The Cry of the Go-Away Bird Read online

  The school sports day arrived. We piled off the bus and on to the field, which was looking festive with lines of bunting everywhere, fresh paint on the tracks and a table covered with a white cloth and dozens of trophies.

  ‘Are you running?’ I asked Kurai. She hated exercise.

  ‘No way. I told them I have my period.’

  Kurai wielded her period to great effect. It appeared every time there was a sporting event. One of the teachers told her that she was lying, that she could not possibly have four periods in a month, but Kurai got her mum to come in and shout at the teacher.

  Since then they had left her alone.

  We stood in neat rows. The headmistress was about to start proceedings when something stopped her, and she turned to look at the road. We heard drumming, and distant shouts.

  We looked around at each other. Someone giggled. Someone else coughed. It was very quiet.

  A crackle of static. A teacher had gone over to the bus and was talking urgently into a radio. She walked back to us briskly, her skirt snapping against her legs. ‘Sit down, everyone.’

  The teachers moved around us in near-silence, making sure that everyone sat cross-legged on the grass. There were still some giggles, but my chest was throbbing with an unnaturally loud and painful heartbeat.

  From the field we could see the main road. A crowd of black men with sjamboks and sticks marched down the road towards town. The traffic tried to weave around and past them, but there were too many.

  We watched as the crowd passed an elderly couple sitting in their car. The old man gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. The first few members of the crowd passed by with cheerful whistles and a few bangs on the roof. The next few stopped and started shouting things through the window. We could not hear what they were saying from the field, but we could see the old man’s profile staring resolutely in front of him.

  The wife looked more agitated.

  Kurai eyed them. ‘Must be scary.’

  ‘My brother’s cycling home,’ whispered Dallas. ‘I hope he doesn’t run into them.’

  ‘If he sees them he’ll turn around and go back,’ I tried to comfort her.

  She shook her head. ‘No. He’ll call them bluddy Kaffirs and get beaten up. That’s just the sort of thing he does.’

  Now a crowd had gathered either side of the car. They started to rock it back and forth rhythmically. Some of the people streaming past were carrying flaming sticks. It seemed just a matter of time before someone decided to set fire to the car.

  As I watched, I saw the old man bang his head on the window. A dark line appeared on his forehead.

  ‘Don’t look at them!’ a teacher snapped, and I forced my eyes away again. We sat as quietly as we could, not even daring to brush the flies off our bare knees. My hand was in the grass, and I quietly tore off little blades and crushed them between my fingers.

  Grip, crush, release.

  After a long time, the shouts faded away. We sat surrounded by cheerful flags and trophies. The warmth of the sun had moved from my shoulder to the very top of my head.

  I heard sirens. I did not look at the road.

  ‘Back in the bus, everyone,’ said the headmistress, and we trudged back. My leg had fallen asleep, and I had a cross-hatch of red lines on my shins where they had been pressed against the grass. Teachers put the trophies back in their boxes.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Kurai, ‘at least we didn’t have to run.’

  ‘I suppose. I wonder what all that was about?’

  She shrugged. ‘Bread, probably.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The rainy season began. The clouds emptied as if Saru were wringing out a wet cleaning cloth, and the air was charged with electricity. Mum got her storm headaches, and lay on the bed with two slices of cucumber over her eyes. There was a blue crackle on Archie’s fur when I stroked him.

  I sat at my window and watched the rain. Storm clouds stalked the city on lightning legs, and I played the counting game between the lightning and the thunder. When I saw the flash of light, I started counting under my breath.

  ‘One chongololo, two chongololo, three chongololo . . .’

  The chongololos lined up. Three meant that the storm was three kilometres away. When you could not get to the end of the word before the thunder started, the storm was over you.

  Our garden became red slush, the grass uprooting and floating on the water in tufts. We could not help tracking mud into the kitchen whenever we came inside, and Saru spent hours down on her knees, scrubbing at the tiles. A slumped pile of muddy flip-flops and takkies developed just inside the door, on a sheet of newspaper that soon became pulp.

