Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  I was taken aback by her insensitivity. Did she expect me to join her in her laughter when my father had just died?

  Undaunted by my silence, the Undertaker’s receptionist gave another callous cackle of laughter. “Give me your phone number,” she told me, “I’ve just had an idea. I’ll try and find him for you by using some … TELEPATHY!”

  I put the phone down. Unfortunately, there was no alcohol in the house otherwise I would have given myself a stiff, strengthening tot of whisky or two. If this was what his receptionist was like, what kind of man was the Undertaker going to be?

  Fortunately, the Undertaker was nothing at all like his receptionist. He was down to earth and didn’t make one joke – at least not in our hearing - and even arranged for a non-denominational Pastor to say a few words to us at the Crematorium. None of us had set foot in a church for years.

  The cremation service in the small chapel in George was a simple one and a small one. Jenny and Paul drove up from Cape Town with their two small daughters, Danielle and Andrea, and David flew down from Harare.

  A few days later, when we collected my father’s ashes from the Undertaker, we decided to scatter them in the sea, in the Indian Ocean. When he’d still been well enough to drive, my father had often gone down to the shore where he’d sit in his favourite peaceful spot. Here, on a bench by himself and with only his thoughts for company, he’d watched the waves and the sea birds and the occasional ship sailing by in the distance.

  At my father’s favourite spot, we all walked down to the water’s edge and stood on the wet sand while David took off his shoes.

  I glanced at my mother and although I hadn’t been around at the time, a picture came into my mind of my parents’ romantic meeting so many years ago now. It had taken place during the Second World War when my mother, who had joined the South African Army, had been billeted in my father’s parents’ house in Port Elizabeth.

  She’d been playing a waltz on the piano when my tall, good looking father had come back home from the North African deserts where he’d spent a lot of time in sandy fox holes, living on bully beef and biscuits filled with weevils.

  Nineteen at the time, my mother had had soft brown eyes, the tiniest of freckles scattered across her pretty face and long curly brown hair floating around her shoulders and, as my father had once told me, he’d been quite bowled over by the sight of her.

  Now, my father was gone and although my mother’s hair was still curly, it was cut short and had turned silver. She wasn’t slender anymore either.

  I wondered what memories were going through her mind. Was she also remembering their beginning and thinking how quickly the years flew by?

  David waded into the sea with the box of Dad’s ashes and started scattering the white grains into the water. Unfortunately, benumbed with sadness, none of us had given a thought to the direction of tides and winds, and so the ashes floated towards the beach and granules blew against my brother’s wet bare legs in his shorts and clung there, coating the front of his legs in white. He bent down and washed off these little white grains … all that was left of Dad.

  Jenny and Paul returned to Cape Town and David flew back to Harare, leaving my mother and me to pack up all her possessions. She would be leaving Mossel Bay and going to live in Cape Town with my sister.

  On the sixteenth day after my father’s death, my mother and I were still busy packing all her things away into large cardboard boxes. Alone in the house except for her small tan and white dog, Bucksie, we went to bed early that night. We were tired.

  Despite my tiredness, sleep was impossible and I tossed and turned until I became more and more irritable. Every now and then, I thumped my pillow with frustration, turned on the bedside lamp and glared at the clock. Oh, how slowly the hours were passing!

  And then, at around about half past twelve in the morning, it happened.

  Moonlight was shining through my windows, as I always open the curtains before I go to sleep and I was lying on my back, still wide awake and staring up at the ceiling. I’d left my bedroom door open and now I heard something just outside the open doorway that grabbed at my attention. A sound that chilled my blood and made my hair stand on end. The quite unmistakeable sound of two heavy footsteps dragging across the carpet, as if someone was forcing himself to walk …

  Aaaah ….

  I lay still, hardly daring to breathe. Who … or what … was this?

  An unwelcome picture came into my mind of a body lying on a trolley in a storeroom in the little Mossel Bay hospital and my imagination took flight.

