Amai places a rack of fresh toast and the butter dish on the table.
“You want me to bring the strawberry jam or the marmalade, baas?”
“Ooh, marmalade I think, please. You’re a star.”
Charles gestures to me with a sweep of his hand. “Help yourself Tess. Here, take a knife.”
“And a plate,” adds Moira. “There you go.”
I rock up here at eight in the morning and no-one bats an eyelid. They place breakfast before me and involve me in their family time like I’ve every right to be a part of it. They do know me inside out though and they know I haven’t seen my horse for a week.
I’m eyeing up the creamy-yellow brick of butter on the table in front of me.
“We got butter at Mushandike. Real butter, just like you have. Mum won’t buy it. She says not only is it expensive, but she wants us to get these poly-un-something-or-others that they put in Sunflower. She says butter is unhealthy.”
Charles grins at me and carves off a large slice from the top of the pat, lays it on his toast and starts to work it in with his knife.
“Everything in moderation, my girl. People have been eating butter for centuries and the human race has prevailed thus far. Tell you what, I’d rather eat and drink a bit of whatever I want and die happy than live a couple more miserable years on lettuce and water, thanks. So. How was your week at Mushandike?”
“How long have you got? I gave my folks a minute by minute account yesterday afternoon which I don’t think was fully appreciated, although Mum gasped in all the right places. Dad heard most of it, probably. My sister disappeared after the first word. She’s furious I got a week off school essentially and she didn’t.”
“Oh, she’ll get her turn,” Gill says, laughing. “It’s the only reason anyone wants to be in Standard Five. What year is she in now?”
“Standard Three. Well here’s the thing though – Mr Barrie reckons there might not be any more school trips to Mushandike. Ever.”
She blinks at me, her head cocked to the left. Moira flicks her eyes up, brows arched.
“What? Why?”
“How come?”
Gill and Moira are confused by my surprise news. Charles isn’t. His eyes tell me he’s already come up with the right answer. His buttery knife is poised over the marmalade jar.
“Mr Barrie said the wardens told him the whole Fort Victoria area’s pretty much classified as hot. It’s not going to be safe for bunches of school children on a jolly. They’re saying they’re going to close the conservation school and turn the dormitories into barracks. Soon. So Rosie will never get to go.”
Any time spent with the Owens at their kitchen table is never anything other than companionable and comfortable, even when there’s a lull in conversation. There’s one of those now but it’s a long way from comfortable and it has an undertone that almost makes it into a sound. Even Amai has paused her watery clunking in the sink as if she’s sensed the altered atmosphere; as if any minute sound she makes might shatter the air. Charles’s face, as he lays his knife down across his plate, is for once as unreadable as Nathan’s usually is.
“Well, if I’m going to be honest, I’m not surprised. Last week there were three terrorist attacks on lone vehicles along the Fort Victoria to Beitbridge road. That’s one of the reasons why the government’s in the process of making plans with the Security Forces to provide armed convoys to escort civilians on that route. There’s talk of creating several new operational areas that cover the whole country, rather than concentrating on the north and north-east. Now that Mozambique’s gone, well…”
Gill sighs. “Fort Vic’s where Barry’s been stationed lately. They were patrolling out somewhere near Lake Kyle.”
Moira snorts and the tension breaks slightly. Amai resumes her washing up.
“When he got himself arrested?”
“Stupid boy!” chortles Charles. “A gallon of booze and suddenly kifing a road sign is a good idea. And God knows where they got hold of the tools to do it.”
“You can’t blame the troopies for going on benders when they get back into town, Dad. I know he was being a pratt, but heck, he got into three ugly contacts out there. When you don’t know when your number’s gonna be up you’re bound to go a bit mad when you get a weekend pass. And get married ridiculously young. It’s happened in every war in history, let’s face it.”
I wish I hadn’t said anything. I’ve only met Barry the once but he’s a part of this family, which makes him a part of my world, and there are no life-threatening situations in my world. It’s not right.
Ugly contacts. I know what that means. I’ve heard the communiqués. Seen Mum and Dad listening to them after the News every night, shushing us if we try to speak while they’re on, wearing their serious faces, having muted discussions in their bedroom. But then, when we come home from school with war stories (and there’s usually one every other day now – So-and-So’s uncle attacked while driving on a lonely road, Whatsisname’s brother wounded in a contact or Thingummy’s cousins’ farmstead revved) we get don’t-worry-it-won’t-last-long and our-army-is-the-best-in-the-world. That’s what they say, but it’s not what I’m starting to hear in this house. Or at school. We are – and am I admitting this to myself for the first time, or have I known all along? – in the middle of a war.
I mean, just last week, at Mushandike, Timothy told us, “The kaffirs want to take over the country. My dad says we’ve got to fight them off down to the last woman and child. I’ve decided I’m going to join the army soon. As soon as I leave school.”
We’re twelve years old. That would mean this’ll have to go on for at least another six years. And he can’t decide to join the army, or not, because it’s compulsory. But it won’t last that long. It can’t.
Charles has been talking all this time and some of his words are touching the periphery of my reverie. Hot areas. A war that can’t be won by anyone. More fruitless negotiations between the Rhodesian Front, the Nationalists, Frontline states and the British government. More tantrums, more stalemates. Bloody Smith won’t allow the Nationalists into the country to talk terms. You have to give a little if you want to take a little. We need to at least listen to them or we’re never going to get anywhere. At least he’s had the sense to free the detainees.
