Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [75]
“They want to kill you?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why would they want to do that?”
“Because I know about them.”
“You know about them.”
“They’re crooks and they’re poaching leopards.”
“We all know they’re poaching leopards.”
“Watch yourself,” says Mum. “Watch yourself.”
A week later, Burma Boy contracts horse sickness, and he is barely recovered from that when he comes down with tetanus.
Mum says, “We need to get fluids into him.”
She fills a bucket with water and empties a bag of brown sugar into it. Burma Boy sucks at the water weakly to get to the sweet silt at the bottom of the bucket, and then he collapses. Mum puts blankets over him and lies with him in the garden for four nights. The dogs curl up next to her. Even Oscar, who has been allowed to sleep inside, on the sofa, during his convalescence, relinquishes his comfortable position and crawls onto the blanket under which the horse lies quivering with rigid spasms every time there is a loud noise.
Thompson gives notice and goes back to the eastern highlands. He says, “This place is poisonous.”
Dad says, “It’s time we moved on, too.”
That night it is so hot that we sit outside in the dark with the windows to the living room open so that we can hear our records. We have managed to hide the Roger Whittaker album in a Chopin sleeve. Dad is playing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
“Loud enough to scare the bloody elephants.”
“There aren’t any elephants.”
“That’s because we scared them with the 1812.”
“Ha.”
We eat a supper of impala steak, balancing plates on our laps. When we look up the sky is deep, lonely black. We can hear the jackals starting to trot the perimeter of the security fence, yip-yipping. They have come for the weak, undernourished, diseased sheep and for the wobbly-legged lambs. A nightjar sings.
Mum is not eating, again. I haven’t seen her swallow a decent mouthful of food since the baby came, and went.
Suddenly Dad says, “I’ll go fishing for three days.”
“Can I come?”
“If the fishing is good, we’ll stay here and make a go of it. If the fishing is bad, we’ll leave.”
“Why?”
“We can’t live where the fishing’s lousy.”
“Leave to where?”
“Better fishing.”
“Can I come?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because then what if the fishing is good for you and bad for me? We can’t confuse the issue.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll leave sparrow’s fart tomorrow.”
The next morning, very early, Dad leaves with his coarse fishing rod, spinners, thick line, and weights. He has packed brandy, tins of baked beans, salt, boiled eggs, tea, powdered milk, and bread into his old ammunition box.
“You’re not going trout fishing?”
“No.”
Dad goes fishing for bass and bream and tiger. He’s never been much of a coarse fisherman.
I say to Mum, “We might as well start packing. Dad never catches anything if he isn’t using a fly.”
Mum is lying in bed staring at the ceiling, as if she doesn’t care.
“Should I bring you some tea?”
“That would be nice.”
Mum spends most of the day in bed. When she gets up, after tea, she is groggy, unsteady on her feet. She makes it as far as the sitting room and sinks into an armchair with a sigh. Her face is longer and older; there are sad lines by the sides of her mouth and under her eyes that didn’t used to be there. Her hair has grown out; the wings on her temples are gray.
She made the house cheerful and homely when we first came here. She made bright new curtains and cushions, she hung pictures and put ornaments on the mantelpiece. Judith/Loveness polished the floors until they shone like marble, and Thompson hammered drooping gauze tightly on the windows and whitewashed the walls inside and out. Mum wrote a list of chores to be done every day and pinned it to the kitchen door: dusting, sweeping, brushing, polishing, shining. Now Mum looks as if she doesn’t care. The list of chores has turned yellow and is splattered with fly shit and has begun to curl up at the edges, and the house is starting to look disheveled without Thompson. There is a population explosion