If I hadn’t got lost in the first place, I wouldn’t be in Africa at all.
THERE IS the common notion that love and marriage find you when you least expect it. In Uganda, it finds me in the fruit markets.
In the middle of a large town square, temporary roadside carts have been pulled together. Splintering wooden slabs are transformed into makeshift table tops. The lingering musk of cigarette smoke blows into the African air mixing with the earthy sweat of men hard at work.
Layered crates hold split peas and baby carrots. Lentils are stacked in old potato sacks, ready to be washed and soaked overnight until soft enough to be tossed together with oil and garlic. Pineapples are piled precariously in pyramids – some have fallen off tables and roll loosely on the ground. Mountains of onions. Trays that smell of sticky-sweet peaches ripe with soft pink fuzz are favourites. People line up to buy them by the crateful.
Crisp green beans fresh from the earth, still muddied with soil, are piled into shopping bags and sent home to be plunged into stews and soups. Mottled brown and honey-coloured eggs, packed in torn cartons, are on special. We can buy a whole carton. Boil them until soft. Have them with toast. With avocado. And cracked pepper. My mouth waters. I haven’t had eggs or avocado in weeks.
Fresh herbs in pots. Mint leaves. Trays of bonnet peppers. Limes, limes everywhere. Papaya, split down the middle, glowing orange like the sunset. Sackfuls of seasonings. The pungency of spices: soft cilantro, black pepper, fiery chillies waiting to be sliced open. The heat, the heat.
‘Oh, bananas!’ Ant points at a pile of green, yellow and brown bananas at the first stall.
‘Twenty-five for thirty thousand.’ The man heaves another bunch of bananas, green and hard, onto the table. It’s exorbitant, even by Australian standards. Even though we’ve learnt the skill of bartering, there will always be a tourist price. What if we lived here, spoke the language, shopped every Saturday – twice during the week? Could we ever be local? I’m not sure. We keep walking.
There is something splendid about this market, the tables haphazardly thrown together. No pathway, no clear corridor. Because of this, we meander past every stall, carefully past a pyramid of passionfruit, stepping over wilted lettuce and discarded banana leaves, stopping to bend and inhale the scents from a hefty sack of cinnamon. It smells like spiced donuts. Like Christmas.
A market girl sits slumped on a stool shelling peas, breaking the pods, popping them expertly with one hand. Each pea is expelled with the force of her fingers, sailing inches into the air before arriving on the round plate, tight little green balls. Perfect aim.
We’re stopped by a shy-looking man with a large grin. His shaved head cut close to his scalp makes his eyes look even larger; he keeps winking at us with his left one. His name is Amarr, but it takes about six times to properly introduce ourselves because we’re sure the first five times he says his name is Emma.
We bargain and barter with Amarr and buy twenty-five bananas for a mere 2500 shillings (about seventy cents). They’re greener and harder than the other ones, but they’ll be wrapped in foil, sweetened with brown sugar and buried under the coals tonight until they’re soft. No-one will notice the difference.
‘You want more fruit? Passionfruit? Mango?’ He asks.
We can’t resist his smile, his deep belly laugh. We buy a bagful of passionfruit, bulging at the top, for two dollars.
‘They smell so good,’ I say, taking the bag he holds out to me. Like summer and pavlova. I can taste them on a mountain of cream.
‘You want pineapple?’ He takes a knife in his right hand, throws the pineapple into the air, and as it begins to fall he swings the knife through the air, slicing the pineapple perfectly in two, both edges landing on the table in front of him.
‘Taste, taste,’ he urges, cutting one half into smaller slices. The sweet scent of summer is on our hands and lips. Sticky and good, it tastes like pineapples used to; the rampant sweetness of sugar, the juice flows over my lips and down my chin. We take two shoved in a small bag.
He wants to give me another piece – straight from his hands to my mouth. He won’t let me take it in my hands, and every time I try he pulls away. Finally, I lean forward and let him place the sweet pineapple piece in my mouth. Is this strange?
‘You want Ugandan husband?’ he suggests to the group.
