Sundowners

Is there better soul food than the slow slide of dusk to nightfall? Is there anything to match it for feel-good factor?

 

Not where I live.

 

When we arrive at the dam, the big dam (the Outpost is flanked by two, one smaller than the other though both swollen happy and fat from recent good rains) the sun is still quite high and drums the earth so that sand is warm beneath our feet. Hat rides her bike and the dogs tear about in an ecstasy of new smells and mud and water. We are all tall; the sun is no longer sitting on noon and we short and stout, instead it’s put us in a rack and stretched us so that we are pin thin and gangly, as if it’s trying to pull us over the horizon with it.

 

 

 

It’s quiet. And it’s not. The dogs splash and bark at everything and nothing. The air is punctured by bird calls. But the absence of car horns and voices and the melancholy hoot of trains mean I only hear silence. Glorious, settling, silence.

 

As the sun sinks, dragging the heat and shadows with it, a few torn fragments of cloud gather about it as if in conference: ‘you gonna be around tomorrow or should we come out?’. The answer in the Outpost, at this time of the year anyway, is always, ‘Nope; I’ll be here’. The clouds blush then, a faint tell-tale pink, a little embarrassed that they’d have dared presume otherwise.

 

Night comes bustling in quickly here. Shooing away the sun when it thinks it’s had its day, hurrying it suddenly, urging it to take its heat and light – which as it collapses into distant hills, is filtered through trees – with it.

 

 

 

 

Low enough now to admire its reflection in the water’s surface which it forges bling-blindingly gold, the sun is making the most of final moments of glory. A showoff.

 

 

 

It’s cool suddenly. My beer is empty and I need a jumper. Hat clambers from the roof top from where she’s been watching the antics of the dogs and telling me about the book she is reading, Frances Hobson Burnett’s Secret Garden. It is inscribed with my grandmother’s name and the price, she remarks, was just two shillings. “Was that a lot of money then, Mum?”

We drive back into town. It isn’t dark yet. I can’t see the sun but I know where it’s hiding: behind the hills which are wearing a giveaway halo. 

 

 

 

 

 

Obscure Blessings

As a mother in Africa one is faced with myriad challenges. Some universal (nits, for example, kids the world over scratch their heads whilst their mothers bow their own in shame), some – like that described by Maggot Man – are unique to our geography. Read it if you want to be entertained. It comes highly recommended. Read it – especially – if you are a mother in this part of the world. Look away now, however, if you are neither equator bound nor able to stand the thought of creepie crawlies.

 

The mango fly to which Maggot Man refers and battles against so valiantly is one of the curved balls Africa chucks at mums.

 

Concisely, and less gracefully, than MM’s description, this is what a mango fly does: first it sleeps with its other half (or at least that’s what one must assume it does in order for this whole wretched cycle to begin, but perhaps anybody’s other half will do?), then – she, the wanton whatsit whose been sleeping around – lays her eggs and abandons them (which is how you know she’s wanton, abandoning her babies already and off to find another mangoflybloke, I don’t know: women today hey?). The eggs, which she lays on the lawn, on your bed (upon which she’s had a post-coital nap and because you left window open) or on the laundry which festoons your washing line (she’s not fussy the mango fly mother, she’s just in a hurry) lie dormant until they come into contact with some nice warm skin. Dog skin, guinea pig skin, hamster skin, they’re not especially fussy though they are particularly partial to human skin. Especially nice, soft, pliable baby human skin. Once in contact, they burrow beneath the skin and do what most incubating babes do: eat, shit, sleep.

 

This would be fine. Nobody would deny any living organism the right to a sustaining part of its lifecycle. Until one remembers that the eating, sleeping and everything else is quite possibly going on beneath the skin of your child. And even if you’re the sort of person who isn’t good at remembering things (like me, for example, who can’t remember where keys, car, sometimes even children are), you will remember about the incubating mango flies because their energetic bowel habits and frequent purges will make your baby’s skin itchy and inflamed and he or she will cry a lot. Loudly. And for several nights until finally you spot the spot and do some extensive and admirable research as MM did and evacuate the little monster. The mango fly. Obviously. Not the baby. 

