The Cry of the Go-Away Bird Read online

  But the workers thought differently. Some of them stopped coming to work.

  ‘Bluddy ridiculous,’ said Steve.

  The farm was built on old blood and bones, and something had freed them. I remembered the words of the witch doctor in Chinhoyi. ‘You have misfortune following you.’

  I woke up in the middle of the night, my head alert and fizzing with thoughts. Someone stood in my doorway.

  ‘Mum?’

  I could not tell who it was – it was too dark – but it looked like a man’s figure.

  ‘Steve?’

  The person just stood there, turning his head slightly to look at me. I made no sound. The world slowed down and congealed, and I had to force my lungs to expand and contract, suck air in and blow it out. My heart felt sluggish and strained. I tried to call out for Mum again, but it took effort to force the tiniest sluice of air through my throat.

  The figure disappeared, and my voice came out in a rush, far louder than I had intended.

  ‘Mum!’

  Mum came down the corridor. Her voice was late-night hoarse, with a thread of panic.

  ‘What?’

  I told her about the man.

  ‘You were dreaming. Go back to sleep.’

  ‘I was wide awake.’

  Mum leaned against the door frame. ‘You know you’re always talking yourself into seeing things. Remember the tokoloshe?’

  ‘The tokoloshe was there too.’

  ‘I’m not getting into this now, hey. Go to sleep.’

  Later in the night, I woke up to the sound of someone talking. It sounded like a radio or television had been left on. I lay in bed for a while, trying to disentangle the voices into separate words.

  Mum appeared in my doorway with a torch. ‘There’s a power cut,’ she whispered. ‘Can you hear that?’

  ‘Ja. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought it was coming from the lounge.’

  ‘I thought it was coming from your room.’

  ‘It must be from the khaya,’ said Mum. ‘I’ll have to tell Tatenda not to play his radio at all hours of the night.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘After two.’

  I followed Mum down the corridor. The radio voices faded out. I clicked the switches automatically as we entered the lounge, then remembered there was no power.

  ‘Does it sound like it’s coming from outside to you?’

  ‘Let’s not go outside.’ Outside was snapping twigs, velvety darkness, spirits calling like owls across the night.

  ‘Ja, no, hey, we’ll stay indoors.’

  The lights came back on with blazing force. A bulb popped somewhere.

  ‘Shit!’ said Mum, then clapped a hand over her mouth, giggling. ‘Don’t you start saying it just because I did, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  I started giggling too. We stared at each other. Our eyes looked naked and hollow, bigger than usual, like the pale eyes of bushbabies.

  ‘What the yell is going on?’ said Steve from the bedroom.

  ‘Nothing.’ Mum clicked off her torch. ‘Do you want some tea?’

  ‘Well, I’m awake now.’

  The noises came the next night, and the next. Even Steve heard them. Archie’s tail was permanently half-fluffed.

  ‘Jeez, man,’ said Steve at breakfast, ‘this is getting ridiculous.’

  He took Tatenda aside. I could only hear bits and pieces of the conversation until their voices became raised.

  ‘Well, someone around here is playing a bluddy radio!’ said Steve. ‘You must have heard something.’

  Tatenda replied, but he spoke softly.

  ‘Then who is it?’

  Steve listened to Tatenda’s reply, then threw up his hands and stormed over to us. ‘He says it’s not him.’

  ‘We heard.’

  Mum and Steve went out to dinner. They paid Saru to stay later and look after me. I lay on their bed watching television, listening to dishes clinking in the kitchen.

  Archie made himself comfortable at the foot of the bed and started washing. I could hear the rasp of his tongue. Suddenly he stopped, and was very still. The room felt colder, and the television screen developed uneven grey lines across the picture. The bedside light flickered.

  I looked over to the open door leading to the bathroom. I could hear a tap dripping. Archie sat upright, his eyes very wide and yellow. The hair rose on his spine, starting from his head and moving down to his tail. Finally his tail puffed up, and his ears flattened. I felt something watching me from the doorway. I wanted to speak, but my tongue seemed to have doubled in size.

