by Andrea Eames
The war was back. No one said it, but everyone knew it. People dug out their old guns. Mum went to bed with a migraine. My heart was scudding on quick waves of blood, and I heard it like a drumbeat in my ears, always. I started to say ‘Pardon?’ every time someone spoke to me, because I could hardly hear them over the drums. The same drums that announced the start of the ZBC news.
This was the second farmer to be killed. And, as if something were hungry for more blood, the killings kept on coming.
Steve watched the news over dinner. Even after he swallowed a mouthful, his teeth kept grinding. We sat in silence, watching Mugabe gesticulate with chopping motions of his hands. There was spittle at the corner of his mouth.
‘I’ll burn the house to the ground myself rather than let those filthy Kaffirs get their hands on it,’ said Steve suddenly. He got up and took his plate to the kitchen.
There were more and more white farmers on the news these days. They all looked the same: so easy to caricature. The dreadful cartoons in the newspaper showed them as comical figures, the Big Baases who owned the land.
I started having nightmares about War Vets invading the farm and destroying our house. We had heard stories of what they did inside the farmers’ homesteads. I imagined them smashing our ornaments, burning the family pictures.
Auntie Mary and Uncle Pieter called every night. Mum held the receiver as if she were gripping Auntie Mary’s hand.
‘They made us invite them in for a drink the other night,’ said Uncle Pieter. ‘I had to go and buy six crates of beer. And they made Mary cook them dinner.’
‘What do you make for thirty War Veterans?’ said Mary when Pieter gave her the phone. ‘It’s not in any etiquette books, is it?’ She laughed. And she laughed again when Mum asked how she was. ‘Ja, I’m okay. We’ve got the dogs if they get too cheeky.’
Mum did not remind her of what the War Vets did to dogs. We had seen the pictures of pets hung on chicken wire fences, dogs shot and crumpled in farmhouse driveways.
Sean seemed to feel personally affronted by the attacks. He folded in on himself, grew shorter. One evening he packed a rucksack and disappeared into the Bush, just took off.
‘That boy behaves like a bluddy idiot sometimes,’ said Mr Cooper. There was a raw edge of worry to his voice. ‘I told him he needs to just put up and shut up. We’ll be fine. I can’t have my workers seeing him panic like this, it won’t make anything better.’
‘Bluddy stupid thing to do,’ said Steve. But I could understand it. There were things that would hurt you in the Bush – insects and snakes and animals and tokoloshes and ghosts – but they would not try and justify the blood with laws and long speeches.
Sean returned the next day. Grimmer and older in the face, he stopped by to apologise for worrying us.
‘That’s fine,’ said Mum. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Ja, thank you, I’m fine.’
I tried to talk to him. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Was just being a sissy. I’ve got my act together now.’
‘You weren’t being a sissy,’ I said. ‘We’re all scared.’
‘Ja, well,’ he said. ‘I’m not any more.’
We went for a walk, leaving the motorbike behind for once. Sean lit a cigarette, and offered me one too.
‘No, thanks.’
‘Gone off them, eh?’ He tapped some ash on to the ground. ‘So what are you guys going to do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Are you staying here?’
I shrugged.
Sean straightened up and took the cigarette from his mouth. ‘Did you hear something?’
‘Like what?’
‘Shut up.’
I heard voices around the bend of the road, and the crunch of footsteps.
‘There’s nothing to worry about.’ Steve’s voice.
‘Don’t be bluddy stupid, man.’ Mr Cooper.
‘Shee-yit.’ Sean stubbed out his cigarette. ‘He’ll kill me if he sees me smoking.’
‘He doesn’t know?’
‘What do you think? Come on.’
He grabbed my hand with his sweaty one, and pulled me over the fence and down among the tobacco plants.
‘Have they seen us?’
‘Shush.’ Sean was listening. His hair had taken on a greenish tinge from the reflected light of the leaves.
I shifted position and bumped a plant, setting it shaking.
‘Stay still.’
We breathed shallowly, trying to take up as little space in the world as possible.
