The Cry of the Go-Away Bird Read online

  Steve switched on the torch, and we followed its optimistic light down the corridor. All the floors were underwater.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Mum.

  ‘The water tank.’ Steve gestured with the torch, making the light flicker and dance on the walls. ‘Looks like it sprung a leak. Must have emptied itself into the ceiling, and then come through and run down the walls.’

  Mum splashed back down the passage to put the kettle on the camping stove.

  We needed tea before we could tackle the water.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ said Steve, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Nothing has ever gone wrong here before. There hasn’t been so much as a termite.’

  We watched the water snake down the wall, coiling and hissing into puddles when it reached the floor.

  ‘Not a bluddy thing,’ said Steve.

  Chapter Eighteen

  One morning we awoke to the smell of cigarettes. The tobacco fields were burning. Steve jumped in the bakkie and drove down there, shouting into his radio. I hopped on my bike and followed.

  Workers scurried like dark ants, hosing down the flames and chopping down plants to create breaks in the fire’s path. White teeth flashed in their faces. This was a Drama, and they enjoyed drama.

  Sean was there too, leaning against his bike, watching the blaze.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Don’t be smart.’

  ‘Mugabe’s lot,’ he said. ‘At least, that’s what Dad thinks.’

  ‘Not an accident?’

  ‘Nah.’ He flicked some ash off his cigarette and it was whirled into the cloud of ash that settled on our shoulders and in our hair.

  ‘Steve says it’s like another bluddy Bush War.’

  ‘Ja, maybe.’

  ‘I hope not.’ I watched the flames soak and die under the weight of the water.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean you wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be so bad, would it?’

  ‘Of course it would, it’s a war.’

  ‘Ja, well.’ He crossed his arms. ‘Give us a chance to show Mugabe’s bluddy thugs what-for, hey?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. We don’t need to fight any more. This whole land thing can be peaceful, we’re not in Rhodesia any more.’

  ‘You might not be,’ he said. ‘The cities might be Zimbabwe, but out here, things haven’t changed.’

  I punched him on the arm. ‘Stop talking like that.’

  ‘What, you’re worried someone will hear?’

  ‘Just stop, all right.’

  We stood and watched the workers tramping among the burned and sodden tobacco leaves.

  Harare was known as the Sunshine City.

  ‘Sunshine City my arse,’ said Steve. ‘Whole place is going to hell.’

  The city was fraying around the edges, and everyone was on strike. Like the rubbish men. For a week the whole city smelled like rotten vegetables. And the rumblings about land invasions had not gone away as Steve had predicted – if anything, they had grown stronger.

  We saw the people called ‘War Vets’ every night on the news. They were meant to be veterans of the war for independence, but most of them were far too young. No one talked about the War. We did not study it at school, either.

  ‘Steve,’ I asked one day. ‘Did you fight in the Bush War?’

  He surprised me by flicking open his old leather wallet. Inside, there was a picture of Mum, a picture of Steve’s parents in black-and-white wedding clothes, and one of Steve with a couple of other boys.

  In the picture he was young, with a shock of curly hair and bony knees pulled up under his chin. His hand rested on the barrel of a long rifle and he was in uniform. His uniform did not look all that different from what he usually wore – a khaki shirt with a collar, shorts and long socks.

  ‘How old were you here?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  Steve gave me a Look.

  ‘Was it during the War?’ I felt very daring. I did not know much about the War, except for a vague idea that it was blacks fighting against whites to rule the country. I knew that a little while before I was born Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia, after Cecil John Rhodes, and Harare was called Salisbury. I knew the War was called the Second Chimurenga or the Bush War, depending on who you asked. The War felt like a death in the family – someone whose name was never mentioned, who was cut out of photographs.

  ‘I was on an army base in the Bush,’ said Steve.

  ‘Were you guarding it?’

