The Cry of the Go-Away Bird Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  THE CRY OF THE GO-AWAY BIRD

  Andrea Eames

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409041177

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Harvill Secker 2011

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Andrea Eames 2011

  Andrea Eames has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  HARVILL SECKER

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781846553738

  Prologue

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘You said you knew.’

  ‘I said I thought it would be a good place to find one.’

  The place at the bottom of the garden, over a small hill, where almost nothing grew – only a straggly acacia tree with white thorns, and a few tufts of khaki grass. An old, rusted tap dripped red water into a small pool fringed with weed and dotted with water-boatmen, insects with long, oar-like legs that rowed in jerky strides across the surface. Away from human eyes; quiet; near water. The perfect place for a tokoloshe.

  ‘Maybe we have to wait till night-time.’ I flopped down in the one scraggy patch of shade that had escaped the glaring sun. It was a hot, humming afternoon, alive with bees and flies, scented with honey and grass seeds.

  My cousin Hennie sat on the ground next to me. He looked a bit like a tokoloshe himself – small and brown, with white hair like a dandelion clock and feet that were even harder and dirtier than my own. We had competitions where we compared bruises, cuts, blisters and calluses, and Hennie nearly always won.

  ‘I’m not waiting here all day,’ he said.

  ‘It’ll only be a couple of hours.’

  ‘Where’s the food?’

  I had liberated five Marie biscuits from the pantry, a little soggy, but still edible, as well as a torch, a map and an apple for the tokoloshe. I did not know what they ate – although I had an uncomfortable feeling that it might be children – but I thought an apple might serve as good bait or a helpful distraction.

  My nanny, Beauty, had often told me the story of the tokoloshe she saw when she was a little girl. One day, when she went to the pump to get water for washing, as she did every day, there was a child-like figure standing there. When it turned around, she saw that it had the face of an old, old man. No eyes; just sockets, scarred and burnt as if someone had gouged them out.

  ‘I was very afraid,’ said Beauty. ‘But I needed water. It stood there watching me. I thought that perhaps it wanted to drink but did not know how to work the pump. It stepped back and let me pump some water into my bucket, and when I had finished it grabbed my bucket with its monkey hands and took a drink. Then it ran away.’

  I had caught glimpses of what could be tokoloshes now and then, but never close enough to tell for sure. I wanted to see one for myself, up close.

  My cat Archie materialised as soon as he heard the packet of biscuits crinkling. I pulled one out and divided it carefully into three. Archie swallowed his piece in one gulp. Hennie also finished his quickly. I had a special method that involved eating all around the edge again and again until it was gone, and so mine took longer. By the time I had finished, my two followers were drooping again.

  ‘I want some juice.’

  ‘I didn’t bring any juice.’

  ‘I’m going back to the kitchen.’ Hennie stood up.

  I grabbed his hand to stop him. ‘You can’t.’

  Archie strolled over to the kitchen and collapsed on the cool concrete steps outside. A startled lizard shot off the steps and up the wall.

  Hennie seemed to resign himself. ‘Okay. What do we do now?’

  I was not really sure. I had a vague plan of using a stick as a spear and creeping through the undergrowth, but the only sticks were thorny ones and there was no real undergrowth; only a few patches of brittle grass. It was the sneaky kind, that drew its blade along the back of your knees and left red welts.

  ‘We wait,’ I said with finality. Hennie looked unimpressed.

  ‘Can we eat the rest of the biscuits?’

  I thought about it. ‘I suppose so.’

  We divided up the biscuits and ate. Then we sat looking at the acacia tree and listening to the slow plonk, plonk of the rusty tap dripping into the puddle.

  Hennie started to get grumpy. He got up. ‘I’m going home.’

  ‘You can’t go home! We haven’t found the tokoloshe yet.’

  But my older cousin authority had lost its power for the day. Hennie stomped off, and I settled down to wait alone.

  The sun cooked the top of my head and turned my saliva into thick peanut butter. After what felt like several hours, I wondered if I could go back to the house and get some juice. That felt like cheating, though, and so I stayed, making a little rock garden out of pebbles and twigs. And then I sat for a bit longer.

  Mum came to check on me, wearing a stained apron and flip-flops and shielding her eyes from the glare. ‘Are you okay? Do you want to come in for some tea?’

  She had not heard about the expedition, but was used to my games.

  ‘I can’t come in, I’m waiting.’

  Mum disappeared, then reappeared with a sandwich and a green plastic cup full of juice. She also brought a hat, which she wedged firmly on to my head. ‘What have I told you about wearing a hat?’

  ‘Agh, Mum.’

  ‘It’s important. Are you sure you don’t want to come inside?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘All right then. Don’t take the hat off.’

