Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [32]
“Under what?”
“Underwater hockey. I was on the national team for Zim.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s hockey you play under water,” said K. “On the bottom of the pool. You have little sticks and a puck. In Europe they play it in big pools with glass sides.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. I was also on the Zim spearfishing team. We went to Turkey for a tournament.” K laughed. “You should have seen! All the other teams had boats and radar and wet suits and there were us Zimbos with our flippers and snorkels and we had to smear ourselves with Vaseline so we didn’t freeze. So we go paddling off the beach—and all the other teams are way out there, in the middle of the sea, diving off their fancy rigs—and start hunting for fish and I am swimming along and a bloody turd goes bobbing past me. But there was a huge fish chasing the turd, so I nailed that.
“Then I noticed there was a pipe this big”—K made a huge circle with his arms—“and there was not just one turd, but hobo of shit pumping into the sea and there were maninge fish, and big ones too, right there. So I called the boys over and we took turns hopping into the sewer and pulling out these monsters, man. We were doing quite well by the end of the first day except then, the next day, we got a little sick of swimming in kak, so we swam out to sea to look for fish and we had a little incident with the Turkish navy.”
“With the what?”
“Apparently we swam into no-go waters and the next thing you know there’s a torpedo boat gunning straight for us and this idiot in a white Elvis sailor suit throwing a thrombie in gibberish. I couldn’t understand a word he said, so then he pointed a gun at me, just to make himself clear.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him to fuck off and stop pointing his gun at me.”
“And did he?”
“No. And there was bugger all I could do about it.” K shook his head. “I guess you could say I lost that round. I had to bareka, or he was going to chaya me.” He sighed. “Man, I hate to lose.” Then he took a deep breath and leaned forward. “I get that from my mother,” he told me. “She was a cheeky one that. Incredibly determined. Half Greek and half South African—we used to say she was the Greek salad. You know, she was also an incredible athlete, my mom. Very competitive. She played hockey for South Africa.”
“Under water?” I asked.
“No, field,” said K. “When she was in her early twenties—right in the middle of her career as an athlete—she got polio. That was it, she was finished. She was a complete cripple. The doctors said she’d never walk again, but she was a stubborn woman. She could do anything she set her mind to. The doctor said she’d never have kids. She had three of us. Okay, she couldn’t have us naturally. But still she had us. She could get pregnant normally, but then she had to have cesareans to get us out. In Rhodesia in the fifties, that was a mission, I’m telling you. But that’s the kind of woman she was. She had absolutely no muscles left in her stomach. You must see photos of her—I’ll show you a photo of her sometime—she was completely collapsed on the side.” K held his hands out to the side as if cradling an enormous bulge of unrestrained stomach. “Her stomach went all the way out here and she was all tipping over sideways, but it never stopped her.”
K lifted up his left leg with both his hands and let it drop. “That’s how she used to drive. She used to have to pick up her leg and drop it on the clutch or the accelerator or the brake. She only had two speeds in the car, flat out, or stopped dead.” K laughed. “People used to see her coming and they’d dive off the road.” He shook his head. “Gondies flying into the ditches left and right. Everyone used to bail out when they saw the Old Lady coming their way. Oh man, I’m telling you”—K looked at me slyly to see if I was listening and smiled—“that’s when we were living on the farm in Kaleni, here in Zambia. Northern Rhodesia in those days. I was at boarding school in Matabuka. Shit, I hated it. I was