Mum sifted through the pile Gogo had given her, until she reached an A4-size envelope. Instead of sliding her fingers under the fold as she normally did, she tore this one open and pulled out the paper inside, her eyes flicking over the page. Her hands clutched at the document so hard I thought it might rip.
‘That wasn’t from the post office,’ Gogo said. ‘A man came by the gate and dropped it off this morning.’
Mum was silent as she continued to read. Gogo and I stood quietly next to her, glancing at each other then looking back to her.
‘It’s from Steve’s lawyer. He’s no longer going to pay maintenance.’
Mum was late collecting me from school the following day, and I was the last girl left waiting on the grass at twenty past five. One of the matrons from the boarding hostel came out to ask me if I wanted to have dinner with the boarders and wait for my mother there, but I told her I was fine. Not long after, I spotted Chitty hurtling through the school gates.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late, sweetie, I just … I had to meet with this lawyer, Mr Wallace, and it was right downtown and then the traffic …’
‘That’s okay. Was this about Dad? About the maintenance?’
‘And the school fees he isn’t paying.’
‘Why isn’t he paying?’ I asked, as Mum drove back through the gates so that the groundsman was finally able to lock them shut. ‘He’s got enough money.’
‘I don’t know, Hannah. It’s just games. It’s all just game playing.’
If Dad was as competitive in this game as he was when we played chess, then I knew Mum was in trouble. He always used a special method – ‘fool’s mate’ – to beat me at the game, and every time I would ask him not to use the trick. But he said I needed to adapt and learn, as it was impossible for him to see a path to checkmate me and not choose it.
‘Do you wish you had never married Dad?’ I asked.
‘No, of course not, because then I would never have had you. You are my star.’
I smiled, but her answer wasn’t enough. ‘Let’s just say … Okay, let’s just say that you could have adopted me or something without ever having met Dad. Would you still have married him?’
She paused for a moment. ‘Yes. I would.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Well, your father has a mean side to him. That side was always there, I suppose, but he did nice things too. And perhaps it meant more when he did do those nice things. He also taught me a lot. Living with Nana and Grandpa on the farm, we didn’t go to the theatre, to ballet, to film festivals. He had a lot of knowledge about those things, and I admired that in him. Does that make sense?’
‘I think you’re smarter than Dad anyway. You probably know more about that stuff than he does.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Mum said, as we passed the burnt-out car on the corner of Oxford and Aberdeen that had been there at least three years. Just two more left turns, and then we’d be home.
‘Where did you go on your honeymoon?’ I asked.
‘We stayed at a hotel in Crete. It was right on this beautiful, secluded beach. We were there for a week or so.’
I was thrilled that Mum was divulging, so I didn’t want to distract her by asking where ‘Crete’ was, instead saying that it sounded like a lovely holiday.
‘It was … it was … but it was also stressful, you know? Your dad got into a fight with the concierge at the hotel because we were meant to be booked into a room with a balcony. But there was no record of him requesting a balcony room. To be honest, I’m not even sure he did book one to begin with. And I distinctly remember the first hour of my honeymoon was spent in the hotel lobby, sitting on a little couch in the sweltering heat, surrounded by all our luggage, watching him yelling and yelling, and requesting to see the manager. I was so embarrassed.’
‘Did you get a room with a balcony in the end?’ I asked.
‘What do you think?’
I felt as if I had broken some invisible barrier, that Mum had spoken to me not as her preadolescent daughter, but as she would to one of her friends. I wanted to ask more questions but was scared she might shut down. I had just opened my mouth when two police motorbikes sped through the centre of the traffic, urgently signalling with their hands. Mum let out a sigh and dutifully pulled over. We watched from our parked car as the Mugabe motorcade tore down the street.
‘I can’t believe this,’ Mum muttered. ‘We’re two minutes away, and now we’ll be another fifteen.’
‘What was your favourite thing about Dad?’ I asked after the ambulance had passed us, signalling the end of the spectacle.
