The Cry of the Go-Away Bird

by Andrea Eames

  ‘No you bluddy can’t.’

  But I had opened the door already and climbed out. Mum reached towards me with a whispered scream – ‘Elise!’ – and her face seemed to collapse in on itself. I had never seen her so frightened.

  I climbed the wire and lifted my legs carefully over the barbed wire at the top. My jeans were wet with urine, but there was no time to feel embarrassed. I jumped down into the perfectly mowed, squeaky clean grass and ran to the door of the shed. It opened with a clang, loud enough to make my stomach churn.

  At first I thought I had made a terrible mistake. The shed looked empty.

  ‘Sean?’ I whispered, and the echo gave it back to me. I could see nothing at first, but my vision adjusted and I thought I could make out a shape in the corner.

  ‘Sean?’

  I heard a breath, a tiny one, hardly enough to fill anyone’s lungs. I moved closer and saw a brief shine of yellow hair. He was sitting with his knees drawn right up and his head resting on them. The bones on the back of his neck stood out like knuckles on a clenched fist.

  I touched him on the arm. ‘Sean, we’ve got the car. We need to go.’

  He looked up. He hardly seemed to understand what I was saying.

  ‘Come on.’ I hauled him up by the elbow and led him outside. In the sun I saw that he had a cut on his head and a sprinkling of blood decorated the shoulders of his white T-shirt like colourful dandruff.

  Mum still had the engine running. ‘Kurumidzai!’ she said. ‘Come on!’

  Sean climbed over the fence as if he were sleepwalking. We could hear shouts and the sound of drums coming from the other side of the farmstead.

  ‘Get in, get in,’ Mum said over and over. I pushed Sean into the back seat and pulled a seat belt across him. Mum gave me a clumsy, one-armed hug, her wet cheek against mine, and then accelerated again with a lurch. I could hardly see out of the windscreen. Mum hummed under her breath, a mad, high-pitched tune that I did not recognise.

  It did not feel like the car was moving. It felt like one of those dreams where you are running away from a monster and your legs do not work. I saw the speedometer, though, and we were driving dangerously fast.

  When we left the farm gates Mum swerved off the road on to the long grass of the verge.

  We clung to each other. Her cheek felt cold against my face. I did not know how long we stayed there, but we were both shivering and our teeth were chattering as if we were freezing, although the sun beat down and turned the car into an oven.

  ‘Why were you saying the Lord’s prayer?’ Mum asked me afterwards. I didn’t even realise I had been saying it. I asked her why she had been humming.

  ‘I was humming?’

  My legs were red and chapped from urine. The car stank. In the back, Sean was white and silent.

  And finally, we had found a reason to leave with which not even Steve could argue.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Shumba was dead, that big floppy Labrador that I took for walks around the farm. Mum tried to hide the pictures in the paper from me, but I knew that his throat was matted with dark liquid and gaping with a pink, vulnerable hole. I remembered the snake we killed all those years ago in Chinhoyi.

  And Mr Cooper was dead.

  I found these pictures, too. His head had been split open like the mangoes I used to eat naked in the bath, in case I got their sticky juice on my clothes. Mum would cut them in half for me so they were open like wet mouths, and I would suck them and pick their fibres out of my teeth. His head looked just like that, as if a second slobbering mouth was smiling out of his forehead. The blood ran down between his eyes and mingled with the fine red dust that traced the lines on his face. He still wore a faint smile. It was the expression he used to have when he was joking with the workers.

  He tapped on the window at night. The wound in his head was black with blood, but his skin was white-green, pale and translucent. There was a faint smile on his face.

  He smelled of wet earth after the rains. Ngozi. Ghosts of the wrongfully killed, looking for revenge.

  ‘You have the wrong person,’ I said to Mr Cooper’s ghost. ‘We didn’t do it. Go and haunt the War Vets.’

  He smiled and said something in Shona that I did not understand.

  ‘Go and haunt Sean,’ I said. ‘He’s your son. If you want someone to avenge your death, he’s the one to do it.’

  The wound in his forehead gaped wider.

