The Cry of the Go-Away Bird Read online

  Something bright shone through my window, and I heard Steve saying ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  About a dozen black men in uniform stood outside the house shining huge torches at the house. One of them had a megaphone. One was holding the leash of a snarling Alsatian. Behind them, our front gate hung off its hinges.

  Steve appeared in his dressing gown and slippers. He waved at the men, gesturing and explaining. They looked grim.

  Mum stood behind me at the window.

  ‘They look angry,’ I said.

  ‘Ja.’ She watched Steve. ‘Apparently they might fine us for a call-out.’

  ‘Are they allowed to do that?’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter if they’re allowed to. They can.’ Mum leaned past me and reached in past the burglar bars to open up the window.

  ‘Hello, guys,’ she shouted, cutting off Steve. ‘We’re really sorry you came out here for a false alarm. Would you like some beers?’

  A few smiles appeared.

  ‘Come round to the back,’ said Mum. She shut the window and pulled her dressing gown closer around her.

  ‘It’s two in the morning,’ I said.

  ‘Ja, well, better than having to pay a thousand-dollar bribe,’ said Mum. ‘Come on. You want a beer?’

  I sat on the back doorstep of the kitchen sipping a Castle Lager while the men sprawled on the dew-soaked grass, laughing and chatting. Mum and Steve stood in the kitchen doorway. There was a party atmosphere.

  ‘Sorry again for calling you out,’ said Mum.

  ‘Eh-eh, don’t worry,’ said one of the men, waving his hand. ‘It was a mistake.’

  Mr Cooper came to our house for dinner the following night. Steve told him the story of the burglary and the false alarm.

  ‘Could well have been Jonah, I suppose,’ Mr Cooper said. ‘Would surprise me, though.’

  ‘Ja, well.’ Steve stabbed a piece of meatloaf with his fork. ‘Bluddy Kaffirs. I’m sick of the lot of them.’

  ‘They’re not so bad, Steve,’ said Mr Cooper. ‘Just struggling to get by, like the rest of us.’

  ‘After everything we do for them,’ Steve said. ‘They never bluddy appreciate it. They’re just waiting for the chance to stick a knife in our backs. I should have left when Mugabe came to power.’

  ‘You thought things would get better,’ said Mum. ‘We all did.’

  ‘We failed,’ said Mr Cooper.

  We all stopped eating.

  ‘We did our best,’ Mr Cooper said. ‘We tried to be fair. I know I did. We wanted the best for everyone. But we failed.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Mum began. Her eyes flicked to me, then Steve. Say something.

  ‘Potholes in the roads, police accepting bribes, Mugabe’s thugs doing whatever the yell they want,’ said Mr Cooper. ‘The whole place is going to hell. And d’you know what the worst thing is? We are going to be remembered as colonialists who didn’t care about anything except staying in power. They won’t remember any of the good. They have forgotten it already.’

  I was halfway through chewing a mouthful, but I did not dare move my jaws.

  ‘And these young skellems like Sean, they’re spoiling for a fight again. That, or they think that all these problems are our fault, that the whites did all this. Don’t know what we were thinking,’ said Mr Cooper. He shook his head, and he was still shaking it when Mum got up to pour him a glass of water.

  When Mr Cooper left, I walked him to his bakkie. Something rustled in the bushes next to us. The moon was a slice of orange rind in the sky, and the air smelled like night-time.

  He paused before he got in, and cleared his throat. I waited. ‘Don’t worry about what I said, hey?’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean it. Not really.’

  He was waiting for an answer. ‘I know, Mr Cooper.’

  ‘Good. Good.’ He opened the car door. ‘I wouldn’t change this for anything, you know.’

  We stood there in the dark. The stars were white pinpricks; the air was humming with night-time noise.

  ‘Not for anything.’ He smiled and climbed back into the car. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Mum from the kitchen door. ‘Come back inside.’

  I inhaled the night before going in. There was nowhere on earth like this, and I would not change it either.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Steve told a story about boiling a frog in a pan of water.