‘Alright, that’s enough questions for today,’ she said with a weak smile, and I felt as though I had gone back to being a child again.
23
I woke up to find that gogo had made me my favourite breakfast as a Sunday treat: scrambled eggs with bacon on top of toast spread with Marmite, and a full glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.
I was meant to be staying with Dad this weekend, but he cancelled at the last minute, as he had done many times before. On each occasion, my duffel bag would be already packed with clothes and books, sitting by the front door. Every time, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was running late, until the phone would ring and I’d receive a predictably lazy excuse: I’m sorry, Hannah – work emergency. Sorry, Hannah-Banana, I have to deal with this thing that’s just come up. Sometimes he didn’t even bother to call.
I started not to mind as much – I enjoyed my weekends at home. Having Nana and Grandpa about the house now meant that I was rarely without company. Which is why it felt strange that today I was the only person seated at the dining table, and hadn’t spotted anyone relaxing in the lounge on my way there. The house was unusually still.
Once I had gulped down my meal, I pulled open the glass doors and walked outside to see if my grandparents were sitting out there or if Mum was still swimming, but no-one was by the pool. Usually after Mum completed her morning laps, I could hear the hairdryer in her bedroom. But I didn’t hear anything. I went into the kitchen, where Gogo was scrubbing egg off the frying pan and asked her where my mum was.
‘She is working today.’
‘But, Gogo, today is Svonda.’
‘Svon-do. Sunday is Svondo, not Svon-da,’ Gogo corrected me. ‘And your mum is working today, I don’t know why.’
‘Muvhoro, Chipiri, Chitatu, China, Chishanu, Mugovera … Svondo,’ I recited the days of the week aloud, using the rhythm to try to remember how Svondo fit in. I was improving my Shona, but was still far off being able to converse fluently. Unless that conversation was solely about my name, where I lived, and involved an unusual request for me to list the days of the week and a collection of staple foods that could be bought at the supermarket.
I wondered how Gogo, who had never been to school as far as I knew, or had an English teacher in the way I had Mrs Muduma, could speak English so well. And maybe this was what really annoyed Mrs Muduma: that a knowledge of English was required for Shona people in order to find work, while Shona was something white people could opt in and out of.
‘What about Nana and Grandpa?’ I asked.
Gogo told me that Grandpa was still in bed and Nana was busy running errands but, if I wanted to, I could accompany her to the supermarket after she finished cleaning.
Mum and I never walked places; we always took the car. Walking with Gogo was amazing. Every street we turned down, she would run into people she knew. From old women sitting on the side of the road, their wares laid out in front of them, to young men pedalling on their fixed-gear bikes through the suburbs with bags of mealies strapped to their backs, she knew them all.
At the store, we bought a large pack of kapenta, some flour, white sugar, several large plastic bags of milk, and eggs. Gogo also picked up a product that was labelled speciality cake, but looked exa
ctly like a loaf of bread.
‘They put the, uh – what’s it called? – cinnamon. They put the cinnamon in the dough so they can call it cake. But it is bread,’ Gogo told me on the walk back home. ‘That is because Mr Mugabe wants to keep the price of bread the same. But there is no wheat. Very little wheat. So the price must go up. But no, no, he doesn’t want that. So now we have cake.’
When we got back home, Grandpa was fixing himself a glass of water in the kitchen. He was sweating profusely, his face red and shiny.
‘Hi, Grandpa,’ I said and embraced him in a hug. Several weeks ago, I wasn’t able to fully wrap my arms around his middle, but now I could wrap them right around and grab the wrist of my opposite hand.
He gave me a gentle pat on the head but pulled away. ‘I’m just going to go lie down for a bit,’ he announced, as he shuffled out of the room, leaving Gogo and me to unpack the groceries.
When Gogo served dinner that night, she said what the rest of the family had been thinking but had failed to voice.
