Twenty Chickens for a Saddle

by Robyn Scott

  I wrote quickly, outlining every evil of money and materialism I could think of. I explained how true happiness lay in things that could not be bought; how trying to buy happiness and power might beget evil. As all Mum’s philosophical lectures and parables and big words came flooding back to me, I became increasingly compelled by my own argument. With every sentence I grew more confident and verbose.

  It was only when I remembered to check the clock – and I realised that with minutes remaining, I’d completely forgotten really to discuss anything – that a flutter of panic returned. Of course, I hurriedly wrote, all the aforementioned depended on exactly how money was used.

  Approaching footsteps echoed along the corridor, and I scribbled my concluding sentences: That money could, in fact, do great good…but only in the hands of the right people and institutions, such as nuns and convents. I considered an exclamation mark, but decided I’d probably been clear enough and put down my pen.

  “You look happier,” said Mrs. Joliffe, as she bustled around, stacking the papers.

  “Well, I think my English exam was a considerable improvement.”

  “Excellent,” she smiled. “I’m sure it’s very good.”

  Afterwards, though, away from the cross, in the bright light and noise of the bustling Bulawayo streets, I started to worry. “I was too blatant,” I moaned.

  “Well,” mused Mum, “I suppose it could sound a tad overdone. Especially after you’d just explained how much you loved your egg business.”

  “I’ve ruined it.”

  “No, no.” She smiled quickly. “I’m sure not. And actually, thinking about it now, on the positive side, it shows how keen you are. So either way, Robbie, it’s probably a good thing.”

  What was made of it, I’d never know. But at the beginning of the next term, Mum was driving me up to Zimbabwe along with all the other Botswana teenagers returning to high school.

  Just across the border, the city of Bulawayo was a favourite of Phikwe families, and there were several familiar faces ahead of us as we joined the crawling, many-hundred-long queue on the Zimbabwean side of Plumtree Border Post.

  “Fingers crossed,” said Mum, sighing. “Remember to smile.”

  Remembering to smile could be difficult. The agonisingly long wait in the dingy building, unpleasant in itself, was made worse by the near total uncertainty of what might happen when you eventually reached the official – by which time, you were usually grim with frustration and worry.

  Wrong stamp, wrong visa, wrong form, wrong permit, wrong insurance.

  On an average day, crossing the busy, inefficient Zimbabwean border would take an hour; on a very busy day it could take three. Occasionally, there were stories of people waiting all day in border post queues.

  The only comfort came from watching busloads of people join the queue behind us; from knowing it could have been worse. But this lasted just until some unsociable person pushed past to the front. The whites in the queue would then scowl silently at each other. But they did no more, always leaving it to irritated black people to do the protesting.

  Just a few hundred metres from Botswana, the atmosphere was as starkly different here as the flags and the forms. On the Botswana side, whites queue-jumped as much as anyone and quickly complained if anyone else did. Here, in front of edgy Zimbabwean border officials, no white dared draw attention.

  But Zimbabwe still had the better high schools, and for most white Botswana parents, the hideous border crossings were a tolerable price to pay. Some read magazines. Most just whispered irritably as they checked and rechecked their forms. An incorrectly filled-out form could have you sent straight to the back again. I checked mine twice and then gave it to Mum to check once more.

  Then I made faces at a small, smiling baby strapped to its mother’s back that drew alongside us in the snake of the queue. The baby giggled and then coughed, its head lolling out of the top of the tightly bound cloth. Fresh mucus seeped onto the dry yellow snot around its nostrils. The mother, who clutched a dark green Zimbabwean passport, began to cough too; a deep, wet, racking cough.

  I wondered if she had TB.

  Which would be ironic, I thought, as I gripped my hard-won new study visa and tried not to inhale too deeply.

