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Dad drives her to Masvingo and leaves her in the middle of town. When he comes home, he has the horses brought to the house and he takes me out riding until after dark, and he doesn’t talk except to say “Race you down the airstrip” and “Race you up the river” so that we don’t walk for long enough to talk and the horses come back in a shiny sweat and I am scratched from dodging camel-thorn branches.

Mum’s okay in the mornings when she’s just on the pills; she’s very sleepy and calm and slow and deliberate, like someone who isn’t sure where her body ends and the world starts. At night she has a few drinks and some more pills and then a few more drinks, and that’s when things start to not be so okay. She gets drunk enough by six o’clock that Dad runs her a bath and says, “Go on, Tub, why don’t you have a bath?” And she is obedient, stunned, taking a brandy with her into the bath, and I can hear her in there crying softly to herself. Then she comes into the sitting room, wringing wet, wrapped only in a towel, so Dad goes into the kitchen and tells Thompson it’s okay, he can knock off now. Mum puts on the old Roger Whittaker record and stands in front of the window where she can see her reflection and she dances to herself and sings softly, “I’m gonna leave old London town, I’m gonna leave old London town. . . .” And the towel gapes open in the rear and exposes her naked bum. I point and giggle and Vanessa hisses at me sternly, “It’s not funny.”

I snort. “Yes it is,” I insist.

“No, it’s not. Mum’s having a nervous breakdown.”

“Oh.”

Vanessa lays the table for supper, since Thompson can’t come out of the kitchen with Mum half-naked in the living room. We eat impala steak, potatoes, tinned peas with a cup of milk, and Milo. Dad says, “Come and eat, Tub.”

But Mum is swaying and singing. She has put the record back on from the beginning. It’s the background music to her nervous breakdown. Dad serves up the food. He says, “Sit up straight. Mouth closed when you chew.”

Night after night for the rest of the holidays it’s the same.

When Mum and Dad drive us back to boarding school at the beginning of term, some of the other mothers ask Mum where the baby is. And they peer over Vanessa and me, as if we might have the baby hidden behind our backs. Mum has to say, “We lost him.”

“Ohmygod, I’m so sorry.”

“Yes.” Mum’s eyes are shiny glazed. She’s holding on to my hand so tightly that her rings bite into my flesh. I hold on to her back. When she kisses me good-bye, she wraps me briefly in the safe, old smell of Vicks VapoRub, tea, and perfume and it’s only when I look into her eyes that I remember she is in the middle of a nervous breakdown. She says, “Be a brave girl, okay?”

“You, too.”

She smiles at me.

Dad says, “Come on, Tub.” He says to me, “Pecker up.”

“Ja. Pecker up to you, too.”

Long road

NERVOUS

BREAKDOWN

Things get worse. When Mum is drugged and sad and singing tunes from the Roger Whittaker album every night, that is one thing. It is a contained, soggy madness, which does little more than humidify the dry, unspoken grief we all feel. But then the outside world starts to join in and has a nervous breakdown all its own, so that it starts to get hard for me to know where Mum’s madness ends and the world’s madness begins. It’s like being on a roundabout, spinning too fast. If I look inward, at my feet, or at my hands clutching the red-painted bar, I can see clearly, if narrowly, where I am in spite of a sick feeling in my stomach and a fear of looking up. But when I pluck up the courage to look up, the world is a terrifying, unhinged blur and I cannot determine whether it is me, or the world, that has come off its axis.

Thompson is beaten up in the compound. One day he comes to work and his eye is purple-black, the skin split open on the brow. He says it’s because he’s from a certain tribe in the east and these people are from a different tribe from the south and they fear and hate him.

“Fear and hate you for what?” I ask.

Thompson shrugs. “I am not one of them.”

“But