  ‘Ja.’ Steve glanced down at the photograph again. ‘It was my birthday.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The boys sang “Happy Birthday” to me,’ said Steve, ‘and I got a beer and a Rubik’s cube.’

  ‘Do you still have the Rubik’s cube?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah, some other bugger nicked it. I didn’t care, I couldn’t figure it out.’ Steve scratched at a little mark on the photograph. ‘We had to sit like that, looking out into the Bush. The bluddy terrs moved like snakes on their bellies and you wouldn’t see them until they were right up close. You didn’t know whether there was no one around or whether they were all-bluddy-around you. They were guerrilla fighters, you see.’

  ‘Gorillas?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘Like the monkeys?’

  ‘No, man, guerrillas, terrorists, Bush-fighters. We called them floppies,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The terrs.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’d flop over when you shot them.’ He laughed a little. ‘Shit, man. I’d love to know what they called us. Seems like anyone would flop over if they were shot, hey?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘They’d sneak up on you. My sergeant told me to look for the whites of their eyes and teeth, and shoot at that.’

  I was breathless. ‘Did you shoot someone?’

  Steve’s eyes flickered up and down. ‘What sort of a question is that?’

  ‘I just thought . . .’ I did not know what to say.

  Something had woken that had been sleeping for a long time. Steve would say it had been sleeping since the last war. But whatever it was, I could hear it circling the house at night and breathing in my ear while I slept.

  Kids started to vanish from school, pulled out to go overseas. They left without any warning, usually. The rest of us were trying to study for our exams, but it was difficult to concentrate. I found that my mind skittered like a flying ant, landing on something and then jumping somewhere else, leaving barely a footprint. I had to read the first line of a book several times before the meaning sank in. Everyone else seemed to have the same problem, even the teachers, and our lessons were disconnected and strange – when they happened at all.

  Kurai and I lay on a blanket in the garden, talking. A storm was roiling up, eating the blue sky and moving towards the city. Clouds were piled like pillows to the east, and the air smelled of copper.

  ‘I’m trying to concentrate on my bluddy exams,’ said Kurai. ‘But some days the teachers don’t even turn up.’ She uprooted grass in great green tufts as she talked. ‘All this political stuff is a pain. I just want to get into a good university.’

  ‘So you can become an executive,’ I supplied.

  ‘Ja. And have a corner office with a view.’

  ‘And a secretary who has a secretary.’

  ‘Exactly, sha.’

  ‘Ja, Mugabe’s awful,’ I said to Kurai. I waited for her to join in. This was a familiar and much-loved game.

  She paused, then made a non-committal noise.

  ‘Don’t you think?’ I said.

  ‘Ja, well.’ Kurai did not meet my eyes. ‘He wasn’t so bad in the beginning, you know?’

  ‘He’s always been bad,’ I said. My voice came out louder than I had intended.

  ‘So what?’ said Kurai. ‘You think you guys should still b
e running the show?’

  ‘What do you mean “you guys”?’ I asked. It took me a moment to realise what she meant. ‘You mean whites?’

  ‘That bastard Smith,’ she said. ‘Mugabe may be a dickhead, but at least he’s our dickhead.’

  I laughed, but it came out sounding not like a laugh at all. ‘You don’t think he’s doing a good job?’

  ‘No, but I’d rather have him doing a bad job than some White doing any kind of job.’

  ‘Some White?’ The word acquired a capital letter. I was suddenly very aware of Kurai’s otherness: the way her skin was coloured and oiled differently to mine; the way her hair grew out of her head; the shapes and curves of her face. Her eyes looked exotic and very, very dark. Looking into them, I saw no reflection of me at all.

  We stared at each other for a moment, and I backed down. ‘Sure,’ I said, and ‘All right.’

  We started talking about school and exams and friends again, but something had changed. The air between us was a different colour.

  Mr Cooper sent us a guard. I saw some of the farm workers building a guard hut by our gate.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked Mum.

  ‘It’s for the guard,’ she said.

  ‘What guard?’

