Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  “I’ve had a good look at … er … Stinky Pixley,” Dr. Hangartner told us, trying unsuccessfully not to laugh at the name, “and he’s going to need an operation. He’s got a polyp growing in his ear canal that’s causing the problem. It has to be removed.” He paused for a moment and then admitted, “And to be quite honest, I’ve never done this operation before, so I can’t guarantee its success.”

  O’D and I craned our necks upwards at the Vet. He was so tall that you almost fell over backwards when you looked up at him. “What’s the alternative?” O’D asked.

  “None,” the Vet replied.

  We left Stinky with Dr. Hangartner and drove back home.

  A few days later, when O’D drove up to Chimoio to phone Dr. Hangartner from the post office about the results of Stinky’s operation, the Vet gave him some alarming news. He had discovered that Stinky was also the owner of a defective heart! He was suffering from Feline Cardio Myopathy, an enlarged heart caused by the modern habit of feeding generations of cats from tinned cat food that lacked the vitamin, Taurine.

  And not only that, while the polyp-removing operation had been successful, Stinky had caught cat flu from another cat in the cage next to his and was very sick indeed. Although Dr. Hangartner was doing everything he could to keep him alive, it was touch and go!

  Amazingly, Stinky pulled through. This, of course, was largely due to Dr. Hangartner’s medical skill, although Stinky also did his bit. Despite being the owner of a flabby enlarged heart, he had the spirit of a lion and a strong and tenacious will to live.

  On our first visit to see Stinky while he recuperated in Dr. Hangartner’s care, the Vet told us a little about the operation.

  “The polyp was so deep in the ear canal that I decided to try using liquid nitrogen to remove it,” he told us “Then, when that didn’t work, I had to cut into the back of the ear to get at it.” He looked pleased with himself. “And I’m glad to say, it all went very successfully.”

  We were pleased with Dr. Hangartner as well. We were in the middle of thanking him for saving Stinky when a woman with short black hair came rushing breathlessly into the room.

  “My fiancée,” Dr. Hangartner introduced us. “She asked me to let her know when you’d be here. She wanted to see what kind of people would call their cat ‘Stinky’.”

  “Actually,” I said, glad to disappoint Dr. Hangartner’s fiancée, “we were not the ones who called Stinky ‘Stinky’.”

  Dr. Hangartner and his bride-to-be exchanged knowing looks. “We’ve heard that one before,” Dr. Hangartner’s fiancée said with a smirk.

  “It was my brother David and his family,” I told them, remembering how Caroline had been too embarrassed to tell their Vet in Highlands Stinky’s real name and had pretended he was called ‘Marmalade’. I had tried calling him ‘Marmalade’ when he’d first arrived in the Nhamacoa but it had been quite obvious that he hadn’t had a clue that this was supposed to be him.

  “Sometimes they fed him kapenta,” I went on, “that dried fish. It made him very … er … windy.”

  Dr. Hangartner and his fiancée burst out laughing at my story.

  “It’s true,” I insisted.

  We brought Stinky home some weeks later. He was a lucky cat, because if he had become ill a year or two in the future, he would have died. Because by that time there wouldn’t be any well-qualified Vets left in Mutare.

  From time to time, O’D and Caetano drove to Maringue, a new felling area Caetano had found, to check on the state of the ground. Unfortunately, it was still too wet to work there and so our panga panga logs languished in the mud and we signed more of our Arrojela Travellers Cheques to keep us all going.

  It was during one of these trips to Sofala Province that O’D saw Mogsie. He and Caetano had just driven out of Beira when O’D noticed a small cat struggling to pull itself along the side of the busy main road. The cat’s thick grey and white fur was bedraggled and wet with sweat and its little pink tongue was hanging out with thirst. Unable to bear the pitiful sight, O’D brought the red Toyota to a screeching halt and jumped out.

  “What’s the matter?” Caetano asked, bewildered and wondering if their abrupt stop meant there was something wrong with the pickup.

