Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [69]
“They’re nice,” I assure her. “Quite big.”
She says scornfully, “What do you know?” She adds, “You have holes in your knickers.”
Which is true.
“And you don’t sit with your legs together, so everyone can see you have holes in your knickers. And they’re grauby.”
“What are grauby?”
“Your knickers. They’re all gray and holey.”
“Well . . .” I am close to tears. “They’re handed down from you,” I say, “that’s why. You get new knickers and I have to get your old knickers when you’ve peed in them for three years.”
“I don’t pee in my knickers.”
“Ja, ja.”
Vanessa shuts her eyes at me in exquisite pain and sighs deeply.
And then Mum notices our fingernails and says, “For heaven’s sake, Tim, no wonder Bobo got diarrhea.”
I say, “Mum, can I feel the baby?” I stretch out my hand, ready to put it on her belly.
“No,” says Mum irritably. She sighs again, like she’s on the edge of screaming or crying. “Have you been riding?”
“Every day when we haven’t been camping.”
“Good girl. Wear your riding hat.”
“I will.”
And then to Vanessa, “Are you drawing?”
Vanessa nods.
Mum closes her eyes. We kiss her cheek. “Have the baby soon,” I say.
Vanessa says, “I’ll get the baby’s room ready.”
Dad says, “Pecker up, Tub.”
We leave Mutare and now we’re on the strip road leading home. All of us miserable, lonely without Mum. We don’t want to wash our hair alone and have no one to tell us to cut our fingernails. We want Mum to come home. Our want floods the inside of the Land Rover and spills out behind us with the diesel fumes.
It’s past the place where Dad needs to pay attention to the road—there hasn’t been any other traffic for miles and miles—when we see the white woman hitchhiking.
“A hijacker!” says Vanessa.
“It’s a lady.”
“We can’t leave her there,” says Dad, stomping out his cigarette in the spilling ashtray above the gear stick. He pulls up. The woman, who has been bent over an ambitiously swollen backpack, looks up at us, pushes a fringe of clean blond hair out of her eyes, and smiles. “Hi,” she says, her voice flat with Australia (dust, boomerangs, kangaroos, convicts, eucalyptus, sheep), “I’m Charlie Chilvers.”
Dad says, “Budge up, kids.”
Vanessa and I squash together.
“Where are you going?”
Charlie Chilvers says, “Wherever you’re going, mister,” and she smiles again and her smile is such a smile. Just so. A smile with nothing behind it. And her face is without worry or anxiety or anger or loss. Her face is hopeful and open and hungry for experience.
Dad says, “Hell, you don’t want to go where we’re going.”
“Where’s that?”
“To the dogs,” says Dad, “to the bloody dogs.”
Charlie laughs and climbs in. “Hi, kids,” she says.
Dad says, “Mind if I smoke?” I’ve never heard him ask anyone’s permission before, and it makes me stare at Charlie harder. She’s crisp and sharp-sweet, like the white under the green skin of a Granny Smith apple.
Charlie says, “Hell, no,” and I am already in love with her.
That night Charlie helps Vanessa and me wash our hair. She has strong, smooth, brown, muscled arms. By breakfast the next morning, it feels as if Charlie has been with us for years.
She says, “Who wants to go riding today?”
“I do, I do.”
Even Vanessa says, “Maybe.”
Dad says, “I’ll see you girls later. Charlie, you all right here?”
“This is great,” says Charlie. “It’s a luxury to be sitting still for a while.”
Every night we go to the manager’s house to get the phone call from Mutare General Hospital and Vanessa and I have to sit on the manager’s wife’s dining room chairs while Dad shouts down the line at the nurse. And the news is always the same. Mum’s fine, no baby.
Then one night Dad says, “What? Say again?” and we sit up.
“What? Dad! What?”
“Hold on!” shouts Dad. He puts his hand over the receiver and shushes us. “I can hardly hear. The line . . .”
So we hold our breath.
“A boy.”
“Weee-oooop!”
Dad puts his hand over the receiver again and tells us, “Hey, keep it down, you two! I can’t hear a thing.”
Vanessa says, “Let’s call him