Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  His words had a strange effect on me. A dart of foreboding, so dark that it made me lose my appetite, flashed through me. I put down my knife and fork.

  “O’D,” I said, “don’t go tomorrow. Something bad is going to happen to you. I can feel it! Put it off until next week.”

  “I can’t put it off,” O’D told me, unperturbed at hearing that something bad was going to happen to him and ladling another helping of curry onto his plate. “Chuck’s expecting me to bring some equipment to him and there’s no way of letting him know if I decide not to go.”

  Although I had a very well developed sixth sense, which often warned me of things to come, you didn’t have to be psychic to realise that driving around Mozambique at the moment wasn’t a very good idea. Police and soldiers swarmed all over Manica Province, the province in which we lived. They bristled with rifles; their jittery fingers hovered dangerously over their triggers and the menacing and suspicious glare in their eyes told you quite plainly that they were looking for trouble and would uncaringly riddle you with bullets first and ask questions afterwards.

  The reason for this excess of security was that Mozambique had recently held elections for the first time in its history and the day that O’D had chosen for his trip was the very day the election results were to come out. No one knew what the outcome would be and there were fears that the losing party might not accept defeat. The country was in such a state of extreme tension that anything could cause the two year old and newborn peace to snap and the civil war to start all over again. As far as I was concerned, the best place to be on such a day was to be indoors and to keep your head down and away from the windows.

  The next morning, very early, a movement on the other side of the bed woke me up. I opened my eyes and in the dim, grey pre-dawn light, saw O’D, already dressed in a blue cotton shirt and khaki trousers, sitting on the edge of the bed and tying his shoelaces. He stood up, walked quickly over to the door and disappeared down the corridor.

  “Wait!” I cried, and raising the mosquito net, got out of bed and ran after him. “Wait!”

  I caught up with him in the sitting room, just as he pulled open the screen door leading out onto the verandah. “I still think you should change your mind. I just KNOW something is going to happen to you,” I told him.

  Ignoring me, he ran down the verandah steps towards his old and very battered white Toyota pickup. This was the company car Tony Taberer, the silver-haired, rich and non-smoking Zimbabwean owner of the Tabex tobacco farm had given O’D to drive. The Toyota’s windscreen was starred and cracked, the headlights were tied on with wire and the bonnet was lumpy with dents and tied down with rope. Inside, the stuffing erupted out of the sun-cracked seat like lava out of a volcano. It was not a car that made me feel proud to ride around in but its dilapidated appearance had quite a few benefits, the most important of which was that no car hijacker in his right mind would be interested in it. O’D had driven it now for two years and had become very fond of it. “She goes like the clappers,” he had once told me, patting the Toyota’s dented bonnet affectionately and, like most men, giving both human and feminine qualities to an inanimate, mechanical, metal object.

  O’D ran his eyes over the equipment tied down in the back of the pickup, checking he hadn’t forgotten anything. Satisfied, he opened the pickup’s door and climbed inside. He closed the door with a clang and wound the driver’s window down.

  “Don’t worry,” he told me reassuringly, “nothing is going to happen to me. Nothing.” He gave me a pitying smile. “I’ll be back no later than seven tonight. Promise.”

  I stood on the verandah and watched O’D drive off along the short farm driveway, past tractors and barns and then, when he turned a corner and disappeared from sight, I went back inside the house and closed the screen door. This was not a man who listened to his wife.

  Although O’D had always been adventurous and drawn to danger like a moth to a candle flame, this hadn’t been much of a problem when we’d lived in Europe. There, the only trouble he’d got into was from the traffic police, who had given him a few tickets for speeding and from me, for spending too long in a bar. In Mozambique, however, it had been quite a different story.

