by Gaile Parkin
The praying mantis in his hand moved slightly, beginning to sway forward and back in a similar sort of way to a chameleon. Chameleons would extend a hand and move forward as if to take the next step, then sway back again, hesitating. That was what made them so slow: thinking too much about every step before taking it. They were such cautious creatures, fearfully swivelling their eyes in every possible direction all at once, and constantly changing their camouflage to keep themselves safe by not looking different.
Baba had said that Americans were looking in every direction at once now, just like a chameleon – one eye looking to the front and the left at the exact same time as the other eye was looking to the back and to the right – only they were probably going to move as fast as a snake rather than being slow like a chameleon. Baba didn’t really manage to talk much sense about animals, but it was nice that he tried.
Mama had made a cake once that looked like the flag of America. Benedict thought about how a chameleon would look if it sat on that flag and tried to change its camouflage so that it looked the same. Eh! Its body would have long stripes of red and white, like a thick squeeze of toothpaste, while its head would be blue with lovely white stars.
There were big lizards with blue heads in Swaziland, Benedict had seen them. Their body was yellow and orange and their head was blue. If something dangerous came, they just hid behind a tree, they couldn’t change their colour like a chameleon to make themselves look like they weren’t there.
Praying mantises had their own kind of camouflage, not the chameleon kind that could change. No, a praying mantis had to stay in one place to be safe. The green one in his hand was safe amongst leaves and grasses, but there were other kinds, ones that looked just like the bark of a tree, and others with lovely colours and shapes that made them look exactly the same as a flower’s petals.
People said mantises looked like they were praying, holding their big front legs up in front of them the way people did when they were talking to God. But Benedict wasn’t sure. To him they looked more like boxers waiting to land a punch. They ate other insects, so maybe they were doing both: attacking something then saying grace; fighting and praying.
Some people also said that a praying mantis was a god, the god of the San people who lived in other parts of southern Africa. The San people used to be called Bushmen, but Baba said that wasn’t correct any more on account of politics. Now their name was San. It made sense to Benedict that people who hunted other animals for food would worship an insect god that killed other insects.
Thinking of killing other insects, his mind came back to Vusi’s story about the boys lighting a fire around the scorpion, trying to make it kill itself, hoping to see it stab itself in the back. Imagine! It was normal for animals to kill other animals, but not to kill themselves. Okay, sometimes grasshoppers drowned themselves, but that was only on account of worms getting into their brains and making them do it. It wasn’t right for animals to make life so bad and so frightening for other animals that they rather suicided themselves.
Benedict wanted to believe what Auntie Rachel had said about scorpions killing themselves, that it was just a made-up story, just pretend. But part of him believed it had to be real, and that made him feel uncomfortable because it made him think of Nomsa, which he tried not to do.
He hadn’t spoken to Nomsa since that night. Auntie Rachel wasn’t letting her go back to school before Mr Magagula had fired Mr Thwala or at least suspended him. Benedict didn’t understand why, except that Nomsa hated him. Okay, he had frightened Benedict and his brothers, but it turned out that he wasn’t such a bad man, really: he had been helping Nomsa with pocket money. But thinking about Nomsa made him feel like the inside of his head had stumbled into a thorn bush.
Quickly, he took his mind back to thinking about camouflage.
Maybe, once upon a time, the Patels had been good at camouflage. They hadn’t stood out from any other Swazi. But what Mr Patel had made Sandeep do had made people notice them, the kind of people who didn’t want to be noticed themselves. And now they were in trouble. It was too late for Mr Patel to hide behind a tree like a blue-headed lizard, so he may as well go out and attack the food ladies who might be selling drugs for the people who were attacking him. It really wasn’t a peaceful way to live.