‘Sorry, I already have a husband,’ Candy says as she flashes her wedding ring.
Ant shakes her head.
‘And you?’ Amarr looks at me. ‘You must have a Ugandan husband!’ He claps his hands, delighted.
‘Do you have a ring?’ Ant yells out.
Everyone’s looking at me. ‘I have a boyfriend at home.’
Do I? He beckons me closer.
‘Well, you take this.’ He puts another passionfruit into my hand. ‘For you. And if you ever want a good husband, you come back to Amarr.’
We wave and call out thank you. We have more than we can carry. I resettle the bag onto my hip like a child. From here I can smell the tropical sugar scent of pineapple. Somewhere in the bag it is already oozing sticky juice through a small escape route near the stem that will coat all of the shells of the passionfruit and make dessert a far stickier affair than anticipated.
Candy stops and turns around, yelling across the market. ‘She would marry you, if there’s a good price?’
Amarr smiles, nods emphatically, then holds up a dowry in his hands: two pineapples and a bag of lychees.
My African worth.
LIGHT TOUCHES the edge of the lake. I lie belly-down on the soft grass and peer through the blades.
I am the right height for a baby warthog, a slithering snake, a tired lioness. Grass tickles my chin while dusk falls around. The lake is dug deep into the earth, a perfect bowl, like a glove curved waiting to catch a ball, a comet. Each side rises steeply, except for ours. Instead of being sheered, like a cliff, it bends along the perfectly globed spine of the earth, curving softly to the water’s edge. Plants cluster and thrive along the banks – palm, pine, weed and lily.
You could take a swim now, into the navy inky water. If you’re a strong swimmer and things go well, you could easily reach the other side in ten minutes, maybe twenty. I dip a toe in and find it colder than I expected for a lake so close to the equator that basks in the sun all year round. My foot submerged, it goes numb within a minute.
Evening comes on slowly, as if it doesn’t want to be there. Tonight marks the equinox; a full moon. The others enjoy long, hot showers – our first. Unroll tents and set up lanterns along the lake’s edge. This is five-star camping for us. There are lights! Electricity! Hot water! Although earlier, I mistakenly thought the shower wall was black and only when I reached out to turn on the hot tap, the wall start to move in a frenzy, dividing and collapsing. Quickly, I realized the shower walls were green. And the black cloud moving towards me was a swell of mosquitos. I don’t think I am overestimating when I say there could have been a million of them.
I can hear the others in the showers now, every few seconds there is the slap of watery hands on body parts, and the telltale Ouch! when you are seconds too late.
In the kitchen, on dinner duty I cut and dice the onions. Tonight I have promised a different meal. We’ve been here a month and have had enough of stews and broths and rice and wilted spinach.
At home, I cook pasta sauce, stirring the freshly chopped tomatoes on a medium high heat, letting them stew in their own seeds and juices, before adding generous handfuls of my favourite ingredients – chilli, basil and garlic. I’ve learned that less is more, so I choose fewer ingredients and add more of them. An extra knob of garlic to the sauce makes it taste grittier – like the ground. Using red onion instead of brown lightens the pungency. I don’t use recipes, or carefully measured ingredients, I add what I think it needs and I taste often. I make pasta from scratch; flour and eggs and water, and roll it through the old silver pasta maker that clamps onto my bench with a steel jaw.
Italian
s are famous for their relationship with food. There is nothing, they believe, that can’t be cured by a good meal. Mangia che ti passa – eat and it will be over. In another life was I Italian?
When in Rome, I ate everything. Everywhere. I couldn’t stop. Wild mushroom (funghi) pizza by the slice. Garlic in oil – so simple, so wonderful. Basil ripped from its stems and thrown atop everything. Yes, I will have a side of fried zucchini flowers. Yes, and the baked peppers with basil. Go on then, just one more spoonful of the lemon gelato. And the berry. Yes, I can fit in a coffee too.
Tonight in homage, I make a risotto. I have made it many times using dry white wine (more than advised), stems of rosemary cooking in their own juices, plump fresh peas, peeled garlic buds, slow sautéed mushrooms and oven-baked pumpkin. But I’ve only ever cooked risotto for eight people at most, and never in a place where I can’t find cheese or Arborio rice.