  Then came the flying ants, and Saru almost gave up on the kitchen floor altogether. When the rain touched the soil they came out of their underground burrows and corkscrewed into the air. Archie danced in the garden, twisting his long body in unlikely ways to claw them out of the sky.

  Flying ants led pointless lives – one dance in the rain, and then they lost their wings and became weak, squishable things crawling on their bellies. They came into the house through every window and door, and flopped about for hours in long, melodramatic death throes. Their wings were crisp, with wiry veins connecting the sheets of brittle skin, and they floated through the house in great drifts, piling up against walls and catching in the bristles of Saru’s broom. When she brushed them outside, the wind swept them back in.

  With storms came the power cuts. We were used to these. They usually happened in the evenings, when a power line was struck by lightning or hit by a falling tree branch. The TV screen folded to a tiny white square, then blinked off. The lights flared, then darkened.

  ‘Everyone stay still,’ said Steve, as he did every time the power went off.

  There was a thud as he bumped into the furniture, and a swear word. We heard him fumbling in the cupboard. A pale cone of light appeared as he switched on the torch. That was the signal for Mum and me to get matches and light the candles we kept around the room. Steve laid the fire, and Archie hovered near him, waiting for warmth.

  Next came the camping stove on its little gas cylinder. Mum heated up some baked beans for supper. Steve tuned his radio to the BBC World Service, and we sat with our food on our laps, hunched over and huddled, our faces sunburned in the candlelight. The rain drummed the roof like impatient fingers on a table.

  After supper there was nothing to do but play cards. It was too dim to read, and there was no television. We paused only to let Mum call ZESA and ask about the fault.

  ZESA knew Mum well. ‘It is the mad white woman again.’ I could hear the tinny voice of the operator from the receiver. After five or six phone calls, we heard that someone had been sent to fix the problem.

  ‘So it’ll be another four hours then,’ muttered Steve.

  It was almost a pity when the lights came back on. The shrunken world sprang outwards again to touch every far wall. Interesting shadows became the same old furniture. Our eyes, dark and mysterious, returned to their normal washed-out selves.

  In the morning, the garden was flattened and swampy, the plants drooping and grey. The world was a jigsaw of puddles linked by slim sections of solid ground, and the storm drains became bridges over slow-moving brown rivers. Dead rodents and insects floated on the surface of the water. The sun looked rinsed and paler than usual; the air smelled clean. I wanted to bottle the air somehow for those days when the world was stale and baked, but instead I plunged my hands into the wet soil and sniffed the secret, mineral smell of plant roots and the burrows of insects. Worms slid away from my hands and down tiny tunnels.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Mum. ‘Come and wash your hands.’

  My fingers were red with mud. Mum helped me scrub under my nails in the kitchen sink, but we could not get all of it out. Red lines like veins snaked through every crack in my skin.

  ‘Well, that was a bluddy stupid idea,’ Mum said.

  I did not care. The rains brought life.
The yellow grass turned green and lush, and the plants swelled and sprouted to double their normal size. Birdsong sounded painfully loud in the mornings. The crickets screamed at night. The cane rats Archie lined up at the door were fat and robustly healthy. The soil was a rich blood-red, writhing with worms. Everything was alive, moving and growing, and the farm crops flourished.

  White farmers and their land were on the news every night. Steve said that Mugabe wanted to take the land away from them. I was in favour of resettlement, after hanging out with Kurai and her friends.

  ‘You think it’s really going to go to the poor people?’ said Steve. ‘Bob wants to give it to his cronies, that’s all.’

  ‘Then why is he doing it?’

  ‘Because there’s an election coming up,’ said Steve.

  ‘Is he going to take Uncle Pieter’s land? And Mr Cooper’s?’

  ‘Nah, it’s not going to come to anything,’ said Steve. ‘It’s just a lot of spear-rattling before the election. Mugabe needs the white farmers. They’re the ones that keep the economy going.’

  I could not imagine anyone making Mr Cooper leave his farm. He was so fluent in Shona and so respected by his workers that he seemed almost superhuman. I could not imagine Lettuce and Jeans and the other black foremen letting War Vets wander in and take over without a fight.

