Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [77]
“I will.”
Vanessa comes in with the tea. “Go and bath, Bobo.” I flee, relieved.
Afterward Vanessa comes into my room and says, “You mustn’t pay too much attention to Mum. She’s just having a nervous breakdown.”
I have an arrow, confiscated from a poacher, hanging on my otherwise bare walls.
Vanessa frowns at it. “It’s about time you had some pictures in your room.”
“Why?”
“You’ll get morbid, looking at that thing all the time.”
“I like it.”
“Ja, but it’s not normal.”
“Nothing’s normal anymore, hey. Everything’s wrong.”
“It’ll be okay.”
“Why are the managers trying to kill Mum?”
“No, they aren’t.”
“That’s what she told me.”
“They aren’t, okay?”
“They tried to kill Oscar.”
“Maybe that was the Africans.”
“And they beat up Thompson.”
“That was the Africans.”
“Mum said they tried to poison her.”
“Ignore her. I told you already, she’s just having a nervous breakdown.”
“Then why are there so many bad-luck things at once?”
“Bad-luck things happen. That’s just the way it is. They happen all the time. It doesn’t mean anything, Bobo. It doesn’t mean that the bad-luck things have anything to do with each other. If you start thinking that bad luck comes all together on purpose or that it has to do with the managers or with you or with anything else, you’ll go bonkers.”
“Mum’s already bonkers.”
“Which is why she thinks all the bad-luck things are to do with the managers.”
I wipe my nose on my arm.
“You’ve really got to stop doing that,” says Vanessa.
Dad comes back from fishing. He has had one bite in three days, and has caught nothing.
“We’ll move to a place where we can catch a fish just by yawning in the right direction,” he tells us.
I look at Mum and wonder how we’re ever going to move her anywhere.
“What do you think, Tub?”
Mum gives Dad her glazed smile and says, “Sounds fine.” Her voice is blurred.
“Mum hates fishing,” I point out.
“Yeah,” says Mum, laughing in a wobbly unhappy way, “I hate fishing.”
“See?”
“Well, we can’t stay here,” says Dad.
“Come back for my body in the dry season,” says Mum.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I say to Dad, “I don’t think Mum’s well enough to go anywhere.”
“The change’ll do her good. She’ll be fine once we’re in a new place.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we’ve done it before. It’s no good wallowing around in the same place too long. Too much . . . too many . . . It makes you morbid.”
“Vanessa says I’m morbid.”
“See?”
I stroke the dogs with my foot. “What about Oscar and Shea? And the cats?”
“We’ll bring everyone with us.”
“And the horses?”
“We’ll see.”
Dad
MOVING ON
Mum is living with the ghosts of her dead children. She begins to look ghostly herself. She is moving slowly, grief so heavy around her that it settles, like smoke, into her hair and clothes and stings her eyes. Her green eyes go so pale they look yellow. The color of a lioness’s eyes through grass in the dry season.
Her sentences and thoughts are interrupted by the cries of her dead babies.
Only Olivia has had a proper funeral. Richard and Adrian are in unmarked graves. They float and hover, un-pressed-down. For them, there is no weight of dignity such as is afforded the dead by a proper funeral. There is no dampness of tears on earth, shed during the ceremony of grieving. There is no myth of closure.
All people know that in one way or the other the dead must be laid to rest properly: burnt, scattered, prayed over, laid out, sung upon. Earth must be thrown upon the coffins of the dead by the living hands of those who knew or loved them. Or ashes of the dead must be scattered into the wind.
“We have offended against thy holy laws, / we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, / and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; / And there is no health in us.”
It doesn’t take an African to tell you that to leave a child in an unmarked grave is asking for trouble. The child will come back to haunt you and wrap itself around you until your own breathing