Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [96]
I said, “I’ll pay you two kwacha for a ride in your canoe.”
“Three kwacha.”
I hesitate.
“Okay, okay, two kwacha.”
Vanessa sits up and shades her eyes from the sun. “Don’t go too far, hey.”
I scud down the rock, gripping on a narrow ledge, toes stretching toward the canoe.
“Hands first,” says the paddler, holding the canoe steady against the rock.
“How can I put my hands first?”
“Ah, but you must.”
“It’ll be all right. You just keep the thing still.” I make a clumsy lurch for the canoe, there is a brief vision of the paddler’s dismayed face, and then we are all over, upside down, the water around me suddenly lively with paddles, dead fish, grasping nets, despondent soggy cigarettes.
Vanessa peers over the edge of her perch. “You’re going to have to pay him for everything you’ve sunk.”
“I will. I will.” I cling to the upturned canoe. “Sorry,” I pant to the fisherman. But he is too busy recovering his goods to respond. I clear myself from the debris, from the leg-heavy fishing nets which threaten to pull me down, and thrash back to the beach, where I lie on my belly staring at the glassy sand and coughing. The fisherman is still hanging on to his upturned canoe, saving cigarettes, which he is placing in a row on the canoe’s sky-facing bottom.
He kicks the canoe to shore. He has lost his day’s catch. He does not look at me as he lays out his life on the beach. He has lost not only his catch, but also his knife, a basket, a plastic bag in which he had an old wine bottle filled with cooking oil, and a tin bowl containing a fistful of dry cornmeal for nshima. I watch the muscles hop on his angry back and dig my toes into the sand. “I’m sorry.”
He does not answer.
“I’ll pay you. How many kwacha?” But even those usually magic words fail to elicit a response.
He turns his canoe upright and pushes out into the lake, balancing briefly, as lightly as a cat, on the gunwale before lowering himself into the canoe, bent like a dancer, from where he digs into the water with his paddle and slides out into the glare of the bright afternoon sun.
I pick my way back up to the top of the rock, where Vanessa’s pink shoulders are beginning to hum a more urgent shade of red.
“You’re burning,” I tell her.
“That’s so typical,” she says.
“Put your shirt on.”
“You’re so annoying.”
I sit, contrite, next to Vanessa. “He wouldn’t let me pay him.”
“No wonder no one will snog you.”
I light a cigarette.
Vanessa scratches under her chin, her jaw thrust out. She is looking far out into the water, as if reading it for further insights into my shortcomings. “Everything you do is a disaster.”
The cigarette is bitter on my tongue. Tears sting behind my eyelids and make a hard painful lump in the back of my throat.
“You’re fourteen years old and you haven’t even been kissed.”
I shrug. “Who says I want to be?”
She pushes out her lips at me. “Can’t you be just a little less . . .? Can’t you? I mean, can’t you just be normal?”
“I am normal.”
Vanessa closes her eyes. We have been taking it in turns spraying a bottle of Sun-In into our hair. It has streaked Vanessa silver-blond and has turned my hair orange, in unsightly blocks. She runs her fingers through her hair and turns her face to the sun.
I have had my hair cut, in an unflattering pudding bowl, by an African hairdresser in Blantyre. My fringe is very short and crooked. I look like a grasshopper wearing a wig. I hang my head on my knees and sigh. Tears roll down my cheeks and splash onto my legs.
“Geoffrey might snog you,” says Vanessa at last.
He looks like a small, greasy weasel. “Thanks.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
Which is how I come to be snogged, at the next New Year’s party, by the rodent-faced