  We were not worried, for the most part. The farm was always sunlit. The winds that blew across it smelled sharp and hot. There was energy in the air – machines grinding gears, people working in the fields, animals running in the paddocks, everything working towards prosperity and wealth. The whole farm shone with money spent and earned.

  Although Mum had protested about the meat hooks being right outside her office, they were still there. Mr Cooper was in the office one day chatting to Mum, and I was sitting on the step outside, when a couple of workers came to the offices dragging a skinny mombe on a piece of rope.

  ‘Sah!’ They called from outside. They must have spotted his motorbike.

  ‘I’ll get him.’ I went inside. Mr Cooper was sitting on the edge of Mum’s desk, as he always did, chatting. Mum was leaning back in her chair and patting her hair with one hand.

  ‘Mr Cooper!’

  He came with me and saw the thin cow on the fraying rope.

  ‘Sah, she is sick,’ said one of the workers.

  Even I could see she was sick. The cow was swaying. Every so often a shudder went through her bony frame.

  ‘Any chance she’s going to recover?’

  ‘No, Baas.’ The worker shook his head. ‘Sorry, Baas.’

  ‘It’s not your fault, man.’ Mr Cooper gave the cow a long, considering look. ‘Ja, okay.’

  He strode over to his bakkie and pulled out his gun. It was an elephant gun. I fired one once, at a school camp, and it almost dislocated my shoulder when it kicked back.

  ‘You might want to go back inside,’ he said to me. ‘It’s not going to be pretty.’

  ‘Nah, I’m okay,’ I said, trying to be a blasé farm kid.

  ‘All right, if you’re sure.’

  His eyes narrowed. He swung the blunt, snake-like head of the gun around until it almost touched the centre of the cow’s forehead.

  The cow closed her eyes, as if in relief. Her legs trembled, once, and then the gun went off with a crack that sounded more like a car backfiring than a gunshot, and she slumped to the ground.

  I turned away, but not before I saw the first worker start to hack at the animal with a bhadza. He lifted it above his head, and the sticky, red edge of the axe blade caught the light. I felt a shiver. I reached my hand up to my forehead to brush away a piece of hair, and when my hand came away there was a dark smear on it.

  ‘What’s that?’ Mr Cooper looked at my hand. He sucked his breath inwards in a whistle. ‘Look at that. Must have sprayed some blood out after all. What are the odds, hey?’

  He gave me his big, white handkerchief and I brushed it across my forehead. There were only a few spots of red on the cotton.

  ‘Now you’re one of us,’ he said, and grinned. He had a smear of blood on his hand too. Noticing, he wiped it with his thumb and imprinted it on his own forehead. It looked incongruously like a lipstick stain, as if someone had kissed him.

  ‘Blooded,’ he said. ‘That’s what they do in the English fox-hunts, you know?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘They put some of the fox’s blood on the forehead of the new hunters. Initiation. Stupid custom.’ He smiled.

  ‘Ja,’ I said. I offered him the handkerchief.

  ‘Nah, it’s okay,’ he said. ‘You keep it.’

  I crumpled the handkerchief up to hide the redness. Mr Cooper climbed into his bakkie and started it up.

  ‘Cheers.’ The red blood on his forehead shone like a gummy smile. I felt a shiver of cold.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  The air smelled like meat. On my way back to the office I caught a glimpse of the workers cutting the cow into pieces to be hauled away, even though I tried not to look. They were humming as they worked. One of them flashed me a grin, and raised his hand, palm flat, in a wave.

  I threw the bloody handkerchief in the bin as soon as I got inside.

  Three ostriches went missing from the paddocks that week. I was with Mum on the day she found out about it, and called Mr Cooper to tell him.

  ‘Ja, three,’ she said. ‘No, no one knows. I’ve asked Jeans. Ja. Okay.’

  She hung up. ‘He’s going to talk to the workers.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because one of them did it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Mum sighed. ‘The whole thing is too well organised. It has to be someone from the farm. They probably took them for the meat.’

