‘Wait, who was president?’ I asked, thinking I’d misheard her.
‘Canaan Banana. Don’t laugh,’ she said, with a smile. ‘He passed a law making it illegal to joke about his name.’
‘What happened to him?’ I wondered why I’d not heard of this person before. With such a remarkable name, I felt sure I would’ve remembered him.
‘He was arrested a few years ago, for sodo— for being gay. He was only just released from prison, from Chikurubi, a little while ago.’
We listened to the end of the song with Mum singing along, getting just over half the words right. When it finished, I asked her whether Marley was as good in person as he was on tape.
‘He was amazing. The best. Also, the concert was completely packed. Everyone wanted to see him. He meant so much to this country. The freedom fighters, in particular – the real war vets. Thousands of people came to stand outside the venue, just to hear him. Eventually, they broke through the gates and—’ Mum pulled into a driveway. ‘Oh, look, we’re here.’ She reached out of the window to buzz the intercom.
‘Then what happened?’
‘Well, then the police came with tear gas. Broke the whole thing up. Not a great end to the day, to be honest … Hi, Geetha, it’s Jane here.’
Geetha, the woman who did the beauty treatments, operated out of her family home, on a massage table in the middle of her living room. I’d usually sit on the couch, sometimes next to a pile of folded laundry, and watch as Geetha used popsicle sticks to pour hot wax between my mother’s brows and across her top lip. While Geetha waited for the wax to cool, she would distract Mum by sharing recipes for chicken korma or palak paneer, or occasionally talking about the ‘political situation’, before swiftly ripping the wax off, leaving pink skin in its wake.
During this visit, Geetha told Mum she would begin charging more for the waxes, as shipping the products in from South Africa was becoming more expensive. Mum joked that she was a ‘captive market’, whatever that meant, and her hairiness would keep Geetha in business no matter what Zimbabwe’s economic climate.
After the waxing, Geetha cut Mum’s hair so that it no was longer almost touching her shoulders, but cropped just below her earlobes. The style was striking and modern and would almost certainly be disliked by Nana.
In the car on the way home I suggested that Mum didn’t need to keep getting rid of all her facial hair, but she reminded me that it was Jeanine’s wedding this weekend, and maybe she would reduce it down to every two months after that.
‘You know, when I was in high school, I was always bullied for my hair?’
Mum explained that at boarding school the other girls all had razors but she couldn’t afford them. I’d always thought she enjoyed her school experience. She had previously told me she loved her sport, was in the school choir, had a boyfriend, and did well academically. For me, these were all the components that went into being well liked and happy; a sentiment I shared with her in the car.
‘You might think that but, no, I wasn’t popular and I certainly wasn’t happy. I remember the time I came back to school after the summer holidays, and we had a swimming gala the first week. I was teased because I had flea bites all around my ankles, and that was on top of my hairy legs! Boarding school was tough. I used to be shy. So shy. And I missed Nana so, so much. I’m glad I can pick you up after school every day, like I did today, and we can spend time together … even if it is just getting my eyebrows waxed.’
‘How often did you get to see Nana?’ I asked.
‘Only during school holidays. And I was six when I first started as a boarder. Only little. And then after high school I went straight to university in a different country. Then there was a patch where Nana and I … we didn’t see eye to eye. But we got over that and I am so grateful to have her and Grandpa in our lives. Nana had a tough life, you know. Defending the house during the war.’
I kind of knew, but I didn’t really know. I knew Nana once kept a semi-automatic rifle in a locked box on the farm, but not whether she’d actually had to use it. I also knew Grandpa fought in the war. But although he was guilty of regularly repeating stories, I hadn’t heard the tales from that time even once.
Mum ended her reflection on the war years with an anecdote about an unclaimed sports bag that was discovered in the middle of Girls High School during a time of heightened military tensions. After the bomb squad was called in, they discovered the abandoned bag belonged to a Grade 5 boarder and contained little more than her old dancing and gym clothes.