  Was it … could it be … my father? Dragging his greeny blue and mouldering self towards me?

  No! Oh, no, no, no!

  And THEN, a few seconds later, I heard MUSIC just by my door! The tune was a familiar one to me but it was made eerie and unearthly by the instruments, which appeared to be delicate, tinkling little bells.

  Pinned rigid to my bed with fainting fearful terror, I listened to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’ being played from its beginning to its tinkling end.

  When the music finally stopped and there was silence, I still didn’t move a muscle but continued to lie motionless on my bed. For the first time in my life I understood what the phrase ‘scared stiff’ really meant.

  In the room next to mine, I heard my mother getting out of bed. She walked into my room and switched on the ceiling light. The flood of light did nothing to dispel the awfulness of what had just happened.

  “Did you hear that, Mom?” I asked from my prone position in bed.

  “Yes, I did,” she said. “And so did Bucksie. She jumped off my bed and ran out of the room, wagging her tail.”

  Wagging her tail?

  “What do you think … it … was, Mom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I pulled myself together and sat up, suddenly hopeful. “Perhaps we left the television on … or the radio!” I threw my sheet and blanket off and got out of bed. “Let’s check.”

  My mother and I walked through every room in the house, turning on every light. All the windows were tightly closed and the back and front doors were firmly locked. The television and radio were off. Brave now that my mother was by my side, I opened cupboards and looked inside them and peered under beds.

  “If it had been someone outside the house,” I said, “Bucksie would have barked, wouldn’t she”?

  “Oh, yes,” my mother agreed. “She’s quite a ferocious little watchdog. No one can get into the garden without her making a noise.”

  “But instead,” I went on thoughtfully, “she wagged her tail.”

  My search turned up nothing and so, as everything looked completely normal, we went back to our beds. Strangely enough, as soon as my head hit my pillow, I fell asleep.

  In the morning, after breakfast, while my mother and I were packing her books into boxes, a sudden thought struck me.

  “The doorbell, Mom! That’s where the music came from last night. Someone must have rung the doorbell!”

  The house had come with a doorbell which, when pressed, had played the most hideous collection of tunes I had ever heard. One of these tunes, I was sure, had been ‘Happy Birthday.’

  My mother looked up from a box with a strange expression on her face. “That’s impossible,” she replied. “No one could have rung the bell because Paul got so fed up with the children forever pressing it, that he removed the batteries.”

  “Perhaps he put them back and forgot to tell you.” Eager to solve the mystery and to put the blame on a human, I walked out of the house and pressed my finger down firmly on the doorbell several times. Nothing happened.

  “I told you it wouldn’t work,” my mother said. “Come and have a look for yourself.” She walked back into the hall and over to a small cupboard set in the wall. She pulled open the tiny door and I saw for myself that it was completely empty.

  “Oh, well,” I said.

  As the morning went by, I thought about the unearthly music my mother and I had
heard in the night and wondered what had been the significance of it. Happy Birthday … it had obviously been some kind of horrible message because almost everyone in my family, including my father, had been born in May.

  We were eating a light lunch of my mother’s chicken pie when I said gloomily, “It’s Dad, isn’t it, Mom? It’s his ghost. That’s why Bucksie ran out of the room last night, wagging her tail.”

  “No,” my mother shook her head. “It’s not him. It’s not him at all.” She gave a shudder. “I’m glad I’m going to Cape Town and leaving this house … this spook house.”

  My mother’s denial that the creepy, ghostly events had anything to do with my father was so definite that I wondered how she knew. Had she seen something I hadn’t seen or heard something I hadn’t heard? I didn’t ask because I really didn’t want to know any more. I would also be glad to get out of a house that had suddenly lost its friendly homely warmth and become haunted by ... something … that appeared to be impersonating my father, an impersonation for which I could think of no reason at all.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AT HOME IN THE NHAMACOA

  MAY 1995

  I arrived back in Zimbabwe in a subdued mood. My visit to South Africa hadn’t exactly turned out as I had expected it to, what with Dad dying and then some ghastly spirit pretending to be him and terrorising my mother and me.