  I ate my tea. Time passed. The tap dripped. A persistent fly tried to land on my face. A beetle climbed over my toe. The swift African sunset came: the shadows grew longer, the air cooled and the first mosquito of the evening whined in my ear, followed by an ominous silence when it found a spot of skin on which to feed. I heard the clinking of plates from the kitchen – Mum making dinner – and saw a sil
houette at the kitchen window. I sniffled a little, feeling sorry for myself. It was a luxurious sniffle, because I knew that, if I wanted, I could go inside where it was safe and cosy, but I had chosen to stay and fulfil my quest. There was a strange satisfaction in it.

  The sun fell away, and it was dark. I clicked on my torch, shone it into the sky and wondered if people in Space could see me. The light made a dusty, pale cone for a few metres and then vanished.

  Night-time was noisy in Zimbabwe. Crickets ululated and the mosquitoes droned like faraway aeroplanes. The grass rustled and snapped. As the night grew darker, hunting a tokoloshe no longer seemed like a game. I turned off my torch and sat in the dark. A feeling like fear, but not quite, spread from my chest down both of my arms.

  Something moved in the acacia tree. I bit my lip, and tasted blood. I stayed very still. Too late, I remembered the apple, still in the bag, that I had saved for the tokoloshe. Hennie might as well have eaten it, because I was paralysed and could not get it out.

  A pair of round, pale eyes appeared in the tree, watching with ancient cunning. I stared back. I did not know what to do. Was I planning to catch the tokoloshe, like Pooh and Piglet setting a trap for the Heffalump? No chance of that. The air seemed to thicken and concentrate itself around that glowing paleness, and I knew that I had made a mistake, that you could not go looking for something if you did not want to find it.

  I forced my eyes downwards, away from those of the tokoloshe. I heard a low chittering, and then nothing.

  I ran to the house. My limbs felt like thick sap, bendy and unreliable. The kitchen light and the moths fizzing and dying around it were the most comforting things I had ever seen.

  When I burst into the kitchen, sobbing, Mum asked me if I was all right. I could not explain.

  Later, Mum told me that it must have been a bushbaby. ‘It’s unusual, though,’ she said. ‘You hardly ever see them up here.’

  I had seen bushbabies on the farm before. They had round, yellow eyes that blinked down from trees. But I knew what I had seen. And I knew what I found the next day, under the tree where I saw the tokoloshe: a small bundle of herbs, a crow feather and a porcupine quill, tied together. A talisman to ward off evil spirits.

  Chapter One

  Beauty’s skin was smooth and many-coloured, like the patina on old copper. When I was a baby, I sat with my nose buried in the sweet, meaty smell of her armpit, where it curved to meet her breast. Now, at twelve years old, I sat beside her, legs outstretched, back against the sun-warmed wall. The proper way for a woman to sit.

  I listened to a stream of Shona, a language that lingered on long vowels. Each sentence was met by a chorus of women’s voices, in agreement or mild horror or quiet amusement.

  ‘Eh-eh.’

  ‘Oh-oh.’

  Comfortable, lazy sounds. They had settled in for a long gossip. I could understand most of what they said, but some words stood out like bright pebbles in muddy water. Amai: mother, or a term of respect for an older woman. Aiwa: No. Maiwe! – variously, oh my goodness, you don’t say, I can’t believe it.

  The earth was red and baking, the sun almost invisible in a white-hot sky. I stared at the ground, an endless source of amusement, covered in ants, worms, chongololos and beetles. I watched red ants swarm over the body of a rhino beetle stranded on his back, who rocked back and forth in dumb bewilderment until Beauty reached out a hand and flicked him over on to his front. I was torn between happiness at the beetle’s redemption and faint disappointment that I could not watch him die.

  The women sat around the cooking fire, drinking greasy tea from enamel mugs. Occasionally a man passed by the coven; tall or short, fat or thin, he always wore overalls of thick, scratchy fabric over a bare chest, and usually had no shoes. The women became more subdued when a man passed, only a few daring to laugh at him or call a remark. I knew that black men (apart from the gardener, and other men the family knew personally) were something to be feared, like strange dogs, and I stayed silent. They flicked me quick glances – who was this white kid sitting with the women? I was the whitest of whites, I knew, with freckles and pale eyes that blinked and burned in the sun, but I did not feel white.

  I loved to sit with the women in the khaya, even though Mum did not approve of me spending too much time there.

  ‘It’s dirty,’ she said. She was proven right when I came home sick one day after drinking water from the pump, and she made me promise not to go back. I did not feel guilty for breaking that promise, however, because the Elise who sat quietly and did her homework in the white house at the top of the hill was very different from the Elise who played with the workers’ children, threw stones at pigeons and helped pluck the chickens for supper.

  ‘You are going back to school soon?’ one of the women said in English. Her hair was glistening and oily under her dhuku, a brightly coloured tangle of cloth tied over her head.

  ‘She starts Grade Seven next week,’ said Beauty, also speaking in English.

