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And we laugh and laugh. I am deliciously, carelessly drunk. I throw my empty bottle to the shore and declare my intention to swim to the log. I soon discover that the dam is shallow enough for me to wade chest-deep the whole way. The dogs swim circles around me.

We eat lunch in the dam. Then Dad opens the wine, and we pass the bottle around. “We need a table,” he says.

“And a roof,” I say.

“A lodge on stilts,” says Vanessa.

“A butler,” says Mum.

Richard is smiling. “This is very civilized,” he says.

“It seemed the only sane thing to do,” says Mum.

That night when we get home, our skins shining with sun, our eyes stinging with sun’s reflection on the water, Richard comes in for supper and Mum gets drunk but she doesn’t dance alone in front of the window, sad and mourning. She dances with Richard. We roll up the rug, push the sofa aside, and put the “Ipi Tombi” record on the player. We all dance wildly—hips sideways, wiggle-wiggle, shuffling feet, shaking breasts and breastbones—the way we imagine Zulu warriors to dance, up and down the sitting room. “Ay ya! Ay ya! Ay-ya, oh in-tombi-um. Ipi in-tombi-um. In-tombi-um!”

Mum is glowing, twisting, beautiful again. Her face is pink with sun and wine.

Dad is laughing, “Let’s have a par-ty!” in his signature, singsong way.

Vanessa is trying to avoid permanent humiliation, but she dances anyway, edging her way around Mum and Richard, “Uh, uh, uh!”

I am dancing with the dog, her feet caught up in my hands, crouched low; she teeters around for a few steps before her feet slip on the floor. “Look at Shea dance! Look!”

We dance until the generator dies. And then we sit outside in deck chairs, under the silver moon, and drink Irish coffees. Dad tells stories about the time he went hunting for a zebra and got lost, the time he was chased by a rhino and had to jump fourteen feet into a dry riverbed, the time he saw a man get downwind of buffalo bean.

Beyond the gate I can hear the jackals laughing, their quick, high voices traveling sharply through the dense night.

It’s almost midnight by the time Richard leaves and we all climb into bed.

Dad with President Banda

MALAWI

North of Zimbabwe (but not bordering it), there is a skinny slice of a country, over one fifth of which is a lake boasting the largest population of freshwater tropical fish in the world. Its highlands are speckled with rivers and lakes that were stocked with Scottish trout before the Second World War and whose waters are still rich with the trouts’ descendants. The air almost anywhere you go in Malawi is salty and rich with the scent of smoked fish.

To reach Malawi we can go the short, dangerous way, or we can go the long, less dangerous way. We can choose to drive this way: first, west out of Zimbabwe at Chirundu, then north through Zambia, following the spiny Great East Road to Chipata and finally into Malawi—a journey of four or five days on increasingly deteriorating roads, but without war and with few bandits. Or we can choose to drive east through the Tete corridor in Mozambique and be in Malawi in a matter of hours, a full day perhaps.

In any normal situation, the journey through Tete would be the more sensible choice. But this is Africa, so hardly anything is normal. If we go through Mozambique, we will have to elude land mines, Renamo rebels, bandits, and roads so decayed they are worse than the tracks that army lorries and trucks have worn beside them.

For once, my parents are prudent. Dad flies up to Malawi from Zimbabwe, his plane (taking the shortest route) breathlessly flying over the Tete corridor while the passengers anxiously drink Carlsberg lager and peer out of the windows. Mozambique slides into, and then out of, view, the years of savage warfare and burnt villages and raped women and child soldiers and no schools and no hospitals and battle-bred malnutrition felt as only a temporary dip of unrelated turbulence. The plane lands in Blantyre—a strangely Scottish-feeling, African-smelling city—and Dad is met at the airport