Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (9 page)

Olivia

OLIVIA,
JANUARY 1978

It’s during the Christmas holidays when everything is green-growing with the rainy season. The roads are slick with rutted mud. Mum and Dad have taken Vanessa into Umtali to buy some new school shoes and catch up with farm shopping. They leave Olivia and me at Aunty Rena’ s. It is January, steaming with the middle of the rainy season.

Aunty Rena has a store on her farm. It is called the Pa Mazonwe store and it is sweet with treasures. There are bright nylon dresses hanging from the beams in the roof among the gleaming silver-black bicycle wheels. On the far right of the store, there are wads of thick gray and pink blankets which have a special itchy smell to them and the smell makes you think of the feeling of catching rough skin against polyester. And there are crates of Coca-Cola and bolts of cloth. Next are boxes of tea and coffee and Panadol and Enos Liver Salts and cigarettes, sold either by the box or by one stick, one stick.

And then comes the explosion of incandescent sweets: the butternut rocks wrapped in transparent paper with blue writing on it; bubble gum with gold foil inside a pink, bubbled wrapper; jars of yellow thumb-sized synthetic apricots and black, sweet gobstoppers which reveal layers of different colors when sucked. And next to the sweets, the bags of Willards chips and the rows of limp penny cools, which are cigar-shaped plastic packets of sugared water and which we drink by biting a corner of plastic off and squirting the warm nectar into the backs of our throats.

On the right, by the door which leads to Aunty Rena’s clinic, are the stacks of Pronutro and baby food, powdered milk, sugar, salt, and hessian bags filled with dried kapenta—a tiny salted fish, complete with eyeballs and tail—which give the whole store its salty, sharp flavor. Under glass at the end of the counter are tinny gold earrings and spools of multicolored thread and cards of bright, shiny buttons. On the veranda, an old tailor sits whirring swaths of fabric through his fingers, his pedaling eating up the shapeless cloth and turning it magically into puff-sleeved dresses and button-down shirts. His treadle-treadle is a rhythmic, constant background noise along with the store’s small black radio, its back hanging open to reveal batteries and wires, which plays the hip-swaying African music which I am supposed to despise but which is impossible for me not to listen to with guilty pleasure.

“Keep an eye on your little sister,” says Mum.

“I will,” I say, swinging in the gap in the countertop through which only the privileged are allowed.

“Do you love your little sister?” asks Aunty Rena.

I love Olivia more than anything else I can think of but I say, “Not really.”

The grown-ups laugh.

While I am being mesmerized by the glut of treasures in the store and by the customers who are coming up to the counter, cautiously, to carefully spend their monthly wages, Olivia must have tottered out of the store and wandered out the back where the ducks splash in an ankle-deep, duck-shit-green pond. Aunty Rena is in the small, thatched, whitewashed hut out at the front of the store doling out rations to the Mazonwe laborers; some of their monthly wages came in the form of salt, mealie-meal, dried fish, tea, soap, sugar, and oil.

“Give these buggers money and they’ll only spend most of it on Chibuku,” says Dad. Chibuku is the lumpy, sorghum-brewed beer on which the African men get drunk on payday.

Duncan, Rena’s younger son, and I are in the store to watch the Africans buy what they have not received as part of their rations: thread, sweets, batteries, buttons. I am still swinging from the gap in the counter where the wood is worn soft-smooth and soft-greasy by so many hands.

The African women keep their money in a folded wad in their dresses, against their breasts, so that it is soft and creased and warm when they lay it out on the counter to count it. One bag of flour, one box of matches, and then, after a voluptuous hesitation, a single cigarette and one Coke. Their children clamor for boiled sweets.

It is almost lunch before anyone notices Olivia is missing.

She is floating facedown in the pond. The ducks are used to her body by now, paddling and waddling around it, throwing back their heads and drinking the water that is full of her last breaths. She is wearing a purple and white vest that Mum had tie-dyed during one of her artistic inspirations to dress us differently from all the rest. When we turn her over, her lips are as violet as her eyes, her cheeks are gray-white. Aunty Rena puts her on the floor in the clinic and pumps duck shit out of her lungs. The green slop is pumped up onto the gray concrete and lies around her head, halolike. My whole happy world spins away from me then—I feel it leave, like something warm and comfortable leaving in hot breath—and a chill settles onto the top of my stomach. Even my skin has gone cold with shock.

Mum, Olivia, and Van

I will never know peace again, I know. I will never be comfortable or happy again in my life.

Oh my darling, oh my darling,

Oh my darling Clementine,

You are lost and gone forever.

Dreadful sorry, Clementine.

After half an hour Aunty Rena sinks back on her heels. She has been pressing soft-dead, green water from Olivia’s mouth and breathing air into her nose and mouth in slow, hopeless rhythm. Now she says, “Olivia’s dead.” And then she says, “My God, it’s the second one.”

I say, “Please do something, Aunty Rena. Aunty Rena, please.”

She says to Duncan, “Take Bobo to the house.”

“What will you do with Libby?” She can’t be dead. This can’t be the end of her life. Just like that. There hasn’t been a bomb or a gun or a terrorist-under-the-bed. She was alive in the morning. She is still supposed to be alive.

“She’s dead,” says Aunty Rena, and pulls a sheet up over Olivia’s head.

