Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  “Where are you going to keep these ducks, Chuck?” I wanted to know.

  “Oh, they’ll have to sleep downstairs until I have time to build a pen,” Chuck said.

  “That room’s already full to over-flowing with animals,” I said, feeling myself beginning to fume and hearing my voice beginning to rise.

  “I’ve just TOLD you,” Chuck said, his voice also beginning to rise “that I’ll build a pen WHEN I HAVE THE TIME!”

  Before you could even say ‘Hey Presto!” the female duck had produced eggs and, fluffing out her feathers, sat down on them to keep them warm. Not long after this, the eggs hatched and several cute and fluffy little yellow ducklings emerged from their shells.

  When the ducklings were about two weeks old, Chuck went downstairs one evening to check on them and to his horror, discovered that they were covered in ants. He cleaned off all the ants and putting the ducklings into a cardboard box with their mother, carried them up into the house.

  “No!” I shouted furiously, outraged beyond measure by Chuck’s continued and complete disregard of O’D’s instructions concerning his animals. Not only had he made no effort to build a goat pen or coops for the chickens, he was now bringing animals into the house itself! “NO, I will NOT have ducks in the HOUSE, Chuck!”

  Outraged in his turn at my hard heartedness, Chuck shouted furiously back at me. “They’re being EATEN by ANTS downstairs! What do you expect me to DO?”

  The ducks spent the night in Chuck and Eileen’s bedroom and the next morning, Chuck poured old diesel down the ant holes.

  Out of their cardboard box and downstairs again, the ducklings kept close to their mother as she moved around, pecking at insects on the ground.

  Eileen bent down and picked up one of the fluffy little creatures. “Oh, Chuck,” she exclaimed, cuddling the duckling under her chin, “aren’t they lovely? Aren’t they sweet? They’re going to need water, you know. We must build a little duck pond for them, right here in front of their room.”

  The female goat Chuck had bought from Sainete had not only thrilled Chuck and Eileen but had thrilled the male goat as well and soon the consequences of Sainete’s gift to Chuck became apparent.

  The female goat became pregnant and produced two small goats and Chuck and Eileen were as excited as new parents. They brought the mother and her children to live under our house with the chickens and the ducks, a ‘temporary’ measure Chuck told me, while the male stayed in the pen O’D had finally ordered the workers to build for Chuck’s goats.

  The male goat didn’t take to being separated from his family. Lonely on his own, he often found ways to escape out of his enclosure and galloping after the female goat, chased her around and around the house.

  And like a thick carpet, millions of round brown goat pellets joined the chicken and duck droppings in the room under our house and around our house. We were more like a guano manufacturing factory now than a sawmill.

  “This is disgusting,” I complained to O’D. “We can’t even walk around the house without being ankle-deep in animal manure!”

  “I’ve had enough of this, Chuck,” O’D told him. “Get some workers to make a coop for the chickens and ducks at the other end of the sawmill and make a separate pen for the female and the small goats.”

  Towards the end of the year, the strain of living together with our conflicting ideas about hygiene and animals became too much. Chuck and Eileen’s sloppiness really, really irritated me and my preoccupation with germs and cleanliness upset them and tired them out. When the end came, it came quickly.

  One Friday morning, after O’D had driven off to Chimoio in the Land Rover, Chuck, Eileen and I lingered on at the breakfast table. We talked about growing indigenous trees and how we’d been unable to get any of the Umbila seeds we had collected to germinate. Then the conversation moved on to the Jacaranda, that gorgeous purple-blossomed tree found in so many towns all over Southern Africa.

  “Is that an indigenous tree, Chuck?” Eileen asked.

  “Yes, it is,” he told her through the mouthful of margarined toast he had crammed into his mouth.

  “No, Chuck,” I interrupted, “I’m sure it’s not indigenous. Isn’t the Jacaranda a South American tree, brought to Africa by the Portuguese from Brazil?”

  Eileen gave me a cold look, annoyed that I was disputing Chuck’s knowledge of Africa and the bush. “Oh, I’m sure Chuck knows what he’s talking about, Val.”