  ‘The trick is to heat the water up gradually,’ he said. ‘Then the frog doesn’t notice the water’s getting hotter, and he doesn’t jump out. When the water gets to boiling point, the frog still won’t jump out because the change has been so slow that he doesn’t realise.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Mum. ‘Of course he would realise.’

  ‘You haven’t actually done it, have you?’ I asked, feeling sorry for the frog.

  ‘No, man, of course not. But it’s true. You can kill a frog by degrees without him knowing.’

  This had always been the land of Make-a-Plan. People were proud of it. ‘Zimbabweans are resourceful,’ they said. ‘We can cope with anything.’

  No power? Simple. Hook up a generator. No bread in the supermarket? No problem. Buy some on the black market. You could always make a plan, work something out. And we all stuck together, calling our friends when we found a garage with petrol, sharing what we had.

  Going to school became optional. Whether because of lack of petrol or riots in town, I stayed home almost all week, and when I did go to school it was half-empty.

  Skipping school was fun at first, but after a few weeks I wanted to go back. Scratch my initials on the desk. Sit through boring assemblies. Study for exams.

  On Uncle Pieter’s farm, the War Vets and the farming families seemed to have reached an uneasy truce. The War Vets were not venturing any further into the farm. Instead, they were camping outside. The revolutionary songs and drumming were not as unrelenting. Occasionally Uncle Pieter would send them a cow to eat, and occasionally they would take one without asking. They also chopped down trees on the farm for firewood and pilfered vegetables and mealies when they could, but no one seemed to be very concerned.

  ‘Could be worse,’ said Uncle Pieter on the phone. ‘And if they start to shuper us again, we’ll boot them off.’

  Over the past two years this had become normal, this strange, limited life. Only sometimes did I feel like we were under siege, behind our high walls topped with glass.

  On the days when I could not go to school, I spent a lot of time on the phone with Kurai.

  ‘I am so bored,’ said Kurai every night. ‘I can’t stand it.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I said, but I was lying.

  Boredom was a luxury. You could not trust ordinary. Ordinary was not safe. You could wake up on an ordinary day, drink a cup of tea, eat a piece of toast, and be killed by a mob outside your door. You could drive to work on an ordinary day and end up in the middle of a riot.

  I held the times I had been bored in front of my mind like beloved photographs. All those hours spent in doctors’ or dentists’ waiting rooms. Sitting in the hot sun at school prize-givings. I looked back at myself then, kicking the legs of a chair or pulling up tufts of grass, and I tried to remember that feeling. Nothing to fear, nothing to think about.

  The petrol queues were getting worse. I left the school gate one day to see backed-up traffic, bumper to bumper, disappearing in both directions. Petrol queue. A record, this time. The Shell station was a good couple of kilometres away.

  ‘Bluddy yell,’ said Steve when he came to pick me up. He had to park several blocks from the school, and it was a long way to the car.

  The atmosphere in the petrol queue was festive. Someone had set up a braai and people were leaving their cars to get boerewors and burgers. Several people had brought cooler bags with Castle Lager inside. There were a lot of empty cars, sitting deserted while their owners ate, drank or made the long trek to the nearest bathroom.

  ‘What if the line moves forward?’ I as
ked. ‘What will happen?’

  ‘It won’t,’ said Steve. ‘The petrol station doesn’t have any petrol yet. These people have probably been here all night, waiting for the delivery.’

  A man in a suit got out of his car and gave the keys to a woman – probably his wife.

  ‘Her shift,’ said Steve.

  There was a joke we told at school about petrol queues. A man who had been sitting in a petrol queue for several hours grew gradually angrier and angrier. When he could stand it no longer, he jumped out of the car and told his friend, ‘Look after the car for me. I’m off to kill that bastard Mugabe.’

  His friend sat in the car and waited for the man’s return. After another few hours, the would-be assassin returned looking crestfallen.

  ‘What happened?’ asked his friend.

  ‘The queue was longer there,’ said the man.

  We fell about laughing at this one.