  Mr Cooper gathered all the workers together and asked them about the ostriches. His Shona was fluent and colloquial, and his speech got a few laughs as well as the expected shamefaced shuffling.

  ‘Come on, guys,’ he said at the end. ‘I’ll be in my office all morning. Come forward and tell me who did it.’

  He sat in his office all day, but no one came to talk to him. Streams of workers passed by on their way to or from somewhere else, but the streams parted and braided around the office. At the end of the day, when Mum and I loaded the car, we saw Mr Cooper come out of the office and light a cigarette.

  ‘Good night, Baas.’

  ‘Manheru, Baas.’

  The workers greeted him and smiled as they passed. Their faces were empty of everything but friendliness. Mr Cooper lifted a hand to Mum and me as we drove off.

  ‘I guess that’s that,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Mum. ‘He has something else up his sleeve, don’t worry.’

  It sounded as if he were engaged in a war with the workers: a strange, amicable war of smiles and jokes that did not disguise the fact that it was always Them versus Us. Respect and affection on both sides, but a healthy dose of suspicion and cynicism as well. I thought Mum was right. Mr Cooper could not let this one lie, not if he wanted to keep up the rumour that he had eyes in the back of his head. He must have a plan.

  He gathered the workers together again. They stood in front of him, looking everywhere but at his eyes.

  Whites often thought Shona people were untrustworthy, because their ways of communication were so different. In Shona culture, it was rude to look someone directly in the eye, as it represented a challenge. If you tried to make eye contact with a Shona, their gaze would slide away.

  ‘Shifty,’ said people who did not understand, and ‘untrustworthy’.

  Shona handshakes were also misunderstood. The kind of people who say ‘You can tell a lot about a man by his handshake’ are the kind of people who grasp your hand firmly and pump it up and down while staring with great intensity into your eyes. Frank. Open. Firm. They will be disappointed by Shona handshakes, which are limp and slither out of your hand like a fish eager to get back to the water.

  Mr Cooper waited, watching the workers’
eyes look everywhere but at his face. He saw the sheepish smiles. He heard the nervous laughs. When no one came forward, he smiled and told them in perfect Shona that they would all be fined to cover the cost of the missing ostriches unless they gave up the culprits. Still nothing.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Mum when we got back to the office. ‘At least you’ll get the money back.’

  ‘Ja,’ said Mr Cooper. He was frowning. ‘But I want to prove a point to these guys.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Mum asked.

  Mr Cooper called in the witch doctor. He made a big show of welcoming him into his office, making sure that all the workers could see. The witch doctor was also a showman. He made a point of embracing Mr Cooper, and shook his rattle (a gourd filled with seeds) enthusiastically. The workers slid their gaze over to him, then away.

  After an hour, the witch doctor emerged from the office. After another elaborate embrace and a lot of back-slapping with Mr Cooper, he left.

  The next day, Mr Cooper called the workers together again. ‘I have spoken to the N’anga,’ he said. Instantly, everyone looked worried. The mood fell like woodsmoke sinking to the ground. ‘If the bodies of the ostriches aren’t returned,’ said Mr Cooper, ‘I am handing over the matter to the N’anga, and he will deal with it.’

  The following morning, there were three dead ostriches laid out neatly in a row in front of Mr Cooper’s office. They had not been touched.

  ‘Magic,’ said Mr Cooper to us with a grin. He left, whistling.

  At lunchtime that day I sat outside, reading and eating a naartjie. The naartjie’s skin was thin and tightly bound to the flesh, and it was a messy business peeling it off. I was so involved in the operation that I did not see the woman walking past until she was right in front of me.

  ‘Afternoon,’ I greeted her, startled.

  ‘Masikati.’

  She was carrying a sack of mealie-meal on her head. She had close-cropped wiry hair and skin glowing like expensive dark furniture, or the parquet floors after Saru had polished them. Red earth powdered her feet and ankles, and the long yellow grass sweeping at her knees made her look as if she were walking through fire.