“It’s what you get after years of, well, exploitation, frankly.”
That’s what Nathan said. I remember it exactly. He never says very much so I guess that’s why I can remember every single word. Even exploitation. The dictionary in my lap says this means “- the act of using for selfish purposes…” I’ve re-read it several times. Enough times. I look up, out into the garden through the French doors in front of me.
Elijah’s weeding and tidying the edges of the beds. I allow my mind to be absorbed for a while by his steady and methodical progress – take a weed in forefinger and thumb of the left hand, insert the trowel tip into the soil with the right, wiggle it, free the roots, shake off the crumbs of earth, deposit the tiny plant into the bucket, move on to the next one. A peaceful, tranquil activity, and watching him releases a small plug somewhere in me so that some of that gnawing humiliation starts to drain away. And also the anger. Yes, anger. The wanting to scream and throw something across the room and then cry type of anger. But if I throw the dictionary across the room I’ll end up breaking something, or damaging the book and how will I explain it? There’s nothing I can do but sit and keep it inside and concentrate instead on admiring those straight and squared off edges, the weed-free paving slabs. Elijah’s so tidy and thorough, like Daddy tells us a good garden boy should be.
Oh hell, no. Not again.
Those words – those very words I’ve just said to myself – have dumped me back in time to the roadside by the school. Simple words, they were, but they’ve brought my peaceful, tranquil thoughts to a grinding halt.
Yesterday, if anyone had asked me, I would’ve said the words formed a perfectly reasonable compliment. And they did, or at least that’s how I meant them to come out. But not now, today. After all that happened earlier, the voice that says those words sounds as if it comes from someone just like the person the policeman took me for. Am I really like that? I never, ever thought what he said I did. I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just… well, I guess I did ignore him. But not deliberately, like I was mocking him. Why did he get so angry?
I stop watching Elijah, try to clear these thoughts of him from my brain, and stare at the tops of the msasa trees behind him instead.
What a horrible day. Can’t I go back to seven o’clock this morning, get up again and start over? Fridays are meant to be good days, whether you’re nine or as old as Daddy. He’s always more cheery on Fridays, even before he goes to work. If only Jess hadn’t been off ill today. If Jess’d been at school with me none of this would have happened.
Okay, so even if Jess is still sick in my new day, if I could start it over again I wouldn’t do what I did.
I wasn’t being deliberately naughty. Me and Jess made plans back on Monday for this afternoon. We were going to read my new Beezer, and the Barbies were going to go on a holiday to New York, which is why I packed Patsy’s clothes in her pink suitcase last night and left it out ready to take over to Jess’s house. When I crossed the road all this was in my head, plus the new plan I’d just hatched, literally seconds earlier. If my brain hadn’t been off in some other universe it would’ve all been normal and he would never have even noticed me.
So he’s been there, at the zebra crossing, every day since I started school and for all I know he might’ve been there every day for the last ten years. I know nothing about him, not even his name. He’s just the policeman who waves us across the road. When he lets us go over, he commands the traffic to halt with his arms raised outwards, a bit like Mrs Morris said Moses did with the Red Sea. Timothy Dunn says he must be a Matabele.
“My dad said – ” (Timothy starts nearly every sentence with “My dad said – ”) “My dad said we need to get tribalism to work for us so we have Matabele police in Mashonaland and Mashona police in Matabeleland.”
Do we do that? Why? Why did I never ask him why?
I’m seeing the traffic policeman in my head. He’s tall, and he’s very serious, unlike Elijah. He has what Daddy would call knife edge creases in his shorts, and crisp, dazzling white armbands that cover the whole of his forearms and make him look so smart. He never says very much, just like Nathan. He only ever speaks when he’s telling one of the boys to dismount and walk over the crossing. For that he always gets the two fingers – behind his back of course.
They’re always trying that, the boys, riding their bikes over the crossing. I never even thought about doing it. Until today. Well I didn’t ride it, did I? I scooted on one pedal, that’s all. That idea sprang on me and I reacted. I needed to go the other way and call by Jess’s house to see if she was feeling better, so our plans could be back on after all. Jess and Tess together again.
So suddenly I was in this big hurry, because I knew Mummy would do the Tessa-you’re-more-than-FIVE-MINUTES-late bit if I took too long.
I just made it worse of course, ending up more than half an hour late and having to tell a lie. If she finds out there never was a traffic accident I don’t know how I’m going to get out of that one.
