Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [95]
Mum says, “Me too.”
So Dad takes a gang of men from the farm and in one weekend they erect an open-air hut out of mud, poles, and thatch on our plot at the lake. Its walls reach to my knees, and its primitive thatch hangs down like too-long hair, stopping just above our heads so that any breeze off the lake is free to press through the hut, through the stifling, humid-thick air, to the back of the hut where Dad has fashioned crude slat beds from rough wood. Each bed has a thin foam mattress and a pair of locally made sheets (rough, raw-to-the-toes cotton) and is misted with a mosquito net. He splashes whitewash on the mud hut and covers the mud floor with raked beach sand.
He comes home and declares (in the presence of the Spy, who has lately returned from his village) that we can now escape the farm at weekends. “Room for everyone,” he declares. “We built a bloody palace.”
On Friday, we load the pickup. Mum brings last year’s unsellable tobacco scraps and sweepings from Mgodi’s grading shed to dig into the clay-tight, black soil. She has ripped up runners from the garden to plant a lawn of thick-leaved buffalo grass (which will spread green, quick, grateful fingers over bare soil) and bags of cuttings from the poinsettias, bougainvillea, and snowball bushes. She has jars of fledgling mango and avocado (coaxed to life on the windowsill in the kitchen) pressed up against the burlap sacks of grass. Dad and I struggle under the weight of a real flush toilet (brought from the hardware store at Zomba) on which Vanessa triumphantly balances herself for the drive (and from which she waves victoriously to shrieking children all the way to the lake). We pile up dry firewood (the lake area has been picked clean of kindling) and sacks of mealie meal for the watchman who has been stationed to keep an eye on our new palace. We whistle up the dogs and climb into the truck. I am holding on to a cage, made of bush sticks and bark, from which a cockerel is glaring. He is Marcus, and Mum insists that he is necessary to eat the ants that crawl out of the floor and cover the bush poles with their red, crusty tunnels.
All the expats-like-us bring a servant down to the lake to cook, clean, and run to “Stephen’s Bar” for the daily supply of beer. But we are loaded to the gunwales and are forced to leave the Spy behind. “Worthless bugger that he is,” Dad says. “Anyway, the watchman can make a fire for us and clean up.”
“And I’ll help cook,” I say, exuberant with escape.
Vanessa retches theatrically.
Mum says, “It’s just this once, Vanessa. We can survive.”
We edge out of the yard, teetering dangerously on top of our heavy load of supplies, and wave to the Spy.
And then the Spy outdid himself.
Because of Christmas and New Year’ s, more than two weeks pass before we can return to our palace at the lake. This time we bring the Spy. We arrive to find an excited gaggle of expats-like-us who report that a Presidential Inquiry was sent to the lake the previous weekend. The Inquiry had apparently come to investigate reports that “Tim Fuller has built himself a palace at the lake with His Excellency’s money.”
The entourage, bad-tempered after an uncomfortable, steamy journey from Lilongwe (which not even a ride in an air-conditioned Mercedes-Benz could cushion), had arrived at Cape Maclear and demanded to know where Tim Fuller’s palace was.
The expats-like-us show them the raw, mud hut.
“This!” The chief government investigator was scandalized; his mouth moved in silent protest until indignation could find words. “This is not a palace! This is nothing but a goat shed.”
The Spy creeps to the back of the hut and makes a fire. He looks furtively at the expats-like-us and then, with obvious dismay, at the hut.
Dad finds a piece of driftwood flattened by water and rock, and Vanessa uses a hot rod of metal, fresh from the fire, to burn the goat shed into it. We hang the sign from one of the hut’s poles.
Dugout canoes—Lake Malawi
FEDERAL FULLERS
Vanessa and