Yet here in Uganda, I’m making a vegetarian risotto for twenty-five meat eaters with old African rice and the only cheese we could find in the local village – a lump of herb cheese, waxy and old. And all of this must be done in large stove vats deeper than the length of my entire arm and balanced precariously on a portable gas stove under a small electric light.
By the light of the large lychee moon I begin to cook. There are no herbs to garnish or flavour, no olive oil to swirl on top. There is a little of the wax cheese left after lunch, which isn’t such a bad thing. While no-one is looking I take a little nibble – a mouse bite – and realise with disappointment that it doesn’t really taste of anything. I take another bite just to be sure, and find it tastes rather like muted wood smoke.
I pour dry white wine with one hand and cheap canola oil with the other, covering the rice buds that lie like husks in cocoons, waiting to grow and soften. I agitate the vat, allowing the rice to be covered with wine and water so they slip over each other. To agitate the vat takes effort. Both hands need to be wrapped in tea towels on the metal handles. I use my entire body in one complete motion, shaking, to mix the layers of oil, rice and wine.
The rule of risottos is this: each grain must always be covered with liquid but not stirred. Stirring the rice begins breaking the grain apart, making a starchy, gluggy mess. Do not stir risottos – ever. Spoons are only ever needed for eating.
The only vegetables left at the markets were limp capsicum, bags of onions and three carrots. We bought them all. I dice them roughly and throw them into the wet white paste. They fall like coloured confetti.
Garlic bulbs found at the bottom of a milk crate by a man at the markets, only after we pleaded, shed their gossamer skins, jumping into the rice like skydivers without parachutes. More salt. More wine. It smells delicious even though my arms ache.
The table is set under the dark, warm sky. The glow of gaslight lanterns is outshone by the moon, which has spent the last hour steadily rising in the sky until she hangs like a dollop of the coldest, whitest cream in the night sky. Soon she will descend again, becoming burnt butter orange, coming closer to earth to get a better view.
By the time the risotto is ready, everyone is starving. Famished. They have lined up with empty bowls and eager stomachs asking, ‘Is it ready yet?’
I’m nervous, but the risotto is a success. Ant finishes first.
‘Delicious,’ she declares, licking her fork clean.
Shamil goes back for seconds. Then thirds. Even those who claim not to like carbs or risotto, saying it’s usually gluggy or tasteless, seem impressed. Sarah, who is a considerable cook, insists I write the recipe for her. Pronto.
They offer to do the washing up, after all, I had cooked, but I insist it won’t take long. I shoo them out of the kitchen like naughty mice – for some reason I want to be alone; something has suddenly come over me.
For a while I don’t touch anything, just sit at the table and watch the moon. Then I use a fork to dig out the last bits of risotto from the bottom of the vat, those that had been seared by the heat and are brown and crunchy like toast crusts.
After I wash up, I need a tea, and boil the kettle until she sings a high soprano note to the heavens. I shoosh her in case others will hear it and want their own cups filled. While I hug the warm cup to my chest, I nibble biscuits and find a stash of chocolate that has to be eaten also.
I’m not quite sure what has come over me. Perhaps there is still a need to be like the Italians tonight, Mangia che ti passa.
Eat until it is over.
I LEAN my chin against the wall of the shady arbour long after everyone has gone to sleep. The lake calls me and yet when I reach the edge, something stops me. I don’t want to go in.
I watch the moon begin her ballet solo. She glides as if lifted by an invisible partner across the sky. When I was little, I used to watch that same moon from my window. If I pushed back my curtains as far as they would go, from where my head lay on my pink pillow, there she was. Brilliant and whole. Me watching her watching me. I was six and then seven and then ten. Still with a pink bedroom, still tucking a glow worm torch to my chest after the lights were turned out so I could read into the night. Up the carpeted corridor my dad snored so loudly it rattled the walls. Even so, my mum slept quietly.