  O’D was waiting for me in Mutare. He was wearing a frayed brown jacket over a frayed and faded cotton shirt. I noticed that some of the shirt buttons were cracked. To complete this ensemble, he had added frayed khaki trousers and a pair of scuffed brown boots. He did not look like the successful sawmiller he and David and everyone else had told me he would rapidly become.

  He was pleased to see me and led me over to the vehicle he had bought to replace the ancient Tabex pickup. This turned out to be an even more ancient Land Rover that looked as if it had been the first Land Rover ever produced by the Land Rover company in England and then shipped over to Mozambique.

  Short-wheel based and squat, most of the paintwork had been rubbed off the Land Rover’s body, leaving it a patchy aluminium, and if the word “grunge” could be used to describe a vehicle, this was how people would have described the car we were now using to take us around.

  “Eeek,” I said, and looked around somewhat furtively. “I hope we don’t see anyone who knows us!”

  “It’s the only vehicle I could find,” O’D explained. “You know how scarce things are in Mozambique.”

  The Land Rover showed its true colours once we left the tarred road into Chimoio and drove the 46 kilometres down to the sawmill. The corrugations were especially jarring in a vehicle without suspension and as we banged and jolted our way down the dirt road, we didn’t talk much. This lack of conversation wasn’t because we didn’t have anything to say to each other, but because a thousand rattles drowned out our voices and anyway, we were too busy putting back bits and pieces which kept falling off the inside of the vehicle and sliding the windows shut. Red dust rose up in choking clouds through the floor and coated our hair, our faces, clothes and bodies. By the time we arrived in the Nhamacoa, I felt as if I had spent several hours in a concrete mixer.

  The sun was already going down when O’D pulled up in front of the house. He took my suitcase out of the back of the Land Rover and we went inside, without opening the front door. This was because the house didn’t have a front door, merely a large gaping hole where a door had once been.

  Chuck and Eileen were in the sitting room. They were also wearing frayed clothes and were relaxing in two old Morris chairs with brown moth-eaten cushions near the west-facing window.

  Like the door, the three metre long window was also a large gaping hole. Some attempt, however, had been made to protect the room and its occupants from the elements. In place of the missing glass, rolled up black plastic was attached to a piece of wood at the top of the windows and was obviously used as a blind. I noticed several large stones on the wide windowsill and deduced that these were used to weight down the plastic to prevent it from blowing in the wind.

  The view from the window was stunning. Above an ocean of trees that went on and on seemingly forever, the darkening sky was awash with streaks of crimson and gold and mauve. A solitary evening star sparkled like a diamond.

  Chuck and Eileen greeted me with a smile. “Had a good trip?”

  Mitzi, comfortably ensconced on Eileen’s lap, ignored me.

  “It was all right,” I said, smiling back weakly and trying not to sound grim.

  Three paraffin lamps lit up the room but their golden glow couldn’t hide the plain fact that since I had last been to the sawmill, Eileen had done absolutely nothing to have the walls scrubbed down and cleaned. They were still black with decades of smoke and mould and grime. What on earth had she been doing in the last six months with all the workers O’D was employing? The house resembled a … hovel!

  I was a stickler for cleanliness and my mood darkened. We looked just like a bunch of American hillbillies now, I thought glumly, and Chuck and Eileen looked just like MAW and PAW!

  We ate a supper of chicken curry and after Chuck had talked to O’D about the activities of the day, I was initiated into life in a broken-down house in a forest in Mozambique.

  At seven o’clock, Chuck gave a huge yawn, forgetting to put a hand over his mouth and giving us a glimpse of his tonsils. “Time for bath and bed,” he told us. “It’s early to bed and early to rise in this place!” He heaved himself out of his chair and walked over to the west-facing window. Leaning over the windowsill, he shouted in the direction of the cook hut, a small construction made out of poles and untidy grass thrown up for a roof. “Avelino! Agua para banho! Chop chop!”

