packet. Mum carefully peered into the brown bag, scavenging for pieces containing the least amount of additional fat. This was fine by me, because I secretly loved the fatty part of the biltong; how soft and salty it was, and how it perfectly complemented the hard, dry pieces.

  Today’s pit stop was not unlike all the others that had come before it. We dove into the food as Grandpa complained about the potholes on the country roads that hadn’t been serviced for decades, and were ‘big enough to bury a body in, vertically’. Mum insisted she rub sunscreen on my face, for the few minutes we were in the sun. The only real difference this trip was that, due to the bread shortage and continuing riots around the capital, Nana hadn’t made any sandwiches but a potato salad instead.

  The second pit stop came only half an hour after the first, with Mum in the back knocking on the dividing window and declaring that she’d drunk too much ginger beer and needed to be let out.

  She found a large tree just a few paces off the road, as I stood guard for snakes and creepy crawlies or worse: other humans who might find her in a compromising position.

  ‘You know what? This is probably the biggest baobab I’ve ever seen,’ Mum remarked, as she kicked some leaves over the wet patch of ground and walked around to the other side of the tree.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ I said, craning my neck to stare at the bare branches above, which made it seem like the enormous tree was doing a handstand, roots reaching to tickle the sky.

  ‘She? It’s a girl?’ Grandpa asked.

  ‘Of course it’s a girl. Look.’ I moved my palm along the thick curves of the trunk. ‘She is akasimba, like Gogo.’ I gave the tree a hug, my outstretched arms not even reaching a quarter of the way around it.

  ‘You’re such a silly monkey, aren’t you?’ he said.

  In response, I gave the tree a squeeze and a kiss on the bark, knowing it would make Grandpa laugh.

  ‘Alright, come on. Back on the road again. And do your business if you need to now, because we’ve got to get to the campsite before it’s dark.’

  By the time we had finished setting up, the afternoon sun was close to sinking beneath the horizon. Grandpa and I had collected wood from around the Mana Pools campsite and placed it in a great pile. I was still skittish around open flames, but watching Grandpa make campfires was mesmerising – the way he methodically cleared the ground, placing the large pieces of wood down first, before scattering the smaller twigs and branches around it. He asked me to hand him a copy of The Herald, the front page of which read Mugabe Defiant in Face of EU Sanctions, which he ripped into long pieces and threaded through the sticks.

  Fifteen minutes later, we were dunking rusks into steaming cups of rooibos tea, our faces warm and red from the roaring flames. Every camping trip we went on would be filled with stories of the last one. As the best storyteller, Grandpa held forth, often using a bit of creative licence to enhance the tales from one telling to the next.

  ‘I have to say,’ Grandpa started, wiping the crumbs from his lips on the back of his hand, ‘my favourite trip was the time when Hannah was still in nappies, back in ’90, ’91, and we were up at B-Camp, camping right near the river. This huge bull elephant comes out of nowhere, do you remember? An enourmous beast he was. And we’re standing a good couple of metres away, as he’s moving towards us, trying our best to stay still, be calm. Hannah wasn’t scared one bit. Didn’t start crying, didn’t try to waddle off. Not until the ellie started toying with the cooler-box, trying to get at the food. I think we had some oranges in there. Anyway, Hannah starts crying all of a sudden. Out of nowhere. She wasn’t crying before – when the elephant was close enough to scoop her up with his trunk and run off with her – but the second he started attacking the food supply … Oh boy, that’s when the waterworks came! Soon as the elephant gets bored and walks off, Hannah waddles to the cooler-box to make sure everything is still there. Our little bush-girl.’

  Grandpa woke me up early so we could go fishing along the lower half of the Zambezi river. He was quiet for most of the three hours we were on the water, except to occasionally point out a kingfisher resting on a branch or show me what he’d caught on the line.

  I divided the page of the colouring pad I’d brought with me in two, shading the upper half – the sky – with a baby blue, reserving my teal crayon for the barely rippling water that stretched for miles into the distance. Grabbing the yellow and green crayons, and using short, hard strokes, I produced the water reeds that sprouted out of the surface in random clusters. And, although I hadn’t seen any, I sketched a handful of grey circles, the ears of hippos that were known to lurk beneath the surface.

  Before revving up the engine to begin our journey back to the land, Grandpa closed his eyes and inhaled. He scrunched up his zinc-covered nose as he breathed in the river: the fresh breeze skimmed across the stagnant water, bringing forth the sweet musk of moss atop rotting tree branches, mixed with the scent of bulrushes and the mangrove swamp, and all the smells of the vast aquatic ecosystem that thrived beneath the hull.

  Over lunch, I told Nana that Grandpa had hooked a barbel fish from the b
oat but let it go.

  ‘Shame old Ephraim and Rukodzo weren’t here to see it,’ Grandpa said. ‘They always wanted to catch a barbel whenever we went out.’

  ‘Hannah, why don’t you tell us some of the Shona words for animals here in the bush?’ Mum asked. ‘She’s so good at it now. They really drill in Shona vocab at Bishopslea.’

  I had to cast my mind back to a few terms ago when we learnt animals, but as I continued to speak they came back to me.

  ‘So, you have shumba for lion, which is easy to remember because it sounds like Simba, from The Lion King, which is actually Swahili for lion. Nzou is elephant. Monkey is tsoko, baboon is gudo … Oh, and twiza is Shona for giraffe.’

  ‘After camping for a few days, I sure hope we spot a twiza I can use for my eyebrows,’ Mum joked, garnering a few chuckles from Nana and Grandpa.

  ‘Mum, that’s rude.’

  ‘You’re right. No, no, you’re right. Sorry. Although, I genuinely do need tweezers, got to keep the monobrow at bay,’ she said, running her index finger in the space between her brows.

  ‘Well, Grandpa didn’t want me to tell you this, but he used your tweezers for plucking the ticks off Oscar Wilde.’

  ‘What!’ Mum leapt out of her chair and ran over to Grandpa, lifting up the bait bucket on the way. ‘I’m going to get you back for that.’

  There was no bait left inside, just some oily brown water, which Mum chucked over Grandpa’s bare chest. He immediately retaliated by scooping her up in a big bear hug, and transferring the water onto her.

  ‘Joke’s on you, I’m wearing your shirt!’ Mum squealed to Grandpa, as though she were a kid my age.

  Nana and I watched on with smiles.

  ‘I miss seeing her like this,’ said Nana. ‘Your mum is so much happier when she’s out of the city.’

  On the journey home, Nana rode in the back with me. She rested against the side and made me sit in front of her, so she could braid my hair.