  I pushed back my chair and stood up. “Oh well,” I said, “I’m off to wash my hair, so if you want to use the bathroom, you’d better tell me now.”

  “No, you go ahead,” Eileen replied, “we’re still eating.”

  In the bathroom, I pulled the curtains shut. I removed the top from my bottle of shampoo and poured cold water from a large bathroom container into an enamel washbowl. When I put the container down, I stared at the water in the bowl. It had always been quite clear but today the colour was different. Today it was a strange pale biscuit colour. I remembered that the night before Chuck had mentioned that the water from the hole in the riverbed had been a bit dirty and for a moment I hesitated. Did I really want to wash my hair in water like this? Oh, it’s only river water, I told myself and making up my mind, plunged my head into the bowl.

  Immediately, a foul stench rose up out of the bowl and into my nostrils … the kind of stench you’d smell if a rat had fallen into the water and died and decayed in it.

  “Aaaargh!” I gave a scream of horror and disgust and pulled my head out of the revolting liquid. Grabbing a towel, I wrapped it turban-style over my now vile, stinking, tresses and rushed down the corridor.

  At the breakfast table, Chuck and Eileen were still placidly munching on toast when I burst into the room.

  “This river water is absolutely stinking, Chuck!” I cried. “We can’t use it. It must be thrown away at once. I can’t wash my hair with anything like this!”

  Chuck looked thoughtful. “Did you use the water from the white container or the yellow one?” he asked.

  “The white one,” I told him. “And the water’s revolting! Fetid!”

  “That’s not river water,” he told me. He took another bite out of his toast.

  “Not …”

  “It’s the water the washermen used to wash our dirty clothes. To save water, I told them to pour it into the white container so that we can use it in the lavatory.”

  A foul dribble of water escaped out of my towel and ran down my face and neck. I mopped it up with one end of the towel. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Like most men who are confronted by an angry woman and know they’re in the wrong, Chuck’s eyes turned shifty. He chewed on, trying to get his brain to come up with a suitable excuse to exonerate himself from being the cause of making a woman’s crowning glory smell like a garbage dump ... and failed.

  “I TOLD you I was going to wash my hair,” I went on, my voice rising with outrage, “and you didn’t say anything. And I went and saturated my hair with filthy, stinking water that was used to wash people’s DIRTY SWEATY SOCKS … AND UNDERPANTS … AND … OOUUUGH!”

  I stomped out of the room and went into the kitchen. Grabbing hold of a container of the clean and precious Macate water we only used for cooking and tea and coffee, I dragged it noisily along the floor, down the corridor and into the bathroom.

  I rinsed and rinsed my hair and then I shampooed it. I scrubbed my scalp, washed my face and neck and rinsed my hair over and over again. By the time I was finished, I had used up a whole 20 litres of valuable clean water. But I didn’t care.

  Then, a few days later on Sunday, something else happened which caused even more friction between us all.

  While Caetano and O’D were busy loading some equipment onto the blue Gaz with the help of a few workers, Chuck’s male goat escaped from his enclosure and came chasing after the female goat. Like mad things, they galloped frenziedly around and around the lorry, blaring and crashing into equipment and getting in everyone’
s way.

  Suddenly, O’D cracked.

  Aptly describing the animal’s character in a fierce, taut voice, he said “I’ve had enough of this fucking goat!”

  He turned to the workers. “Go and catch that goat and tie it up on top of the lorry. I’m giving it to Caetano.”

  Eileen and I had been standing nearby and now she began to cry. Tears streaming down her face, she rushed over to the workshop in a stumbling run and shouted “Chuck! Chuck! Come quickly! O’D’s giving our goat to Caetano! He’s got no right! It’s OUR goat!”

  Chuck came out of the workshop, wiping his oily black hands on an oily black rag. “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing, upsetting Eileen like this?” he shouted at O’D.

  O’D went white with fury.