  Here, he had taken to life in a broken-down, war-torn and primitive African country like a duck to water. He had gone where few people, even the Mozambicans, had cared to go. He had made friends with all sorts of unsuitable people and had become a fount of knowledge on Mozambican colonial history, Mozambican culture, Mozambican religion, Mozambican politics and Mozambican food and drink …

  Once, his curiosity about Mozambican culture had had such an adverse effect on him that it had turned the whites of his eyes and the skin on his face as yellow as a paw paw and he had had to take to his bed for more than a month. This had occurred after he had driven down to Macate and had visited a banana plantation belonging to Mr. Mabeleza, a witch doctor. The witch doctor had offered him something called NIPPA to drink and he had accepted this offer – even though it had come out of a very grimy and unhygienic bottle that would have been condemned in England. The consequences of this had been a trip across the border to Zimbabwe. Hepatitis, Dr. Featherstone had told us.

  Another time, O’D had ignored my warnings to keep the windows of his ancient Toyota closed at night. “You’ll be sorry,” I had warned him, “when you find yourself driving down the road with a deadly poisonous green mamba in the car with you.”

  While no snake had deigned to enter the Toyota’s interior in the dark of the night, other creatures had explored it and taken up residence. One morning, O’D had driven off surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes and with his hands on a steering wheel which had a pungent and particularly unpleasant fragrance. It had taken him several minutes to identify the scent but eventually it had dawned on him that his steering wheel had been liberally sprayed by one of the 27 cats belonging to our neighbour, Maciel.

  Marion, O’D’s mother, who lived in the Algarve, had once told me to control O’D. I had thought that this was a bit much coming from someone like Marion, who in her youth had been equally adventurous and quite uncontrollable herself.

  This was a woman who had been something of a female James Bond in her time and had set an example as a role model that her eldest son had been only too happy to emulate. Before the Second World War, Marion had driven fast cars very fast and had been selected to represent England in the Olympic skiing championships. And then, after the Second World War, she had smoked SIXTY CIGARETTES A DAY (!) while she had been helping Allied Agents to look for all the gold bullion the Nazis had looted. Meeting O’D’s father, Ti, she had married him and they had run off for a honeymoon in Paris where they had stayed in the most expensive hotel without having the money to pay for their room! The only thing that had saved them from endless weeks of washing dishes in the hotel kitchen had been a hasty telegram to Ti’s father for funds. With a mother like this …

  At eight o’clock, Biasse, dressed in his immaculate white cook’s uniform and the veldskoens he had begged me to buy for him from Zimbabwe, called out “Scoff’s ready, Madam!” and I emerged from the bedroom, showered and dressed for a long day on my own.

  I sat down at the table in the dining room and began to eat toast, scrambled eggs and the pile of hard and dried-out little bits of bacon that Biasse thought was the way to cook bacon. The bacon was impossible to eat with a knife and fork and as Biasse had the usual Mozambican obduracy when it came to changing his ways, O’D and I had had to eat bacon with our fingers for two years.

  Biasse had come with the house we were living in on the Tabex farm and had learnt to speak English the Zimbabwean way, hence the “Scoff’s ready, Madam!” Regrettably, he had also been taught to cook by white male Zimbabweans, and as white male Zimbabweans only ate meat (preferably steak) and chips and had a horror of vegetables and salads, his range of recipes was very narrow. However, over the years I had managed to introduce two new and simple additions to his repertoire; spaghetti bolo
gnaise, and fish cakes made from tinned tuna. This had required a lot of patience on my part and had made Biasse tremble with anxiety, as if he was taking an examination. The fish cakes had proved such a success with various officials from the Department of Labour that we had all started calling him ‘The King of Fish Cakes’. This title had pleased him so much that sometimes, and on his own initiative, he daringly experimented by adding a tablespoon of fresh parsley to the fish cake mixture.

  I drank the last of my coffee and put down my cup. “Thank you, Biasse. You can clear the table, now.”

  While Biasse busied himself tidying up, I sat down in the sitting room and began to put the finishing touches to the large charcoal portrait I had drawn of a zebra. “Looking good … you’re looking good,” I told the Zebra.

  When a loud crash in the kitchen disturbed my concentration, I looked up from my drawing and saw Biasse’s small and skinny figure in the doorway. In each hand, he held one half of a mustard coloured plate.

  “This plate, Madam,” he told me with a mournful look on his wrinkled little face, “it has broken itself!”