 

My first experience of mango fly, or putzi (why putzi I don’t know, onomatopoeic? pssstzi is rather what you imagine you hear as maggot pops through the skin?) occurred almost 17 years ago. I was a virgin mother. Not as in Virgin Mary of course, but virgin as in not having done the mothering thing for very long so fairly clueless and lacking in self confidence.

 

Ben – who at 8 or 9 or 10 months had finally realized nighttime was for sleeping and was revelling in newfound activity – suddenly began to wake regularly and howl. I did all the things it told me to do in the books if your baby woke and cried at night: checked his nappy; gave him a hug; made him a drink; promised there was no bogey men under the cot. No to avail. He hollered. Three evenings later as I attempted to bathe him without falling into bath and drowning myself on account of 72 hour sleep deprivation, I noticed a temptingly yellow spot on his forearm. Like a zit that is begging to be squeezed. So I did. Squeeze it. And out popped a worm – a fat little maggot – which wriggled along the edge of the bath as quickly as it could, whilst Ben watched in delighted fascination whilst I retched into the loo.

 

Furtive questioning of better mothers and some research later and I realized what I was dealing with. And I got better at dealing with it for inevitably the problem continued: ironing ones clothes is all very well (the heat kills the blighters off) until the power goes off as it used to often in those days. And for a lot of days at a time. Whether to ‘fess up and admit my children had mango fly or whether to tweak the truth and say they had a boil instead presented a tough choice, Hobsons’ choicest. Come clean and people would suspect you weren’t really – clean – and they’d be left in little doubt as to the slovenly nature of your domestic skills; ie you didn’t supervise the ironing or at least make a pretence at coordinating laundry days with power days. (And in my case they wouldn’t be far off the mark: domestic goddess I am not). Fib in a bid to elicit sympathy, telling everybody it was a boil and your child risked being banished from everybody else’s sandpits (which is apparently, according to better mothers than I, where putzi fly and boil-bearing bugs and God only knows what else hang out).  Claiming either though – puzti or one masquerading as a boil – were certain to eliminate your poor baby from birthday parties. And you from coffee mornings so that proper mothers could discuss your failings at leisurely length.

 

Our geography now means that I am no longer exposed to the daily intimidations of the school car park (which – like most school car parks, and a lot of coffee mornings come to think of it? – resembled arenas of old where the Christians were tossed to hungry lions to snack on to the roaring approval of a thousand spectators), it means that if Hat’s older siblings – at boarding school – did, get mango fly, I could sneeringly and smugly enquire of the administration, “but whose organizing the laundry?”  As if Hat does, nobody but her dad and I would need to know about it.

 

Except that here, in the Outpost, with its desiccating heat and kiln dry air, mango fly offspring would be dehydrated to lifeless crisps long before they had a chance to do any subcutaneous burrowing.  We don’t get them here – much like we don’t get pedicures, cappuccinos or fresh butter.

 

I shall remind myself of that next time I am frustrated by the lack of a deli.

 

I was brought up to Count My Blessings. This is presumably one of them?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

H is for Hydrant, Hose-pipes and lots and lots of Hot Water

Ha!

 

Rain dance paid off.

 

We have discovered – in the garden of the house we anticipate moving into in June (according to contractor) or October (according to cynical husband) – a water hydrant. It came to light after we had cleared the area of maize and bush and years of accumulated rubbish and weeds.

 

It lies in the ground proudly, and promisingly, sporting an H. I didn’t know what the H was for until the plumber told me: Hydrant, he said. In English. He might as well have announced there was an oasis at the bottom of the garden.

 

Or, for that matter, a well.

 

Sylvester, who is busily and optimistically, trying to urge a lawn forth by tossing bucket upon bucket of water on the grass we have planted telephones me. (Everybody in Africa owns a mobile phone: they are a ubiquitous status symbol: Sylvester cycles to work in overalls and Wellington boots, clutching his cell phone-cum-camera which is a far trendier model than my own).  