  ‘You know, I used to be able to see him in his office when I was having clarinet lessons,’ said Kurai one day.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mugabe.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Ja. The College of Music looked right over his wall and into his office.’

  ‘You could actually see him?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘Nothing. Boring as hell. Just sitting writing or reading papers. But I missed an opportunity.’ Kurai hefted an invisible gun on to her shoulders. ‘Great place for a sniper. Bang! Problem solved.’

  If only. I prayed for an assassination.

  The news had become a fearful, hated ritual. When we heard the familiar drumbeat, we dropped what we were doing and went into the lounge. We did not sit to watch the news; we stood with our arms crossed and our feet planted firmly on the ground, facing it. What was he saying about us today? What did this mean? Sometimes it was not translated into English and I could only pick up a word here and there.

  I watched him yelling at the camera. The television’s sound was muted, but I still felt each word landing on me like a physical blow. There were little sequins of sweat on his upper lip. It had a very clearly defined line down the middle, filled with a tiny moustache. I felt my own lip. I had the same line.

  Mugabe had very beautiful eyes. People always said that you could read someone’s character in their eyes: if they were shifty, or too close together, or had a mad light. Not so with Mugabe, who had a neat fringe of almost feminine lashes along his top and bottom lids, and brown eyes that seemed to glisten with feeling.

  Sometimes I tried, really tried, to understand him. I stared at the screen and tried to read his expression, to see what was going on in his head.

  People said it was after his wife Sally died that Mugabe went mad.

  I looked at Mugabe’s face, leaning in so close that the television image disintegrated into coloured dots of light, and wondered why we were all in thrall to him, this little old man with the long eyelashes.

  Mum found a place that exchanged goods for cash, no questions asked. It was outside the city, in a new development that was abandoned when inflation rose and the money ran out. We piled furniture and electronics into the car and drove out there. When we had the cash in our hands we went straight to the shops and spent it, giddy and giggling.

  ‘Hey, chocolate!’ said Mum, spotting some of the imported stuff on a shelf. ‘Get six bars.’

  We bought twelve tubes of toothpaste at a time, acres of toilet paper, enough canned food to build a pyramid. Prices were strings of 0s looped together on long chains, and they went nowhere but up.

  The summer was hotter than usual. I wished I could run around in nothing but my underwear, like I did when I was five, but the best I could do was drink continuous glasses of iced water.

  Mum came home from the farm office with bright eyes and something exciting to tell us.

  ‘Mr Cooper has offered to put a pool in for us,’ she said.

  Steve had no expression. ‘Put in a pool?’

  ‘Ja. He’s going to pay for it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, because he likes us. It’s a present.’

  ‘A present.’

  ‘Ja. He’s going to get some of the workers to come over and measure for it this afternoon.’

  I could feel the water on my skin already.

  ‘We don’t need a pool,’ said Steve. He flapped his newspaper out to straighten it.

  Mum stood still. ‘Come on, Steve. It’s free.’

  ‘We don’t need it. Tell him no thanks.’

  ‘Agh, come on, Steve.’

  ‘Come on!’ I said, sitting right on the edge of my chair. It would be so wonderful to be able to dive into our own pool.

  ‘I said no.’ Steve got up. ‘I’m going to talk to Tatenda about those beds by the rockery.’

  ‘All right.’

  We watched him go.

  ‘Mum!’ I began, ready to launch into a tantrum that would somehow persuade her to persuade Steve.

  ‘Shush.’ Mum was pale. She gave me a quick smile and went out after Steve. I watched her walk to him and slide a hand around his back.

  I did not whinge about the pool. Instead, I did what I used to do in Chinhoyi – turned on the sprinkler on the lawn and ran through the water in my swimming costume until I was almost too cold and could lie on the grass, letting the sun warm me through.

  There was a letter in the paper that said, ‘If white farmers think they are so good at farming, why can’t they go back to Britain and farm there?’

  ‘They’re bluddy Zimbabwean, just like the blacks,’ said Steve. ‘Can you imagine Mr Cooper farming in England?’