‘Graham,’ she addressed Grandpa, ‘you are not looking good. Too skinny. Not healthy.’ She piled an extra serving of boerewors onto his plate and dolloped the mashed potatoes as high as she could.
Grandpa joked that it was a good thing he no longer had a ‘Bohlinger’s beer belly’, but no-one laughed.
I watched as he painstakingly cut his meat into small pieces, scooping small portions at a time onto his fork and placing them in his mouth. I must’ve looked the same when trying to swallow down Maria’s cooking over at Dad’s place.
When Grandpa first struggled with eating, a few weeks back, I took pleasure in helping him polish off the remaining food on his plate. There’s my bush-girl, he would say. But now it just made me sad. He had cut down on his food so much that I wasn’t simply nibbling on leftovers, I was eating two meals.
That night Mum had brought home Grandpa’s favourite dessert in the world: koeksisters, fried dough coated with sugar and honey, threaded in a way that resembled a thick German braid. But not even the sweet treats fresh from the bakery roused his appetite.
24
Usually i enjoyed visits to the medical clinic. Our GP was a kind man named Doctor Patel who, at the end of my appointments, would hand me a pile of plastic syringes that I got enormous pleasure out of later filling them up with water and squirting unsuspecting friends or family members. The waiting room had a designated kids’ corner, complete with Goosebumps books, two-hundred-piece puzzles and mountains of magazines. The novelty of the experience – particularly when I was skipping school to be there – never wore thin.
But this visit was different. It wasn’t even me who was being seen by the doctor. It was Grandpa.
Doctor Patel had just diagnosed Grandpa with trypanosomiasis, and had called Mum, Nana and me from the waiting room to explain exactly what that was. He blamed the disease, otherwise known as sleeping sickness, for Grandpa’s weight loss and his sallow complexion, along with the night sweats and debilitating aches he complained about. The tsetse fly, prevalent within bushlands, carried the disease, and he’d probably picked it up on our camping trip to Mana Pools. Grandpa considered it lucky that he was the only one infected, but Mum held the opposite opinion – why him? And why, when they were still grieving the loss of their farm, did this have to happen now?
‘Trip-an-oh-some-eye-is-is,’ I sounded it out, aloud. I thought it was the biggest word I had learnt yet. At least, the biggest word I knew the meaning of. Antidisestablishmentarianism was the biggest word I’d memorised, but I didn’t know what it meant.
I was instructed to return to the waiting room alone so that Doctor Patel could continue talking to the adults. Sitting back there I decided my favourite words were now metamorphic (from playing The Magic School Bus Explores Inside the Earth), congregation (from hearing Gogo talk about church) and trypanosomiasis (from Grandpa being sick).
Grandpa was not a man who belonged in a hospital bed. Not that it would be anyone’s natural state to remain horizontal on a single mattress in a room full of strangers, but it was even less suited to Grandpa. He looked so uncomfortable, like Oscar Wilde did when I once fastened a wizard cape around his neck and he became confused and anxious, chasing the material round in circles.
It was only when one of the nurses entered with a tray of food that Grandpa briefly perked up. He grabbed the Scotch egg off the plate and bit it in half, moving the food to the corner of his mouth to chew as he spoke animatedly about the jelly they served with dinner that he’d be getting later today. As Nana and Mum spoke with the doctor in the corridor, I curled up next to Grandpa in his hospital bed, pecking at the other half of the Scotch egg he’d left discarded on his tray. Lying there, Grandpa told me stories about his school days at Prince Edward, the glory days filled with hijinks and harmless tomfoolery. I had heard most of them before already, but I was thrilled to listen again.
‘We’d do anything to get out of class,’ Grandpa began, a familiar opener to many of his childhood tales. ‘Our English classroom had these huge sash windows. And on the outside of the class was the bicycle rack. Every now and then, one of the boys would reach his arm out the window and ring a bell on one of the bikes. Just keep ringing it.’ Grandpa mimed this action with his left hand, and I was worried he might accidentally rip out one of the many tubes connected to his body. ‘The teacher would send a lad outside to figure out who kept ringing the bell, and the bloke would just bugger off and not return. And then she’d send someone to find out where that bloke had gone, until no-one was left!’
