Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [10]
“No one’s going to understand what I am,” I pointed out.
“The clever ones will,” Mum said. “Now hold still. I don’t want to poke your eyes out.”
There was the sound of Mum attacking the insecticide drum with scissors.
“I think I’m getting a rash,” I said. “I can feel bumps.”
Mum started to sing, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden. Along with the sunshine, there’s gotta be a little rain sometime. . . .” There was a pause followed by a couple more violent assaults against the insecticide drum. Then Mum said to Vanessa, “Go to the kitchen and fetch me a knife, would you Vanessa? Ask July for a nice sharp one.”
“I can’t breathe,” I said.
“Oh, buck up, Bobo.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if I got out?”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“But then you won’t poke my eyes out.”
“Whoever said anything about poking eyes out?”
“You did.”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
I could hear Vanessa rustle demurely back into the room. “Thank you, darling,” Mum said. She only called one of us darling when she wanted to imply that the other was not, at that moment, darling. “You’re such a big help,” Mum said.
I didn’t need to be on the outside of my insecticide drum to see the pink ruffles on Vanessa’s tutu puffing up.
“Now hold still, Bobo.”
There were flashes from a knife blade and two slits of light appeared.
“Are those near your eyes?”
“No,” I said. And then I reconsidered my close escape. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, very.”
“There we go then,” Mum said. “I’ll just get my Uzi and we’ll be off.”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to go,” I blurted with as much feeling as I could muster out of my nearly eight-year-old self. “I look stupid.”
“Now look here,” Mum said, “if you aren’t careful, you’ll get a jolly good hiding.”
While Mum got her gun, I weighed up the cons of a jolly good hiding versus the cons of arriving at a Fancy Dress Party dressed in an insecticide drum. I decided, on balance, that at least there would be Sparletta Creme Soda and Willards Chips at the Fancy Dress Party and that at least the Davises didn’t have frogs in their pool—or only a few. Not like our algae soup of a pool that had wild ducks, scorpions, thousands of frogs, tadpoles and the occasional Nile monitor. Plus, this would be my last party before I was packed off to boarding school forever and ever.
“Right,” Mum said. I heard her check the Uzi magazine for rounds. We were a year into the worst part of the Rhodesian War, and ambushes and attacks against farmers had increased lately, especially where we lived on Robandi, right up against the Mozambique border where the view was spectacular but almost everything else was lousy.
In April 1966, the year before my parents moved from Kenya to Rhodesia, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) launched an attack against government forces to protest Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. The uprising was swiftly and definitively suppressed. Seven ZANLA troops lost their lives. No Rhodesian forces died. After that, the war simmered along mildly with the odd attack or ambush here and there until 1974, when the ten-year conflict in neighboring Mozambique between the Marxist Front for the Liberation of Mozambique rebels (FRELIMO) and the colonial Portuguese ended, and a new confrontation between the FRELIMO government and Rhodesian and South African–backed Mozambican National Resistance forces (RENAMO) began. Then, as if the uptick in violence in the neighboring state were contagious, the war in Rhodesia also picked up momentum. ZANLA forces based in Mozambique under the guerilla-friendly FRELIMO government came over the border into Rhodesia to lay land mines