  The open doorway grew, looked darker and more gaping the longer I stared at it. The hairs on the back of my arm rose with a crackle and snap. Static. The television screen went fuzzy too, and only vague shapes of people appeared before being whisked away into a grey snowstorm. An arm. A hand. A face. A collection of letters, indecipherable.

  The air was thick and tasted like metal.

  After a minute of this, Archie slowly started to relax. Watching him, so did I.

  The television image cleared, and the room seemed warm again.

  I took no chances, though. Hauling the duvet after me, I trotted down the corridor to where Saru was sitting in the living room, and without a word sat next to her on the couch.

  The strange incidents mounted up. Footsteps followed us from room to room, and even out into the garden. Pictures fell off walls, little objects went missing and turned up in strange places. Steve found his car keys in the fridge. Glass vases fell off shelves and shattered. There were spots in the house that felt cold for no reason. The cat became skittish, jumping sideways down the corridor or suddenly bristling up.

  Mum asked the other farm managers about it.

  ‘Ja, we’ve had some strange stuff happen,’ one of them said. ‘Thought it was the servants.’

  Every white on the farm was on edge. None of them admitted to believing in spirits, but all of them did. It felt like the farm did not want us there.

  That weekend, I went to Mr Cooper’s house to take the dogs for their walk. As soon as I entered his garden, I tripped over nothing at all and fell over.

  Jonah watched me with empty eyes as I floundered. I felt like he knew more about what was going on than he would say. To get out of his line of sight, I walked down towards the back fence.

  ‘Go carefully,’ he called out. ‘There are snakes down there.’

  I walked faster. The garden was poisonous green, humming with bees. I called the dogs, but they did not come. I would have to look for them.

  I saw a brown shape out of the corner of my eye. One of the dogs, playing games? When I looked around, however, it had moved just out of sight again. This happened so often that I decided to try to track whatever-it-was down. When I saw the flicker of movement at the edge of my vision, I started walking towards it, keeping my head turned away. Doing this, I ended up at the far edge of the garden, near the compost heap. There were so many flies that their buzzing was not so much a noise as a throbbing in the air.

  I stepped carefully over kitchen scraps – banana skins, avocado pips, potato peelings – and walked towards the strange movement. It was that time of day when the sky was leeched of colour and the first mosquitoes were starting to whine, just before the sun dropped abruptly off the edge of the earth.

  I heard a crunch, and looked down. I had crushed a chongololo, and it was not quite dead. Its body was flailing on the ground, spewing yellow liquid, and its little blind eyes stared up at me. It had a fine fur of tiny yellow legs along each side, and they furled themselves into clenched claws of pain.

  Chongololos emerged from all over the compost heap. Maybe it was going to rain – but I had never seen so many at once. The flies hovered in the air, watching me.

  I caught the movement again, just on the edge of my vision. I felt something tickling the back of my neck and put up a hand to brush away whatever flying thing had landed on me, but realised that
it was not an insect. The air thickened with static, and my hair gently lifted itself off my scalp. Something snapped my feet out from under me. The ground rushed up towards my face, and my nose spurted blood. I did not realise I had actually hit the ground until the pain arrived, a couple of moments later.

  I lay there, watching the blood drip red on to the ground, turn brown and sink into the thirsty earth. My bleeding had somehow released the tension in the air, as if whatever knocked me down would only be satisfied with an offering.

  I looked up and saw a crowd of people staring at me. They were not transparent or pearly white, like the ghosts I had seen on television; they were stained with dirt, sweat and blood. Some were black and some were white, but all of them were silent and staring at me. They reeked of decay and body odour.

  I screamed. Jonah came – not running, but walking.

  ‘Medem?’

  I looked at him, and then back to where the crowd had stood. They were gone. ‘Did you see them?’

  Jonah shook his head. ‘I have to get back to work,’ he said.

  I watched him go. I knew he had seen them too.

