Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [93]
We lie on the beach reading, we swim and drink and try out our new-fledged flirting skills on our friends’ brothers, who are either kind and ignore us, or are cruel and take us to heart. All day, there is a sting of petrol in the air from the speedboats that periodically cut drunkenly out across the ripple-free lake, towing the swinging stick figure of a water-skier behind them or bumping the ecstatic bodies of children on their bows. And there is the soft, rotten smell of humid heat and there is the periodic piercing burn of a freshly lit cigarette (“Can I have one?”) and the underlying, constant persistence of smoked fish.
When the dugout canoes come in from the lake, the fishermen bowed silver-backed in the lowering sun as they paddle for shore, we stretch sun-and-sweat-salted bodies, crush out our cigarettes in the sand, and saunter down to greet them. We haggle for their fresh catch, carefully scratching the scales of the fish and sniffing to check for freshness (we want just-caught fish, not fish from the morning that have been recently splashed to make them appear just-caught). We take our fish back up to the various ribbons of blue smoke over which cooks are bending and into which cooks are blowing, sending roaring orange flames into crackling wood. We eat fish and rice and drink local gin, slapping mosquitoes off our ankles and sweating into our tin plates.
After supper, we build bonfires on the beach and sit with toes dug into blood-warm sand, watching the moon’s reflection on the lake as it rises over the hills behind us. We smoke and talk, tired from all-day beer-and-sun. Gradually bodies roll back to camp and shack and caravan. The singeing smoke of mosquito coils curls in the air. Some nights, we drag mattresses down to the beach and shake out mosquito nets under trees, hunching sunburnt shoulders to each other, and we sleep next to the silver-edged, moon-and-star-speckled lake, from which there comes an occasional, mysterious splash.
It is the beginning of the rains and the Spy takes leave in order to return to his village, where he will plant a new year’s crop on his small patch of farm and plant a new year’s baby into his mournful young wife’s belly. Doud is too old for babies, he tells us. His sons have taken over his small farm now. He tells us he will stay for Christmas. He makes daily attempts at hot mince pies, which are stomach-heavy in the steaming heat but which we swallow dutifully, along with equally unrefreshing mulled wine. There are no fir trees or Christmas decorations, so we decorate a dusty, droughted pine with the cutout golden stars and globes of old Benson & Hedges cigarette boxes.
The rains are rhythmic, coming religiously in the afternoons (after lunch has been eaten but before tea, so that the nights are washed clean-black with bright pinpoints of silver starlight hanging over a restless, grateful earth). The rains are gray solid sheets of water, slamming into the mock-Spanish house with sudden sideways ferocity and soaking everything, slashing through the window louvers and damping beds and curtains until everything seems heavy and turning-green with moisture. Laundry, which until now has hung behind the cookhouse (and is returned to us fragrant with wood smoke), is never quite dry. It hangs, steaming over Doud’s head, from a wire running over the woodstove and now (when it is returned to us) our clothes and sheets and towels smell of the dogs’ boiling fish-head stew.
The pet guinea fowl crouch damp and miserable under the dripping trees’ inadequate shelter and the chickens stop laying all but the most deformed eggs (from which hatch sickly, one-legged