  “This is MY sawmill,” he shouted, “and you work for ME, not the other way round! I’ve asked you over and over again to keep that goat penned up and out of my way but you won’t listen. You NEVER listen! If you can’t understand this and won’t do what I ask, you and Eileen can pack your bags and get out of here right now!”

  When O’D stopped shouting, there was a dead silence that was broken only by loud blaring bleats from the male goat, now protesting about being tied up on the lorry and struggling to free itself.

  Eileen was the first to make a move. She turned away from us and ran back to the house, sobbing as if her heart was breaking.

  After a while, I walked back to the house too. Inside, in the sitting room, Eileen sat hunched in the Morris chair, now sobbing into a white handkerchief.

  “All this isn’t good for me,” she sniffed pitifully, in between sobs. “It’s making me ill.”

  “Well,” I said, sick at heart myself with the way things were going, “well, you and Chuck should have listened to O’D, you know, and kept that goat penned up as he asked you to.”

  “O’D has no right to give our goat to Caetano, no right at all!” Eileen cried, ignoring my words and proving how true O’D’s claim had been that she and Chuck never listened. “It’s OUR goat!”

  No one ate lunch that day. The food sat untouched on the table. When O’D and Caetano drove off to Chimoio in the blue Gaz with the equipment they had loaded and the goat, Chuck and Eileen disappeared behind the curtains in their room. No one ate supper that evening either after O’D returned from Chimoio and so I gave it all away to the workers who were still awake. That night, Avelino and Pocas had an unexpected feast. Without a fridge, it was impossible to keep food in the torrid heat of the Mozambican summer.

  The next morning, Chuck told O’D that he’d been thinking things over and had realised he’d been in the wrong. O’D accepted his apology and they decided that it would be best for all of us if Chuck began to renovate one of the other houses for himself and Eileen, so that we wouldn’t be on each other’s backs all the time.

  While Chuck was organising eucalypt beams and thatching for another grass roof, Eileen gave me a clue as to what she and Chuck were planning

  We were in the sitting room at the time. I was busy filling in the Forestry Register Book and Eileen was reading another more exciting book of her own, when she put her book down and said “Chuck’s brother-in-law is a very rich and important man, you know. He’s got kapenta rigs on Cahora Bassa. (Kapenta is the name for the tiny sun-dried and salted fish Africans like to eat so much) “He’s a very successful businessman,” - here her voice lowered almost to a murmur - “not like some I could mention.”

  A few weeks later, Chuck drove the blue Gaz up to Chimoio and while he was there, made a phone call from the post office to his rich and successful brother-in-law. On his return, he told us that he and Eileen needed a rest and that they were going away for the weekend.

  Then, on a Friday afternoon, a rusty old blue VW Golf with yellow Zimbabwean number plates jolted slowly down the forest track and stopped outside our house.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s our car and chauffeur,” Eileen told me and headed for their bedroom. “Chuck! Chuck!” she called out, “Are you ready, Chuck? He’s here!”

  “See you on Monday,” Chuck told us and together with Mitzi, of course and their two small weekend suitcases, they climbed into the car and drove away.

  While they were away, I took the first opportunity I’d had since my arrival in the Nhamacoa to start cleaning all the black mould and old smoke stains off the sitting room walls. Although I’d managed to scrub the blackened and grimy tiles still attached to the bathroom and kitchen walls until they’d come up sparkling and white, Eileen had strenuously resisted my attempts to clean the rest of the house. “It’s a waste of time,” she had told me. “You’ll never be able to get thirty years of dirt off these walls.”

  Now that she was safely out of the way, I rounded up Seven and a couple of other workers and handed out scrubbing brushes and buckets of soapy water. We pushed Chuck and Eileen’s old furniture into the middle of the room and set to work.

  Chuck and Eileen’s weekend lengthened to more than the original weekend and the work O’D had organised with Chuck went undone. Already fed up with Chuck, O’D’s temper began to fray around the edges.

  Then, late one evening, a little, rusty VW Golf came jolting down the forest track and stopped outside our house. There was no “chauffeur” this time as Chuck was driving. When they walked into the house, I immediately noticed that something was missing. Where was Mitzi? Still in the car?