‘All that fuss,’ she said. ‘Thinking they were going to detonate a bomb, and instead pulling out some ballet slippers and a tutu!’
My mum always had a gift for being able to bring light into the darkest moments, and for finding humour within tragedy. Of all the things she lost during our time in Zimbabwe, this was not one of them.
21
‘How do i look?’ mum asked Gogo and me, doing a quick twirl as she showed us her outfit: a pair of black slacks matched with a white silk blouse.
‘Do up a button, madam. Is too low. Is far, far too low.’ Gogo reached over and did up the second button down from the top of the shirt.
‘I’m not a teenager, Ruth,’ Mum said, as she undid the button again but also pulled the fabric up to cover her cleavage.
‘Yes, yes. Far too old to be teenager,’ Gogo agreed, before moving behind Mum to help her put on her pearl necklace. Mum had told me this necklace was expensive, but her pearls were tiny compared to the ones that Gogo wore to church.
The intercom let out a quick ping.
‘Okay, he’s here,’ Mum said, heading out the door. ‘Bye, Ruth.’
It was the day of Jeanine’s wedding. Greg, a friend of Mum’s who I had never met, but whose name I had heard with increasing frequency in the past few weeks, was driving us to Nyanga and back.
‘Did you pack your dress?’ Mum checked with me as we scurried in the heat down the driveway to reach the black car that was waiting outside the front gate.
‘Yep.’
‘Toothbrush, hairbrush?’
‘Yep, yep,’ I said, desperate to climb inside the back seat where the air-con would be on.
‘What book are you bringing?’
‘I’ve got The Chamber of Secrets.’
‘Alright then, let’s skedaddle.’ Mum said and eased herself into the passenger seat.
I got into the back, where I would remain for the arduous three-and-a-half-hour journey up to the Troutbeck Resort, which was probably why Mum double-checked that I had brought along some reading material.
The first thing I noticed about Greg was his hair, or lack thereof. Greg was bald, which was weird because he seemed about as young as my mum and the only bald men I knew were Grandpa and Grandpa’s friends. Greg caught my stare in his rear-view mirror and mentioned that he shaved it once for swimming in varsity, liked the feel of it, and had continued to shave it since. Mum said it looked great, but I thought that the shape of his hairless skull and his narrow, green eyes made him appear rather like a snake.
The drive with Greg was long and dull. He spoke a lot: about himself, about the rental-car business he owned, and about the fact that he was good friends with Andy Flower.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked.
‘Andy Flower? He’s a cricketer. The best. You don’t know Andy Flower? What are you teaching your daughter, Jane?’
Andy Flower sounded like the name of a boy in one of the books Diana and I would read in school. I wrote it down on a piece of scrap paper, resting on the flat surface of my book to keep it steady.
I spotted and and flower, which were obvious. Then low and law and flow and red. I knew there must be more.
‘Mu-um,’ I called out. ‘What words are in Andy Flower?’
‘What’s that?’ Greg asked, even though I wasn’t talking to him.
‘
Um. Flower?’ Mum ventured.
‘I’ve already got that one,’ I said.
‘Hannah, my sweets, can we play later? I was just speaking to Greg.’
I went back to playing the game by myself, only managing to find two more: ‘fan’ and ‘flo’, which I wasn’t sure was a word, but was a nickname for Florence Zinyemba at school. I was about to ask Mum whether it would count, but decided against it.
It was only when we hit Marondera that I realised Greg was not a friend of Mum’s in the same way John and Zayn were her friends. Occasionally, after he changed gears, he would put his hand on Mum’s knee, giving it a squeeze, before returning his hand to the gearstick. Watching that action made me feel uncomfortable, and I tried my best to avert my eyes. Every now and then, when there was a silence in the car, Greg would fling a question at me in the back, as though it had just occurred to him to ask what my favourite subject was at school or he was suddenly deeply curious about whether or not I liked to swim.