  ‘Our guard.’

  ‘When did we get a guard?’

  ‘Mr Cooper gave him to us.’

  I felt something press at the back of my eyes, like the beginning of a headache before a storm. Mr Cooper heard things that we did not. He talked to the farm workers. He knew about things before they happened.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He just wants us to be safe.’ Mum smiled at me with just her mouth, not her eyes.

  Our guard arrived the next day.

  ‘Cephas!’ I had not seen him in a long time. I shook his hand and felt the familiar stump of his half-finger. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Good-good, Medem,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘Mum, you remember Cephas? He used to be the compound guard.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Mum, who had no idea. She showed Cephas where the guard hut was.

  ‘Have any new books?’ I asked him once he was settled in.

  ‘Ah, no,’ he said. ‘I am busy, too busy for reading.’

  That night I lay awake listening to him walk around the property: the crunch of gravel, the crack of twigs in the grass, a cough. And then again, crunch, crack, cough, around and around. Every time I dropped off to sleep, I heard a noise and jerked awake, my heart leaping, until I remembered that we had a guard and it was not another burglar or prowler. When I woke up in the early hours of the morning, I looked out of the window and saw the quick orange flare of a cigarette from the guard hut. I found the small flame comforting.

  After a week, Cephas went missing. He did not turn up to work in the morning.

  Mum called Mr Cooper to arrange a replacement.

  ‘Of all the times to have a hangover,’ she said. ‘We need a bluddy guard more than ever.’

  Soon a worker appeared at the gate and took up Cephas’s post. He was a fat man with a face like a toad’s, but an amiable grin.

  ‘Do you know Cephas?’ I asked him.

  ‘Hongu.’ Yes.

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  The man shrugged. ‘He has been at the shebeen every night. He is probably sick.’

  It seemed Mum was right. Until he did not appear the next day either. Or the day after that.

  ‘He’s scarpered,’ said Steve.

  ‘He wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye,’ I insisted.

  ‘Jesus, Elise.’ Steve was exasperated.

  I went looking for Cephas on the weekend. I cycled along the edge of the dirt road that led to the workers’ villages, swerving into the bushes when a truck or tractor passed me.

  The soft white dust of the road was like talcum powder in its consistency, but showed a terrible persistence when it came to sticking to things. Things like the underside of your car, your hair, your hands, your eyeballs. If I did not get out of the way, I would be coated in the stuff and look even whiter than a White.

  When I came to the workers’ compound, there was the usual crowd of piccanins kicking a football around and fooling with an old, abandoned car on the side of the road. When they saw me, they came running up. ‘Money for sweets!’ ‘Do you have sweets?’

  Their eyes glittered with simple greed and a more complex acquisitiveness.

  Whites had money, everyone knew that, and it was your right to pester them until they gave it up. What gave them the right to hang on to it?

  I dispensed the few coins I had in my pocket. The little kids loved the two-dollar coins especially, because they had pictures of pangolins on them, but they were next to useless those days.

  ‘Do you know where Cephas is?’ I asked them.

  ‘Cephas the cook?’

  ‘Cephas the guard.’

  The piccanins were the best people to ask if you wanted to know anything. But it came at a price. I found a mint in my pocket, befurred with lint. It disappeared into someone else’s pocket.

  ‘He has gone.’

  ‘Do you know where?’

  They consulted. ‘He went into the Bush.’

  ‘The Bush?’

  ‘Ja!’ They giggled and ran away before I could ask them anything more.

  I biked into the compound. Most of the men and women were at work, but I found an elderly woman cleaning clothes in a tin basin and asked her where Cephas had gone. She pursed her lips together and shook her head with great significance. I knew that this meant she knew, and disapproved.

  ‘Where is he?’

  She spoke in Shona and her accent was thick. I only understood a word here and there. I heard ‘young men’ and ‘angry’ and ‘camp’, and I heard ‘the Bush’.

  ‘Do you know where?’

