The Cry of the Go-Away Bird Page 7

  ‘Come on!’ Sean appeared in the windows again. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘I’m fine out here.’

  ‘What, you’re afraid you’re going to break something? Come in.’ He turned, and I followed. The first thing I saw was a buffalo head, hanging above the fireplace. It was easily bigger than my entire body.

  ‘We call him Buffy,’ said Sean. He had poured two Cokes. They were in tall glasses, with ice. I sipped mine and felt the fizz like little pins pressing into my tongue.

  ‘You have a nice house,’ I said, as Mum had said to Mr Cooper before.

  ‘Ja, it’s all right, eh.’ Sean threw himself into a chair, legs and arms hanging off at strange angles.

  ‘You live on the farm?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘Brothers and sisters?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Like me.’ He gulped more of his Coke. I sat holding my glass until he had finished. I dared not have too much to drink in case I burped from the fizz, which would be so embarrassing that I would never be able to look at him again.

  ‘Well, I suppose I’d better take you back, eh?’

  ‘Ja.’ Thank goodness. ‘What was it you needed to get?’

  ‘Oh, ja, thanks for reminding me.’ He disappeared for a second, then returned, slipping something into his pocket. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  But we did not go to the bike. Instead we went around the side of the house.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘The generator shed.’

  ‘The what?’

  Sean opened a corrugated iron door. ‘The generator shed. We only use it when we have power cuts, it’s perfectly safe. Come on.’

  The shed was hot and thrumming with electricity. Sean leaned against the wall and opened the packet of cigarettes in his pocket.

  ‘Why are we in here?’ I eyed the machinery uncertainly.

  ‘So Jonah doesn’t see us and tell Dad. How old are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Nearly thirteen.’ I watched him. The cigarettes were slim and elegant in their white-and-gold casing – adult and impossibly glamorous. Sean mumbled the cigarette from one corner of his mouth to another and lit the end, cupping his hand over the flame as if he was keeping it a secret. When he took his first breath, he dragged it in with a sigh, leaned back and looked at me through half-closed eyes. I knew he was showing off, but that did not make it any less impressive.

  ‘Want one?’ he asked.

  Of course I wanted one. I took one of the cigarettes he offered and held it between my fingers.

  ‘Like this.’ He took my hand and corrected me. His fingers were warm and slightly sweaty.

  ‘Oh, ja.’

  He glanced at me, amused. ‘Want a light?’

  I watched the flame come close to my face, flapping in the breeze. It looked like something alive sitting on the end of his lighter, like a moth with orange wings. I leaned back and inhaled. For a moment it tasted like the tobacco fields and I felt proud, but then it scorched a woodsmoke taste down my throat and started me coughing and spluttering.

  By the time the tears cleared from my eyes, he had lit his second cigarette.

  ‘You can’t own a tobacco farm and not smoke,’ he said. ‘Although Dad doesn’t want me to. Fat chance. And he smokes.’

  Cigarettes, motorbike. I could smell petrol and nicotine. It would be easy to be carried away by Sean’s air of glamorous adulthood.

  ‘The workers call me Mini Cooper,’ he said.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m going to be running the farm one day.’

  ‘All right.’ I was getting tired of all these studied poses, the way he let the cigarette dangle from one hand as if he was too tired to hold it properly. I watched it burn down.

  ‘I want to go now.’

  ‘In a sec.’

  ‘Fine.’ I walked out of the shed, into the bright world.

  ‘Iwe!’ he chased after me, stubbing out the cigarette with his foot. ‘Hold up.’

  ‘I need to get back.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll take you now.’ He grinned. ‘See, all your shupering paid off.’

  I said nothing as I climbed on the bike behind him, and I said nothing on the way back to the offices. When he dropped me off, he gave me a distant grin, as if in his head he was already on to the next thing.

  ‘See you later.’

  I was in love.

  Chapter Eight

  I felt hot and overdressed in my school uniform, with its heavy blazer and woollen socks. It was designed for a different country.