  I’d often been to Bulawayo for horse shows. I’d even lived in Bulawayo for a few months to improve my riding, bringing my correspondence work with me and boarding with Floss van Leeuwen, who’d taken me to horse shows and given me daily intensive riding lessons at her stables. This time, I would again be staying with Floss, as the Convent didn’t have boarding facilities. Even the schools that did, like Girls’ College, struggled to meet the demand from foreign students. Many stayed with friends or in private boarding houses, and Melaney Nevill and the Jolly sisters, two other horsey friends from Phikwe studying at Girls’ College, would be boarding with me at Floss’s.

  But while before I’d come freely, now that I was officially studying, paying school fees, I was a health hazard: acceptance to the Convent, it turned out, was the easiest of the hurdles to getting a study visa. For final approval, I’d even needed an X-ray to check for TB – which, I speculated as mother and baby coughed simultaneously, I might well be about to catch in this airless border building.

  Before I’d even arrived.

  Then the queue and the sick woman shuffled on, two steps closer to Zimbabwe and school.

  Pikfontein Skool may have been an utterly foreign place, but Pikfontein hadn’t felt anything like a foreign town.

  Barring the flags and the Afrikaans signs, northern South Africa basically looked like Botswana. The cars, mostly Toyota bakkuj and shiny new Corollas, were the same, as were many of the shops – Spar for groceries, PEP Stores for cheap clothes, Woolworths for expensive ones. Botswana imported most of its groceries from South Africa, so the shelves were stacked with the same Koo jams, Simba crisps, and Ouma rusks, and with the pula pegged a few percent above the rand, even the prices were similar.

  The ugly brown buildings of the Dominican Convent School and Catholic Cathedral stood in the centre of a city that felt, smelled, and looked profoundly foreign.

  Lining Bulawayo’s impressively wide streets – wide enough, Cecil Rhodes had insisted, for a wagon to complete a U-turn – were shops with fading signs and names never seen further south: Meikles department store, TM supermarket, Solomons, all selling locally made products priced in dollar amounts at least ten times those in Botswana. In reality, goods were nearly ten times cheaper, and people from Botswana loved shopping in Zimbabwe because of the even more favourable exchange rate available on the black market. This was operated from the pavements by hundreds of money changers, waiting to take your foreign money in exchange for wads of Zimbabwean dollars, often craftily bulked out with ordinary paper for the unwary.

  Outside the streets buzzed with more people, in more of a hurry.

  Raggedly dressed curio sellers crowded many of the pavements, and whereas the placid Botswana vendors awaited enquiries, the Zimbabweans sprung out into your path, grinning madly, waving everything from intricate bead necklaces to two-metre wooden giraffes. If you claimed no money, they offered to trade for foreign goods – any foreign goods, as we’d discovered on one holiday in Victoria Falls when an eight-year-old Damien had vanished and reappeared barefoot, bareheaded, and staggering under the weight of a watermelon-size solid wood hippo.

  Quoting inflated prices, these relentless salesmen pounced on all foreign cars, which were almost as recognisable by their age and make as by their number plate.

  The vast majority of Zimbabwean cars were of a similar era and decrepitude to Jill Davies’s old Datsun. Many were ancient Datsuns. Old Peugeots, Citroens, Morrises, and Fords were also common amongst the extraordinary specimens that rattled, listed, belched, ground, stalled, and generally begged for overdue retirement as they trundled along Bulawayo’s streets.

  In such company, it was quite something to stand out – a feat that Floss van Leeuwen’s shabby Bedford t
ruck nonetheless accomplished with aplomb.

  Making lull use of the spacious roads, its roar drowning all but the most chronically ill engines, the elephantine cream-coloured truck dwarfed everything else. To park comfortably, it needed a good one and a half spaces. This was rare on busy Lobengula Street, which ran past the Convent, and Floss would often just stop the shuddering beast in the road, forcing other cars to drive around as she waited for me to emerge from afternoon lessons.

  Back at Floss’s stables, spoiled for choice, I’d spend all my spare time riding. I loved it. And, barring one exception, I couldn’t believe my luck to live in a place with so many horses.

  The exception was when the Bedford arrived at the Convent piled high with yet another massive load of feed sacks and spiky hay bales.

