Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [10]
She says, “The nurse at the hospital in Salisbury told us we could either go and get something to eat or watch our baby die.”
Mum and Dad take Vanessa to get some lunch and when they come back to the hospital their baby son, who was very sick with meningitis an hour earlier, is now dead. Cold, blond ash.
Adrian
The story changes depending on what Mum is drinking. If she is very drunk on wine, then the story is a bit different than if she is very drunk on gin. The worst is if she is very drunk on everything she can find in the house. But the end is always the same. Adrian is dead. That’s an awful ending no matter what she’s been drinking.
I am eight, maybe younger, the first time Mum sits down in front of me, squiffy in her chair, leaning and keening and needing to talk. The Leaning Tower of Pissed, I say to Vanessa when I am older and Mum is drunk again. Ha ha.
Mum tells me about Adrian. I understand, through the power of her emotion, her tears, the way she is dissolving like soap left too long in the bath, that this has been the greatest tragedy of our lives. It is my tragedy, too, even though I was not born when it happened.
Usually, on nights when Mum is sober, and we are kissing her good night, she turns her face away from us and puckers her lips sideways, offering us a cheek stretched like dead-chicken skin. Now that she is drunk and telling me about Adrian she is wet all over me. Arms clasped over my shoulders, she is hanging around my neck, and I can feel her face crying into the damp patch on my shoulder. She says, “You were the baby we made when Adrian died.”
I know all about making babies, being the daughter of a farmer. I have already put my hand up a cow’s bum, scraped out the sloppy, warm, green-grass pile of shit and felt beyond that, for the thick lining of her womb. If the womb is swollen with a fetus I can touch the shape of it, pressing against the womb wall. A curved back, usually, or the hump of a rear, the bony fineness of a tiny head. I know about conception. Cows that don’t conceive have their tails cut to differentiate them from the fertile cows, whose tails are left long. The short-tailed cows are pulled from the herd and put on a lorry and sent into Umtali, where they become ground meat, sausages, glue. They become Colcom’s Steak Pie.
The next morning, Mum, who usually eats nothing for breakfast, has two fried eggs, fried bananas, tomatoes. A slice of toast with marmalade and butter. She swallows a pot of tea and then has a cup of coffee. She usually does not drink coffee. The coffee tastes bad because there are sanctionson, which means no one will sell Rhodesia anything and Rhodesia can’t sell anything to anyone else, so our coffee is made from chicory and burnt maize and tastes like charcoal.
All morning, Mum is more bad-tempered than usual, in spite of her enormous breakfast. She yells at the cook and the maid and the dogs. She tells me to “stop twittering on.” I shut up. That afternoon, she sleeps for three hours while I sit quietly at the end of her bed with the dogs. We’re afraid to wake her, although the dogs are ready for their walk and I am ready for a cup of tea. I am watching her sleep. Her face has fallen away into peace. The dogs sit prick-eared and watchful for a long time and then they lie with their heads in their paws and worried eyes. They are depressed.
Adrian is buried in the cemetery in Salisbury.
Mum and Dad leave Rhodesia. They leave the small anonymous hump of their son-child in the huge cemetery opposite the tobacco auction floors in town. They go to England, via Victoria Falls, conceiving me in the sixties hotel next to the grand, historic, turn-of-the-century Victoria Falls Hotel.
I am conceived in the hotel (with the casino in it) next to the thundering roar of the place where the Zambezi River plunges a hundred meters into a black-sided gorge. The following March, I am born into the tame, drizzling English town of Glossop, Derbyshire.
The plunging roar of the Zambezi in my ears at conception. Incongruous, contradictory in Derbyshire at birth.