 

The plumber is here, he announces.

 

I leap into my ancient car which was recently spray painted. It does not remotely resemble the gleaming new 4×4 modelling the colour on the paint chart: it is not a sleek bronze, it is a dirty Euro-trash gold. And I race round to the new house where a dozen fundis are languishing in the shade of the recently completed verandah. (Clever chaps: finished that off first so they’d have somehwere to languish).

 

Sylvester introduces the plumber as, merely, ‘the plumber’.

 

I enquire of him what his name is.

 

‘Fundi Maji’, he tells me importantly.

 

No, your name?

 

‘Technician’, he says beaming.

 

I tell him my name in the hope this will encourage him to be more forthcoming.

 

It does. He is called Jimba, he says.

 

We examine the hydrant together and he demonstrates how I can up the ante in the irrigation stakes by introducing a few valves and the odd hose in order that I can harvest some extra water.   Not a tired little leak, but a great gushing torrent, he says. I will be able, he assures me, to fill up the newly constructed water tank, with its 60,000 litre capacity, in less than an hour.

 

This sounds a mite too confident.  Not to say, dicey. That kind of pressure and I risk demolishing the house or certainly blasting all the dozing plasterers off the verandah. 

 

But I’ll take the chance.

 

And hope that my Outpost garden will, in time, courtesy of resident hydrant, be a veritable sanctuary of cool, lush, green; my showers always an exhilarating experience of water pounding against my skin instead of present frustrating exercise in attempting to wash beneath a lazy dribble, and my toilets perpetually flushed and sweetly scented.

 

 

 

 

In the name of God

Home now. Beneath the Outpost’s big wide-eyed-clear-blue-cloudless skies. The rain has gone, the ebullient green that I left behind has already begun to lose its confident optimism and desiccate on account of relentless sunshine and a surprisingly cool wind. This is winter. I am wearing shorts. In deference to the season, I’ll don a jersey come nightfall.

 

My journey home was long. A nine hour flight delayed by almost two and succeeded by another – shorter – flight, an equally long delay in a different airport, and a subsequent ten hours in the car.

 

My seated companion on the long haul was a missionary from Houston. He was on his way to Tanzania to sink wells. He was full of woe. Africa is a hopeless case, he told me, ‘In the ten years I have been going there to work, I have not noticed any improvement’. I wanted to ask him why he bothered then, if he hated it all so much. But I didn’t need to: he told me anyway, ‘they are the Lord’s people, I must help them’. Some, I wanted to point out, indeed a significant number, are Allah’s people actually (Tanzania’s Muslims outnumber her Christians).

 

“Are you a religious person?”, he asked me.

 

Religion, my grandmother taught me, was a private matter and ought never to be discussed over dinner lest you offend. Or, for that matter, over a revolting airline supper in a plastic tray.

 

“Not really”, I said. (He didn’t seem to be the sort to whom I wished to divulge my ideas about religion which lean more towards spirituality and individuality and what’s good for the soul than conventional Christianity).

 

“Were you not even baptized?”, he persisted.

 

Yes. A Roman Catholic.

 

“And did your mother never pressurize you to practice your religion?”

 

No. (She’s far, far too wise for that, besides, she respects my interpretation of faith. But I didn’t tell him that either; he didn’t strike me as having the intelligence or the imagination to accept my point of view).

 

Undeterred the patronizing well-drilling Christian from Houston who continues to visit Africa despite apparently hating everything about it, persevered, ‘Have you seen the film about Jesus Christ?” (Nope. But I did watch In Bruges last week, does that count?).

 

“I organized a translation so that I could show it to the people I work with on the wells”.

 

The ones he so despises, presumably?

 

“So that they could understand something about God.”

 

His God.

 

Even though they probably have their own perfectly good one.

 

I am struck, whilst he wastes time trying to convert me, by a recent conversation with an Indian doctor I know who was planning a pilgrimage to Iran. He told me that as a practicing Muslim he and others like him are dismissed by Bush as ‘fundamentalist’, terrorists in the making. This gentle and charming man, one who observes his religion privately and moderately, has never tried to convert me to anything other than greater respect for my health.