  ‘Why us?’ I asked, but I knew I was not going to get an answer.

  Sean stayed with us for a few days. He did not talk, but drifted around the hotel touching the walls with one hand, as if he would lose his way if he did not hold on to something solid. He smelled of cigarette smoke all the time, but I did not see him smoking.

  ‘Thank you for having me,’ he said after a few days. He was very formal. ‘I think I’m going to go back now.’

  ‘Are you sure? You can stay here . . .’ said Mum.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, boy,’ said Steve. ‘Stay here.’

  ‘No.’ His fingers looked long and nervous as he fumbled with his cigarette. ‘I have to go back. Who else is going to run the farm?’

  ‘But the War Vets are still there.’ And the blood, and the memories.

  ‘There are still some farm managers who stayed on.’ There was a criticism in his tone.

  ‘We have to go.’

  ‘Ja, well.’

  ‘We do. We can’t stay now. And you should go, too.’

  Sean was scornful. ‘Go where, man? You can’t just switch this place off. You’ll see.’

  ‘Sean, you can’t go back there.’

  ‘Not straight away, maybe,’ he said. ‘But someone has to rebuild it when this is all over.’

  His hands were shaking as he lit his cigarette. Mr Cooper’s ghost cupped the flame in both hands to keep it from blowing out.

  The murder was on the news that night. Seeing it on television made me watch through a different lens. Everything was distorted. Mr Cooper’s body was under a tarpaulin, and we could not see it. The thirsty earth had drunk the blood from where he fell and there was only the faintest brown stain on the sand.

  I started to shake when I heard the BBC news theme. An English accent told the story of the latest white farmer to be killed.

  I thought of all the people around the world who would hear this on the news. I imagined them waking up, yawning, padding through to the kitchen in slippers and pouring a cup of coffee, then switching on the television to see this news item. Another white farmer dead in Zimbabwe. Oh dear. They would watch it the way we watched news from some far-off place. With vague interest, maybe. With indifference. It made me angry to think that someone could watch the news footage, hear a voice saying, ‘Mark Cooper was killed on his Mashona-land farm this afternoon,’ and just switch it off as if that could make it go away. Or perhaps it would not be on the overseas news at all. Perhaps it would just be another death added to the growing number.

  At Mr Cooper’s funeral, the church smelled of incense and worn clothes. We sat in the very front pew, next to Sean, staring at the coffin. It was smaller than I thought it would be.

  People kept coming up to us and shaking Sean’s hand. Their voices were low and they used the same words. Bluddy Tragedy. Murder. Brave. Revenge.

  The first hymn started.

  The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want

  He makes me down to lie

  In pastures green . . .

  Mum gave my arm a pinch and I realised I had not been singing. I mouthed the words along with everybody else. Looking to the side, I saw Jonah, Mercy and the two girls. It gave me a shock to see Jonah. What was he doing here? He had joined the War Vets now, the same men who had killed Mr Cooper.

  They were in their best clothes – no funereal black. Mercy wore bright orange silk with a frilly skirt and the girls were in white and pink. Some of the congregation gave them disapproving looks, but I did not think it was strange, because I knew that this was what Sho
na people wore to church, and they were honouring Mr Cooper with the finest clothes they could find.

  Jonah did not sing. He stared at the Cross above the altar. At least, that was what I thought he was staring at until I saw the little opening shrouded in curtains, to the left of the Cross.

  We sat with a great rustle of skirts and creaking of shoes on the polished floor. We listened to people talk about Mr Cooper.

  When they had finished, the priest looked at Sean. There was an expectant pause, but Sean shook his head and sat, white about the mouth, while the congregation craned to see his face.

  The priest’s voice rose a little. It sounded as if he was building up to something. The curtains to the side of the altar twitched open and the coffin rumbled towards them on little tracks.

  ‘Mum,’ I whispered.

  ‘Mmm.’ She was staring straight ahead, her eyes red.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘He is being cremated.’

  ‘What?’

  The curtains opened. The coffin lumbered between them.