‘Do you think they’ll hear us?’ I whispered.
‘Well they bluddy will now, won’t they? Shut up.’
‘You shut up, you’re doing it too.’
Our shoulders were close together, but self-consciously not touching. I could smell the intimate, nicotine-stained scent of his skin.
‘Just be quiet.’
On the road, the voices grew louder again.
‘They’re coming,’ I said.
‘Did I not just tell you to shut up?’
‘You need to take Elise out of the country,’ we heard Mr Cooper saying. ‘It’s not safe here.’
‘Ja, well,’ said Steve. ‘We’ll see. We’re not making any decisions yet.’
‘Listen, man.’ The footsteps stopped. ‘I’m serious. I can feel it coming. It’s not going to be pretty.’
‘You don’t think they’d invade Cooper Farms?’
‘It’s hard to tell. I don’t think things are going to get better, put it that way. You need to get Elise out of here.’
‘That’s my decision to make.’
‘No, it’s not. You have a kid, it’s your responsibility to go.’
‘What the yell are you talking about? You have a kid!’
‘Sean is different.’
‘How?’
‘He has to run this farm one day. He has to know what it’s like. I don’t want him to go running when there’s trouble. You need to stand and fight.’
‘And why should Elise be any different?’
‘For one thing, she’s a girl. For another, there’s no need for you to stay.’
‘Don’t you bluddy tell me what to do with my stepdaughter!’ said Steve.
There was a short silence. Steve coughed. ‘Look, Mark, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’
I could not hear Mr Cooper’s reply. The voices moved out of earshot again. Sean and I sat in the cool, waxy shade of the tobacco leaves.
‘I guess you might be going after all,’ he said.
The fabric between the old world and the new one started to tear. Shapes moved in the night, a whisper of a darker black. Older gods than ours had woken up, and they lived by older rules. Mercy was not one of them. Nor was forgiveness, nor happy worship songs, nor ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’. As we crowded around the BBCWorld Service listening to the stories of violence and murder, I could feel the night pressing on the windows of the house like black hands cupped over ears.
We were under attack from the world around us, too. Army worm infested our garden. Steve and Tatenda launched a counter-attack with foul-smelling chemicals that burned our grass to a peroxide blond. The army worms, which were really caterpillars, marched on tiny legs with their blind, blunt faces pointing towards our house. I did not walk on the grass those days.
I caught bilharzia from swimming in the waterhole. We used to study the lifecycle of the parasite at school, but I could not remember anything about it except that it was carried by snails and entered your body through the skin – which was disgusting. The doctor gave me a fat pill almost too big to swallow, and told me to stay in bed after I had taken it.
‘Why?’
‘Because it will upset your balance.’
When I got home and swallowed the pill, I lay back carefully on the pillow and waited for it to take effect. Then I realised I needed to go to the bathroom. I swung my feet on to the floor, and the ceiling seemed to wheel aro
und under me while the floor shot up to where the ceiling used to be. Gravity was not working. Strangely, this was a relief; all the other laws had failed, so why should physics be any different? Finally, the world looked the way it felt – upside down and spinning.
There were more crows than usual, too. They sat on the branches of the pecan and macadamia trees, laughing at us and throwing empty shells. Steve decided to try shooting a crow and hanging it from a branch, as Mr Cooper did.
He did not trust Tatenda with the pellet gun.
‘Sure you can manage it?’ said Mum.
‘Of course I can bluddy manage it,’ said Steve. ‘I was in the army, wasn’t I?’
I went outside with him. Tatenda was there too, grinning. This was the most exciting thing to happen to him all day.
The crows snickered down at us. They cocked their heads on one side and eyeballed Steve.
‘Right,’ said Steve, and raised the gun to his shoulder. There was a commotion among the crows. They knew about guns. They scrambled to take off, tripping over each other, but before they could escape Steve fired once, twice into the crowd, and a bird fell.
‘Got the bastard,’ said Steve, but when the bird hit the ground it got to its feet and started staggering towards us.
‘Shit.’ Steve lowered the gun.