When I lean over the wooden gazebo, I can’t see the bottom. Just an inch deep into the water it turns a nightshade black, and this turbidity makes me wonder what mysteries lie below.
If I watch for long enough, fish come to bite the surface. Their tails flitter, carrying currents of soil and sand. For a second, there are hollow shoots, as though I’d put a giant straw into the water, and it had found the bottom, clearing the muck in its way. It seemed as if the place above and the place below the surface aligned for just a little bit, and I could see everything down there.
When I was young, I swam everywhere I could. In the pool, the ocean baths, my own bath, the sea flat and glassy, the mouths of waves turbid and choppy. If there was water, I was never content until I was in it. I never understood why my parents, who always insisted on having a pool, never used it.
Each summer holiday we spent at our cousins’ beach house down the south coast, where the sand gets whiter and the ocean cooler. Perfect conditions for a great white shark riding the cold southerly current.
My parents watched me swim, and boogie board, and body surf the waves, minding the bags, holding the fort while my sister took on the larger waves that crested like towers to the small nine-year-old that I was, and steamed through the cove. One would watch me and the other my sister, but never do I remember seeing either my mother or my father enter the water.
It’s only recently that my mum has taken up ocean swimming at the age of seventy-two. When she told me, I didn’t know what to think.
‘Inside the flags?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Inside the shark net?’
‘Sometimes.’
Part of me wonderfully admires the youth still blooming in her bones. Time hasn’t ravaged her body as it has with so many other parents in their twilight years. Yet, part of me worries. Similar worries to those of a parent, but this notion has nothing to do with chronological age. Rather, worries are always bestowed upon the stronger party in the yoke of a relationship. And for the last decade, that has been me.
It was me who fretted whether my father had done his exercises for his hip replacement, taken his medication, wore sunscreen when he was gardening. Wondered why my mother’s blood pressure kept rising and she needed daily pills, what the lump in her mouth was, why her back seemed to bend her over and make her a little old lady, well before I was ready for her to be one.
‘When you die,’ my dad once told me, ‘that’s it. That’s forever.’
My mum doesn’t seem to have an ideology on death, only that it happens. If she thinks any more about it than that, she never tells us.
Our dog Dinah died underneath her favourite fern tree in the backyard. She was missing for days and I kept hoping she’d come bounding in from the horses’ paddock up the road covered
in manure and smelling like something rotten. My mum found her a few days later. When she picked me up from ballet class, she told me ‘Kate, it was just her time.’
Dinah must have known it too, as she crawled into the safe cave of the fern tree. Inside the shrub was a hidey hole, the perfect size for a dog – or a small nine-year-old. It was me that taught her to climb in there and stay hidden from the outside world, surrounded by the gold-green leaves. We played in there, slept in there, my head resting on the soft rise and fall of her belly.
I invited other creatures in there with us: birds with broken wings, little possum babies, and the worst, a three-legged cat who couldn’t use his limbs after a run in with a car. I tried to save them. Dinah had watched as I tried, many times, to whisper to them, to softly touch fur bellies and wings, and nurse them back to health. I placed them in shoeboxes with old towels in the shape of pillows and blankets. For hours I patted them, and whispered in their ears. I thought that if they were going to live, touch was the way to return, as though my hands held the secrets of healing. And if not, I wanted them to leave the world knowing they weren’t alone.
None of them made it.
My mum and dad dug shallow graves and I placed them inside, marking the soil with my tears and making each of us say something. Even now I can’t pass an animal on the side of the road without stopping the car and giving it some kind of burial. Even if it is just the crossing of a stick over its soft crumpled body, the laying of a flower. And a quick prayer; I hope you are in some place better.
My parents don’t know this, but every night I lie in bed and worry one of them won’t wake. I dread the phone call that will inevitably come, tear my heart from my bones and mangle it like a soft body in a shark’s mouth, ripped and torn, until I can’t be put back together again.
Dear God, I press these words into the sky at night, please let them be here tomorrow. I leave it hanging, a blanket of whispered prayers, pinned to the night sky with stars.
Ways to Come Home Page 8