Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [92]
All day we must leave unspoken any thoughts that might be taken as negative with regard to the country: the country’s government, the country’s leader, the country’s roads, the country’s climate, the country’s population. But at night, with the hum of the generator throbbing light into the compound (where the Spy lives with a sad-looking young wife and a fat child always embalmed in pink wool), Mum sits yoga-cross-legged on the chair next to the beer (as if guarding it), and shouts of the conspiracy against us. She hates the Spy. She hates the breath-sucking crush of bodies around us. She hates the censorship that interrupts our mail, our phone calls, our reading, our boxes of South African crackers.
Dad smokes quietly. He looks at me over the top of his cards. He says, “You’re feeling brave.”
I’ve put down four matches on the strength of my hand. I struggle, unsuccessfully, for a poker face.
Mum’s waving a finger in the air. “Corrupt! Every last one of them. What a bloody country.”
“Don’t cheat,” says Vanessa.
“I’m not.”
“You’re trying to look at Dad’s cards.”
“Am not.”
“They can send their little spies . . .” says Mum.
“You are, I saw you,” says Vanessa, kicking me under the table.
“I am not. Owie, man. Hey, Vanessa kicked me.”
“It was an accident.”
“Liar.”
Dad squashes out a cigarette. “Hey, cut it out, you two. No fighting.”
“But they can’t change the way I think,” says Mum.
Dad smiles. “Now I have you girls by the short and curlies. A pair of kings, a pair of queens, and three eights.”
“Jeez, Dad.”
“You know the little creep is lying to them about you.”
“I’ll have another beer, please Mum.”
“What little creep?”
“That little spy of a houseboy. He’s reporting everything we do to the government.”
“Can I have a beer, too, please Mum?”
“You need to watch their every move, Tim, I’m telling you.”
Van—Cape Maclear
Dad lights a cigarette and grunts.
“My God, if we don’t get off this bloody farm, we’re going to rot.”
Mum scratches her ankles absently. They have begun to bleed from bites on bites on bites.
Near the southern tip of Lake Malawi is a bay confusingly called a cape. Cape Maclear is tucked into hills and accessible only by a long, thin, terrible road. It is protected on each side by wings of rising rocks and in front by a thin string of uninhabited islands, which are wild and secret and guarded by monitor lizards who lie sunbathing on black rocks. The bay is habitually unruffled and its waters miraculously free of those traditional drawbacks to African swimming—bilharzia and crocodiles—although the occasional hippo has been known to stray up onto the beach.
The beach is two miles long. Black, powdery sand near the water leads to sugar-coarse dunes. Sitting on the beach, we can smell the bittersweet pungency of the rising camp settlements behind us. Periodic rain flushes debris and litter down from the shanties onto the beach and into the water.
It is here that the expatriates congregate on the weekends to drink.
“Expats like us,” says Mum. By which she means, not missionaries or aid workers, “with whom one doesn’t want to drink anyway.”
We find a small patch of land among the other parcels on the edge of the lake where the expats-like-us camp in shacks or tents during the school holidays and on weekends. This is where generators throb all night to keep beer cold and milk fresh and where the beer drinking begins at breakfast, when there is a fatty, salty hum of bacon and eggs coming from each blue-smoked fire and where the crackle of radios or the bah-bum-bah-bum of kids’ pop music (turn-that-bloody-racket-down) wakes us from our hot, beer-heavy sleep.
Eventually, the morning sun beats us out from under our mosquito nets in search of tea and we join the other pink-shouldered soldiers blearily trudging to the refreshing