  ‘Such a smart blazer,’ said Mum as she straightened it. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine.’

  My new teacher was called Mrs Starling. She had dyed blonde hair that hung straight down, dry and chemical-smelling, a husky voice and a squawky laugh that coughed out cigarette smoke with every ‘Ha’. As soon as I arrived at school, I knew she did not like me. Instead, she liked the pretty girls who crowded around her desk at lunchtime and talked about boys. Their names were Cheydene, Lamese, Tasha, Kerry and Dallas – girls with breasts and periods and older brothers and mascara.

  Dallas was assigned to me as a buddy on my first day. She had white-blonde hair and a hedge of dark eyelashes. She showed me around the school and introduced me to the harem of pretty girls. I knew already that I would never be friends with any of them.

  On my third day at school I realised that my new girl status had disappeared and I had become a target. A black boy called Simba took a dislike to me. He was one of the leaders of the class, lounging in his seat during lessons and making smart remarks. Bored and looking to cause some trouble, he told Mrs Starling that I had called him a black pig.

  I was called to the front of the class.

  ‘Is this true?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘It is,’ said someone from the rows of desks. ‘I heard her.’ A girl I had not even spoken to.

  ‘I didn’t,’ I insisted.

  Mrs Starling sighed. ‘There are witnesses.’

  ‘They’re making it up. I . . .’ My voice was getting gulpy and I could feel tears rising in my throat. I swallowed them back. No need to be soft in front of everyone.

  ‘We have to take this seriously,’ the teacher said. ‘You can’t speak to people like that.’

  I had never been so aware of blacks and whites at school before. I did not know if it was just because I was older, or because things were different in Harare, but there was a very clear division between us. And, after Simba had called me a racist, I was unwelcome in both camps. There was no way to defend myself against it, so I kept out of everyone’s way and stared at my desk during lessons.

  This was how I first noticed Kurai – from the corner of my eye as I was hunched over the desk. She was a tall and beautiful black girl, truly black, her skin dusky and shining blue in the light. I heard from others in the class that she had been battling it for years with lightening creams and moisturisers, but they never worked. Her hair was short or long, in braids or close-bound to the side of her head, black or red or brown, hers or someone else’s, depending on her mood, and it seemed to change every few days.

  Whenever I walked near her, she pulled out a ruler and brandished it at me.

  ‘What is she doing?’ I asked Dallas, my supposed buddy.

  ‘It’s because you’re a racist,’ said Dallas, flipping her hair. ‘She doesn’t want you to come too close.’

  ‘Thirty centimetres,’ someone else chimed in. ‘That’s why she uses the ruler.’

  Mum picked me up after school every day. ‘So, how’s it going?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  After a few weeks the racism incident seemed to blow over. Kurai stopped carrying a ruler and the class stopped hissing the word at me between lessons.

  Only one person kept tormenting me. Stuart was a handsome, overgrown boy, too old for our class. For the last few weeks he had been pushing me against walls and casually grabbing my (almost non-existent) br
easts, spitting in my face while he talked and trying to flip up my skirt in the corridors. When I would not let him, he told everyone that I was half-boy, half-girl.

  One break-time, Stuart trapped me in a corner with the teacher’s wheeled chair and he and the other boys shouted and jeered at me. My eyes started to swim and I felt like I was going to fall over, but I heard Kurai yelling at them. I was suddenly outside, with a brand-new bruise on my wrist where she had grabbed me.

  ‘Bhenzi,’ she called me, ‘idiot’. ‘Don’t you know any better?’

  ‘No,’ I said, rubbing my arm.

  ‘They’ll tear you apart,’ she said. ‘Come sit with me. You shouldn’t be wandering about on your own, you’re certifiable.’

  I followed, minus my hat, which I had left behind in the classroom. The sun tore at my hair and bit my scalp. We were not allowed outside without hats, even in the winter.

  ‘Shit,’ said Kurai, ‘I’ll go get it. You don’t want to go back there.’

