Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [30]
It is almost lunch before anyone notices Olivia is missing.
She is floating facedown in the pond. The ducks are used to her body by now, paddling and waddling around it, throwing back their heads and drinking the water that is full of her last breaths. She is wearing a purple and white vest that Mum had tie-dyed during one of her artistic inspirations to dress us differently from all the rest. When we turn her over, her lips are as violet as her eyes, her cheeks are gray-white. Aunty Rena puts her on the floor in the clinic and pumps duck shit out of her lungs. The green slop is pumped up onto the gray concrete and lies around her head, halolike. My whole happy world spins away from me then—I feel it leave, like something warm and comfortable leaving in hot breath—and a chill settles onto the top of my stomach. Even my skin has gone cold with shock.
Mum, Olivia, and Van
I will never know peace again, I know. I will never be comfortable or happy again in my life.
Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling Clementine,
You are lost and gone forever.
Dreadful sorry, Clementine.
After half an hour Aunty Rena sinks back on her heels. She has been pressing soft-dead, green water from Olivia’s mouth and breathing air into her nose and mouth in slow, hopeless rhythm. Now she says, “Olivia’s dead.” And then she says, “My God, it’s the second one.”
I say, “Please do something, Aunty Rena. Aunty Rena, please.”
She says to Duncan, “Take Bobo to the house.”
“What will you do with Libby?” She can’t be dead. This can’t be the end of her life. Just like that. There hasn’t been a bomb or a gun or a terrorist-under-the-bed. She was alive in the morning. She is still supposed to be alive.
“She’s dead,” says Aunty Rena, and pulls a sheet up over Olivia’s head.
I say, “Let me feel.” I press my fingers against Olivia’s wrist, as I have seen Aunty Rena do, and hold my breath. “I think I feel something,” I say hopefully.
Aunty Rena looks away. “Take Bobo to the house,” she says again.
Duncan takes me to his room and shows me his comic books. Desperate Dan, Minnie the Minx, Roger the Artful Dodger. I say, “I just want Olivia back.”
He says, “She’s dead.”
“I want her back,” I insist.
“She’s well and truly dead.” He knows about death because of his kitten-killing experiments. He has drowned and burnt and buried kittens before. That way, he says, he’ll know what it’s like when his turn comes to be drowned or burnt. He says, “Drowning is better than a cat in the fire.”
I say, “Maybe she’ll get better.”
“You don’t get better from being dead.”
I cry violently into Duncan’s pillow until he sighs and fetches me some loo paper. “Here,” he says, handing me the paper, “blow your nose.”
I wipe my nose on my arm. “My brother also died,” I tell him, screwing the paper into a damp ball in my fist.
“You don’t have a brother.”
“Ja, but he’s dead. Before I was born, he died.”
“Then he wasn’t really your brother.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Not if he’s a dead brother. Dead before you were alive, I mean.”
“He was still in our family. Then he died. If he didn’t die he would still be in our family.”
“How’ d he die?” he asks, challenging me.
“Because Mum and Dad took Vanessa for lunch when he was in the hospital.”
“You don’t die from that.”
“He did.” I start to cry again.
Duncan says, “Stop crying.”
I cry harder.
He says, “I’ll read to you.”
I keep crying.
“I’ll read to you only if you stop crying.” And then, his voice rising with impatience and edged with panic, “Stop crying, hey.” He puts his arms awkwardly around my skinny, worm-swollen frame. “Please, Bobo. Please stop crying.”
“Okay.” I sniff and push Duncan away. I scrub my face vigorously with the back of my arm. “There,” I say, “I’ve stopped crying.”
I sit with Duncan for a long time. He reads his comic books to me, trying to do all the voices. I can’t hear what he’s saying but I can hear cars and grown-up voices outside and the Staffordshire terriers barking. I can hear the cook going on about