Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  “AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH!”

  The dead rat dropped out of my nerveless fingers, back into the oily black bathwater. Oughh, oughh, oughh! Shuddering with disgust, I grabbed the bottle of Dettol, pouring disinfectant over my hands and washing them over and over and over again.

  “BIASSE!”

  He put his head around the doorway. “Madam?”

  I pointed at the bath with a Dettol smelling finger. “There’s a big dead rat in the bath, Biasse. Please get rid of it!”

  One evening, towards the end of the year, the usual gentle soothing music on Zimbabwe Radio One was rudely interrupted. “People are rioting in the centre of Harare!” the announcer told us urgently. “They’re overturning cars and setting fire to them! Smashing shop windows and looting! The Riot Police are out, with tear gas!”

  It seemed that the simmering dissatisfaction with the rising price of fuel, food and other basics of life had suddenly erupted in the capital city. I took heed of the signs and made a decision.

  “I think it would be a good idea to take all our money out of Stanbic bank,” I told O’D.”

  As Zimbabwean banks were much more efficient than the banks in Mozambique and, believe it or not, our bank in Guernsey in the Channel Islands, we had transferred some of our Arrojela money to a sterling account in Stanbic Bank. It had made the money easier to get at when we needed it.

  At the Mutare Branch of Stanbic, the Manager tried to persuade us to leave the money where it was. “Your money will be quite safe,” she assured us.

  “I’m sure it will be,” I told her, “but I have this feeling …”

  As Stanbic Mutare didn’t have the foreign currency available to pay us out in sterling, they turned our Arrojela money into Thomas Cook Sterling Travellers cheques instead. The wad was thick and there was a lot of signing to do.

  “We’ll open another account with you when the trouble’s over,” I told the Manager when we finally stood up to leave But as it turned out, we never did. And the trouble didn’t go away. It only got worse. Much worse.

  At the end of the year I began to dream strange and unsettling dreams. Dreams about demons with chalk white faces and evil eyes as black as soot, dreams about the devil. They stretched out long arms to catch hold of me and I had to fight and fight and fight them off.

  The dreams were so terrifying that I always cried out in my sleep and woke O’D up and he wasted no time in shaking me awake. My dreams frightened him, too, because the sounds I made when I struggled to call out for help were peculiarly eerie and quavering and gave him a pretty good idea of the unpleasantness of what was going on in my subconcious mind.

  I put my dreams down to the unsettling situation and the awful things happening just across the border from us. I had no way of telling, of course, that some of the dreams I dreamed would actually come true, especially the most chilling one of them all …

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A DREAM IN THE NIGHT

  “Aaah ...!” I woke up with a gasp, my heart thumping frantically into the mattress and looked through the folds of the mosquito net at the bedroom door, still expecting to see him standing there. But there was no one and the door was closed, not open.

  I hadn’t been able to see his face, because he’d been silhouetted against the orange glow from the paraffin lamp in the bathroom. He hadn’t been alone either. As I had stared at him, I’d seen another figure flit quickly past, behind his back, and then disappear. I had known why he was standing there in the open doorway. He was there because he had come to kill me.

  “O’D,” I shook his shoulder, not wanting to be alone with my fear. I needed to share it and to be reassured. “O’D, wake up!”

  “Whaza matta?” O’D’s voice asked sleepily in the darkness of the bedroom.

  “A horrible nightmare, of a man standing in the doorway. It was so real ... so real, that for a moment I didn’t know whether I was awake or asleep. He was going to kill me!”

  O’D’s response to my frightening explanation came in the form of a soft burbling snore, followed by some little popping sounds, like a baby blowing spit bubbles.

  Ignored, I lay back on the bed, listening to the night sounds in the Nhamacoa forest and trying to blot out the dream. An owl hooted in the big mango tree next to the house and the sound of drums drifted through the trees ... louder and louder ... as it was wafted along on the wind. Eileen had hated the drums and I had grown to hate them too. There was something evil about the way they invaded and manipulated my dreams while I slept, giving them a whiff of the witchcraft that was practiced not only in the forest, but also all over Mozambique.

