Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [111]
Charlie and Mum
The wedding party carries on for three days after Charlie and I leave for our honeymoon safari in South Luangwa National Park. Adamson, who has given me a small carved wooden box for a wedding present, has stopped trying to go home. He sleeps under the ironing table and reemerges periodically to drink beer, smoke marijuana, and cook for the surviving guests. Mum takes them on rides around the farm, for extended drunken picnics. Several are last seen slipping wearily from the saddle and are found afterward by the groom asleep on the sandy road or under the gum trees. They sleep in shifts on any available space: bed, sofa, carpet. Dad keeps the champagne and beer and brandy flowing, which is lucky because the water runs out when the pump is exhausted. The gardener runs up from the dam with buckets of water and guests are instructed to rest the plumbing and use the long-drop, dug especially for the wedding, in the back of the garden. Dad fries eggs and bacon and bananas and tomatoes and serves breakfast for thirty while Adamson snores softly under the table with the dogs.
The party ends when the electricity fails and Dad sets himself alight, as a human torch, for the common good.
The flowers for the wedding have been done by a drunken homosexual from the Copperbelt. His flower arrangements, his way of life, his entire philosophy, everything about the man is centered upon the theme of disguise. My wedding bouquet is made from wild African weeds, not flowers. The stagnant green pool is hidden with brightly colored balloons. White building sand covers the cow and horse shit in the paddock where Charlie and I exchange vows. The trees (bare-limbed in midwinter) are festooned with crepe-paper-covered hula hoops.
Dad puts all the hula hoops over his body, one on top of the other. He says, “You miserable buggers want light. I bring you the Timothy Donald Fuller Electricity Supply Commission.” He lights a match and sets himself on fire.
Mum, singing and arms raised in triumph, shouts, “Olé!”
Dad is extinguished with a bottle of champagne by an alert, alarmed American guest.
I couldn’t be more thoroughly married.
Natasya and her father—
Zambia, 2001
NOW
Mum has been diagnosed with manic depression.
She says, “All of us are mad,” and then adds, smiling, “But I’m the only one with a certificate to prove it.”
She went to what she calls the loony bin in Harare after a particularly manic phase.
Birds started to talk to her. And she listened to their advice.
She couldn’t sleep and wouldn’t eat and didn’t speak except in a mad voice, not her own. Her eyes went pale yellow, the color of a lion’s eyes.
She began to try and be drunk by breakfast, so that the voices, the noise, the buzz in her head weren’t so loud.
She forgot to bathe or change her clothes or walk the dogs.
Then one night, she was found by a nice middle-class Zambian couple on Leopards Hill Road. She was, she told them, running away from home. Dad was in bed at Oribi Ridge with all the dogs and only realized she was gone when the neighborhood watch appeared in their pickup and with two-way radios crackling to tell Dad that Mum had been last seen with a nice Zambian couple and what did he want to do about it.
The nice Zambian couple had picked Mum up and driven her to their house, where they tried to get her to tell them who she was and what she was doing. But Mum wouldn’t talk. They made her a cup of tea and radioed the neighborhood watch and while they were distracted by the radio communication, Mum ran out the back door, climbed their fence, and kept running.
She ran to the small private clinic where she remembered the nurses had been kind when she had gone in a year earlier for an emergency operation on her stomach. She beat on the gate and shouted until the watchman woke up. “Let me in,” she was crying. “Fergodsake let me in.”
The watchman opened the gate cautiously. He peered suspiciously around the gate.
“Ah, but madam . . .”
But Mum rushed into the yard, past the watchman, and into the clinic, where she surprised