‘Did you ever get in trouble, Grandpa?’ I asked.
‘Did I? Oh boy. If they caught us, it was ffft’ – he made a sharp sound expelling air through his lips – ‘straight to the headmaster’s office, where you’d be getting five of the best on your bum, no questions about it. And the prefects could give you hidings too – they had that power. That was the only reason people wanted to be prefects.’
‘My dad was a prefect at school,’ I reminded Grandpa.
‘Did I ever tell you the story about Peter Harris and the ice-cream truck?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
But he had; Grandpa repeated these stories so many times that I felt as though they were my own to tell. When he finished the ice-cream truck story, he also recounted the plight of a boy named Basil who got locked in the classroom by himself after he dropped a homemade stink bomb. Then the room fell silent.
‘You’re going to be okay, aren’t you, Grandpa? You’re not going to ...’
‘Hannah, my girl. I’ve been in rivers with crocs and hippos. I’ve walked right next to a black mamba. Had to chase a boomslang off the farm with a shovel, remember? Hell, I once had a bull elephant charge through the campsite. I’m not going to let a bloomin’ fly take me down. I wouldn’t let that happen.’
‘Promise?’
Grandpa pulled me into his arms and rubbed the top of my head with his rough hands, the tubes connected to him rustling as he did so.
‘For sure, my bush-girl. I promise.’
As we pulled into our driveway at home, we heard the sound of people singing, growing louder as we drew closer to the house.
Mum opened the front door, walking through the living room to the set of sliding glass doors that led to the garden. There were fifteen, maybe twenty, women kneeling on the grass alongside the swimming pool. Gogo was at the head of the group, leading a ceremony of sorts.
‘And bless him, Father, send your angels down for this man. He is a good man. He is a good man. Bless him, Father.’
‘Bless him, Father,’ came the echo from the women on the grass.
Mum crossed over to the group, her heels making clunky sounds as they hit the concrete around the pool until they squished into the freshly mown grass.
‘Hello, madam,’ Gogo greeted my mother, and the women in front of her did the same in unison, as
though it were a mere continuation of her sermon.
‘Hi, hi,’ Mum said first to Gogo, then to the group of strangers as she shot them a cursory glance.
‘We are praying for Mr Reynolds to have good health again. The more prayers, the more of a chance he will get better.’
‘Oh. Oh wow. Thank you, Gogo,’ Mum said, before turning to the women. ‘Thank you, thank you very much. Tatenda. This will mean so much to him.’
‘Of course, madam.’
‘Can I get you anything? Some tea, some coffee, water?’
The women shook their heads, seemingly content to be kneeling outside on a hot day with nothing but their faith.
‘Well, thank you. Thanks again,’ Mum said, and she clapped her hands together and did a soft bob down, as is the Shona custom to show respect.
‘Can you believe that,’ Mum said, as she reached me and shimmied one foot out of her heels, then lifted her other leg to remove the other shoe by hand. ‘Gogo must’ve rounded up all these women, just to come and pray for Grandpa. They don’t even know him. How beautiful.’
25
I was back at dad’s house for the first time since his outburst at the wedding. We sat on the upstairs couch together, Dad reading his newspaper while I read my book. We didn’t speak much but I enjoyed being in his company nonetheless and hearing the soft, familiar rustle as he turned the page and smoothed out the creases with his hands.
When the doorbell rang, my heart sank. I thought it might be one of Dad’s female friends and I would be left upstairs alone, out of both his sight and mind, increasing the volume of the television to drown out the sound of high-pitched giggles.
I followed Dad down the stairs and along the passage to the front entrance, but Maria had beaten us to the door. To my surprise, when she opened it, a stocky black man was standing at the stoop. I didn’t know that Dad had any black friends.
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