  Witchcraft …

  At first, O’D and I had been sceptical when Caetano had told us of the powers of witch doctors … but then we had seen Mr. Goncalves call up a twirling dust devil straight out of the ground … and then we had seen the demonic Nora Swete … seen with our very own eyes …

  It was no wonder I dreamed weird dreams, living with all this stuff around me in the forest. It was impossible to avoid, because it came TO you, uninvited – just like the drums. They were so loud now that they seemed to be right in the room with me, beating and beating at my ears. They never broke up O’D’s sleep or disturbed him. Only me. Sometimes I had the uneasy feeling that this was deliberate and that they were meant to disturb me, because something in the forest didn’t like me …

  I pulled a pillow over my head to muffle the drumming. “Oh, shut up,” I whispered. “Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!” A terrible blood-curdling scream cut right through the drumbeats and the feathers of my pillow. I felt O’D’s body jump a little on the bed but he didn’t wake up. I knew the horrible scream well. It came from the night apes living in the trees just below our house. Under cover of darkness, the forest was noisy with activity and the air was often filled with some pretty hair-raising sounds.

  Still awake and unable to go back to sleep, I unmuffled my ears. While I lay on my back with my eyes closed, I listened to the bubbling sound of a nightbird I was never able to identify and tried to think of something pleasant. But my mind refused to obey me. Instead, it fearfully went over and over my dream, replaying it like a repeat on television. Every now and then, I forced myself to open my eyes to stare at the door, just in case it was ajar … just in case someone was standing there, waiting to do something incredibly evil ...

  But the door stayed closed and eventually, towards dawn, I drifted off to sleep.

  The dream stayed with me for a long time, filling me with unease and making me edgy, jumpy. How real it had been! And how terrifying! As the months went by, however, and life went on without even the hint of any personal danger, the dream began to fade, as all dreams tend to do. I had no idea, of course, that it had been a prophetic dream - a truly prophetic dream - and that an unseen and sinister hand would soon begin to set the stage and to engineer my meeting with the man he was sending to kill me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  THE WORLD’S BIGGEST PARTY

  2000

  Towards the end of 1999, the world began making plans to celebrate the new millennium. People in the developed countries of the world were splurging enormous amounts of money in preparation for the greatest party the earth had ever seen and champagne producers were rubbing their hands in anticipation of unheard of profits.

  O’D, too, became caught up in the world’s festive preparations. A few days before the New Year, he splurged out on a couple of bottles of red Portuguese wine, several cases of Manica beer and some Chinese firecrackers he bought from Riaz, Faruk’s brother.

  “I thought it would be nice to see the New Year in with a fireworks display,” he told me, “but the only ones I could find in the whole of Chimoio are these three rockets.”

  “Hmm …” I said, “Chinese … I hope they don’t blow your fingers off. And before you shoot them up over the forest, I think you’d better go over to Macate and ask Mario for permission. We don’t want to get into trouble with people thinking we’re starting
a revolution.”

  When O’D returned from Macate some hours and several beers later with Mario, the Policeman and Mario, the Nurse, he only brought back two rockets. Mario, the Policeman, had taken one for himself as he and the villagers of Macate had also wanted to celebrate the New Year with us. The plan was for O’D to shoot off his two rockets at midnight and then, when Mario saw these flare up in the night sky, he would shoot off his rocket as well.

  On the eve of 2000, while O’D and his workers and their wives sat outside and drank beer under the starry sky, I sat on the sofa in the sitting room with a glass of red wine and listened to the BBC World Service, waiting for the countdown to midnight and the sound of Big Ben striking the hour. Bandit, as usual, lay on the carpet close to my feet while a small, pure white cat called Grumpy curled up on my lap in the space usually occupied by Miss Sydney. Miss Sydney was sulking and nowhere to be seen. Beside herself with fury at the gift Caetano had given us, she alternated between bullying Grumpy unmercifully and disappearing out of the house for hours on end.

