Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [26]
“Probably not,” I said.
K was quiet for a few minutes and then said, “Ja, well, in any case, it’s true that I’d rather sit and talk to a fisherman on the Chabija all day about tiger fish and bream and his bloody millet crop than try and spend one afternoon chatting to a honky about his shallow crap. No . . . maybe it’s just that this hondo stuff shouldn’t be spoken at all. Not to a gondie or to you or to anyone.”
And then the pickup gave a jolting buck and we were hiccuped out onto the tarmac. A black, curling ribbon of shiny highway, connecting the fragments of Zambia that fall on this side of the escarpment to the city of Lusaka. As we turned up the dirt road toward my parents’ camp, the headlamps swung briefly against Sole’s candlelit brothels and caught the stunned eyes of drunks on the verandas of the throbbing taverns.
“You must stay for a drink when we get to the camp,” I told K.
“No, I should get home,” said K. “I have a busy day tomorrow. Anyway, I don’t drink anymore.”
“I think I knew that.”
“Who told you?”
“It was an international news flash when you stopped.”
K laughed. “Ja, it should have been. I used to drink. Mai we, I used to drink!”
Suddenly, a man riding a bike with a woman balanced across his handlebars came reeling out of the village, wobbled in front of the pickup for a few swollen seconds, and then veered out of the way. K spun the steering wheel and the pickup juddered off the road, where it cruised along at a terrifying angle before regaining four wheels.
K carried on talking as if nothing had happened. “All of us guys, you’ll find we drink in binges. Three weeks sober and then a week of being absolutely blallered. Maybe a bottle of vodka and a dozen beers in a night. It’s what we learned in the war.”
I glanced behind us and the man and the woman were toiling on through the mud, quite matter-of-factly, their faces reflected red in the tail lights of the pickup.
“You’re in the shateen for three weeks straight,” K was saying, “and then you’re back in camp for a week and you spend the first three days trying to forget the last three weeks and the next three days trying not to think about the next three weeks and one night with an almighty hangover and then you’re back in the shateen.” K shook his head. “Voddies and Coke was my drink,” he said. “But my hangovers! And my demons! One night about two years after the war I was in a hotel room with the ex, and you know those ceiling fans with a toggle on the end of a string to switch the thing on and off, ja? Well, in my sleep, I guess, I could hear the fan—thuka, thuka, thuka—and the toggle—tinka, tinka, tinka—and in my alcoholic state I thought it was a helicopter coming to chaya me. Man, I woke up and I was screaming and leaping around the bed and donnering that fan with a pillow and there were feathers flying everywhere and the ex was screaming at me. But I honestly thought I was under attack, which was bull if you think about it because in real life, it was us with the choppers and the gooks getting stonked with those K-cars.”
K drove in silence for a moment. Then he said, “Thank God—I thank the Almighty—that I stopped the old elbow-lifting exercises because those other boys . . . binge? Ja, that’s how they still operate. They work like dogs for three weeks and then they soup it up for a solid week. That’s how we got through the war. That’s how we learned to get through real life.”
K paused and then he said, “I can’t blame them though. You know, if I didn’t believe in the Heavenly Father, I think I might have scribbled myself by now, either by accident or on purpose. Because what’s the point of life? Do you know what the point of life is?”
“No,” I said, “I haven’t figured it out yet.”
“I’ll tell you,” said K. “Unless you have been saved by Jesus, life is just the few seconds you have before death. That’s it. Over and out . . . Without Jesus as your savior, that’s all life is. . . . And doing everything you can to forget that you’re going to snuff it