  ‘Just one more year, and then to high school!’

  She smiled at me. I looked away. I did not want to think about high school just yet.

  ‘Oh-oh.’ The other woman said something in Shona that I could not catch.

  ‘We must go now.’ Beauty stood up with a great deal of exclaiming and brushing away of dirt and ants.

  ‘Do we have to?’ I asked.

  ‘Your Amai will be wondering where you are.’

  We made our way up the road, passing women who carried their babies in slings on their backs. Little round macadamia-nut faces peeped over their shoulders.

  ‘Mangwanani!’ the women said as they passed. I imagined the word like a chongololo, a black and yellow centipede, unfurling.

  The road on the farm was red dust and tyre tracks. Eventually it led to the houses of the farm managers, and huts gave way to whitewashed walls and green lawns. All the other grass, especially in the Bush, was golden brown like baked bread, but the grass by the houses was broad-leaved and squeaky to walk on. Sprinklers sput-sputted along the side of the road, unwinding and spinning backwards with a hiss.

  Our house was at the top of the kopje, just in front of the Bush, a prickly, dry tangle of thorns, branches and grasses full of buzzing things that bit. Ever since I was little, Beauty had told me that the Bush was also full of spirits. You must not insult the spirits. If you did, they would make you get lost for ever.

  When I was small, my uncle had taken me walking in the Bush. He put a red cloth down where we stood. ‘We’ll see the red cloth and know that this is where we started,’ he said. He shook the compass a little and started the needle swinging. ‘And the compass makes sure that we know how to get back.’

  We walked away from the red cloth, carrying our rucksacks. After a while, I grew hot and tired. There was nowhere to sit. A fly buzzed around me, trying to land on my eyeball.

  ‘Bluddy flies,’ said Uncle Pieter. I wondered if this counted as insulting the Bush. ‘We’ll go back now.’

  We turned around and followed the compass. After a few minutes Uncle Pieter began to look worried. We could not be very far from the house, but it was impossible to tell – every part of the Bush looked exactly the same.

  I asked if we were lost.

  ‘No, no,’ said my uncle.

  The spirits were mischievous and quick to take offence. I did not know how to appease them. The Bush suddenly looked malicious, and the light was fading. I blinked, and through the film of tears saw a sharp face winking from a tree. I looked again, and it was gone. I did not know if I had imagined it.

  ‘Ah, here it is,’ said Uncle Pieter. He reached up and took the red handkerchief down from a branch. ‘I wonder how it got up there.’

  I knew how, but did not say anything in case the tokoloshes were listening.

  I had lived on the farm all my life, in the little house on top of the kopje, and I knew all the best ways to spend my time. Spotting an antlion’s tiny burrow in the red soil, and mimicking the footst
eps of an ant with a slender twig. Watching the antlion emerge in an avalanche of dust, pounce on the stick, then disappear beneath the surface, disappointed.

  Finding a chameleon on a branch and letting it walk along your hand, feeling its scaly feet loop and scrape along your fingers like Velcro. Spending half an hour with a sharp rock and a concrete slab, trying to break open a macadamia nut. Catching black beetles and keeping them in an old ice-cream tub with some grass and a bottle-cap of water.

  ‘Be careful,’ Mum always said.

  I knew that we were not welcome here. Too many things could kill us: snakes, leopards, hippos, hyenas, charging elephants, spiders. Potential death or pain in every step. Even the plants were out to get us. Walking barefoot, I grew hard and crusty soles on my feet to protect against acacia thorns lurking on the ground. Every expedition outside was accompanied by insect repellent, sunscreen, a hat and calamine lotion, and Mum eternally dabbed things on me, pulled out splinters or bee stings and slapped on plasters. A day did not pass without a cut or bruise.

  My mother, however, was someone I saw in the mornings and at night, and for some parts of the weekends: it was Beauty who made me breakfast, Beauty who walked with me to school every day, Beauty who was waiting for me at the gates when the final bell rang. Beauty heard all my stories about the teachers and the other kids. Beauty put plasters on my knees when I grazed them, and promised not to tell Mum that I had not eaten my apple again.

  Beauty had come to live with us when my dad died, which was before I can remember. Dad had worked with Uncle Pieter on the farm, and when he died, we stayed there.

  ‘Shall we go and get a Penny Cool?’ asked Beauty.

  Penny Cools were little tubes of flavoured ice in a plastic bag. I liked to bite a hole in the top, squish them in my hands until the ice warmed up and melted a little, and then squeeze the slush out through the hole.

  The village shop was full of colourful things: Freddo Frog bars; white Milko chocolate; Mazoe orange juice; cream soda; fake cigarettes made from sugar and food colouring; real cigarettes; Coke; a lost chicken chased out by a broom. The man behind the counter wore blue overalls and was missing a tooth.