The new houseboy scuffles idly at the door of the back kitchen, where Doud is making up the massive pot of nshima that will feed the dogs, cats, chickens. A pungent, oily soup of bones, fish heads, green cuttings, and leftovers bubbles on the woodstove.
Mum says, “Yes?” and glares.
“I have orders,” he announces.
“Orders for what?”
“I have orders to work here.”
“No, you don’t.” Mum turns her back on the man and shows Doud a recipe in her well-fingered, brown-spattered Good Housekeeping Cookbook.
“But I have orders.”
Mum heaves a deep, irritated sigh and turns back to the man on the doorstep. “From whom?”
The new houseboy looks sullen. He shrugs his shoulders impatiently under the new crisp cut of his khaki uniform (not issued by Mum).
“It is required that I am hired.”
“Well, I unrequire you,” declares Mum.
But the next day the new houseboy arrives again (late, after we have eaten breakfast) for work and skulks around the house until Mum screams at him.
“You can’t fire me,” he says.
“I didn’t hire you to begin with.”
The new servant lets this settle for a moment before declaring, “This is not Rhodesia.”
“I know it’s not bloody Rhodesia.”
But he stays. And at the end of the month he is paid along with Doud, the gardener, the watchman, and the driver who make up the household staff. And Mum says, “I suppose it’s just as well. We need someone for Fridays,” which is Doud’s day at the mosque.
The new houseboy is caught reading our mail, looking through our drawers, rifling in the suitcases under our beds, but whenever we threaten to fire him, he only bares his teeth and tells us, “You can’t.” And it gradually dawns on us that this little man with the hostile breath and furtive tackies (squeaking sneakily from room to room) is an official employee of the government, sent to spy on us. Thus employed, he is an indifferent houseboy.
When we ask him to fetch us a tray of tea it arrives lukewarm, tea leaves floating damply in the top of the pot, with unmatched cups, and we only glance at one another and obediently drink the inferior brew. He irons wrinkles and scorched, burnt-brown stains into the clothes (he overfills the charcoal iron so that hot coals spill from its lid). He overcooks the supper (meat appears dried and flaking next to shriveled vegetables and parched rice). Even the dogs hunch their backs at him and slink wearily from his feet.
All day we must leave unspoken any thoughts that might be taken as negative with regard to the country: the country’s government, the country’s leader, the country’s roads, the country’s climate, the country’s population. But at night, with the hum of the generator throbbing light into the compound (where the Spy lives with a sad-looking young wife and a fat child always embalmed in pink wool), Mum sits yoga-cross-legged on the chair next to the beer (as if guarding it), and shouts of the conspiracy against us. She hates the Spy. She hates the breath-sucking crush of bodies around us. She hates the censorship that interrupts our mail, our phone calls, our reading, our boxes of South African crackers.
Dad smokes quietly. He looks at me over the top of his cards. He says, “You’re feeling brave.”
I’ve put down four matches on the strength of my hand. I struggle, unsuccessfully, for a poker face.
Mum’s waving a finger in the air. “Corrupt! Every last one of them. What a bloody country.”
“Don’t cheat,” says Vanessa.
“I’m not.”
“You’re trying to look at Dad’s cards.”
“Am not.”
“They can send their little spies . . .” says Mum.
“You are, I saw you,” says Vanessa, kicking me under the table.
“I am not. Owie, man. Hey, Vanessa kicked me.”
“It was an accident.”
“Liar.”
Dad squashes out a cigarette. “Hey, cut it out, you two. No fighting.”
“But they can’t change the way I think,” says Mum.
Dad smiles. “Now I have you girls by the short and curlies. A pair of kings, a pair of queens, and three eights.”
“Jeez, Dad.”
“You know the little creep is lying to them about you.”
“I’ll have another beer, please Mum.”
“What little creep?”
“That little spy of a houseboy. He’s reporting everything we do to the government.”
“Can I have a beer, too, please Mum?”
“You need to watch their every move, Tim, I’m telling you.”
Van—Cape Maclear
Dad lights a cigarette and grunts.
“My God, if we don’t get off this bloody farm, we’re going to rot.”
Mum scratches her ankles absently. They have begun to bleed from bites on bites on bites.