  She disappeared, and I scratched my legs and swatted flies until she returned triumphant. She crammed it on my head. ‘There. Come on.’

  We walked around during lunch, talking. I realised that, although tall and blindingly confident, Kurai was a natural defender of the weak.

  ‘You have to stand up for yourself, sha.’

  We became friends.

  That is when we discovered the secret place behind the classrooms. We needed somewhere away from the others – or, at least, I did. We picked our way over weeds and dead earth to get there.

  ‘Maiwe, this place doesn’t smell so good,’ said Kurai.

  ‘I think something died here.’

  ‘Yes, those beans.’ They flopped depressingly over the fence.

  ‘It’s disgusting.’

  It was behind a classroom block, invisible from the rest of the playground, a patch of dusty red earth that coughed up a slimy weed now and then. Chicken wire separated it from the black caretaker’s vegetable garden; limp carrots and tomatoes that ate up the sun and guzzled the thick, solid raindrops of the big storms, but never actually grew any bigger or lost their yellow, frayed edges. The air was a warm facecloth pressed over our noses and mouths; our schoolgirl legs, bare under ugly summer dresses, itched from the bites of invisible creatures with too many legs. It was worth it, though, to be hidden from everything but the tiny green eyes of beans.

  ‘This is great,’ I said.

  ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘No one will be able to see us here.’

  Kurai sighed and sat down. She stood up again, pulled off her school jersey and sat on it. I knew I had won, and we sat there every break-time.

  Being friends with Kurai raised my cool factor. I listened with awe as she told stories of six hours spent in the hairdresser’s, wearing relaxing creams that burned her scalp and pulled out her hair in angry tufts. Mine took half an hour at the most. I felt cheated.

  We created catchphrases, in-jokes, secret words. We talked about our futures.

  ‘I want to be an executive,’ Kurai said. Her hair was braided close to her head that day, and had a greasy shine in the bright sun.

  ‘An executive who does what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t care. I want a corner office with a view. I want my secretary to have a secretary.’

  Her mother taught at a prestigious girls’ college; her father owned five companies. She had an older brother and sister who were both impossibly cool, like her. I was especially lost in admiration of her older brother, with his baggy clothes and heavy gold jewellery. He listened to loud rap and called himself T-Zone, although his real name was Tafadzwa.

  No one ever bothered Kurai or me again after Tafadzwa visited the school. Simba had called Kurai’s mother a whore. Kurai tore furiously at tufts of grass in our secret place and announced that she would tell Tafadzwa. The next day he came in with two of his friends, black men in heavy jackets, with heavy rings on each finger and a heavy stride.

  Tafadzwa held Simba by his collar and crunched him against the wall. I could not hear what he was saying, but I could see Simba’s eyes: white and round, spinning in his anxious face. I could not help laughing.

  ‘That sorted him out,’ Kurai said with satisfaction. ‘No one talks about my Amai like that.’

  There was a school play at the end of term. We lined up on the polished floor of the hall to find out what parts we had been assigned. I was hopeful. I did not want to be the main character, but I would not mind being one of the princesses.

  It was a very short process. All the girls with long hair (the Lameses, Dallases, Laras and Kerrys) were princesses. All the girls with short hair (me and two others) were going to be rocks, dressed in all black. The black girls got to be the front and back ends of the pantomime horses. Worst of all, the boys and girls had to pair up at the end for a dance number.

  ‘Great,’ said Kurai, picking the polish off her nails.

  I was assigned to partner Gary, a blond boy who was Evil Stuart’s best friend, and shorter than me. He tried his hardest not to touch me at all, but it was a waltz and required us to clasp hands. He kept his head turned, and I could feel his fingers straining to get as far away as possible. If an extra millimetre of skin happened to touch, he flinched as if I had given him an electric shock.

  We were both terrible at the dance. The partners were meant to practise on their own, but I knew that we would not. As we walked away from the hall, I overheard Gary talking to Stuart.

  ‘That dance is gay, man.’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘But at least you have someone decent.’