The mantis flew off Benedict’s hand when Krishna started barking on the far side of the dam. He had been wanting to see Petros – who was very, very good at camouflage – to try to find out more about his confused story about his treasure. Benedict wasn’t sure if he’d got it right, but it seemed that one of Petros’s ancestors had come to Swaziland from Mozambique with the Portuguese, who were looking for slaves. They were going to buy the slaves with gold from India, though why a Portuguese somebody would have an Indian somebody’s gold, Benedict didn’t know. Then Petros’s ancestor stole some of the gold and buried it. Petros had once mentioned a map, so maybe his ancestor drew a map to help him to find the gold again. But something must have gone wrong, and an English somebody found the gold many years later when they were digging for the railway.
Eh! Mr Quartermain was an English somebody! Was it him? Benedict thought about what Auntie Rachel had said about Mr Quartermain’s story. Was there a railway? He wasn’t sure.
Anyway, Petros’s grandfather came from Mozambique to steal the gold away from the English somebody, but when he was trying to get back home with his wife and his baby, a lion ate him. The baby grew up to be Petros’s mother, and now the gold was with Petros.
Maybe that was the story, but Benedict wasn’t sure. Maybe it was really a story about planting funny-smelling tobacco and an English somebody digging up the plantation to build a railway. Maybe what Petros had was seeds for growing Swazi Gold, like the seeds for growing giant beans in the story about Jack. Or maybe he was talking nonsense, just like everybody said. Maybe Petros really wasn’t right in his head. Because if he really did have gold, and if the gold was real and not just pretend, why did he work here on the hill with cows, without any shoes or any nice clothes? And why wasn’t he getting enough to eat?
Benedict wished he could ask Mama for some cake for Petros, but he couldn’t, on account of the Tungaraza children not being supposed to talk to him. He thought that Petros might be somebody he could talk to about Josephine. Maybe he was somebody who would understand what Benedict meant without needing to understand all his words, and that might help Benedict to work out for himself exactly what it was that he did mean.
Getting a new sister meant so many things, but he hadn’t yet worked out exactly what. Daniel and Moses didn’t seem at all concerned about it, though Benedict knew they would have been excited to get another brother, especially one who knew how to kick a ball. Grace and Faith were excited, simply expecting Josephine to be just like Innocence. None of his siblings seemed to feel the way he did, like he was suddenly in the middle of a minefield with a loud boom echoing in his ears, unsure where to put his foot down next.
Krishna’s bark came again from the far side of the dam. There were days when the cows went to one of the other fields, either beyond the milking shed or down near the chickens, and there were days when somebody else was with them. But with his dog here, Petros wasn’t far away.
Maybe he was somewhere smoking one of his funny cigarettes. Uncle Enock had said it was dagga, which Benedict knew from school was bad on account of it being drugs. It wasn’t nice that Petros had drugs, but maybe when you didn’t have parents or a teacher to tell you no, you could easily do wrong things. You could do wrong things even if you did have parents and a teacher. Look at Sandeep Patel. Anyway, dagga wasn’t un-Swazi: it grew here, it was called Swazi Gold. But the people standing across the road from Mr Patel’s had said that the drug-sellers were un-Swazi. Maybe the dagga they sold was imported from somewhere outside Swaziland.
As he waited for Petros to appear, he glanced at the narrow bridge leading to the pump in the dam’s centre. He was sure that Petros felt big enough and brave enough to walk a
long it. He wondered if he ever had. On the whole, he thought probably not. Petros would have no need to try, and no need to prove that he could. Besides, he wouldn’t feel comfortable out in the open like that. No. Petros was at home on the edge of things, where he wasn’t noticed. It was a safer place to be, really, and perhaps the Patels should have stayed there.
Benedict waited a long time for Petros, and he began to lose patience, wanting to go down to the house to check on the ladies Mama was training. He didn’t want just to sleep through getting his percentage the way Zodwa’s brother-in-law did, he wanted to know what was happening. When he finally stood up and called to Krishna, the dog didn’t come and Petros didn’t suddenly make it clear that he had been there, unseen, all the time. Benedict gave up waiting.