She’ll try and talk about it to one of her friends, won’t she? I bet she’ll say something like, “Tessa told me about the accident near the school on Friday. Was anyone hurt? What happened? They were held up a long time.” And for sure the friend will be one of the mothers who pick up their kids, like Mrs Harrison or Mrs Pretorius, and she’ll say, “Accident? No. No, I was there and it was all fine. Where did Tessa say it was?” And then…
If I can’t throw the book then I’ll slam it shut and shove it onto the floor in front of me. I haven’t had a churning stomach and buzzing head like this, ever. What if I get reported and have to go to Mr Westfield’s office? The policeman doesn’t know my name but there were enough kids there who do. Good old Tessa Harmand, never disobedient, never swears, always does her homework, and now in trouble with the police. Mummy and Daddy will be disappointed and Rosie will be ashamed of me and I might even get expelled. I might never be able to ride Gill’s horses again. And I wasn’t even trying to be rebellious, or disobedient, or whatever the guy thought I was up to.
Go on, torture yourself. Relive the scene again, why don’t you? There I am, dodging round Robert Thacker, who’s fiddling about with the straps of his satchel right in the middle of the cycle track, and I get this strange sensation that something’s happened behind me. I’d ignored the first burst of shouting and laughing that rose above the general hubbub of voices and traffic, vaguely curious, yes, but in too much of a hurry to care. Then this weird, kind of sixth sense sensation comes to me just a fraction of a second before I hear my name.
“It’s Tessa!”
“Wey-hey, Tessa!”
“Tessa Harmand!”
So I brake, stop, look back. Always stop first, before looking round – I know this from experience. There’s the traffic policeman, punching the air with one fist and pointing the other forefinger directly at me, and I’m standing like a lemon with my head twisted round, staring at him, wondering what the heck is going on. He’s shouting but I can’t hear what because my heart is thumping so hard. For a few thumps I’m not even sure he’s speaking English. Then I can hear him. And so can everyone else in the world, and they’re gawking, whispering, all focussed on me.
“Iwe! You! You must wait! I will speak with you.”
Elijah’s picked up his bucket of dug-up weeds, put his tools in with them and is walking across to the corner of the house, towards the shed, presumably. He disappears from view. There’s some clattering from the kitchen that makes me twitch like you see people on TV do when they’ve been shot. If Mummy comes through and finds me sitting here on the floor in the study she’s bound to ask why. I grab the dictionary again, fumble with a few pages, settle on one. If she does, I’ll find a word and say I’m looking it up for my English comprehension question sheet. Then all goes quiet, except for the muffled sound of the patio door opening and closing. Me and the dictionary are back alone with my miserable secret.
So when the officer yelled at me, still pointing at me, I had some crazy thoughts, like why, why me, he can’t mean me, jump back on the bike and ride home flat out, just pretend this isn’t happening, he’s not talking to me.
The problems were, a) I couldn’t make any of my muscles move, and b) he clearly was talking to me. So many interested, excited, delighted voices told me so.
“Ooh, Tessa!”
“What a naughty girl! You rode your bike across the road!”
“It’s Tessa who’s done it! Wow!”
“He’s going to arrest you!”
And I was thinking, all I did was scoot on my pedal and since when was that a crime?
Well, of course I know it’s not a crime. I know now why he singled me out like that, but I didn’t then.
I felt sick and hot and sweaty, waiting for him by that big jacaranda tree where he leaves his bike. The air’s always sticky and sort of heavy in November and December, even long before there’s any smell of rain. It still is now. My legs, folded like this, are all slick on the insides. The weather forecaster last night was still harping on about the ITCZ bringing storms, but it hasn’t arrived in Rhodesia yet that’s for sure.
I didn’t have to wait long of course. School empties out in no time at all on a Friday. I’d already decided exactly what I was going to do. Be cheerful and say sorry. He would be happy and I could go home. But it didn’t work.
I smiled at him so brightly, but he just scowled back. Scowled back so hard he made me feel like something that had crawled out from under a stone. Even when I said, “I’m sorry. I was in too much of a hurry. I promise I won’t do it again,” he carried on glaring at me, so then I said “I’d make a horrible mess on the front of someone’s car wouldn’t I?”
I still think that’s quite funny. He didn’t.
“Why did you not get off your bicycle? I shouted to you to get off. You ignored me.”