  O’D bent down and scooped the little cat up off the ground. “Here, you hold it,” he told Caetano and put the animal onto a surprised Caetano’s lap. “We have to go back into Beira to find a Vet, Caetano. This cat’s hurt. We can’t leave it here, it’ll get run over.”

  In Beira they found something that passed for a Veterinary Surgery and left the cat there, together with some money for its medical treatment and food. Unfortunately, it turned out that the little cat had a dislocated hip and there wasn’t anyone qualified enough at the Surgery to deal with this sort of thing. There was nothing for it but to drive down to Beira again and to bring the cat back to the Nhamacoa.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” O’D told me, “but I just can’t leave her to die.”

  “Of course you can’t,” I agreed.

  We now had one dog and TEN cats!

  The Mog or Mogsie, as I called her, was the sweetest little cat. Although she was greeted with a few hisses from the other nine cats, they didn’t seem to mind her arrival too much and even Miss Sydney, who usually made the most fuss, only gave her a couple of bats on the head with her little black paw to show her who was the boss. They knew she was no threat to them.

  By this time, Dr. Hangartner had sold his practice and together with his new wife had fled by way of a cargo boat to greener pastures in Australia. It was becoming more and more difficult for us to find medical help now, not only for ourselves but also for our animals.

  However, there still remained one other well qualified Vet in Mutare and that was Dr. Mafara, who, like Dr. Umbawa, had also been trained in America.

  Dr. Mafara gave Mogsie an x-ray and told us her hip appeared to have been dislocated for such a long time that he would have to operate on it to get it back into place. She also had a chest infection and would need antibiotics.

  Leaving Mogsie in Dr. Mafara’s competent hands, we drove back across the border to Mozambique.

  We kept in touch with Mogsie’s progress by using the post office phone to speak to Brenda, Dr. Mafara’s receptionist. She had a real love for animals and was exactly the sort of person a Vet should have working for him. A couple of weeks later, when we told her we would be in Mutare for the day, she told us to bring our cat box. Just in case Mogsie was ready to come home.

  Dr. Mafara’s surgery was also in an old house in a shady garden. As O’D wanted to get some spares from Toyota, he dropped me off in the meantime.

  Crunching noisily across the gravel drive towards reception, I stepped out of the sunlight and into the cool front room and was met by quite a comical sight.

  There was Brenda, large, plump and motherly looking, sitting placidly behind the reception counter with a tiny Vervet monkey attached to the top of her short dark hair like a yarmulke. Another slightly larger Vervet was entwined around her neck like a scarf, munching on the green pea it was holding in one of its tiny hands.

  “Hi, Brenda,” I said.

  “Oh, hello,” she replied. “As I told O’D on the phone, Mogsie’s had her operation. She’s much better now …”

  Startled by my appearance and my unfamiliar voice, the monkey around Brenda’s neck suddenly decided to panic. Dropping the pea, it scrambled to the top of her head for safety and immediately began to jostle and fight for space with the other Vervet already there.

  “ … Ow! OW!” Brenda gave a scream of pain as the two struggling Vervets dug their fingers into her scalp to stop themselves from falling off her head.

  Raising her hands, she wrenched at one of the Vervets and tried to detach its hands from her hair to pull it off her head while still continuing to talk to me “…but it would probably be better if you waited for Blessing … he’ll be back soon … to talk about her …”

  Red in the face
from the struggle, Brenda finally managed to prise the smallest monkey off her head “In the meantime,” she gasped, holding the monkey in her arms and cuddling it like a baby, “I’ll take you to see her.”

  I followed her down the corridor and into another room, laughing to myself at the sight she made. With a baby Vervet still firmly perched on top of her head, she looked hilarious from behind, as if she was wearing a monkey hat.

  Mogsie did, indeed, seem better. When I put a finger into her cage to stroke her on her head, she squashed her head against the bars and purred at me as loudly as a contented lion. “O’D’s coming to see you in a minute, little Mogsie,” I told her. “And then maybe we’ll be able to take you home.”