He’s already explained to me that Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo and Ndabaningi Sithole got set free so we could make a settlement with them, but in the end no-one can agree on how to do this.
Dad calls Mr Sithole, “Ndaba-Nincompoop”. He would disagree about this talking lark though, wouldn’t he? He would say things like, “You can’t talk to these people. They just bang on about majority rule right now. They can’t rule the place. It won’t happen. Our Smithy knows what’s what. Talking’s useless. Look what happened when they sent those South African police to parley with a bunch of gooks. Violence is the only language these bastards understand.”
The South African policemen went in unarmed and got gunned down. Timothy told us. No negotiations. Not even a battle. Just, well, murder, I guess.
Dad’s convinced we’ll win the war in no time at all and Mr Smith will be Prime Minister for ever and we’ll never hand over the country to anyone. He whinges that the two new black members of his golf club will bring the standards down and it’s all doom and gloom and then in the next breath tells us that the economy is booming and the future hasn’t looked so good in a long time. I come over here and Charles tells me that the attitude of the whites has to change, move on, and that the foreign currency and import cuts have affected his business pretty badly, and that the rising cost of defence will cripple the economy.
I believe Charles. It’s a weird thing to say, but the person I am deep, deep inside my head, and also my body, my core, tells me that his version of the current situation, of the past and of the future, is the one that is. I am meant to be a product of my parents. I am meant to be what they want me to be. They have unshakable confidence that I’ll believe what they believe, and I’ll know without doubt that what they say is true. They trust me to know that they’re guiding me through life. And what right have I got to dispute this? But what they don’t explain fully enough is that other people have other opinions. That other people believe in their own opinions.
They would say they know this, of course. They’re not unreasonable people. But what would puzzle them – disappoint them? – is the idea that I should listen to, take note of and consider believing those other points of view. Rather than theirs.
He startles me by scraping back his chair, standing up, announcing, “Right. I need to go to the Farmers’ Co-op. You girls coming?”
Everyone’s getting up now, taking crockery and cutlery to the sink. Gill’s telling Amai not to worry, to go and sort out the laundry stuff; she – Gill – will wash up the breakfast plates.
Then over her shoulder, “No thanks Dad. We can’t, because I’m going to give Tess here a lesson. And she needs to commune with her horse. He’s missed her.”
Moira’s saying that’s sweet and that I must take a large carrot from the veggie rack down to the yard for Induna, and then the Nowhere Boy appears in the kitchen. I didn’t even know he was in the house.
He refuses an offer of the last piece of toast from Moira.
“Thanks all the same. It’s already gone cold. I like the butter to soak into it when it’s warm. I’ll just grab some coffee and then take High Time out for a hack.”
That’s exactly how I like my toast.
“You’re back,” he says to me, taking a mug from the plastic basket next to the sink and shaking some drops of water off it. “Did you see the hippo?”
I nod. Manage a smile. “Hannah? Hannah the hippo? Yes, she was there.”
“See ya later,” calls Charles, exiting, tossing his car keys in his hand and bending down to kiss Gill on the cheek while she’s pulling on her jodhpur boots at the back door. She beckons to me, laughter all over her face.
“Hannah the hippo? Classic! Come on Tess. Let’s go get tacked up.”
He’s not looking at me. He’s wiping a tea towel over the mug, so I start edging towards Gill and the door and then turn away. Behind me, he asks, “And the eland? Huge, aren’t they? Did you hear the way the tendons in their legs click when they walk?”
I did indeed. I remember the day Mike told us to listen to them walking, calling out to us as we stood up in the open Land Rovers, watching the herd watching us. Huge, buff coloured antelope. Not as graceful as some, but magnificent, massive, curious and unafraid. Earlier, Charles wanted me to tell him about my week, and there are so many stories I could recount, especially to Nathan because he’s been there too. We could put together a book, couldn’t we? Tales From Mushandike. But the moment’s gone and it’s too late to revive it.
I need to treasure those memories, because Mushandike’s a thing of the past now. We met a hippo and some eland, a family of warthogs and some jackals and we learned how to track animals and about ecosystems. We climbed a rockface near the dam wall and we ate our dinner and sang songs around a campfire in the middle of nowhere. We watched a sheep being dissected and measured the length of its small intestine, and Elizabeth threw up. We imagined ourselves to be a band of Mashona escaping the marauding Matabele by using that natural rock tunnel hidden in a hillside, crouching and scuttling along it in the dark. We just had such a good time. And then, yesterday, it was over. The birdsong woke us early and the dawn was all pink and misty and we ate bacon and eggs around the revived campfire while the sun gradually rose up over the tops of the trees and its light crept down towards the ground. Then we had to go. None of us wanted to leave, just like, I’ll bet, so many other school children over the years, but we had to go home. We left a bush school and soon it will be just an army barracks. Maybe Barry will stay there, in the dormitory where Jess and I were. Maybe Nathan will get to go back.
I guess hope is a thing of the past too. This is real, isn’t it? There really is a proper war and it’s just arrived on my doorstep.