Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [34]
And when we stop singing, Dad shouts, “Sing!”
So we sing, “Because we’ re”—pause—“all Rhodesians and we’ll fight through thickanthin, / We’ll keep this land a free land, stop the enemy comin’ in. / We’ll keep them north of the Zambezi till that river’s runnin’ dry / And this great land will prosper ‘cos Rhodesians never die.”
And we sing, “Ag pleez, Daddy won’t you take us to the drive-in? / All six, seven of us eight, nine, ten.”
Until Mum says, “Please, Tim, can’t we just have some quiet? Hey? Some peace and quiet.”
Mum is quietly, steadily drinking out of a flask that contains coffee and brandy. She is softly, sadly drunk.
Dad says, “Okay, kids, that’s enoughofthat.”
So we sit on each side of the back seat with the big hole in the middle where Olivia should be and watch Mum’s eyes go half-mast.
We are driving through a dreamscape. The war has cast a ghastly magic, like the spell on Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Everything is dormant or is holding its breath against triggering a land mine. Everything is waiting and watchful and suspicious. Bushes might suddenly explode with bristling AK-47s and we’ll be rattled with machine-gun fire and be lipless and earless on the road in front of the burned-out smoldering plastic and singed metal of our melting car.
The only living creatures to celebrate our war are the plants, which spill and knot and twist victoriously around buildings and closed-down schools in the Tribal Trust Lands, or wrap themselves around the feet of empty kraals. Rhodesia’s war has turned the place back on itself, giving the land back to the vegetation with which it had once been swallowed before people. And before the trappings of people: crops and cattle and goats and houses and business.
And then, through deep-quiet, long-stretching-road boredom and quite suddenly, and as surprising as the Prince battling madly through briars to reach a sleeping woman he has never met, two white figures appear on the road. They aren’t princes. Even from afar we can tell they aren’t princes. They look stained gray-brown in filthy travelers’ clothes with unruly hair sticking up with grease and dirt. They aren’t Rhodesians either, we can tell, because they are walking along the road and white Rhodesians don’t walk anywhere on a road because that’s what Africans do and it is therefore counted among the things white people do not do to distinguish themselves from black people (don’t pick your nose in public or listen to muntu music or cement-mix in your mouth or wear your shoes hanging off at the heel). One of the walking white men sticks out his thumb as we approach.
Mum slumps forward damply as Dad slows down. Dad gives her an anxious look. Mum feels his glance and smiles crookedly. She says, “Why are you slowing down?”
“Hitchhikers.”
“Oh.”
Dad says, “Well, I can’t bloody well leave them on the side of the road, can I?”
“I don’t see why not. It’s where we found them.” Mum, who picks up every stray animal she ever sees.
Dad says, “Stupid bloody buggers.”
At this point in our journey, when we see the hitchhikers, Vanessa has built a barrier of sleeping bags and suitcases between us so that she doesn’t have to look at me because, she has told me, I am so disgusting that I make her feel carsick. We have run out of the toilet paper we had brought for the trip. It now lies strewn in our wake or clings, fluttering, to thorn trees by the sides of the road. We have played I Spy until we accused each other of cheating.
“Mu-uuum, Bobo’s cheating.”
“I’m not, Vanessa is.”
“It’s Bobo.”
I start crying.
“See? She’s crying. That means she was cheating.”
Mum turns around in her seat and swipes ineffectually at us, slow-motion drunk. Until now she has been