‘It’s not dead,’ I said.
Steve gave me a look. ‘I can see that. We’ll have to shoot it again.’
The bird was turning in a circle around its injured wing and flapping with the other, trying to get off the ground.
‘I can’t hit it while it’s moving,’ said Steve. ‘Hold it still.’
I hesitated.
‘We have to put the bluddy thing out of its misery.’
I did not want to touch it. Its black eye revolved in its head as it looked for a way out. Its beak clicked.
‘Hold the bluddy thing still!’
I grabbed the crow’s wings and held them closed. It snapped its beak at me and rolled its eyes.
‘Right,’ said Steve, and rested the gun right against its head. He pulled the trigger. The crow’s brains fell out of the back of its head, looking like chewed gum.
‘Good stuff.’ Steve picked it up by one foot. ‘Tatenda, grab the ladder. We’ll string the thing up.’
Tatenda did not bother with the ladder, just shimmied up the tree with the agility of a vervet monkey. He tied the crow’s feet to one of the higher branches. ‘Is that good, Baas?’
‘Ja, good.’
The crow revolved slowly. The sun reflected off its dead eye.
‘Kill one and the rest will go away,’ said Steve.
The crow cast a pall over the garden. All I could see from the back doorstep was its dead, slowly spinning body. It rotated one way, then, when the string had wound itself too tightly, it started to spin the other way. It was hypnotic.
When I looked out into the night, I did not see the bright fingernail of moon or the pale shapes of moths. Instead, I looked for shadows where something might be hiding, the glint of eyes that did not belong to any animal. We were besieged. We had always locked every door and had burglar bars on every window, but now there was no sense of safety, even when we were barricaded indoors.
I lay awake for an hour every night listening for sounds outside. Sometimes I listened so intently that I forgot to breathe, and my chest surged up with a laboured puff of air, startling me out of my trance. I knew Mum and Steve were awake too, in their bedroom. I could not hear anything, but the silence from their room was a listening silence, a watchful silence.
We were woken up at nearly midnight by the phone. It rang and rang in the darkness while we swam up from our dreams and back into the quiet house. I heard Mum answer. A light was switched on; I could see the band of yellow under my door. When people started moving about and I heard the hiss of the kettle, I climbed out of bed and walked down to the kitchen.
‘What are you doing up?’ said Steve.
‘I heard the phone.’
‘Oh.’
Mum was pale and red-eyed. ‘That was Auntie Mary,’ she said. ‘They’re about half an hour away.’
‘From here?’
‘Ja.’
‘But it’s the middle of the night.’
‘They had to leave the farm,’ said Steve.
‘Why?’
Mum and Steve looked at each other through the steam from the teapot. ‘Just had to,’ said Steve.
‘Do you want some tea?’ said Mum.
She poured me a cup. I sat down. Steve pulled his little radio over to him and started fiddling with the dials to tune it. Whistle, crackle, hiss, a voice, then a snatch of sunshiny trumpet music that could be from South America. Steve loved to tune the radio, and he was fussy about getting the perfect sound. The static scraped over my nerves and the voices, when they came, sounded startling.
The light from the kitchen window shone into the garden, and I could see the dead crow revolving slowly in its dull gleam.
Chapter Twenty-two
They piled into the house. My aunt and uncle looked thin and tired, older and smaller than I remembered. My cousin was fuzzy around the edges and half-asleep. They carried two bags each, and all the bags were bulging.
Mum had thrown blankets and pillows on the sofas in the lounge. Soon it was awash with people and luggage. There were awkward hellos and hugs.
Hennie was disconcertingly large and masculine. Equally disconcertingly, he reminded me of Sean. His voice had broken. The thin, vulnerable curve of his neck that I remembered so well, bent before me as we rode the farm pony, had become thick and strong, studded with freckles.
‘Hi Elise.’ His voice walked a tentative line between low and high. He shook my hand, an oddly formal gesture.
‘Hi, Hennie.’ It was so strange to see him again. Especially then, when circumstances were too serious to allow us to laugh and swap stories. ‘How is everything going?’ I said.