  Which meant the day’s groceries would be in the front.

  Which meant I had to clamber on top of the bales.

  On these afternoons, I’d dash to the truck, scrambling on the back as quickly as possible. Installed thus, perched high on the mountain of hay, pieces of grass poking through my ugly light blue uniform, I’d do my best to avoid the gaze of my new classmates as they streamed out of the buildings. And as the engine roared and the Bedford rattled off in a cloud of smoke, I’d stare steadfastly ahead, reassuring myself that, all things considered, I was blending in quite well.

  Later, as my classmates became close friends, I’d learn that the Bedford had paled in comparison to all the other odd things about me – most relating to the way I behaved in lessons. But to begin with, I was much too pleased to be there, and too absorbed by classroom novelties, to consider how different I might appear in non-material respects.

  Nor did I have much time to dwell on what everyone else made of me. The daily workload was high for everyone, and I had the extra task of revising past sections of the syllabus. At the end of my first term I’d be writing the same exam as everyone else, based on nearly two years’ work I’d mostly missed.

  It was a daunting task, and when I did occasionally come across something in which I was ahead of everyone else, I was delighted. Probability was one of these. I soon found I could rapidly answer questions that left everyone else blank-faced. The teacher praised my amazing grasp of the subject, and after lessons I was able to help my new friends with their homework.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Roulette.”

  “Huh?”

  “Designing systems to beat the house.”

  “A gambling system? To bet?”

  “Yip. Usually variations of the old Laubouchere cancellation system. But we never used it. The zero gets you every time.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “My dad and I.”

  “Doesn’tyour mum mind?”

  “Nope. She said it ‘was good for my maths. She used to do it too.”

  “Aren’t you too young?”

  “Are they addicts?”

  A few girls laughed, and I suddenly noticed just how shocked everyone looked.

  I felt my face going red. “No, no. It’s not like that,” I said. I hurriedly explained that I’d never actually been in a casino, that working on gambling systems was just one of Dad’s hobbies, that he hadn’t actually gambled since he’d first played systems in London casinos with Mum when she was still at university. But lately, as he’d become increasingly frustrated with his clinics, he had taken to getting out the small plastic roulette wheel and the sheets of calculations. I told the girls how I’d helped him: sitting in his upstairs study, looking out over the Tuli Block bushveld, spinning the wheel and poring over strings of odds and evens and reds and blacks and cursing the zero and the ceiling, which gets you every time.

  Such odd areas of expertise were, however, fairly rare. And in maths I had more gaps than any other subject. Despite this, maths soon became my favourite lesson. For once I understood how something worked, the answer was all there: a full, perfectly satisfying conclusion to a problem, with no loose ends that couldn’t be pursued.

  In other subjects, there were suddenly unfamiliar limits. For the first time ever my questions were answered with, “You don’t need to know that.”

  I was shocked. I kept trying. But after a few weeks, my waving hand was often just ignored. I persisted still. And then, about a month after I arrived, I was finally tackled by a teacher.

  It was in a geography class, taught by a kind, if fierce, nun called Sister Ludgera. I’d asked her to explain one of the points on the blackboard. She’d replied, answering a different question altogether, and then proceeding straight to the next point.

  I raised my arm. “No more questions,” she said.

  I stretched my arm even higher.

  “Robyn,” she snapped, “I’ve just said no more questions.”

  My desk was at the back of the room. Every girl in the class turned around to stare at me. Some smiled. Some looked scared.

  “But you didn’t actually answer the question I just asked,” I said.

  “I believe I did.”

  “Well, I don’t understand your explanation.”

  Sister Ludgera, red-cheeked, looked at me in amazement. “Robyn,” she said coldly, “you’re going to have to learn to appreciate that this is a class of more than thirty other students, and I have a responsibility to teach you a syllabus. Just because you cannot understand something does not mean you can have it personally explained.”

  “Sister Ludgera,” I replied, trying to steady my voice as I felt my own cheeks burning, “I’m sure no one else in the class understands what you just said.” I looked around me. “Who understands?”