But by that time, Zodwa had already come to fetch the ladies, and Mama was working on a cake of her own, one she had decided to make even though nobody had ordered it. It wasn’t a beautiful cake, but it was important to Mama. She had read in the Times of Swaziland that the British High Commission was giving a special gift to the Swazi police, a machine that could destroy all the illegal rifles and guns that were in the kingdom. In the whole of Africa there was only one other machine like that, in Kenya, Tanzania’s neighbour.
Mama was making the cake as a thank-you gift for the British High Commissioner. It was going to look exactly like an AK-47, and when it was complete she was going to cut it into three pieces, which she was going to move apart on the board to show that this gun would never again take the life of any mother’s child. Benedict knew that it was really a cake about the gun that took the life of Mama’s own child, Benedict’s first baba. But he never said.
Waiting in the kitchen for the milk to boil for their tea, he read through the newspaper article lying on the counter, that was Titi’s English homework from Auntie Rachel. She always chose something for Titi to read that they could talk about in English afterwards, after Auntie Rachel had helped her with any difficult words. This article was about the king buying twenty-five new luxury Chevrolets for himself; it said how much they cost and also mentioned about the king wanting to buy a private jet.
Benedict knew that Auntie Rachel would say that maybe it would be better to spend the money on Swazis who were sick or hungry, and he also knew that Titi would argue that it must be very nice to sit in a car that was completely new, or to fly in any kind of aeroplane at all.
He wondered what Titi was saying to Henry right now. When Henry had come for her at teatime, he had seemed nervous. He must have been anxious to hear Titi’s answer, and it can’t have helped that Mama and her cake students hadn’t let him leave with Titi until he had contributed to the money they were collecting for the families of America’s late.
Benedict crossed his fingers, hoping that Titi wouldn’t say yes and trigger another loud boom in his life.
The thunder began while Benedict and Mama were drinking their tea, and the other Tungaraza children ran home from the other house between large drops from very black clouds. They had barely managed to close all the windows when the rain began battering the tin roof and lightning flooded the sky. Benedict knew from when Baba had helped him with his English grammar practice of making sentences with words ending in –est, meaning most, that Swaziland had one of the highest incidences of electrical storm activity in the whole entire world. It also had the world’s oldest mine, though that mine had been for iron, not gold.
When the power went off, Moses and Daniel offered to help Mama and the girls with cooking supper on Mama’s gas oven, but only because there was no TV to watch and the storm was so big that it frightened them. Benedict stood staring out through the glass of the sliding door, praying that Baba and Titi would both make it home safely, and that anybody who didn’t have a home or whose home was made of mud or grass would be okay. With every stab of lightning, he prayed that nobody was late because of it, and as the wind tore at the trees, he prayed that it wasn’t sending any more creatures to Heaven, whether it was Monkey Heaven, Bird Heaven or any other Heaven that Uncle Enock could imagine.
It was Uncle Enock who got home first. Benedict saw the lights disappearing into the garage and then, lit up by a flash of lightning, a dark, huddled form ran towards the other house and dodged around Mrs Levine’s Golf to get to the front door. At last another pair of lights swung into the garage. Was it Baba or Henry? Benedict couldn’t tell. Mama brought a lit candle in from the kitchen and used it to light some more for the dining table.
‘Somebody’s here, Mama. In the garage.’
‘Who?’ Mama joined him at the glass door.
Benedict shrugged. ‘Should I go with the umbrella?’
‘No, no, they’ll come when the rain eases. The food will still take time.’
But when the food was at last ready the rain was still pounding, and, afraid that Baba or Titi might spend the whole night in the garage waiting for it to ease, Mama let Benedict go. The steps were slippery, water gushed over each of his bare feet in its haste to get down the hill, and wind pushed the umbrella this way and that so that he needed both hands to hold on to it and battled to keep the torch focused on the way ahead.
When at last he managed to get into the shelter of the garage and something dark and wet leapt at him, he almost screamed like one of his sisters! Eh! He dropped the torch. It went out.
