Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [20]
I want to warn him that I can see him the whole way down the driveway, that he doesn’t blend in at all. The terrs will easily see him and shoot him. He shouldn’t walk down driveways. I shout, one last thin hysterical message into the hot air, “Don’t let the bugs bite, Dad!”
Mum says, “Shh now. That’s enough.” Dad has heaved his rucksack onto his lap and turned to take a light from a friend for his cigarette. The Land Rover pulls away. As Dad disappears from sight, as the Land Rover jolts over the bump where the snake lives in the culvert at the bottom of the driveway, he raises his hand and I think he’s waving. But he’s just taking a pull off his cigarette.
There’s a lump in my throat that hurts when I swallow and I can’t talk or I’ll start to cry. Mum puts down her hand. She hardly ever lets me hold her hand. I slip my hand into hers and we begin to walk back to the house. It feels strange to hold Mum’s hand and too quickly there is an uncomfortable film of sweat between us. I slip out of Mum’s grip, wipe my hand on my trousers, and run ahead to the house, banging into the warm, meat-smelling, fat-greasy-walled kitchen where July is making bread and the kitchen is becoming rich with the smell of bubbling yeast (which is like the smell of puppy pee).
Mum wears a neat gray uniform—a dress with silver buttons and epaulets and the letters “BSAP” on the sleeve.
“What’s that for?” I finger the letters.
“ ‘British South African Police.’ ”
“But we’re Rhodesian.”
“Mmm.” She tucks her hair under a peaked hat and looks in the mirror, lips crooked the way people look when they are pleased with themselves. “How do I look?”
“Pretty.”
She flashes me a rewarding smile. I am kicking-legs bored on her bed.
Mum tugs a pair of nylon tights onto humid-hot legs and slips into a pair of black lace-up shoes, which look like school shoes.
“Are you a policeman?”
“A police reservist.”
“Oh.”
We drive into Umtali. Mum stops to buy lunch. A sausage roll and a chocolate-covered sponge-cake mouse each from Mitchells the Bakery on Main Street, with a Coke for me.
The police station is out toward the African part of town, in the Third Class district which is less than the Second Class district (with the Indian shops and mosques) and less again, by far, than the distant First Class district where the Europeans shop and live.
There is a small gray duty room for the police reservists, with a wooden desk under a window at which Mum sits. She has brought a book. She sighs, slips off her shoes, and rubs her nylon-covered feet together while she reads. Against the other wall is a thin, narrow bed for the person who will be on duty all night. I sit on the floor nibbling the delicious, flaky, greasy luxury of my sausage roll, working my way through the pastry to the salty meat in the middle. I am in an agony of knowing that the sausage roll will come to an end. But I am also fat with the knowledge that I will have the chocolate mouse next and then my Coke. I make my lunch last, lick by lick, sip by sip, as long as I can. On the wall above the bed there is a chart with the army alphabet on it. After I have finished my lunch I press my back against the cool metal frame of the bed (my belly swollen) and stare at the wall quietly for a long time until the words are completely in my head: “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot . . .” all the way to “Zulu.” I pretend that I have twenty-six horses named after the army alphabet and gallop them around on the bed, my fingers jumping wrinkles and dodging water hazards. Under my breath, “Come on, India. Chtch, chtch. Up we go, boy.”
Next to the bed there is a map of Manicaland with lots of tiny lights dotted here and there.
“What are the lights for?”
“That shows where people live.” She points to where we live; our dot almost spills into Mozambique.
“Why lights, though?”
“If someone gets attacked then they press the alarm on their Agricalert and the light will go off here and I can tell who is getting