  Biasse had the Mozambican habit, which I had come to know well, of never admitting personal guilt for anything but always blaming someone or even something else.

  “Oh, Biasse,” I sighed. Biasse was fumble fingered in the kitchen and since our arrival had sent 6 Tabex plates, 3 soup bowls, one teapot, 2 teapot lids, 5 cups and 2 saucers smashing into smithereens on the grey cement kitchen floor. “I hope we’ve still got enough plates to eat off until the boss and I get a chance to go across the border to buy some more!”

  “I think so, Madam.”

  I looked down at my drawing again. The heat and humidity of the day had made my fingers grow sweaty and black around my stick of charcoal and my damp hands had smudged one edge of the paper. Still, I was pleased with my efforts and got up to prop the board and its attached drawing against the mantelpiece over the fireplace so that I could admire it every now and then as the day wore on. I wiped my hands on a piece of loo paper - there were no tissues in Mozambique – and decided that the next best thing to do to pass the time was to go for a swim.

  Arming myself with an icy Coca-Cola, a glass and a book, I wandered down the brick path to the swimming pool and sat down under the thatched pool shelter for a while.

  The sun blazed down out of a pure blue sky. There was not a wisp of a cloud. Except for the cool splashing sound of the small waterfall cascading out of the mouth of the stone fish at the edge of the pool and the drone of the bumble bees browsing fatly in the flower beds and shrubs, there was silence.

  Clive, the Zimbabwean farmer and his girlfriend, Trish, who lived in a house only a couple of metres away from ours, had gone across the border into Zimbabwe. Conceicao, who lived in the house at the other end of the swimming pool with her husband Maciel, had flown off to Portugal. I idly wondered where Maciel was. I had forgotten to ask.

  Suddenly, the silence seemed eerie and I felt a prickle of apprehension. Was I completely alone on the farm, except for Biasse? Perhaps my feelings of foreboding hadn’t been for O’D after all, but for … ME! What would happen if there was trouble and men came to the farm with guns? What would I do? I didn’t have a car and there were no telephones.

  I ran my eyes over the sparkling swimming pool and the green lawn and flowerbeds, lush with water from all the boreholes. Visitors to the farm often remarked on its resemblance to a resort, and so it was in a way. It was a tiny oasis of beauty and normality in a desolate wasteland still very wild and very, very dangerous even though the civil war had ended.

  I remembered what had happened to Clive not so long ago, while the United Nations Peacekeepers and the Italian Alpini had been camped on the farm. One evening, he had driven off with two South African road engineers to Peter Thornycroft’s small fishing lodge on Lake Chicamba. On the return drive, they had been ambushed. An obstruction, bags of charcoal or something, had been placed in the road to block it and when Clive had slowed down, men lying hidden in the grass by the side of the road had opened fire with AK-47’s. Clive had been shot through both his arms, making them completely useless. Despite this, they had still been able to keep their heads, to turn the car around and make a mad dash for safety. One of the South Africans had taken control of the steering wheel and gears, while Clive had used his feet on the clutch and accelerator. There had been blood all over the inside of the car. Clive was lucky to be alive. They were all lucky to be alive.

  The U.N. Peacekeepers had been shocked and had tried to investigate the attack. But the men had never been found.

  I pushed these thoughts away and opened my book. It was called ‘The Shell Seekers’ and had been given to me to read by Frances, the Tabex mechanic’s wife. The thought of Frances made me smile as I remembered our recent encounter with a Zimbabwean police superintendent on the other side of the border.

  About a week after Frances and Jake Jackson had come back from their short honeymoon, she had asked me if I wanted to go shopping with her in Mutare. Of course, I had jumped at the offer.

  We had arrived in Mutare quite early in the morning, about nine o’clock, and Frances had parked Jake’s shiny white new pick-up in front of the Holiday Inn. It was only after she had locked and alarmed the car and we were standing on the pavement under the trees that she had revealed that there was another purpose to our trip.