I say, “Let me feel.” I press my fingers against Olivia’s wrist, as I have seen Aunty Rena do, and hold my breath. “I think I feel something,” I say hopefully.

Aunty Rena looks away. “Take Bobo to the house,” she says again.

Duncan takes me to his room and shows me his comic books. Desperate Dan, Minnie the Minx, Roger the Artful Dodger. I say, “I just want Olivia back.”

He says, “She’s dead.”

“I want her back,” I insist.

“She’s well and truly dead.” He knows about death because of his kitten-killing experiments. He has drowned and burnt and buried kittens before. That way, he says, he’ll know what it’s like when his turn comes to be drowned or burnt. He says, “Drowning is better than a cat in the fire.”

I say, “Maybe she’ll get better.”

“You don’t get better from being dead.”

I cry violently into Duncan’s pillow until he sighs and fetches me some loo paper. “Here,” he says, handing me the paper, “blow your nose.”

I wipe my nose on my arm. “My brother also died,” I tell him, screwing the paper into a damp ball in my fist.

“You don’t have a brother.”

“
Ja,
but he’s dead. Before I was born, he died.”

“Then he wasn’t really your brother.”

“Yes, he was.”

“Not if he’s a dead brother. Dead before you were alive, I mean.”

“He was still in our family. Then he died. If he didn’t die he would still be in our family.”

“How’ d he die?” he asks, challenging me.

“Because Mum and Dad took Vanessa for lunch when he was in the hospital.”

“You don’t die from that.”

“He did.” I start to cry again.

Duncan says, “Stop crying.”

I cry harder.

He says, “I’ll read to you.”

I keep crying.

“I’ll read to you only if you stop crying.” And then, his voice rising with impatience and edged with panic, “Stop crying, hey.” He puts his arms awkwardly around my skinny, worm-swollen frame. “Please, Bobo. Please stop crying.”

“Okay.” I sniff and push Duncan away. I scrub my face vigorously with the back of my arm. “There,” I say, “I’ve stopped crying.”

I sit with Duncan for a long time. He reads his comic books to me, trying to do all the voices. I can’t hear what he’s saying but I can hear cars and grown-up voices outside and the Staffordshire terriers barking. I can hear the cook going on about his happy, normal day in the kitchen, counting eggs, making bread, cooking supper. Then Duncan’s sisters come and they say to me, “You have to be brave.”

I nod.

The sisters take me outside to a car and someone drives me to the Dickinsons’ farm which is next door to our farm but no one tells me why we are going there. I say, “Where are Mum and Dad?”

Someone says, “They’re coming.”

I shrink my head into my chin. “They’re going to kill me,” I say.

“What? They won’t kill you.”

I nod and start crying again. “I let Olivia drown.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

I look out of the window at the spiky-topped fields of pineapples that the Dickinsons grow. The pineapple fields have dissolved into orange and green blurs through my tears. It was my fault. It was definitely my fault. I kick the seat in front of me out of sheer, trapped misery. I wish it was me lying dead, instead. I am going to be in trouble for the rest of my life.

Olivia is lying on the spare bed at the Dickinsons’ house. Someone has washed all the duck shit off her face and has combed her dark curls where the algae had been clinging. Her hair has never had comb marks in it, in life. In life her hair was a soft, brushable halo. Mum used to brush out the brown-shining curls with a light-bristled blue brush. I think,
Then she’s really dead.

There are some flowers from Cierina Dickinson’s garden on the pillow by her head. I stare and stare at her face. I wanted her to be alive. I was the one who prayed her into life that day with the missionaries. Now it is my fault she was dead. I had looked the other way and Olivia’s life flew out of her body because I wasn’t taking care of it. Here she is, her skin a blue-gray pallor, lying on the Dickinsons’ spare bed with summer violets around her head and she is not breathing.

Then Rena’s two daughters, Anne and Ronelle, appear. Ronelle takes me by the shoulders and says, “That’s enough,” and she and Anne take me for a walk.

Anne says, “You won’t see her again. She’s gone to Jesus.”

Which is a lie. She has not gone to Jesus. Her body is still on that bed. Jesus has not
suffered her to come unto Him.
I press my lips together. My throat hurts because there will never be enough crying to get rid of the sorrow inside.

Mum and Dad come back from town and I run down the driveway where I have been walking with the Viljoen sisters to meet them. Dad catches me in his arms. He is crying silently, both his cheeks are wet, and his face is drawn and gray. He dries his tears on my neck and says, “You’re so brave, Chookies.”

But I feel as if he won’t say that once he finds out that Olivia is dead because of me. She’s dead because I haven’t been paying attention. I think,
He’ll probably hate me then.
But I don’t tell him what has happened. The lump in my throat makes it hurt to swallow.

That night Vanessa and I sleep in Mum and Dad’s room, except none of us sleep. It is the first time in my life that I have lain awake all night from beginning to end. I listen to Mum’s soft, drugged sobs. Aunty Rena has given her some pills: “You need to take these to help you sleep.” Dad is a hump in the dark, perched up against the wall. He smokes one cigarette after another, the red glows of their cherries traveling steadily to his lips. Vanessa is very quiet next to me on the floor, very still. I know she has gone deep and still and inside herself. I whisper her name into the acrid-smoke-smelling density of our collective grief, but she won’t answer.