  I laughed it off to Kurai later. ‘He’s a pathetic excuse for a human being,’ she says.

  But I worried about it at home.

  Kurai taught me about music. She taped the Top Ten hits from the radio and brought them to school in her Walkman. She liked rap and hip-hop. She especially liked Tupac Shakur, and did a school project on him.

  ‘He didn’t die,’ she said. ‘He left clues in his lyrics. If you play the songs backwards they tell you where he’s hiding.’

  She taught me how to rollerblade. I wore her brother’s skates, which were too big for me. Eventually I became good enough to follow in her wake, skating around the block with a practised swish and clip. We stopped only to press an electric gate bell and run away when someone answered.

  She told me about the time her maid took her to visit her boyfriend.

  ‘I was only about three,’ she said. ‘I remember her taking me to this scummy khaya somewhere down the road, and putting me in a chair. She told me to sit there and face the wall. The chair was in the bedroom and I could hear them behind me, grunting and gasping away. It was disgusting.’

  ‘Did you tell your parents?’

  ‘No. The maid told me not to or she would kidnap me and take me away.’

  ‘That’s horrible!’

  ‘Ja, well, I was just stupid.’ Kurai stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes.

  Her house was exotic, smelling of strange cooking and a body odour different to my own.

  Her family spoke Shona and English indiscriminately, and ate sadza at almost every meal. They found me exotic too, Kurai’s white friend with the fair hair, who sat quietly at their table being small and pale while white teeth flashed around her, hands gestured, and voices rich as molasses talked in two languages.

  Kurai was at once fiercely loyal to and contemptuous of her family. Every month she, her parents and her siblings travelled into the rural areas to visit their extended family, the country cousins.

  ‘We’re going to the gwash this weekend,’ she would tell me when I invited her over. ‘Sorry.’

  She sounded bored, but these visits were important to her. She returned with dusty skin and stories of cooking freshly killed chickens, pounding peanut butter, hoeing gardens to plant sorghum or maize. She had a mysterious air after these visits. Even though she told me long stories about what this cousin said to that cousin, what the witch doctor s
aid to her aunt and what her aunt did to her grandmother afterwards, she knew I could never quite understand. I felt whiter than snow and boring. But then she was suddenly the Kurai I knew again, talking about chart music, clothes and cars. I never knew how to deal with the air of black magic and tribal secrets that hung about her after her visits to the country.

  For the first time, I had formal Shona lessons. Our Shona teacher was called VaChihambakwe. He had little round glasses and his hair grew down the sides of his head in a neat beard. None of the other male teachers wore a suit and tie, but he did. His accent was not Shona at all – he sounded just like a white, except when he read aloud from our textbook.

  Everyone hated Shona lessons.

  ‘They’re pointless,’ said Dallas.

  ‘It’s a waste of time,’ said someone else.

  Even some of the mums and dads did not like the Shona lessons. ‘It’s hard enough to get them to do their English reading,’ I heard one say to the teacher. ‘Why do they have to learn all this Shona rubbish as well?’

  ‘All they need is a bit of Kitchen Kaffir to use with the servants,’ said one man, who was quickly shushed by his wife.

  I loved Shona. It reminded me of the farm, and of Chinhoyi. When we were first asked to speak some words aloud, VaChihambakwe was impressed by my accent. No one else was, though. I quickly learned that the white kids were meant to read Shona in their normal voices, without bothering to pronounce things properly.

  He must have been lonely, being the only black teacher at the school. All the other blacks who worked there were gardeners, cleaners and groundsmen. I watched VaChihambakwe sometimes through the glass window of the staffroom – as the only dark shape in the room, he was easy to see. While the other teachers chatted at lunchtime, he read his book and ate sadza with a fork.

  Once I waved to him through the window. He seemed to catch the movement out of the corner of his eye, and looked up. ‘Mangwanani!’ I mouthed at him, and he smiled and raised one hand. I felt like we had a secret, and I ran back to my classroom, giddy with my own daring.