‘I’ve got a pool at my house,’ Greg said. ‘You and Jane … you and your mum should come over one weekend, we can have a braai and a swim. How does that sound?’
‘We already have a pool at our house,’ I said.
‘Hannah!’ Mum exclaimed.
I knew I was being rude, but I let out a confused ‘What?’, hoping I could feign ignorance and use my position as a just-turned-eleven-year-old to shed doubt on whether or not my response was bratty or an innocent comment about the fact we did not need to outsource our pool-time.
I thought about all the ways that Greg and my dad were different. Greg had an Afrikaans accent, while my dad had a broader Anglo–South African one. Greg was muscular but squat, with his black t-shirt fitting tight against his body. Dad was slim and tall and had knobbly knees, and on the rare occasion I saw him in a t-shirt it was collared and featured a small embroidered horse or alligator on the chest.
I wondered who would win between them in a physical fight. I stared out the window, gazing at the vast stretches of barren land that were intermittently disrupted by women carrying great wicker baskets atop their heads. I decided that Greg would win in the punch-up, but Dad would sue him for battery and assault and take his house. I couldn’t wait to get to the wedding so I could complain to Dad about this guy and how lame he was.
I was relieved to find that at the wedding, unlike at Dad’s birthday celebration, there were other children. I was seated at a table with a few other kids, including Michaela Parker. After the cake was cut and served we became restless and went to ask our mothers whether we were free to leave and explore the rest of the hotel. We caught them mid-conversation, and Mum seemed to just be finishing up telling Karen about the War Vets taking over the farm in Karoi. I wanted to ask them quickly for permission, but they’d both had a few glasses of wine and were oblivious to impatient offspring waiting on the outskirts, and we were roped into listening to them talk.
‘Sure, bad things happened to black people in the past,’ Karen responded. ‘It was awful. But you don’t have permission to punish the people generations later who had nothing to do with it. I had bad things happen to me, in my life. My father was busy doing you-know-what with the woman who ran the local pub and everyone in the village knew except my mother and, when she found out, she went mad. Plucked all her eyelashes out and refused to eat for a week. The point is, I don’t sit around crying about it and asking to be treated differently. I don’t use my sob story to ask for government handouts.’
‘Who’s getting government handouts?’ Mum asked.
Karen shook off her question, like it was a little gnat that had landed on her hand. ‘Did you hear what they’re teaching our girls at school?’ she continued. ‘They just had a safety lesson on what to do in a hijacking … isn’t that right, Michaela? Admit it, Jane, it’s not normal. You need to get out of Africa. This isn’t how normal people live.’
‘I know you miss the UK, Karen, but I’m not British. Africa is my home. Do you really think you could go back to living in Leeds? It’s such a completely different lifestyle. Wouldn’t you miss it? The bush, the animals? The people here?’
Before Karen could answer, I took my chance to cut into their conversation in order to get permission to leave the room. I was surprised when they both agreed, and we were free to mill about, beginning an elaborate game of hide-and-seek in the corridors, gathering various stragglers from the wedding party and other functions along the way.
After hours of playing (and after Michaela jumped out from behind a corner to scare me, causing me to almost wee my pants), I decided we should go find our parents. We spotted hers first, sitting hunched over like discarded puppets, Karen’s head on Richard’s shoulder. We went over to them, and I asked where my mum was.
‘She’s with your dad,’ Karen said, and gestured limply towards the verandah.
Those four words automatically set off an alarm inside me that washed away all the fun I’d had during the evening with Michaela, hiding in the linen storage cupboards. I took my time walking to the door that led outside, and saw them standing apart and arguing.
‘… And here I find you, dancing with some goddamn Boer with a shaved head, who looks like he’s been abusing steroids for half his life.’
‘He’s not a Boer, Steve. He’s a nice guy.’
‘You brought him here just to spite me.’
‘I did not. You brought a date too.’