  Avelino, a lugubrious looking fellow of mixed Mozambican and Portuguese parentage who had a shock of frizzy hair and who was a sort of Man Friday, staggered out of the cook hut and up the back stairs, carrying a large smoke-blackened tin filled with steaming water. Chuck met him at the top of the steps and the back door - another hole in the wall - and took it from him. Grasping the tin’s two handles, he carried it down the corridor into the bathroom and I heard the sound of water being poured into a small tin bath.

  Eileen picked up one of the three paraffin lamps lighting up the room. “Goodnight,” she said, and followed by Mitzi, made her way down to the bathroom with the light, “see you in the morning.”

  “We have a water-saving system here,” O’D told me. “Eileen always baths first and then Chuck baths in her water. They use half the hot water in the tin. When he’s finished, he empties their bathwater into the cistern of the lavatory.”

  The primitive long-drop lavatory, I’d been glad to see, had disappeared during my absence and had been replaced by a proper, modern lavatory in the bathroom right inside the house. Without a water supply, however, the cistern had to be filled up with water by hand, a very common practice almost all over Mozambique.

  In the dim light of a paraffin lamp, I bathed that night in a small tin tub in a bathroom where only a curtain strung up in the hole in the wall where the door had once been, gave us some privacy. However, as there were no ceilings in the house, only a grass roof, even the slightest sound anyone made could be heard very clearly.

  I shot a glance at the white porcelain lavatory and its wooden seat just under the gaping windows. Sharing a house like this with strangers meant that you couldn’t be inhibited when it came to normal – or abnormal - bodily functions ... especially in a country like Mozambique, where things often happened to us … and we got diarrhoea … or vomited …

  Still, being heard by everyone would always be highly embarrassing, even though we were all in the same boat.

  While O’D bathed in my bathwater, I prepared myself for bed in the room opposite another curtained-off room where Chuck and Eileen and Mitzi, of course, were already all snoring their heads off.

  My new bedroom was very spartan. Two green camp beds were set out side by side on the bare black c
oncrete floor and neither of them had a mosquito net hanging over them to protect us from bites. A long built-in cupboard without doors was filled with some of O’D’s tools and equipment. The window didn’t even have black plastic for a blind and the door curtain was a capulana strung across the doorway on a wire.

  “Chuck kicked one of the legs of your camp bed the other day and broke it,” O’D told me when he climbed into a sleeping bag on his camp bed near the window. “We managed to fix it but now it tends to tip over if you’re not careful.”

  “Why on earth did he do that?” I asked, annoyed. Chuck and Eileen were sleeping on a proper bed and mattress, their own from Matsinho.

  “He was testing it to see how strong it was.”

  Although I was tired from my journey, it took time to fall asleep. Without doors and windows to restrain them, creatures of the night invaded the house. A bat flew in through the window and after fluttering around the room, hung on a beam not far from my camp bed, depositing disgusting bat droppings onto the floor. A shadowy shape with a long tail scuttled across the floor – a rat! – and disappeared into a pile of O’D’s spare parts in the open cupboard. When another rat ran across the floor towards me, I sat up hurriedly and my camp bed tipped over and I rolled out onto the floor, still zipped up in my sleeping bag. Getting out of it, I righted my camp bed. Drat that Chuck!

  The sound of drums floated over the forest, louder and louder ... boom boomboomboom … boom boomboomboom … BOOM BOMBOOMBOOM …

  As I lay carefully back down on my camp bed again, I knew I was in the real Africa now. That same Africa that my ancestors had known. But the problem with this was that I, along with about three quarters of the population of the African continent, had no desire whatsoever to live in the real Africa!

  A gong woke me up the next morning at six o’clock. Not far from my window, I heard O’D’s voice.