I absolutely did not ignore him. I didn’t. I never heard him shout. Maybe he didn’t shout. Maybe he spoke too quietly. I don’t know. I told him this. I told him I never heard him. I said sorry again and I still thought he’d believe me, let me go. I never expected him to say what he said next.
He put his hands on his hips. He leaned forward so close to my face that I had to take a step back. He said a lot of things that are still imprinted in me.
“You think that just because I am a black man you can take no notice of what I say. I call to you. I tell you to get off your bicycle and you think, ‘He is black. He is just my servant.’ Huh? That is what you think? I am a policeman and I have to tell you to walk across the road but you can say ‘No’. You can ignore me. I always have this. White children think I am their servant. I’m just a kaffir.”
I didn’t know what to do, or say, or think. I just started crying. It was like I was ashamed of myself, but I hadn’t done anything wrong. He was making out that I’d insulted him, but I didn’t… did I? He accused me of calling him a kaffir. Well, not calling him that, but thinking it, but I didn’t. Lots of people do and now he thinks I’m one of them. I’m not. I don’t. I’ve never called anyone a kaffir.
Of course when I said nothing in my defence, he started nodding, like he knew he was right. Then he gave up. Walked away, to his bicycle. I got my voice back too late and shouted, “I. Did. Not. Hear. You!”
Before getting on his bike, he scowled at me again, over his shoulder.
“If I was a white policeman you would have heard me.”
I don’t want to go back to school on Monday. I can’t face him again, or any of them, after that. Everyone else who watched him leave me there found the whole thing hysterically funny. I’ve never, never been so mortified – is that the word? – in my life.
I can’t be bothered to try and find it. I’m done with the dictionary. I get up, put it back in the bookcase, hover near the door and listen, and then scuttle to my room across the corridor. I shut the door, but then just stand in the middle staring out of the window again – this time at the driveway and the gate and the view across the valley.
To make things worse – if that’s possible – after I thought I’d got away from the scene there was Nathan, popping up out of nowhere on the corner just down from the school. Well, it seemed to me like he came out of nowhere, as he does, but it turns out he’d been standing there all the time, in front of the hibiscus hedge. Last time I remember seeing him was, what, a week ago? At Makuti Park. Jumping High Time over some ginormous fences.
Why did he have to see it all? I hate that he saw me humiliated like that. And what if he tells Gill what happened? She’ll be disappointed in me too.
He was looking scruffy as usual. No tie, socks round his ankles, hat on top of his satchel, on the grass. He might be in Standard Five but he hasn’t been made a prefect and, to be honest, if any of the prefects had been about he’d have been in for detention for sure. Abuse of the school uniform. But does he care?
He had a hand across his forehead to block out the sun and I was thinking maybe he should’ve worn his hat. He didn’t even say hello. He just started with, “Are you okay? I saw you talking to the traffic cop. He seemed a bit pissed off. I was going to say something to him but he upped and went. What was he on about?”
I really do remember all his words. But then, the last time he said anything to me was the day of the Mushandike exhibition. That was probably even the last time I heard him speak to anyone.
God, how humiliating. He has to watch me get lambasted by that guy, then has to listen to me break down and gabble at him like a baby, explaining myself, justifying what a good girl I am, how I don’t ignore people just because they’re black, and all because I was so desperate that he should believe me, even if that damned policeman didn’t. I wish I’d never… well, I wish a lot of things had never happened today.
It was after we’d stared at each other for a bit, like neither of us knew what to do next, that he said, “I believe you. But he probably doesn’t. It’s what you get after years of, well, exploitation frankly.”
Elijah’s back. He’s carrying the shears and he’s full of purpose, the hedge next to the road in his sights.
Admit it, Tessa. You never normally even notice what he’s doing in the garden. He’s just there, but you’ve never seen it as a concern of yours to think any further than your eyes. Have I ever been guilty of thinking he’s just a black man, a servant, so he doesn’t count? He’s never got angry with me, or even with Mummy, and she’s pretty mean to him sometimes. Like last week when she said to him, “The compost heap is getting rather big now. If some of it doesn’t get dug into the beds you’ll end up having to dump those grass cuttings you’ve got there by the garage.” So what did he do? He dumped the grass cuttings in a pile – a neat pile – by the garage. She got all miffed and said he’d deliberately misunderstood her but if she talks in backward, obscure sentences like that, what does she expect?
He was nice to me afterwards when I made him up some Mazoe orange squash in his blue enamel mug. He’s our garden boy. He has been for ages now. Me and Rosie like him. I am not like that. I’m not.