‘What, Chrissie Henman? She’s not a date, she’s a … a … placeholder.’
‘Look, I’m not with Greg. I’m not with any man.’
‘What, have you swapped teams now? Spent too much time with the theatre-crew lesbians and fancied you’d take the plunge? Explains the new dyke haircut.’
‘Which is it, Steve? Am I sleeping with every man in Harare, or am I a lesbian?’
Mum caught sight of me first, and then Dad turned around, following her gaze. She rushed over to me, told me how sorry she was that I’d had to witness them arguing, that it was late, and that she would walk me back to our room now, which she did without saying another word to Dad.
22
The day after the wedding we were back on the road with Greg. We pulled into a lonely petrol station in the middle of the long stretch of empty highway. There was no need to queue here; instead Greg drove his car straight in, jumped out and said hello to the garage attendant who started to fill the tank.
‘Do you like crisps?’ he asked me, poking his head back through the driver’s door.
‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to convey how stupid I thought his question was with just one syllable, having to stop myself from replying, ‘No, duh.’
‘Good stuff,’ he said, and he slammed the door and walked towards the store.
I caught the eye of the worker filling the car with petrol, who smiled with all three teeth he had left. A few minutes later, Greg returned carrying an armful of mini crisp packets like a litter of newborn kittens. He opened my door with one hand, using his chin to keep the chips steady, and then poured them all onto my lap.
‘Whatcha think of that?’ Greg asked.
‘Wow, Hannah,’ Mum said, craning her head around from the passenger seat. ‘Isn’t that nice?’
‘Yeah!’ I said, with a bit more excitement this time. I counted the packets – twelve in total. There were Lay’s and Simba and Korn Kurls and Nik Naks and Flings and Fritos, with two flavours of each.
‘Lucky, lucky girl,’ cooed the attendant, as he retrieved the petrol pump and placed it back on the holder.
‘Thank you, Greg,’ I said through a mouth of crinkle-cut crisps, and soon we were driving again.
Somewhere near Macheke, I began to feel ill. I wanted to wind down a window, but Greg had the air conditioning on full blast. The circulation of stale air was nauseating. The car dipped into a pothole, causing the seatbelt to tighten against my stomach. By the time I felt it coming,
it was too late, and I spewed yellow-orange barely digested chunks of crisps onto the leather upholstery of Greg’s BMW. I had been halfway through devouring my eighth packet – Simba cheese-and-onion flavour – when it happened. I lurched forwards in my seat as Greg pulled the car to one side, nearly causing me to be sick again.
‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ he yelled out, and unclipped his seatbelt to gain a better view of the carnage behind him. ‘Fuck!’ he cried a fourth time.
‘Hannah, what happened? Are you okay?’ Mum asked.
Truth be told, after I’d thrown up, I felt much better. Not continue-to-eat-cheese-and-onion-chips better, but pretty good nonetheless.
‘No … I … I feel sick. I’m sorry, Greg. Really sorry.’
We used some of the empty crisp packets to scoop up the vomit and discarded them on the side of the road, the aluminium foil packets glistening in the sun. The rest of the drive was spent in silence, with all four windows rolled down.
‘I don’t like Greg,’ I announced, after he had dropped us home and we were walking through the front door.
‘Hannah, honey, I think he was just shocked.’
‘So? It’s just a car. But it’s not even about that. I don’t want to see him again, please.’
Mum paused a bit and nodded. ‘Okay, we don’t have to see Greg anymore. Although you could have just told me you didn’t like him – you didn’t have to throw up all over his car.’
‘It wasn’t on purpose, Mum. I promise.’
She laughed and squeezed my cheeks between her hands, kissing the top of my head.
As always, Gogo appeared in the living room soon after we’d arrived and handed Mum a stack of envelopes. Like most people living in Harare, Mum did not trust official correspondence to be delivered to a mailbox at a home address, instead opting for a PO box. Gogo walked to collect the mail once a week.
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