  Mum and Steve called in a priest from church to say a prayer in our house. He came with his Bible, wearing full regalia. I sat with my knees drawn up to my chest and watched. He had a bottle of water that he sprinkled on the rug and he said prayers in English and Latin.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mum as he left.

  ‘You’re very welcome,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you’ll have any more problems.’

  That night was worse than any of the others. As well as the voices, there were footsteps up and down the corridor, and a painting fell off the lounge wall. None of us got any sleep.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Steve at four in the morning. His skin looked crumpled, like slept-in sheets.

  ‘Maybe we could try something else,’ I said.

  ‘Like what?’

  I asked Saru the next day.

  ‘Black man’s medicine does not work on white spirits,’ she said. Her face was implacable.

  ‘Please, Saru.’ I had great faith in the powers of the N’anga. ‘Just ask. They might not be white spirits, anyway, we don’t know who they are.’

  ‘I will ask,’ she said, ‘but I do not think he will come.’

  He came. Our electric gate intercom buzzed and Mum answered it.

  ‘Who did you say you were?’ she said into the speaker. I heard muffled Shona from the other end. Mum turned around to stare at me and I jumped up and pressed the button to let him in.

  ‘It’s the witch doctor, Mum,’ I said.

  ‘What witch doctor?’

  ‘I asked Saru to ask the witch doctor to come to the house. To get rid of the spirits.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’

  Mum looked at me. She picked up one of the walking sticks that we kept by the door. ‘All right. But we’ll keep an eye on him, hey? And if he steals anything, it’s your fault.’

  The witch doctor was a small man, wearing jeans and a shirt. I could only tell that he was a N’anga from the string of wooden necklaces he wore, and the little bag of rattles, powders, feathers and stones that he carried.

  As soon as he got inside he stopped and sniffed the air. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘there are definitely vadzimu here.’

  He shook a gourd rattle in the air and chanted something in Shona. Mum gave me a meaningful look, then asked Saru to make some tea for us all. She glanced down to where the witch doctor’s bare feet were leaving greasy marks on the floor and closed her eyes briefly. There was a faint smell about him: body odour, yes, and fresh sweat, but also something spicy and unfamiliar.

  ‘What are vadzimu?’ I asked.

  ‘They are the ancestors.’

  ‘But it is usually good to have ancestors around, isn’t it? These ones are causing trouble.’

  ‘Ah, yes, usually it is good to have one’s ancestors around, but not when they are not at peace. When someone dies, their spirit wanders until they are asked to come home and look after their family. Come with me.’

  We walked from room to room. In each, the witch doctor shook his rattle and chanted. Mum followed us, looking anxious.

  The witch doctor stopped at the door to my room. ‘It is strong here.’

  I told him about the man I had seen in the doorway.

  He nodded. ‘That does not sound like the ghost of your ancestors. But when a spirit is unhappy, it attracts other spirits to the place.’

  Mum sniffed. The witch doctor spent a few minutes cleansing the doorway and then went down the hallway into the bedroom. Mum stood in front of the cupboard where she kept her jewellery, arms crossed. The witch doctor spent some time standing over the bed, murmuring. Mum rolled her eyes.

  ‘It is done.’ The witch doctor straightened up. ‘I have asked the spirits to come home. They are still here but now they are not wandering. They are happy because they know you are here and they can watch over you.’

  ‘The priest tried to get rid of them,’ I said.

  ‘Ah.’ He shook a finger. ‘That was a mistake. That would just make them angry. You do not want vadzimu to go away. You want them to stay and make your family stronger. No wonder they were shupering you.’

  Mum did not offer him tea, in the end. She did offer him money, which he did not accept.

  ‘No, no. You tell your friends about me, yes?’

  Evidently he imagined that there might be a run on exorcisms in the white community. We managed to give him some avocados and vegetables from our garden in thanks, and ushered him off the property. It was getting close to the time when Steve came home, and if he saw the N’anga there would be hell to pay.

  I was given the job of closing – and locking – the gate behind the witch doctor.

