Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [19]
She said, “Did you look?”
I said, “No ways, hey.”
Once at the police station I saw the army guys unload bodies in black plastic body bags from the back of a pickup and I heard the damp-dead sound of the heavy flesh hitting the ground.
I told Mum I had seen dead terrorists.
She said, “Don’t exaggerate.”
“I did. They were in bags.”
“Then you saw body bags,” she told me, “not bodies.”
That’s how I think of dead bodies, as things in long black bags, the ends neatly tied off. And I think of dead bodies as strips of meat hanging land-mine-blown from trees like strips of drying, salted biltong, even though I have only Vanessa’s word for it.
We drive through the Tribal Trust Lands to get to town, past Africans whose hatred reflects like sun in a mirror into our faces, impossible to ignore. Young African men slouch aggressively against the walls of the taverns. Their eyes follow us as we hurry past, and we stare at them until they are swallowed in the cloud of dust kicked up behind the armed convoy and the mine-detecting Pookie and the snake of farmers coming into town to sell green peppers and mealies, tobacco and milk. Outside one of the African stores (which advertise Cafenol for headaches and Enos Liver Salts for indigestion and Coke for added life on bullet-pocked billboards), there is a gong hanging from a tree. When our convoy thunders through, an old woman squatting under the shade of the tree gets painfully to her feet and beats the gong with surprising vigor.
The sound of that gong echoes through the flat, dry TTL and bounces against the hills that border them. Anyone camped in those hiding, thick hills or crouched behind boulders by the side of the road can hear the warning. We know now that we are being watched. A blink of binocular glass against the rocks up in the hills. An unnatural sway of thigh-deep grass on a still day. The shaking foliage of a tree as branches are parted, then allowed to spring back.
Mum sits back in her seat and slides the Uzi forward out the window.
She says, “Be ready to put your heads down, girls.”
Dad on call-up
WAR, 1976
Mum and Dad both join the police reservists, which means Dad has to go out into the bush on patrol for ten days at a time and find terrorists and fight them.
I watch him strip his gun and clean it; it lies on the sitting-room floor in pieces and the house and our clothes and the dogs reek of gun oil afterward. Dad lets me press the magazine full of bullets.
“Faster than that. You’d have to do it a lot faster than that.”
In the back of my cupboard, stacked under my one hanging dress (which is too hot to wear and was sent to me from England by Granny and which smells of mothballs), are the rat packs. Small government-issue cardboard boxes in which there are pink, sugar-covered peanuts, small gooey packets of coffee which leak on everything else, two squares of Cowboy bubble gum, a box of matches, teabags, a tin of bully beef, a packet of powdered milk, sugar, Pronutro. Dad packs five rat packs and a flask of contraband brandy into his camouflage rucksack along with ten boxes of cigarettes.
He puts on his camouflage uniform and he has a camouflage band that Mum made to put over his watch so that it doesn’t blink in the sunlight and alert the terrorists. He paints black, thick paint on his face and arms and when I ask, “Why?” he says, “So the terrs won’t see me.” But he doesn’t blend in. He stands out. He is a white human figure, hunched with the weight of a pack and his gun. He walks with his head down and his legs striding and bandy like a cowboy, without his horse, in a movie. I can see him all the way to the bottom of the driveway when he climbs into the Land Rover that has come to take him away and he doesn