  “I have to go to the police to get some papers for Jake’s car so we can import it into Mozambique,” she had told me. She and Jake were Zimbabwean citizens. “Police clearance papers, stating that Jake bought the pick-up in Zimbabwe and that it isn’t a stolen car. Shall we do this now or later, Val?”

  “Let’s do it now,” I had said. Both the Zimbabwean and Mozambican border posts closed at six in the evening. “We don’t want to find it takes longer than we thought and end up having to spend the night on this side of the border.”

  The police station was just across the road from us and so we had gone inside and after being escorted from one person to another, had finally found ourselves in the starkly furnished office of a burly, khaki-clad Zimbabwean Police Superintendent.

  He had listened to Frances’ request. He had told us to sit down on some hard wooden chairs in front of his desk. He had turned two dark basilisk eyes towards Frances and had examined her …

  She was large and plump and had looked particularly attractive this day. Her long, red gold hair had hung down to her waist in a thick plait and she had been dressed in a low-cut silvery grey top (which I had recognised as being from Marks and Spencers because I possessed an identical one, in beige - thank goodness I hadn’t worn mine!) and wide black silky trousers with big red and green and purple polka dots all over them.

  … And then, he had dropped his bombshell.

  “You are not allowed to drive Mr. Jackson’s car,” he had told Frances sternly.

  Frances’ mouth had fallen open in astonishment. “But … I’m his wife!” she had exclaimed.

  “How do I know this?” The Superintendent had asked. “You could have stolen Mr. Jackson’s car. Show me proof that you are Mrs. Jackson. Show me your passport.”

  Frances’ fair skin had turned a dark red. “We’ve only been married for a few days,” she had replied. “My passport’s still in my maiden name.”

  “You see!” the Superintendent had exclaimed, his police instincts now working overtime. “We have to be careful,” he had gone on “because people are stealing cars all over the place … and you …” he had paused thoughtfully “… and you have no proof that you are Mrs. Jackson.”

  “But I AM Mrs. Jackson!”

  The Superintendent had picked up the receiver of the old-fashioned black Bakelite telephone on his empty desk and narrowed his eyes at Frances, preparing to call her bluff once and for all. “What is Mr. Jackson’s phone number so that I can speak to him and confirm that you are who you say you are?”

  Little beads of sweat had popped out on Frances’ face at this relentl
ess grilling and the way her simple request was leading into more and more complications, compounding her supposed guilt. “He hasn’t got a telephone! We live on a farm in the bush in Mozambique. There’s no way I can contact him!”

  Satisfied that his suspicions concerning Frances had been confirmed, the Superintendent had given a nod and dropped the receiver back onto the handset. “Well, in that case,” he had told her, “we’ll have to CONFIS TI CATE Mr. Jackson’s car until you can prove that you are who you say you are.”

  Frances had fallen back in her chair with shock and, close to tears, her voice had risen up in a loud and despairing squawk. “CONFIS TI …? But how will we get back home to Mozambique, now?”

  No one had answered Frances’ question and for a short time we had all sat in silence and pondered. It had seemed strange to me that the Superintendent should have thought that a member of a gang of car thieves - and one as flamboyant and unforgettable as Frances - would have gone anywhere near a police station and asked for papers for a stolen car. However, this was Africa …

  I had been ruminating on the probability that the Superintendent no doubt considered me to be Frances’ accomplice, when she had rallied.

  Pointing a trembling finger at me, she had said, “This lady … this lady also lives in Mozambique. Her husband, who is THE ADMINISTRATOR of the TABEX FARM at Chimoio, will be very worried when she doesn’t come back home.”

  “Ah! Administrator … ” the Superintendent had said. He had turned towards me and, picking up his telephone receiver again, had asked, “What is your husband’s telephone number?”

  A sudden and almost uncontrollable laugh had threatened to burst out of me at his question but I had managed to control myself and to suppress it. Laughing, I had known, was the worst thing I could have done in a police station … especially in Africa, and especially in this one.

  “He’s not at the office in Chimoio, today,” I had told him, struggling to keep a straight face. “He’s in the bush - with Mr. Jackson!”