 

Eventually the Texan admitted defeat and stopped haranguing me with his Belief. He resorted to his bible instead and I to Sally Brampton’s Shoot the Damn Dog, a graceful and eloquent account of her experience of Depression.

 

On my second flight a member of the crew noticed the title of the book I was still absorbed by, ‘Sounds like a horror story’.

 

It is. For Sally Brampton.

 

For Mum.

 

For anybody who lives with the Damn Dog.

 

I’d like to see big black clouds banking on my wide-arc blue horizons. I’d like it to rain or else the new lawn I have planted will grow dangerously thirsty and perish.

 

I’d quite like a well from which to draw the necessary water to irrigate it.

 

But I think I’ll do a rain dance instead. It sounds like more fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Letting in the Light

The rape seed flowers are brilliant; they cast a neon luminosity upwards - as if somebody had switched on a light somewhere beneath shallow soil. It looks - from where I sit in a small Northamtonshire village - as if somebody has tossed enormous yellow picnic rugs upon the countryside all around.

I’m here because Mum has been sick. I thought about whether I ought to write about it: about her illness. But I think not to - I think to sit upon it silently - would be to exacerbate the stigma that already clings tightly, parasitcally greedy, to mental illness; my mum has suffered from recurring episodes of debilitating clinical depression since I was only a little older than Hat is now.  Depression is quite black enough without keeping it in the dark. So there it is - out in the open - the reason I’m here. In England. With Mum. Where she has been accompanied by this particular visit from the Black Dog since January.

I came to see if I could make a difference. I might have done. Fleetingly. I might occassionally, with my chat and observations and the energy I have brought with me (along with a small bag and a laptop that has lurked idle beneath the dining table since I got here) have lifted Depression’s suffocating shroud and let brief, brave illuminating shafts of vitality into Mum’s life so that by evening she has the courage, the necessary allied force, to snub Depression and laugh a little. Then again, I might not have done: Depression is persistent. It’s especially persistent first thing in the morning which seems grossly unfair: Depression makes life hard enough as it is without making getting out of bed and facing the day harder still.

Depression has been a part of my life for longer than it hasn’t.  I think it defines me sometimes. But not mum - it doesn’t define her. She is Mum. Depression is Depression.  I need to keep reminding her of the separateness of it all. When the illness floods her and submerges her joie de vivre and drowns out her happiness leaving her heavy with soggy lassitude, when she says, ”I’m being so stupid”, I need to remind her: it’s not you, Mum. It’s Depression.

My children understand why I’m here. We all call Depression by its real name in my house. No point in disguising it with euphemism. Euphemism is stigma’s best friend.

When I go, at the end of the week, I hope I might have loosened Depression’s grip by the tiniest degree. I probably won’t have done: the arrogance I once assumed that I’d be able to fix Mum just by bullying her to wellness left me long ago. But I have to hope. 

And that’s what makes me lucky: because I can: hope.

 

Putting Bread on the Table

Hat says, ‘There’s something wrong with the bread; I don’t think it’s meant to look like that’.

 

She means the bread I’m making; the loaf that is ready, judging by penetrating beep of bread machine, but has yet to be removed and sliced for breakfast.

 

I got it for Christmas from Best Beloved. The bread machine. He gave it to me because we cannot always buy bread in the Outpost and because he could not bear for me to attempt to make my own unaided as I did in manner persuaded to me by Isabella Beeton when at 23 and newly married and naïve I thought the ability to make yeast come alive with fat bubbles and elevate dough to glossy springiness was fundamental to a happy marriage. Luckily it was not: though the yeast stayed stubbornly flat and the dough was the consistency of a cannon ball and the bread utterly inedible, though best beloved suggested I sell it to demolition mobs that were breaking down old buildings in the city we lived in then – Dar es Salaam – in favour of newer ones, we have remained together.