  I tried not to imagine what was happening, but I could not help it. I had seen meat cooking at a braai, and I imagined Mr Cooper scorching and curling up like a piece of boerewors. I could not believe we were sitting around nodding gravely and weeping dignified snot into our handkerchiefs while someone burned in front of us.

  The Shona believed that burning someone after they had died was wrong. It took a year for a spirit to leave the body and join its ancestors. This way, he was condemned to wander. We were sweeping him out of sight, like Saru swept dirt under the rug.

  Jonah got up and walked out. Mercy, looking worried and apologising as she brushed past people, followed him, bringing the girls.

  ‘Typical bluddy munts,’ whispered someone behind us.

  Jonah saw me before he left. He paused at the church door and looked back at me. His eyes were dark and unreadable. And then he left, walking out into the parched and sunlit world.

  That night I had dreams about Mr Cooper being trapped in his coffin. I saw him, wide-eyed in the dark, scratching at the lid with his white fingers as the curtains opened and the flames took him.

  I knew Jonah would have stopped it if he could.

  We saw Sean again before we left. Not in person, but on the television. A woman in a blue suit held a microphone up to his face and nodded as he talked. Her hair did not move, even when she shook her head.

  Sean looked thin, all elbows and knees. His hair stuck straight up, like a little boy’s. I turned the volume down gradually as he talked, until he was mouthing silently. He looked like a fish swimming in the heat haze, gulping for air. Behind him I saw a gaggle of farm workers. Three of them stared at the cameras, hands hanging uselessly at their sides. One of them smiled and pointed. Look Mum, I’m on television. He made me smile, too, through my tears.

  The week before we left, Mum and I both got dysentery. We threw up every few minutes, so often that sometimes we had only just finished flushing the toilet when the next spew of vomit rumbled up and out. We could hardly walk. We clung with both arms to the porcelain as if we were drowning in the bathroom tiles. As soon as we had finished vomiting we drank as much water as we could, so that there was something in our stomachs to throw up and it was not just foul-tasting nothing, shuddering out of us in humourless Ha-Ha-Has.

  It got so bad that Steve had to drive us both to the hospital. We took a bucket each in the car, the green ones that Saru used to soak the dirty cloths in. It was embarrassing, lugging our puke-filled buckets into the waiting room. I was still throwing up, even though there were people staring at me. I could not help it. The room filled with the humid smell of vomit, and the other people in the waiting room went green. The doctor hurried us through to his room before we made everyone sick.

  ‘Pull down your broekies,’ he told me. I was too weak and sick to care if he saw my bum or my privates, so I did as he told me. He jabbed a needle into my bum.

  ‘Move your legs like you’re riding a bicycle,’ he told me.

  The injection stopped the vomiting for a while, and when it came back it was not as violent.

  We spent that week lying in bed drinking water and eating boiled rice. I stared at the ceiling while Mr Cooper’s ghost tried to attract my attention from the bedside. He mouthed things at me that I could not hear, but I understood what he was trying to say. You do not build houses for them to be stolen and defiled. You do not raise children to die in the dust with an axe in their skull, unwanted, in a country that hates them.

  Mum asked me what jacket I was going to wear on the plane.

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Well, decide.’

  ‘Why do I have to decide now?’

  ‘You just do.’

  ‘Fine.’ I chose one, and Mum took it away. She returned with it the next day.

  ‘Here, put it on.’

  The jacket crackled as I put my arms into it.

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My jacket’s making a weird noise.’

  ‘Put it back on.’

  ‘But I’m hot.’

  ‘Put the bluddy thing back on.’

  ‘Why?’ I was suspicious. I crunched a corner of the fabric in my hand, and heard that rustling again.

  Mum sighed. ‘I sewed US dollars into our clothes last night.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘But we’re not allowed to take it out!’

  ‘Why else do you think I’d sew it into the lining?’ said Mum. ‘Look, we’ll be fine. Just act normally.’

  Normally. I could not remember how.

  My grandparents were excited. They called us every night to ask if we were still coming, if everything was ready, if we were sending boxes over yet. They did not talk about what happened on the farm, or what was happening on the other farms.