  Back in reception again, I leaned against the counter where Brenda and her Vervets were once again ensconced in her chair. Realising I wasn’t a threat, the little animals were back to munching on their green peas.

  “Where did you get the monkeys?” I asked.

  Brenda heaved a sigh. “People keep bringing them in. These are the sixth and seventh baby Vervets I’ve been given to look after.” She gave me a wry smile, “People are beginning to call me a rather unfortunate name - the Monkey Lady!” and bending her head over the tiny monkey she was cuddling, she kissed it right on the mouth.

  “Gosh, Brenda!” I exclaimed, “I really don’t think you should do that. You might get all sorts of germs … even Ebola … that terrible hemorrhagic disease with blood coming out of you everywhere!”

  She ignored me and went on stroking the tiny creature gently. “They’re so sweet,” she said fondly. “They’re just like little babies.”

  The Vervets certainly were sweet although I wouldn’t have wanted them attached to the back of my head all day. “Who is bringing them to you and why?”

  Brenda’s plump face turned grim. “People are buying them off the side of the road and bringing them to me. The locals are killing their mothers for bushmeat and selling the babies. One of the little Vervets still had its umbilical cord … ”

  “Oh …” I turned away from the counter, feeling sick. “How can they do that … how can anyone kill something that’s just given birth …”

  “I know,” Brenda said. “It’s horrible, but that’s what’s been happening.”

  “Why don’t you contact the World Wildlife people in London?” I asked. “Maybe they’d be able to help.”

  Brenda gave a contemptuous snort and like most people in Southern Africa, spoke her mind. “Oh, them,” she said dismissively, “they’re just a lot of useless old farts, full of hot air. A waste of time … they never do anything ... they just talk. I’ve been sending the Vervets on to a private game park but the way things are going in this country, I don’t know if even their animals are going to be safe.”

  Blessing, Dr. Mafara’s assistant, pronounced Mogsie to be fully repaired and so we took her home. There was one thing that I noticed about her, though. Mogsie couldn’t look up. She could only look straight ahead. There must have been more damage to her than we had originally thought. However, she didn’t seem to be in any pain and when she was back home again, I often picked her up and carried her around so that she could see a bit more of the world than what was just straight ahead of her and low down on the ground.

  A happy little cat, she had a particularly raucous purr. Food made her happy and being picked up and cuddled made her happy. Her moments of greatest happiness, though, came when she saw O’D. She knew he had saved her and she adored him with all her little cat heart. She often showed off for him, with a little trick she thought would amaze him. Lying on her back on the sitting room carpet, she would roll over onto her left side and then turn her head to look at him, expecting praise. When O’D exclaimed “Mogsie!” in admiration, she waved all her paws delightedly in the air and then rolled over onto her right side and looked at him, waiting for another “Mogsie!”. This performance could go on for quite some time.

  In the evenings, when she heard the sound of the red Toyota pulling up in front of the house, she always clambered off the chair she was lying on and went to the door to greet him. He was the love of her life and her purrs when he picked her up were lionesque in their roaring quality.

  On the 18th October, O’D fired Frank.

  One morning at roll call, O’D noticed that Frank could barely manage to stand without supporting himself against one of our other workers.

  “Frank!” O’D said. “You’re drunk! What did I tell you would happen if you came to work drunk?”

  “I’m … nosh drunk, Madam … er … Shir … er …” Frank protested, staggering up to O’D and inflaming a temper already inflamed by enveloping him in foul and noxious clouds of Nippa fumes.

  “Not drunk? You’re stinking of Nippa!” O’D gave Frank a push in the direction of the forest track. “Go home. Go on! You’ve had your last warning. You’re fired, Frank!”

  From my bedroom window, I watched Frank weaving his drunken way along the forest track, back towards the hut he shared with Azelia. As he finally staggered around the bend and disappeared from sight, I shook my head and heaved a long sigh.

  I was sorry to see Frank go, not only because I had a soft spot for him but because I doubted whether we were going to find another Mozambican who spoke and wrote English as well as he did. Frank had been my go-between when I needed help to understand a worker or a customer. My Portuguese would never be up to much and I often needed an interpreter. Even more importantly, he was also a known quantity and had been trustworthy to a certain extent when it had come to the large sums of money we had handled together.