  Listening to the world’s hectic celebrations gave me a strange dark feeling of foreboding. They were throwing a massive birthday party but they hadn’t invited the very person whose birthday they were celebrating. If they disregarded Jesus Christ, why were they having this party? Surely they realised that the earth was much older than 2000 years? What they were doing seemed completely illogical.

  An uneasy thought popped into my mind. The world was going to pay for this omission, I was sure of it …

  Fifteen minutes to midnight, the BBC let me down. “Wouldn’t you just know it,” I complained to O’D through the sitting room window, “the BBC’s gone off the air!”

  “Keep your eye on the clock, then,” O’D ordered, “and let me know when it’s twelve o’clock.”

  At midnight, I called out “Happy New Year!” and O’D shot off his two Chinese rockets in swift succession into the starry sky above the forest.

  The earsplitting, yowling, screeching sound was terrifying. It sounded just like war and was greeted with loud shrieks and screams of fright from the occupants of the various huts dotted around us. One more to go. Turning our eyes in the direction of the night sky above Macate, we waited and waited … in vain. Where was Mario’s rocket?

  “Must’ve downed one Nippa too many and shot it off in the wrong direction,” O’D decided.

  Back in the house, I had a premonition and shared it with O’D. “You know,” I said, “It’s been such a dry year, I think we’re in for another drought.”

  On the 8th January, O’D and Caetano made a very uncomfortable bus ride down to Maputo to buy a new Toyota pickup. This was because Toyota in Beira hadn’t had one pickup for sale! In Maputo, they bought a red one, not because they liked the colour but because here again, Toyota only had one red pickup for sale. They made the long drive back to the Nhamacoa just in time, because my prediction that we were in for another drought turned out to be totally wrong.

  When the rains first came, the big warm drops spattered on the parched dry brown earth and left round spots in the dust and a deliciously fresh clean fragrance in the air. At first, the rain was soft with a silky, swishing whispering sound and then, when the swollen purple-black clouds burst, water hurtled down from the sky, pounding and roaring so loudly on our grass roof that we had to shout to be heard. Thunder rolled around overhead and while lightning bolts cracked violently all around us, two young cats and a dog cowered underneath the sofa, shivering with terror.

  Day after day, the rain poured down.

  Our workers’ mud huts collapsed. Our house sprang a dozen leaks. In the forest where Naison and his crew were working, the Muanga River rose so fast that our lorries and tractors couldn’t get across and were stranded. Leaving two unfortunate workers behind with some food to guard the vehicles, Naison and his men removed their clothes, tied them in bundles on top of their heads and swam across the swollen river. It took them two days to walk back to the sawmill.

  When the rain considerately stopped for a week and the level of the river fell again, we took the opportunity of getting our vehicles back to the sawmill. Just as well, because this time, when it began to rain again, it didn’t stop until parts of southern Mozambique looked just like an enormous lake.

  In Manica Province, we wallowed around in a sea of mud. Swollen rivers cut us off from Maputo and the sawmills that bought our timber disappeared under water. In the forest, our logs were bogged down in places no lorry or tractor could get to and our own sawmill was silent. Everything ground to a standstill, including our income. Vegetables and maize turned black and rotted in the ground and food became scarce.

  The weeks passed slowly while we waited for the rain to stop and the water to drain away. Money ran low, food even lower and life turned very tough for our workers and ourselves. We were back to living off Faruk’s bounty and buying dried beans, tins of tuna, chickens and maize on credit from his shop.

  We lost about three quarters of our local business at this time. Many of the small carpenters who had done so much to help our sawmill along stopped buying planks from the stock we still held in the Nhamacoa. No doubt this was because of the knock-on effect the floods had had on all businesses and there were no customers or work for them. Unfortunately, these carpenters were never able to get on their feet again and consequently vanished from our lives. Their loss was a big blow to us.