  Before he stepped out, he turned to me and smiled. ‘All they want is to be remembered. That is all vadzimu want. When you do not remember, you condemn them to wander.’ He tapped his nose as if he had shared a great secret with me, and stepped out into the road.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The workers had started wearing T-shirts showing their support for Mugabe or the MDC. I noticed the opposition leader for the first time. Steve had told me about the Movement for Democratic Change, but I had not paid much attention to them before; now, I saw photographs of Morgan Tsvangirai in the paper. He had a big, wide face like a frog’s, and he lifted his open hand as a symbol of his party. Mugabe’s symbol was a closed fist.

  ‘Don’t wave at anyone unless you mean it,’ warned Steve. ‘Showing an open hand can be dangerous these days.’

  No more Sweet or Sour games, then. But I had not played them for years.

  I still went to the Coopers’ every week to take the dogs for their walk. Jonah’s expression was darker and darker each time I saw him. He stopped greeting me, and just grunted instead. After a few weeks he did not even bother to grunt – he kept his head down and ignored me.

  ‘What’s up with him?’ Steve asked Mr Cooper. ‘He has a face like a baboon’s bum.’

  ‘I didn’t give him the day off to go to the ZANU PF rally in town,’ said Mr Cooper.

  ‘Bluddy right,’ said Steve.

  One morning when I arrived to pick up the dogs, Mr Cooper was there. The dogs, delighted to have him home, worshipped at his heels as he strolled. I hovered, feeling like I was intruding, but he spotted me.

  ‘Howzit, Elise?’ he said.

  ‘Fine, thanks, Mr Cooper.’

  ‘Surveying my kingdom,’ he said, sweeping out a hand to indicate the garden – half-joking, half-not. ‘Your parents are well?’

  It still bothered me to hear Steve described as one of my parents. ‘Ja, they’re fine, thank you.’

  Mr Cooper took a breath as if to say something else, but then stopped as if he had noticed something. I followed his gaze. A monstrous bougainvillea plant, draped over the fence, sagging under the weight of a thousand bright blossoms. ‘I thought I said t
o cut that bougainvillea back?’ he said to Jonah, who was clipping the dead heads off some roses.

  ‘Yes, Baas.’

  ‘And you haven’t done it.’

  ‘No, Baas.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know, Baas.’

  ‘Did you forget?’

  ‘No, Baas.’

  ‘All right, then. I would like you to cut it back today.’

  ‘Yes, Baas.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Mr Cooper looked at me, ‘Cheers, Elise,’ and went back into the house.

  I avoided Jonah as much as I could. When I was in the Coopers’ garden I felt his eyes on me, like a cold finger sliding down my spine. When he and Mr Cooper talked, Mr Cooper looked shorter, suddenly, and younger, while Jonah’s face looked like a dark soapstone carving: definite and bitterly chiselled.

  I kept an eye on the bougainvillea. It was heavy and lush with life, like everything in the garden, and it spilled over the wall and hung over the flowerbeds. By the next week, it was still not cut back. I noticed Mr Cooper was watching it too.

  Jonah did not cut it back the next week, or the next. The bush grew larger and even more luxuriant.

  ‘That is bluddy stupid,’ said Mum when I told her.

  The bougainvillea continued to grow, taking over the fence and drowning the other plants in its shade. Its flowers darkened, turning from bright pink to a poisonous red. It dropped blossoms on the ground, and I trampled them when I came to pick up the dogs.

  Soon there was a smashed, bloody carpet of red mingling with the mud and grass.

  Mr Cooper’s manner towards Jonah changed. He started to bark out orders. He started treating him like a servant. When I saw Mr Cooper shaking his finger in Jonah’s face, I realised that their relationship was not as cosy as I had imagined.

  One week, I was crouching to attach the dogs’ leads to their collars when I heard shouting. Jonah and Mr Cooper. I knew I should have straightened up, but instead I stayed, listening.

  ‘Do not speak to me that way!’ shouted Jonah. The deferential servant voice was gone.

  ‘You are a bluddy employee in my house, living on my land!’ Mr Cooper shouted back.