  I could not imagine Mr Cooper anywhere but on the farm. Like Steve, he was part of the landscape.

  Mugabe announced that he was putting forward a referendum to give him almost unlimited powers. As a side note, it allowed the government to take white farms without any compensation.

  ‘What a bluddy surprise,’ said Steve.

  People could say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the change. Mum and Steve voted and sat back, laughing and giddy with pessimism, joking that it was probably rigged anyway and there was no point.

  I started to see people wearing ‘Vote No’ T-shirts – even some of the farm workers. There were big ‘Vote No’ adverts in the paper, too.

  Mum and Steve threw a party to hear the results of the referendum. All the farm managers came to the house for a braai, to grow warm and drunk in the February sun. It felt like the end of the world. Everyone had been throwing those kinds of parties lately – where people got so drunk that they could not move, voices were brittle and laughter had a hysterical edge. We had a perfect life here, in this perfect weather, with our servants and sunshine and silver teapots, and we were determined to make the most of it while we could. If we were going down, we were going down with a gin and tonic in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  The time came. The results were going to be announced on the radio. The party trooped into the living room and sat around the transistor, waiting for one word.

  It came. ‘Fifty-five per cent of Zimbabweans have voted “No” to the proposed amendment to the Constitution.’

  There was a silence, and then, ‘Bluddy yell,’ said Steve.

  Everyone broke out in excited talk. Surely Bob would have rigged the vote? He always did. Was he really that confident? Had he really thought that he could intimidate enough people to guarantee a ‘Yes’? People jumped up and clapped their hands. They were euphoric. They could not believe something they did had actually made a difference. They started to think that perhaps they could change things after all. On the news that night, people cried and laughed.

  ‘We have the old rooster cornered,’ said a Shona woman. ‘He can’t hang on much longer now.’

  Everyone thought it was just a matter of time, that this meant the end of Mugabe’s rule. The people had spoken against him.

  I remembered this, and tried to freeze it in my mind like a
photograph. The time when we did make a difference, despite everything. When we wrote something on a piece of paper and it changed history.

  The Shona people were fatalistic. If you were run over by a bus, it was your time. They did not rail against God and fate, which could be why they were so good at religion – any religion, be it Christianity or the older, less forgiving ones. It was so easy to adopt this attitude, living in Zimbabwe, and to think that we were on an inevitable slide downwards, and that no one could do anything to change it. That night, I felt hopeful. I remembered Mr Cooper telling me that our duty was to leave things a little bit better than we found them. It was the idea that we could make changes, redirect fate, that made the colonists build roads and schools and hospitals. We were in charge of our own destiny; that was the philosophy of the West. We could make things better. I could almost believe it.

  Mugabe made a speech after the results were released. He was very calm, staring over the heads of the crowd, saying that the people had spoken.

  ‘Shit, man,’ said Mum, staring at his face.

  I knew what she was seeing. I saw it too. There was a powerful anger in Mugabe’s face that seemed to come right out of the TV screen and jab me in the chest. You, it said. You will pay for this. You will be next.

  Mugabe had started wearing his old army fatigues again. The trousers were too short on his spindly, old-man legs, showing a few inches of blue sock. His ankles poked out, knobbly and thin. For a moment I felt sorry for him, this old man who was petulant at not getting his own way.

  Articles started popping up in the government newspaper, blaming the whites for the referendum results. The farmers forced their workers to vote ‘No’, the paper said.

  ‘How the hell is this supposed to be our fault?’ said Steve. ‘There’s only a bluddy handful of us.’

  We went to another farm manager’s house for yet another celebratory party. When we got home that night, the house was ankle-deep in water. The parquet floors were drowned and stained, and the paint on the walls had started to bubble.

  ‘What the bluddy yell . . .’ said Steve as we splashed our way into the kitchen.

  He pressed the light switch, but nothing happened. Power cut. We did not bother putting the candles and torches away now, because there was one almost every night. The camping stove had a permanent place in the corner of the kitchen.