Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [4]
We wedge Mum into the back of the pickup along with my suitcase and satchel and books and the spare tires, next to the half-built generator we are taking into Lusaka to be fixed. She is humming “Flower of Scotland.” And then Dad and I climb into the front of the pickup and set off down the farm road. I am going to start crying. There go the horses, two white faces and one black peering over the stable doors, waiting for Banda to bring them their breakfasts. And here come the dogs running, ear-flapping hopeful after the pickup, willing us to stop and let them ride along in the back. And there goes the old cook, hunched and massive, his bony shoulders poking out of the top of his threadworn khaki uniform. He is almost seventy and has just sired another baby; he looks exhausted. He’s sitting in the kitchen doorway with a joint the size of a sausage hanging from his bottom lip, a fragrant pillow of blue marijuana smoke hangs above his head. Marijuana grows well behind the stables, where it thrives on horseshit, cow dung, pilfered fertilizer intended for Dad’s soybean crop. Adamson raises one old hand in salute. The gardener stands to attention on his bush-broom, with which he is sweeping leaves from the dusty driveway. “Miss Bobo,” he mouths, and raises his fist in a black power salute.
Mum leans over the rim of the pickup briefly, precariously, to blow the dogs a kiss. She waves at the staff for a moment, royally, and then collapses back into the folds of the tarpaulin.
Dad offers me a cigarette. “Better have one while you still can,” he says.
“Thanks.” We smoke together for a while.
Dad says, “It’s tough when you can’t smoke.”
I nod.
“Don’t smoke at school.”
“I won’t.”
“They won’t like it.”
“They don’t.”
It’s past seven in the morning by the time we leave the farm. I have to be at school by five-thirty that evening to make it in time for sign-in and supper. That leaves us half an hour for business and lunch in Lusaka and an hour to get through the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia.
I say, “Better be polite to the blokes at the border today. We don’t have time for silly buggers.”
“Bloody baboons,” mutters Dad.
When we get to Lusaka, Dad and I drop off the generator at the Indian’s workshop on Ben Bella Road.
“Hello, Mr. Fuller,” says the Indian, head bobbling like a bobbin of thread on a sewing machine. “Come in, come in, for tea? Coffee? I have something for you to look at.”
“Not today,” says Dad, waving the man away. “Big hurry with my daughter, you see.” He talks between clenched teeth.
He gets in the pickup. Lights a cigarette. “Bloody Indians,” he mutters as he reverses out of the yard, “always up to something.”
We buy boiled eggs and slabs of white cornbread from a kiosk on the side of Cha Cha Cha Road, near the roundabout that leads to Kafue, the Gymkhana Club, or home, depending on where you get off. We wave some food at Mum, but she isn’t moving. She has some oil on her face from the generator, which has been leaking thick, black engine blood. Otherwise she is very white, bordering on pale green.
We stop before Chirundu, the small hot nothing town on the Zambezi River which marks the border crossing into Zimbabwe, to make sure she is still alive. Dad says, “We’ll get into trouble if we try and take a dead body over the border.”
Mum has undone the tarpaulin which was meant to keep the dust out of my school clothes, and has wrapped herself up in it. She is asleep with a small smile on her lips.
Dad puts his forefinger under her nose to feel for breath. “Still alive,” Dad announces, “although she looks nothing like her passport photo now.”
From the back, as we ease into the melting hot, tarmac-shining car park in front of the customs building (broken windows like thin ice in the white sun) we can hear Mum shuffling back into life. She eases herself into a sitting position,