Near the southern tip of Lake Malawi is a bay confusingly called a cape. Cape Maclear is tucked into hills and accessible only by a long, thin, terrible road. It is protected on each side by wings of rising rocks and in front by a thin string of uninhabited islands, which are wild and secret and guarded by monitor lizards who lie sunbathing on black rocks. The bay is habitually unruffled and its waters miraculously free of those traditional drawbacks to African swimming—bilharzia and crocodiles—although the occasional hippo has been known to stray up onto the beach.
The beach is two miles long. Black, powdery sand near the water leads to sugar-coarse dunes. Sitting on the beach, we can smell the bittersweet pungency of the rising camp settlements behind us. Periodic rain flushes debris and litter down from the shanties onto the beach and into the water.
It is here that the expatriates congregate on the weekends to drink.
“Expats like us,” says Mum. By which she means, not missionaries or aid workers, “with whom one doesn’t want to drink anyway.”
We find a small patch of land among the other parcels on the edge of the lake where the expats-like-us camp in shacks or tents during the school holidays and on weekends. This is where generators throb all night to keep beer cold and milk fresh and where the beer drinking begins at breakfast, when there is a fatty, salty hum of bacon and eggs coming from each blue-smoked fire and where the crackle of radios or the bah-bum-bah-bum of kids’ pop music (turn-that-bloody-racket-down) wakes us from our hot, beer-heavy sleep.
Eventually, the morning sun beats us out from under our mosquito nets in search of tea and we join the other pink-shouldered soldiers blearily trudging to the refreshing lap-lap of the sweet blue bay. We swim out to the rocks and back, and then run back to our camp (over already foot-searing hot sand) for goggles and snorkels, cigarettes, towels, books. The day becomes seamless and sunlit, its passage marked only by the diminishing supply of beer in various generator-run fridges and by the peripheral activities of the local fishermen (who leave at dawn in their dugout canoes and return at dusk).
We lie on the beach reading, we swim and drink and try out our new-fledged flirting skills on our friends’ brothers, who are either kind and ignore us, or are cruel and take us to heart. All day, there is a sting of petrol in the air from the speedboats that periodically cut drunkenly out across the ripple-free lake, towing the swinging stick figure of a water-skier behind them or bumping the ecstatic bodies of children on their bows. And there is the soft, rotten smell of humid heat and there is the periodic piercing burn of a freshly lit cigarette (“Can I have one?”) and the underlying, constant persistence of smoked fish.
When the dugout canoes come in from the lake, the fishermen bowed silver-backed in the lowering sun as they paddle for shore, we stretch sun-and-sweat-salted bodies, crush out our cigarettes in the sand, and saunter down to greet them. We haggle for their fresh catch, carefully scratching the scales of the fish and sniffing to check for freshness (we want just-caught fish, not fish from the morning that have been recently splashed to make them appear just-caught). We take our fish back up to the various ribbon
s of blue smoke over which cooks are bending and into which cooks are blowing, sending roaring orange flames into crackling wood. We eat fish and rice and drink local gin, slapping mosquitoes off our ankles and sweating into our tin plates.
After supper, we build bonfires on the beach and sit with toes dug into blood-warm sand, watching the moon’s reflection on the lake as it rises over the hills behind us. We smoke and talk, tired from all-day beer-and-sun. Gradually bodies roll back to camp and shack and caravan. The singeing smoke of mosquito coils curls in the air. Some nights, we drag mattresses down to the beach and shake out mosquito nets under trees, hunching sunburnt shoulders to each other, and we sleep next to the silver-edged, moon-and-star-speckled lake, from which there comes an occasional, mysterious splash.
It is the beginning of the rains and the Spy takes leave in order to return to his village, where he will plant a new year’s crop on his small patch of farm and plant a new year’s baby into his mournful young wife’s belly. Doud is too old for babies, he tells us. His sons have taken over his small farm now. He tells us he will stay for Christmas. He makes daily attempts at hot mince pies, which are stomach-heavy in the steaming heat but which we swallow dutifully, along with equally unrefreshing mulled wine. There are no fir trees or Christmas decorations, so we decorate a dusty, droughted pine with the cutout golden stars and globes of old Benson & Hedges cigarette boxes.
