Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [12]
“I can’t stand up back here!” I cried, “slow down!” But my protests were lost under the roar and rattle of Lucy’s engine. The fact that I wasn’t, at that moment, being beaten by dead fish was small comfort.
THIRTY YEARS, two countries and four farms later, Vanessa, Mum and I were sitting under the Tree of Forgetfulness at Mum and Dad’s fish and banana farm on the Middle Zambezi River. Something about the quality of heat, and the itchy burn from the windborne, stinging hairs of buffalo bean, reminded me of the day of that long ago Fancy Dress Party.
“Do you remember when you made me be I Never Promised You a Rose Garden at the Davises’ Annual Christmas Fancy Dress party?” I asked Mum.
“Oh God,” Mum said. “Here we go. Another traumatizing repressed memory come back to haunt us.” She looked around. Then she flung her arms in the air. “Shrink! Someone fetch the child a shrink!” Mum does exactly this gesture when her drink runs dry at a party: she flings her arms in the air and shrieks, “Drought! Nicola Fuller of Central Africa is experiencing severe drought!”
“Olivia was the Summer of Love and Vanessa was a Rose, all dressed up in a pink tutu,” I said.
“Was I?” Vanessa said.
“Yes,” I said.
“No, I wasn’t,” Vanessa said. “I was From Russia with Love.”
I frowned. “Really?”
“Yes,” Vanessa said firmly, “in a hat made out of fermenting, flea-infested carpet. And I had to wear a baking red shirt, billowing black pants and Mum’s riding boots.”
“I think you’re mixing up fancy dress parties. I distinctly remember you were a rose,” I said.
“I wish,” Vanessa said.
“From Russia with love I fly to you,” Mum sang. She paused and went on conversationally, “I remember that film. I made Dad drive all the way to Nairobi so we could watch it. They had vodka shots lined up at the bar.” She sniffed. “Hm, well, the film must have made quite an impression on me if I wasted a perfectly good carpet on Vanessa’s fancy dress costume.” She took a breath and continued to sing, “Much wiser since my good-bye to you . . .”
“See?” Vanessa said.
“I’ve traveled the world,” Mum sang, “to learn I must return to Russia with looooooooo-oooove!”
“Well, I remember I had to sit in the back of the Land Rover and you, Mum, Olivia and the dogs sat in the front,” I said.
“Straitjacket!” Mum shouted.
“And only the front part of the Land Rover was mine proofed,” I said.
“Tranquilizers!” Mum shrieked.
“So if we’d gone over a land mine, you, Olivia, Mum and the dogs would have been fine. But I would have been blown up. Wouldn’t I, Mum?”
Vanessa started laughing. “That’s hilarious,” she said.
“Wouldn’t I have been blown up if you’d gone over a mine, Mum?” I asked.
Mum let her arms drop by her side. “I suppose that’s right,” she said. She paused, and then continued, “But if I’d known then that you were going to grow up and write that Awful Book, I might have actually aimed for one.”
“Mum!”
Mum sighed. “You know, you’re just like Christopher bloody Robin. That wretched child also grew up and wrote an Awful Book even after all those lovely stories and poems his father wrote for him. He went on and on about what a rotten parent A. A. Milne had been and about how A. A. Milne hadn’t hugged Christopher bloody Robin enough.” Mum, a dedicated fan of all things Pooh, shuddered. “Luckily,” she said, “I don’t think many people read it and I am sure hardly anyone took it very seriously.”
Mum with her first best friend, Stephen Foster. Kenya, circa 1946.
OUR FAMILY’S overwhelming attachment to animals and their apparent lukewarm attachment to their own offspring (quite different from a passionate connection to “blood”) go back at least as far as my grandmother’s childhood, which is where anything close to reliable oral history ends. Mum’s younger sister, Auntie Glug, remembers my grandmother as a remarkably efficient caretaker and a very capable nurse, deeply interested in her children’s welfare but quite unable