  She traced a map for me in the dust. Just outside the farm boundaries, in the scrub land where no food would grow, not even mealies. And mealies would grow everywhere, from the dirt in a pothole to a pile of sand in the back of a bakkie.

  I thanked the old woman. It was turning into a long expedition, but I was too curious now to leave it alone.

  Before I had left the compound, one of the piccanins grabbed my arm and tugged on it. ‘They took them away,’ he said in a whisper.

  ‘What?’

  ‘ZANU. They came with trucks and took them away from the compound. The man said it was for correction. He said the boys needed to be re-educated.’

  ‘Who’s “he”?’

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘All the boys?’

  ‘Some of us ran and hid, but they took the rest. My father went.’

  ‘What are they going to do to them?’

  ‘They are going to teach them,’ said the boy. He pursed his lips suddenly and turned away.

  ‘Wait! Where did they go?’

  He did not come back.

  I hopped back on my bike and pedalled down the dirt road, towards the Bush. I knew I had ventured beyond the farm boundaries when potholes appeared in the road and the wire fences sagged and bent. I turned on to a small dirt road, startling a goat that had been grazing on the verge. Soon I passed more goats, in lean-to pens. I knew there had to be people nearby, but I saw no one. It was a surprise when I turned a corner and came across a makeshift camp in the grasses. Lean-to houses made from boards and a surprising number of people. Rough and uneven fencing, topped with razor wire. A man with a rifle, guarding the entrance. There were dozens of people inside: men, women and even some children. The children were all boys, as far as I could see. I wheeled my bike into the bushes and stood, one foot on the pedal, watching.

  A group of men sat, smoking, around a cooking fire just outside this gate. They looked familiar, I thought. There was a cow hung up on meathooks – one of Mr Cooper’s cows, I recognised the brand on its flank – and a hunk of meat over the fire. It smelled good, greasy and hot.

  Cephas emerged from one of the sh
acks, holding a Chibuku Scud. He walked over to the edge of the fence, near to the clump of bushes where I was hiding. I stood with one foot on my bike pedals, ready to take off. His eyes were striped red with veins, absorbed in their own world. He was not seeing the Bush and the camp, but something else.

  ‘Cephas!’ I hissed. ‘It’s me.’

  I stepped out of the bushes a little way, still holding the bike by its handlebars. He turned his head to stare at me, and I did not know if he had recognised me or not. His mouth opened, and his jaw moved slowly. ‘Bluddy white kid,’ he said.

  I felt like someone had clasped my head in cold hands. ‘What?’

  ‘Bluddy white kids think they can do whatever they want,’ he said. He was speaking very slowly, and his eyes were not focused.

  ‘Cephas! What are you doing here? Who brought you here?’

  He put his face close to the wire. I thought he was going to whisper something, so I moved forward as well. He pursed his lips and spat a yellow glob of saliva that landed at my feet. His blank eyes glared. ‘Bugger off.’

  And I did. My legs shook, and my bike swerved left and right before I could straighten it out. Stupid – and cocky. Why did I think my smart-alec Shona comments and my supposed farm-girl toughness would impress anyone? Why had I come here? It took me a long time to cycle back to the farm, and I looked over my shoulder the whole way.

  The new guard’s footsteps sounded different at night. He was a good man, who enjoyed chatting in his breaks, but it was not the same.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We were Whites, and nothing else. We did not have lives outside of our whiteness. We huddled together with the rest of the community like pale maggots in a dusty corpse. All we could do was watch the news, and wait.

  Every week, my grandparents posted us what they called aid packages. They did not put anything valuable inside, because parcels were always opened at Customs.

  When we got them, they were battered and haphazardly taped together.

  They sent us videos taped from the BBC. They sent me teenage magazines with pictures of smiling white girls on the covers and articles about boyfriends and clothes and pop stars. I was fourteen, nearly fifteen, but I had nothing in common with those girls. I read the magazines anyway.