‘All right,’ he said.
‘I’ll make some more tea,’ said Mum, and vanished. She popped her head around the door to add, ‘Better call Mum and Dad.’
‘Ja.’ My aunt took the phone out of the lounge, smiling apologetically at us all.
My uncle leaned his elbows on his knees.
‘So,’ said Steve. ‘What time is your flight tomorrow?’ He glanced at the clock. ‘Today.’
‘Five,’ said my uncle.
‘Early.’
‘You still okay to give us a lift?’
‘Ja. Is there going to be any trouble with . . . ?’
‘No, I don’t think so. We’re saying we’re going on holiday. They wouldn’t have had time to . . .’
‘Ja.’
‘What happened?’ I asked.
My uncle looked at my cousin, then me. ‘We thought it would be a good time to go visit Granny and Grandpa for a while,’ he said.
I supposed that in his head Hennie and I were still barefoot, grubby piccanins wandering around the farm.
‘The farm was invaded,’ said Hennie in a flat voice. ‘They said they were going to kill us unless we left.’
‘Hennie!’ My uncle tried to silence him.
‘What? Why shouldn’t I say?’
‘Don’t talk to me like that, domkop.’ Uncle Pieter clapped him across the ear.
He turned to me. ‘They wouldn’t have killed us, hey, but I thought it was better safe than sorry.’
Better safe than sorry – a good enough reason to leave your home, your livelihood and all the possessions you had worked for? Yes, I thought.
Steve and Uncle Pieter started talking in murmurs about the trip. I was left with my cousin, but I did not know what to say.
‘We had to leave the dogs behind,’ Hennie whispered. ‘And all the horses.’
‘I know.’
‘We gave them to a friend. We didn’t just leave them.’ His face was fierce.
‘I know.’
We had all heard the stories of dogs and cats left to forage on farms, or du
mped out of car doors on the airport road.
Soon, Hennie fell asleep. He was exhausted. Mum came through with a tray of tea and toast spread with butter and anchovy paste, the meal she always made for me when I was sick. When she had poured the tea and sat down, and we were all clutching hot cups, the real business began.
My aunt came back with the phone and sat down. ‘They’re going to pick us up from the airport,’ she said to Uncle Pieter.
‘Lekker.’
There was a silence, and then ‘Those bloody Kaffirs,’ she said.
‘Ja.’ My uncle nodded slowly. They did not say anything more. We all knew that this was how things worked in Zimbabwe. You had to be strong, you had to shrug these things off and Make a Plan.
Steve and my uncle sat together, unconsciously mirroring each other’s bowed heads and clenched knuckles, chins resting on fists.
I thought of the farm – the stretches of white road lined with dead flowers, the blue gum trees, the horses with their dust-powdered coats, the endless ear-splitting racket of the chickens. I did not know what the War Vets would do to it, but I imagined them rummaging through the closets and drawers, using every pan in the kitchen, running themselves baths and using all of Auntie Mary’s expensive bath salts. I knew this was ridiculous.
‘What about the workers?’ said Steve.
‘Ja, well, they tried,’ said Uncle Pieter. ‘That poor bugger Phineas got himself beaten up for his trouble.’
‘What will they do?’
‘Hell, I don’t know, hey,’ said Uncle Pieter. ‘Some of them might stay on, but, shit, if they break it up and use it all for growing six mealies each, there’ll be no work.’
‘Hapana basa,’ said Steve. The men laughed a little.
My uncle was rooted in the soil like a baobab tree. There was dirt under his fingernails that no amount of scrubbing would clean, and every crease in his palms was a thin brown line. His skin had been burnt by forty African summers to the consistency of horse-hide. He spoke Shona more readily than he spoke English, which is why his words came out in short, sharp bursts, as if he had to think before each one.
‘Ja, well,’ said my uncle again. I could see him already looking ahead to the next step. There was always a next step.
‘Auntie Mary,’ I said, ‘what really happened to the dogs?’