The rains are rhythmic, coming religiously in the afternoons (after lunch has been eaten but before tea, so that the nights are washed clean-black with bright pinpoints of silver starlight hanging over a restless, grateful earth). The rains are gray solid sheets of water, slamming into the mock-Spanish house with sudden sideways ferocity and soaking everything, slashing through the window louvers and damping beds and curtains until everything seems heavy and turning-green with moisture. Laundry, which until now has hung behind the cookhouse (and is returned to us fragrant with wood smoke), is never quite dry. It hangs, steaming over Doud’s head, from a wire running over the woodstove and now (when it is returned to us) our clothes and sheets and towels smell of the dogs’ boiling fish-head stew.
The pet guinea fowl crouch damp and miserable under the dripping trees’ inadequate shelter and the chickens stop laying all but the most deformed eggs (from which hatch sickly, one-legged or wingless chicks). Snakes slide onto our veranda, slithering from flooded holes. Frogs breed energetically in the pool and in the fishpond, where the toads grow so fat and large we suspect them of having eaten the last of the goldfish (which were plagued with unsightly growths anyway); monitor lizards are washed from their swamps and one of these six-foot lizards even wanders into the sitting room where I am legs-tucked-up-in-a-chair reading a book.
When we peer (lifting tired eyes from books and games of cards) into the gray rain and over the grass fence, we can see the tenants’ children run, knees high through puddles, mahogany-colored arms shaking into the air, heads thrown back, pink mouths open. The very little children are shining-naked. They look polished and ecstatic and I am jealous of them.
The daily rains mean that we can no longer camp at the lake and so now our weeks lump ahead of us in a dreary patternless marathon of tobacco planting, trays of tea, card games, beer drinking, rain gazing. Weeks pass. The rains have set in and their generosity is assured. It will be a wet year, and now we all long for one or two days’ reprieve. The rains are no longer a cause of daily celebration and relief, as they were a month ago. Even the tenants’ children have stopped playing when the heavens burst upon us. Now comes the playless, earnest task of ensuring that all the crops are in before the fields become too wet. And now the flush of weeds, which have sprung up like tufts of unruly hair, must be snatched from the earth before they sap precious food from tobacco and maize. Through the gray, hanging afternoons, tenants and their children are bent over freshly turned fields pressing raw, startled tobacco seedlings into ridges and dropping maize pips into tiny raised mounds of hot, damp, welcoming earth.
Vanessa rescues a rain-sick, one-legged chick from the coop. She keeps it in a shoe box near her bed and spends most of her day trying to tempt lumps of Pronutro porridge down its sickly beak until the porridge oozes out of its nostrils and the creature suffocates. Vanessa wears a black scarf to the sodden funeral in the garden and after that she won’t be coaxed from her room except for beer and cards in the evening. Nor will she allow Doud to clean away the deceased chick’s shit-smelling shoe box. The house takes on the smell of Vanessa’s dead project.
It is too wet for me to get the motorbike through the vlei which cuts through the middle of the farm. I walk the farm for days, but the wet is persistent and soul-rotting. I give up and read my way through Mum’s library.
Mum presses herself into gumboots and spends her mornings hovering over the tobacco seedbeds watching the limp-necked plantlings as they are loaded onto the trailers and taken to the tenants’ fields. But when the seedlings have all been transported and planted, there is nothing left for her to do except wait and hope that most of them survive the ordeal. She comes home and we lie on her bed and read books.
I dye Mum’s hair a streaky, porcupine blond and shave my legs just to see if I need to.
Vanessa experiments with eye shadow and looks as if she has been punched.
I try and make meringues and the resulting glue is eaten with clench-jawed dutifulness by my family. Mum encourages me not to waste precious eggs on any more cooking projects.
Mum—hair job
I learn what I hope are the words to Bizet’s Carmen and sing the entire opera to the dogs.
Vanessa paints a picture of a girl with long blond hair. The picture depicts the girl drowning and screaming, her hair spread out around her. She calls it The Scream—Mgodi.
Mum rinses her hair in purple wash and her porcupine blond streaks turn silver.
Dad teaches me to drive the old truck. I have to balance on the edge of the seat to reach the pedals, and the steering is so loose that it bucks my thin arms into the air when we jolt over a bump.
I smoke in front of the mirror and try to look like a hardened sex goddess.
Vanessa declares, hopelessly, that she is thinking of running away from home. I stare out at the nothingness into which she would run and say, “I’ll come with you.”
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 n
ew 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.