Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [33]
Sometimes Mum and Dad are terrifying now. They don’t seem to see Vanessa and me in the back seat. Or they have forgotten that we are on the roof of the car, and they drive too fast under low thorn trees and the look on their faces is grim.
We are not supposed to drive after dark—there is a curfew—but the war and mosquitoes and land mines and ambushes don’t seem to matter to Mum and Dad after Olivia dies. Vanessa and I sit outside at the Club while Mum and Dad drink until they can hardly open the car door. We are on the tattered lawn, around the pond where Olivia drowned (fenced off now, and empty for good measure). Mosquitoes are in a cloud around our ankles, and Mum and Dad do not care about malaria. We are sunburnt and thirsty, bored. We lie back on the prickling grass and watch the sky turn from day to evening.
Dad
We drive home in the thick night through the black, secret, terrorist-hiding jungle on dirt roads and Dad has his window down and he is smoking. The gun is loaded across his lap.
Vanessa and I have not had supper.
So Mum and Dad buy us more Coke’ n’ chips for the drive and tell us to sit in the back seat with the dog, who has been forgotten about in the car all afternoon and who needs a pee.
We let Shea out for a pee.
Mum is fumbling-drunk and Dad, who is sharp-drunk, is getting angry.
“Come on,” he says to Shea, aiming a kick at her, “in the bloody car now.”
“Don’t kick her,” says Mum, indistinctly protective.
“I wasn’t kicking her.”
“You were, I saw you.”
“Get in the bloody car, all of you!” shouts Dad.
Vanessa and I quickly climb into the car and start to fight about where Shea should sit. “On my lap.”
“No, mine.”
“Mine. She’s my dog.”
“No, she’s not.”
“Ja, she is. Mum, is Shea my dog or Bobo’ s?”
“Shuddup or I’ll give both of you a bloody good hiding.”
Vanessa smirks at me and pulls Shea onto her lap. I stick my tongue out at Vanessa.
“Mum, Bobo pulled her tongue at me.”
“I did not.”
Mum turns around and slaps wildly at us. We shrink from her flailing hand. She’s too drunk and sad and half-mast to hit us.
“Now another sound from either of you and I’ll have you both for bloody mutton chops,” says Dad.
That’s that. Mutton chops is not what we want to be. We shut up.
Vanessa and I eat our chips slowly, one at a time, dissolving them on our tongues, and the vinegar burns so we swallow Coke to wash down the sting. We each feed Shea three or four chips. She missed her supper too.
Dad drives wildly, but it’s not children-on-the-roof-wild which is fun and scary all at the same time and we’re singing and the saliva is stringing from our mouths in thin silver ribbons. This is the way a man drives when he hopes he will slam into a tree and there will be silence afterward and he won’t have to think anymore. Now we are only scared.
Mum has gone to sleep. She is softly, deeply drunk. When Dad slows down to take a corner, she sags forward and hits her forehead damply on the dashboard and is startled, briefly, awake. The car is strong with the smell of cigarette smoke and stale beer. Burped-and-farted beer. Breathed-out beer. In the dark we watch the bright red cherry from Dad’s cigarette. It lights his face and the lines on his face are old and angry. Vanessa and I have finished our Coke’ n’ chips. Our tummies are full-of-nothing-aching-hungry. Shea is asleep on Vanessa’s lap.
If we crash and all of us die it will be my fault because Olivia died and that made Mum and Dad crazy.
That’s how it is after Olivia dies.
Bus stop
VACATION
The house is more than we can stand without Olivia. The emptiness of life without her is loud and bright and sore, like being in the full anger of the sun without a piece of shade to hide under.
Dad has said we’ll go on holiday.
“To where?”
“Anywhere. Anywhere that isn’t here.”
So we drive recklessly through war-ravaged Rhodesia.
A green Peugeot rattling along the desolate black strips of tar with toilet paper flying victoriously from the back windows (where Vanessa and I were seeing how long it could go