Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [15]
We loaded up two cats called Fred and Basil and three dogs called Tina, Shea, and Jacko, and we drove, our worldly possessions balanced perilously on the roof of our car, clear across Rhodesia from flat west to convoluted east. We stopped to fill up the petrol tank, drink Cokes, and buy bags of Willards chips (“Make music in your mouth”). Everyone, dogs included, was let out for a pee on the side of the road, behind the bougainvillea bushes.
“Go now or forever hold your pee.”
Dad doesn’t like to stop. Even if your legs are crossed and you can’t see straight you have to pee so much, he doesn’t like to stop. He says, “You should have gone back there when you had a chance.”
“Ja, but I didn’t need to go back there.”
Dad lights a cigarette and ignores us.
“Agh, please, Dad.”
“I have to pee, man.”
“She’s going to widdle in her knickers,” warns Vanessa.
“Oh fergodsake. Tim, pull over, won’t you?”
The dogs panted hotly down our necks and we itched with their irritably scratched-off hair, the cats cried angrily from their boxes, strong gusts of wind threatened to flip the mattresses off our roof. Dad smoked and we ducked his ash in the back seat. Mum read, occasionally nodding off into broken-chicken-neck sleep. Vanessa and I fought and whined and dodged the consequent flailing hands aimed toward our bottoms.
Rebel, the horse, was on a lorry with the sofa and the dining room table and Mum’s woodwork machines. He was padded by our sheets and towels and two suitcases in which Mum had packed all our clothes. Our whole lives, everything we were and everything we owned, were in a Peugeot station wagon and a lorry. If we had been vanished away, sucked up into the atmosphere, just as we were, there would have been no trace of our little family ever having been on the planet. Not even Adrian’s grave, which was never marked, would tell of our short, unimportant passage on this earth.
As we drove over Christmas Pass, through the Mutarandanda Hills, the small city of Umtali suddenly winked up at us in the bright eastern highland sun, which seemed more glittering and intense out here than it did in the dust-yellow western part of the country.
Umtali (corruption of the word mutare, meaning “piece of metal”) is the last city in Rhodesia before the somewhat mysterious, faintly exotic border of Portuguese-held Mozambique draws a red line across the map.
Against a cliff overlooking the road, a hedge had been planted to read welcome to umtali. During the war, the terrorists chopped out the “l” in welcome, so that the subsequent greeting read a chilling we come to umtali. As quickly as the women from the Umtali Gardening Club directed the “garden boys” to replant the all-important missing “l,” it was ripped out again, until the war was won (or lost, depending on whose side you were on) and the hedge was replanted to read welcome to mutare.
We stopped in Umtali, at the Cecil Hotel (renamed the Manica Hotel after the war). Vanessa and I were given a Coke, not out of the bottle and warm but in a glass, floating with little wondrous cubes of ice. A shiny African waiter with impeccable hands and careful, clean nails brought us little white plates of ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off and green shreds of lettuce and paper-thin tomatoes sprinkled all over them.
Mum and Dad were in the bar for a beer or two.
Vanessa and I picked the vegetables off the sandwiches and finished our meal quickly, eyeing each other competitively, mouths bulging. Then we ran around on the blue patterned carpet, dizzy with luxury and Coke (“Adds life”); wall-to-wall carpeting; the unfamiliar bitter-smelling chill of air-conditioning; hushed lights; vigorously flushing loos; soft-footed waiters whose gleaming uniforms were made of thick, shiny cream nylon, crisply piped in gold, sharp-shouldered with blue epaulets. The chairs were swallowingly soft, the colors were bubble-gold and shades of greeny-blue. A