  “You’re late, Chuck,” O’D greeted him.

  Chuck mumbled something evasively and disappeared into his bedroom.

  While Eileen took in the changed appearance of the sitting room - clean pale grey walls, a telltale bucket of soapy water and a scrubbing brush, some of her furniture still pushed against a wall - I took in her new and amazingly changed appearance.

  Gone were the shapeless, frumpy, washed-out shift dresses she always wore and in their place was a strange new dress I had never seen on her before. White with large pink flowers scattered all over it, the dress was short and figure-hugging with a neckline so plunging it made me gape. Was this a relic from her youthful days in the Swinging Sixties?

  “Hello, Eileen,” I said, and indicating the bucket and brush, added, “I didn’t expect you back this evening.”

  “So I see,” she replied, in a tone of voice that could only mean trouble. “Well, this is a nice welcome, I must say. No ‘how was your week-end, Chuck?’ or, ‘did you enjoy yourselves, Eileen? Obviously nothing’s changed around here.” She turned on her heel and flounced her ample pink flowered bottom at me as she clumped her way down the corridor and disappeared into their room. “That’s it! I’ve had enough! Chuck! Chuck! Come on, let’s go!” she cried and, with the fate of their goat obviously still rankling, added “They’re still as nasty as ever!”

  Left standing in the sitting room, O’D and I listened to the sound of suitcases being pulled out and things being thrown into them. It didn’t take Chuck and Eileen long to pack and within a few minutes they emerged from their room and climbed back into their borrowed car.

  Following them outside, I said, “Goodbye,” while Eileen glowered at me through the dusty windscreen and Chuck’s eyes went all red and teary and he choked “I can’t … just can’t go on … sorry things had to end like this …”

  I turned away from them and went back into the house. Although O’D hadn’t said a thing, his face was very white. Was he angry? Was he upset? Or, was he worried now that we were on our own?

  The little car started up and O’D and I listened to the sound of Chuck and Eileen, our too-close companions of more than a year, driving away down the forest track and out of our lives.

  “They left all their things behind,” I said to O’D, “their furniture, their kitchen stuff, their books … ALL their animals!”

  “Oh, I expect Chuck will come and collect them when he’s ready,” O’D said.

  A mix of feelings enveloped me. Relief that they had gone, mixed with a strange sense of
regret and of loss. What a pity we hadn’t been able to get along together. Although Chuck and Eileen hadn’t exactly been our friends, they had been company in this wild and isolated forest. You needed support in the African bush, you needed people to turn to for help if you got sick or were injured, people to talk to and discuss things that were happening.

  Now we were on our own. A sudden jolt of fear stabbed through me as the realisation dawned of what exactly this was going to mean. Now, except for O’D, I was going to be on MY own! Remembering what a fright Milton, the Secret Policeman, had given me when Eileen and I had been alone in the Nhamacoa, I wondered how on earth I was going to cope when O’D went into Chimoio on his fuel buying trips or into the forest with the blue Gaz. I’d been surrounded by people all my life and now, here I was, alone in a forest filled with trees and smothering grass … living in a broken down house with no doors and windows and barefoot people tiptoeing around at night …

  When Caetano came down to the sawmill and heard that Chuck had left, little lines of worry appeared on his forehead. Mechanics who actually knew what they were doing were like gold dust in Mozambique. “We’ve got to find another mechanic in a hurry,” he said, “but where?”

  “There’s one standing right in front of you, Caetano,” I told him. “O’D used to work for the Americans in the Middle East, you know, fixing all the machinery on one of their oil rigs.”

  Soon we had fallen into a routine. While O’D worked in the forest, bringing in timber and repairing the lorries and tractor when they needed repairing, Caetano worked in Chimoio, dealing with the mountain of paperwork the Mozambican government departments always foisted onto us.

  We were now almost at the end of the year and although we were making some money, it was all going on paying the worker’s wages every month and repaying the expensive loan to the BPD Bank. We desperately needed a pump for the borehole so that we could have water of our own and could start planking, but buying the pump was always beyond us.