  No one said anything. Suddenly everyone was looking down at their desks.

  “Robyn!” said Sister Ludgera. “I am the teacher. No more questions!”

  For the rest of the lesson, resolving never to speak to her again, I stared, amazed and furious, at my desk. The greater shock, however, was still to come, over lunch, in the large junior schoolyard across the road.

  “I can’t believe it,” I fumed, as six of us sat down around one of the shady concrete tables. “She wouldn’t even listen to what I was asking.”

  “Why do you care, though?”

  “Because it’s so unjust.”

  “Teachers can be like that. Forget it. No point fighting.”

  I tried to argue, but was totally outnumbered.

  One by one, every girl provided why-not-to-bother-to-fight examples from their school lives. Some pointed to the windows of the classrooms in which a biased, grumpy, or unthinking teacher had inflicted some memorable injustice – a withering remark, a slighted suggestion, an undeserved punishment, a damning comparison. Often it was just once, and often it was petty. But that, and seeing it happen to others, had been enough.

  I was stunned, and indignant on behalf of my friends. Having always wondered if I was missing out by not going to school, this, for me, was a small epiphany. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like, not being bothered to fight, in a school, for the principle of understanding.

  Deeply relieved that my spirit of protest was intact – and resolved to preserve it – I left that lunch hour fiercely determined not ever to let my teachers get to me.

  ♦

  Mrs. Burrows, one of our English teachers, was amongst my favourites.

  Relevant to the syllabus or not, she loved discussing books, and when she spoke of them, her sorrowful face would light up with a huge grin, which reminded me a bit of Granny Betty. Of all the teachers, she was also the most tolerant of my endless questions and opinions. For this, alone, I liked her.

  But Mrs. Burrows gravitated to angst, and in literature-related discussions of the human condition, the family condition, and the female condition, she tended to dwell on the problems considerably more than the joys.

  One day she arrived in class carrying a large stereo. In it, she explained, was a tape recording of Celine Dion’s ‘Because You Loved Me’, which she was going to play as a sad example of how women could lose
their sense of self-worth by caring too much about the opinion of the opposite sex.

  She pressed play, and for a few minutes the mournful song filled the room.

  “Isn’t this amazing?” sighed Mrs. Burrows, as Celine crooned her last impassioned lines.

  Several girls nodded understandingly.

  The tone set thus, there followed a discussion on female teenage insecurities. In a class of more than thirty fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls, most of whom had been at the Convent since the age of six, she had no trouble soliciting animated participation. The examples lasted until the bell, and obviously deciding we all had a lot more to say, Mrs. Burrows assigned for homework an essay in which we could further delve into our demons.

  Then she hurried out of the room, leaving on the blackboard one precisely written line: “What I don’t like about myself.” Discuss.

  Later, as I studied the irritatingly leading question, I thought of Mum and how she invariably saw the best in everything. Then of Dad, who whenever I lost my fledgeling sense of humour, grinned mockingly and sang his favourite Bing Crosby, “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.”

  I opened my exercise book and wrote the date and a title.

  At the end of the next lesson, as we handed in our books, I told Mrs. Burrows that I personally believed the best way to deal with our problems was to think about all the good things instead. If she wanted to give me zero out of twenty, I’d obviously be upset. However, I explained, zero was nevertheless preferable to writing such a potentially psychologically destructive essay.

  “All right, Robyn,” she said, looking alarmed. “I’ll mark whatever you’ve written.”

  “Thankyou,” I replied, trying not to show my relief. In truth I would have much rather written her essay than get a zero. Triumphant that my bravado had paid off, I left quickly.

  At the door I turned round to see Mrs. Burrows gazing, bewildered, at my open book. I would get one of the best marks in the class for my essay on ‘What I like about myself’.

  What the convent liked about me, I only discovered several months later. The revelation occurred in the most unlikely setting of a Religious Education lesson, which, with my dismal Bible knowledge, was undoubtedly my worst subject.