  “What are we going to do, now?” I asked O’D at breakfast. “You know how difficult it’s going to be to find another cubicador. They all want to work in the towns.”

  “Oh, someone is sure to come along,” O’D told me, “and if they don’t, we’ll just have to try and train one of our workers.”

  In the afternoon, three days later, O’D and I were standing and talking outside the house when we saw a figure striding purposefully down the forest track towards us.

  He was a polite and pleasant young man and he told O’D that his name was Samsone Joao. He had come all the way from Beira and he was looking for a job.

  “What kind of job?” O’D asked.

  “A cubicador,” Samsone Joao replied.

  O’D and I exchanged a look.

  “A cubicador …” I repeated, amazed.

  After a small test, to see whether Samsone Joao did, in fact, know how to measure timber and work out their volumes, O’D employed him.

  “He’s quick and he’s bright,” O’D told me.

  Well,” I said, “what a coincidence! One cubicador walks off into the distance, just as another cubicador comes walking out of the blue to replace him! Isn’t this just the most extraordinary piece of luck?”

  O’D was thoughtful for a moment. “Hmm. It certainly is peculiar,” he muttered, “but as for luck, only time will tell whether it’s going to be good luck … or bad luck.”

  At the end of the year, Azelia brought me news of Seven. We were in the kitchen at the time, measuring out some Sunlight dishwashing liquid and diluting it with water, when she casually mentioned she had spoken to him at the market in Macate on Saturday afternoon.

  “He was selling tomatoes, Dona. Small, bad looking tomatoes and he was talking about his machamba and about being a farmer. He was laughing, laughing like a mad person.”

  “Mad …” I said.

  “Yes, and he looked dreadful! All his hair has fallen out and he is thin, very very thin.”

  Suddenly, I felt a terrible sense of urgency. “Do you know where he’s living, Azelia?”

  She shrugged. “No, Dona.”

  “Well, we’ve got to find him and bring him back here.”

  She stared at me in amazement. “But why?” she asked. “He’s mad!”

  “He’s not mad,” I said. “He’s sick. Will you try and find out where he is, Azelia? Ask people if they know?�
��

  She was silent for a while and I remembered how she and Seven had often bickered. “Alright, Dona,” she said eventually and with some reluctance. “I will ask.”

  I would find Seven, I thought, and then we would take him straight to hospital, get him well again and feed him up.

  But before I could find Seven, something was to happen that would put all thoughts of him out of my head for a while. And then, when I finally did remember him again, it was only to discover that his fate had been taken out of my hands.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  MURDER IN THE NHAMACOA FOREST

  Whenever I think of what happened to us all in 2002, a passage from the Bible comes into my mind. It’s that part of the book of Job where God asks Satan what he’s been up to and the devil replies “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it.”

  And during all his walking back and forth, Satan paid me and Caetano and O’D a visit in the Nhamacoa … and our lives were changed forever.

  I didn’t know, of course, that I had been ‘set-up’ until much later and oh, what a set-up it was. A neat little series of events, which started with Frank being fired and which then led, step by cunning step, towards its planned conclusion, when it exploded in the ultimate evil of all … murder!

  In the beginning of the year, Murray Dawson paid us an unexpected visit.

  Murray was - or used to be - a successful Zimbabwean commercial farmer and an old friend of Paul and my sister Jenny. It had been years since we had last seen Murray and then he’d been brown haired and clean-shaven. This long lapse in time was to cause a little confusion, especially when he pulled up at our house at exactly the same moment as Alan Schwarz who had come to pick up some Umbila he had bought from us.

  “Hello, O’D!” Murray greeted Alan, as they both clambered out of their pickups.

  When Alan denied being O’D, Murray walked over to O’D, who stared at him blankly, trying to pinpoint where he had met him before. Who was this bespectacled man whose face was almost entirely hidden beneath a great fuzz of white?