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So the next time we are in town Mum, uncharacteristically, spends time and money on herself. There are some Zambian hairdressers in Ndola who Marianne tells us can cut mazungu hair.

Dad, Vanessa, and I find a piece of shade under which to eat our jam sandwiches and boiled eggs and to swallow our thermos of coffee (bitter with too much boiling and made palatable only by powdered milk and spoons of sugar). We smoke and Dad reads the paper. We keep half an eye on the hairdresser’ s.

When Mum emerges, we are momentarily startled into silence.

“Well?” she says, blinking into the hot midday sun. She has brought with her the flowery, powerful chemical smells of the hairdresser. The scent of the lotions used to straighten kinky hair, to perm and color mazungu hair, to cleanse and condition any hair, have wafted onto her clothes and skin and she is conspicuous against the hot, salty, dust-smelling African town.

Her hair is cut very short, elfin, up above her ears and spiky short on top. Its color is deep auburn, the layers of hair that have been hiding from years of sun and wind. Her eyes are pale and startling; they appear bigger and more piercing than I remembered them an hour ago. Her cheekbones are sculptured, down into a full mouth (freshly painted). Mum has always been small-boned, athletic, hard and muscled from years of riding and walking and lean farm living, but the short hair shows off her spare frame.

Dad slowly puts down his paper and clears his throat.

“What do you think?” says Mum.

“Very respectable,” says Dad.

“You look great,” says Vanessa.

I nod. “Smashing.”

Mum smiles broadly, shyly.

“Who’s ready for a beer?” says Dad.

By the time we are ready to leave town for the farm, in order to get back before dark, we are all gently, heat-of-the-afternoon drunk. Mum’s hair stands up well under the pressure.

Rainstorm at Serioes

THE LAST

CHRISTMAS

The year I turn eighteen, the rains are late.

The first rain had come as usual, in early October, and the world had turned a hopeful, premature green. But now that early green has turned a limp, poisonous, scorched blue-gray. The air is thick with mocking and sucks back the moisture from the plants. The clouds that form from this stolen earth-plant water scud north and south, torn by hot wind, and are left scattered like a thin white scarf across the sky. It makes us thirsty for beer.

The pump spits mud into the water tank from the sinking, stinking dam, and the water chugs from the faucet thick and red and muddy. We can only have water for drinking and we share baths. A small frog is spat into the hot bath one night. It is boiled, petrified, eyes wide open, dead and astonished. The boreholes dry-heave, and the thin trickle that issues from the lips of their pipes is as yellow as bile. The riverbed glitters glassily up from between islands of rock. A farmer next door says he saw a crocodile sauntering across his fields, prehistorically out of place, in search of water.

It is the year that Vanessa, who has been working in London for a children’s television channel, comes home to travel Africa with her English friend. The friend is sexy and worldly and she dances at a party at the Mkushi Country Club and the old Greek-coloured who, it is known, hasn’t smiled in forty-something years, raises his glass of beer to the ceiling and his eyes grow glassy and his lips grow wet and if he could find the words, he would say, “Here’s to women with legs that go on forever!” His trembling lips break over his teeth.

I say he smiled.

Dad says it was a prelude to a stroke.

I am in awe. I start trying to emulate the way she smokes, slow and needy and intimate. I get smoke in my eyes and revert to smoking the old way, like an African, with the cigarette between thumb and forefinger.

I have briefly, and not very seriously, found God and I have stood up in front of the charismatic church (which I attended, briefly, in Harare) and accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior. The rest of my family finds this development