  We’d been at a standstill for about five long months when Caetano found a way out of our financial dilemma. Or so we all thought. Little did we know at the time that his solution would bring a new person into our lives and that this would set the stage for the terrible and tragic events that were to take place two years later, in 2002.

  Along with the floods, there had also been a cyclone called Eline and she had knocked down a vast quantity of trees along the Mozambican/Zimbabwean border, in the pine plantations at Tsetsserra.

  “I heard the other day that the government’s looking for private companies to pull the pine, saw it up and sell it before it’s destroyed or burnt in the queimadas,” Caetano told us. “So far, only a couple of people have taken up the offer. If we can scrape enough money together to buy the licence, I’m sure I can organise a contract with IAC (the government sawmill) to supply them with the pine.”

  Caetano talked to IAC, we scraped the money together and with Caetano now driving the white pickup and in charge of the venture, Fo’pence and our workers set up camp at Tsetsserra.

  Unfortunately, there had been a change at the Department of Forestry. Ana Paula had left to work for an Aid Agency and had been replaced by a man called Ribeiro who had spent some time in Cuba and who abhorred private enterprise. Despite the fall of Communism, Ribeiro remained a loyal and rabid follower of this failed ideology and had wanted the work at Tsetsserra to be done by a co-operative of local people - with himself in charge.

  When his ideas came to nothing, he worked off his disappointment on Caetano, harassing him with frequent visits to castigate and criticise. The work was being badly done! It was too slow! Too inefficient! Caetano should never have been given the job! He didn’t know what he was doing!

  One day, Nhaca, the new Governor of Manica Province, also paid Caetano a visit at Tsetsserra. He looked around at the work in progress and was full of praise for Caetano’s organisation. How well the work was being done! So quickly! So efficiently! Used to Ribeiro’s unflagging criticism, Caetano was completely taken aback by the Governor’s compliments, so at variance with the Head of Forestry’s unpleasantness. What were we to think?

  Shortly after the Governor’s visit, the local people began to stir up trouble. They got in the way, they hindered and prevented Fo’pence and our workers from pulling the pine and complained to Ribeiro that the work should have been given to them to do.

  Ribeiro promptly suspended our operations and told Caetano that he and the local population had had a meeting and had decided to buy a saw, form themselves into a co-operative and do the work
themselves.

  Incensed by it all, Caetano disputed Ribeiro’s right to suspend our work. Ribeiro dug his heels in and rather than leave our workers idling away their time, we brought them back to the Nhamacoa. The pine which Fo’pence had pulled and which Ribeiro was refusing to allow us to supply to IAC lay in a safe estaleiro, awaiting its fate. We left our chainsaw operator, Caetano Jorge, to guard it. After all, it had cost us money to pull. Money for the licence, money for fuel, money for our worker’s wages and their food. Were Ribeiro and his so-called ‘Co-operative’ going to compensate us for this?

  While the dispute was raging, the local population carelessly started a forest fire that got out of control and also began to rage in Tsetsserra. It roared through the thousands of hectares of fallen pine, sending them up in smoke and leaving piles of ash.

  When the fires died down, Caetano drove off to Tsetsserra to check on our own pine, although he knew the timber had been pulled into a well-cleared estaleiro and should have been quite safe.

  On reaching his destination, he got a shock.

  The estaleiro was untouched by fire … Caetano Jorge was still there … but the pine … worth six hundred million meticais (U.S. $25,000) … was gone! Caetano Jorge was guarding an empty estaleiro!

  Caetano tottered out of the pickup. What had happened to our timber?

  “The foreigner came and took it away,” Caetano Jorge explained.

  “The foreigner … what foreigner?” Caetano’s voice rose up in astonishment.

  “The one the Company gave the wood to.” Caetano Jorge went on.