‘Baba?’
Nothing. The rain on the tin roof was so loud!
‘Henry?’
Trying to push whatever it was away, he stumbled in the total darkness into the back of the vehicle, banging his elbow hard against it. One of its doors swung open, switching on the light inside it. He could see a figure climbing out as something wet slapped his face.
‘Baba?’
‘Benedict? Is that you?’
‘Baba!’ He could see now what was jumping up against him and licking him. ‘Krishna!’
‘What?’
‘It’s a dog, Baba. I brought the torch, but I dropped it.’
‘Wait. Titi, bring the torch from the cubbyhole.’
With the help of that torch they found the other one, and with a bit of shaking and fiddling Baba got it to work again. Benedict shone it around the garage, but saw no sign of Petros.
Although the umbrella was large, there was no way three people were going to fit under it. Titi didn’t want to be left alone with a dog, so she went first with Baba and then came back for Benedict. Krishna didn’t try to follow them up to the house, which was a good thing: Mama would never have let her in, and at least she was out of the rain in the garage. Besides, Petros must be sheltering somewhere nearby.
The noise of the rain on the umbrella made it impossible for Benedict to ask what had happened with Henry and why Baba and Titi were together. He had to wait until they were all dry and seated round the candle-lit table for supper.
Then Titi told them that she had said no.
Benedict felt so relieved!
But he couldn’t help feeling sad for Titi, and also for Henry, whose company he had always enjoyed.
‘I thought I could do it if we all stayed together in one house, I thought I could be friends with his other wife. But no. He was going to put me in my own house. Eh! When he was with her, I was going to be alone. If he wasn’t with me to show everybody that I was a Mrs Vilakati, I was going to be just a shangaan, a kwerekwere.’
Everybody at the table said how glad they were that she wasn’t going to leave them, and she smiled bravely. But Benedict could see that there was something more that she wasn’t saying.
‘What did Henry say?’ he asked her.
Titi sniffed. ‘He...’ Tears began to flow, and Mama handed her a tissue from inside her T-shirt.
‘He told her he didn’t have to accept that answer.’ Baba had already heard the story. ‘He threatened to smear her with red ochre.’
‘Eh!’ said Mama, and when she explained to the children what that meant, they all said the same. If a man smeared red ochre on a lady, it meant that she w
as his wife. He didn’t have to ask, and there was nothing she could do or say. It was an old Swazi custom.
‘Imagine!’ said Benedict.
‘Surely he was joking, Titi?’ It was Mama who asked. ‘Smearing with red ochre is also part of a traditional wedding, where both parties are willing and the man’s family has paid cows to the woman’s family. Was he not talking about that?’
‘I don’t think so, Auntie. I told him no, he couldn’t make me his wife by smearing me, I’m not a Swazi. He told me no, a kwerekwere has even less rights than a Swazi lady. He was laughing, but eh, I was afraid.’
‘She took a taxi to my office,’ said Baba. ‘Left him sitting there at Quick Impact.’
‘I didn’t want to go in the car with him.’
‘He could have taken her anywhere, Angel!’
‘I can’t believe he would do anything bad, Pius! That is not the Henry I know!’
It wasn’t the Henry Benedict knew either, but maybe any man could behave badly when it came to girls. Look how badly he had behaved himself when people had said that Nomsa was his girlfriend. And look – though he really didn’t want to look – look how his own first baba had behaved. When people had looked at his first baba, they had seen a man with one family, a man with a wife and three children. But that had been just a story, just pretend.
Benedict knew from Uncle Enock that almost no animals stayed together in one pair their whole entire lives, and the bird book said most birds stayed in one pair for just one season, just long enough to raise their babies. But when it came to other animals, pairs didn’t seem to matter very much. People were supposed to be different, though. But maybe that was just a story. Although, really, how could it be just a story? Mama and Baba had been in a pair for ever. It was all very confusing, and maybe you had to be big to understand it fully.