  There was no time to feel sad. We saved everything for the other side, when we would be miles away. We needed to get away from this place where there had been so much death.

  Steve went back to the farm, taking a gang of friends and a stack of rifles in case of trouble, and collected our things. When he got back, he drove us out to a remote well and threw in his weapons. His old bayonets, his rifles. They juddered along the sides and fell into the water with a muffled splash and clang.

  ‘Worth a fortune, some of them,’ said Steve, but we both knew that was not the point. We could not take the guns with us, and we certainly could not leave them in the house to be found.

  We said goodbye to Saru and Tatenda for the last time. Saru cried, not so much because she was going to miss us, but rather because it was hard to find a job when so many whites were fleeing. Mum promised to send some money. We gave them our address in England. We were lucky, to be able to leave. They were stuck here. I was relieved to be going, and guilty to be relieved.

  We sat on the verandah for our last dinner, cobbled together from the odds and ends that were left in the fridge. I heard ice clinking in the glasses and the whine of the evening’s first mosquito.

  ‘Won’t miss these buggers,’ said Steve, slapping his arm.

  Mum reached out and stroked Steve’s shoulder. Her eyes were red and puffy.

  A bird cried from one of the trees.

  ‘Listen,’ said Mum. ‘The loerie.’

  We heard the loerie every day. It was a nondescript grey thing, with a haunting, high-pitched shout. ‘Go ’way, go ’way!’

  I had known ever since I could remember that the loerie was the Go-Away Bird. It only just occurred to me that its song could be any number of things – it depended on how you listened.

  ‘Why is it called the Go-Away Bird?’ I asked Mum.

  ‘Because it says Go Away.’

  ‘But . . .’ I thought about it for a second, then remained silent. I thought it was significant that we had always heard it as ‘Go Away’, every day, all these years.

  Epilogue

  Madam Elise


  Come see Beauty. She is very sick.

  Rudo

  And an address. The letter arrived just a few days before we were due to leave.

  I had always meant to write to Beauty again. I kept her neatly written letters in a drawer. I saw wistfulness in them now, and I noticed the way the words sloped backwards like sad pairs of eyebrows. The shaky handwriting seemed brave, the exclamation marks little waving flags.

  Mum drove me to the village where Beauty was living.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right to go in?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘All right. I’ll be waiting here.’

  Beauty’s niece met me at the door of the hut. She was tall, with fierce, dark good looks. I could tell she did not like me.

  ‘Come inside.’

  I followed her into the semi-darkness of the hut and through to a tiny bedroom. There were no curtains on the windows; instead, a batik was pinned up to block the angry sun.

  Beauty was in bed. Thin, with skin like a pecan nut, brown and pockmarked.

  ‘Beauty.’

  She frowned and rolled her eyes. She did not seem to recognise the name.

  ‘Her name is Rufaro,’ said her niece. ‘Rufaro Bvumbe.’

  I never knew.

  ‘Rufaro.’ That seemed disrespectful, in a way Beauty never did. Or, at least, in a way I never thought it did. ‘MaiBvumbe.’

  She turned her head on the pillow. It was yellowed where her head had rested.

  ‘Do you remember me?’

  She licked her lips with a dry tongue.

  ‘It’s Elise,’ I said. ‘From the farm.’

  She smiled and held out her arms.

  Later, when we had cried and talked, Rudo gave me a bowl of sadza.

  ‘Thank you, but I am really fine.’

  She glared at me. ‘Please, eat.’

  She was insulted. Chastised, I dipped my fingers into the stodge and put it into my mouth. It was difficult to chew. Suddenly the whole idea of eating seemed impossible. I felt a moment of panic as the sadza lodged itself in my throat, but managed to force it down somehow.

  Beauty had a plate of sadza and relish as well. She exclaimed loudly at how delicious it was and how Rudo had become so good at cooking meat lately and making it tasty. She dipped the same piece of sadza in the relish over and over, nibbling at it and making noises of appreciation. It was hard to watch her eating, or pretending to eat. When she finally stopped, Rudo took the full plate away quickly so we would not have to look at it any longer.