 

So. Almost twenty years on and because we no longer live within a 20 mile radius of a reasonable bakery, I was presented with a bread machine. Something small and dainty and sparkly in trademark blue Tiffany bag might have been nice to own, might have impressed my friends, something from Prada might have done too. But neither are of much use in hard-line, out-lying Outpost.  So a FastBake it was instead.

 

The family watched as I fastidiously measured the ingredients for the first attempt into the tin with the precise little measuring spoons provided and regular reference to recipe in accompanying booklet. They observed as I carefully set the timer and they applauded when my fat, light loaf appeared on the breakfast table the next morning.

 

Three months later, though, and I had become a little slapdash. Remembering there’s no bread for breakfast at 11pm when you’ve had a few glasses of Red isn’t a good approach to cooking. In my rush to get the necessary done - ‘I must just put the bread on’, I’d say importantly to BB when he enquired (by hollering through house) if I was planning on coming to bed anytime that week – I began to carelessly gauge amounts, quite disregarding the ominous little warnings in booklet: Please use measuring cup and spoons provided accurately. I also cut back on the salt – two tablespoons of it – since I thought it’d please my doctor if I did so whilst simultaneously displeasing gathering cellulite which I understand thrives on a diet stacked with sodium secreted into benign looking foods like homemade bread, for example.

 

On Hat’s ‘I don’t think it’s meant to look like this’, I got up to examine the fruits of my midnight labours. And she was quite right: bread’s not meant to look like that. It’s meant to look arched with pride and deliciously, inviting promise. Not slumped with soggily, grey misery.

 

Hat is quite a stickler. Unlike her sloppy mother.

 

‘I think we should look them up in the book again, Mum’, she said, ‘the instructions, she pressed.

 

I did.

 

Under Troubleshooting.

 

Who’d have thought you could troubleshoot a loaf of bread?

 

It said: if you are so slovenly you can’t be bothered to measure things out properly or if you think you know better than us and begin to invent your own recipes or if you ditch the salt because you a vain cow who would rather have sleek thighs than feed her family properly, your bread will sink disastrously in the middle and be hard and lumpen and you might just as well use it as demolition fodder. Or words to that effect. I got the message though.

 

I made my bread at 7 last night. Before I was too tired to see my way around the kitchen and before the Red had interfered with my eyesight so that I was unable to decipher the calibrations on the cups and spoons. 

 

I will – as a consequence – be able to set before Hat for breakfast today a loaf that has risen to perfect roundness, a loaf with a firm, brown crust and innards the consistency of warm marshmallows upon which her butter will melt just as she likes.

 

And I shall be able to bask in both her praise and a very, very rare glow of domestic and maternal success.

 

*****************

 

I am going away for a bit. Far away. For a fortnight. I shall begin my journey tomorrow and arrive at my destination 48 hours later. I like to think I’m going where I am because I’m needed there for now, might make a difference. I’m not sure I will.

 

But I have to try.

Obstruction

 

I slide into Tanzania Telecommunications Company Ltd to load some money onto my older daughter’s phone. Because I am a kind mother. Because I am fearful of teen sulks. Because then her excuses not to call me will ring hollow.

 

TTCL’s building must be the biggest in the Outpost and it is a vivid egg yellow. All over. As if somebody above us has stabbed his free range morning fry with a fork and allowed the yolk to explode across the exterior walls of this imposing building. I wear my sunglasses until I get inside, even when it’s overcast; the paintjob is headache-bright to behold.

 

I leave the engine of my car, parked outside the gates, running. Not so, like other expatriates (not here – there aren’t any here) the air-conditioning keeps humming coolly (the fact I don’t have a/c is beside the point). But because if I switch the ignition off, my car will not start again. Not until Hat and I have opened the bonnet, ferreted around in the boot for a bag of spanners, retightened all the battery terminal leads as we did before we left home twenty minutes ago, but which Outpost potholes have already rudely nudged out of place and gathered about us a not insignificant crowd of amused onlookers. I also leave Hat in the car because she is busy trying to think of a name for the soft toy I have just been persuaded to buy for her from a roadside vendor. It is a snow leopard whose bent plastic whiskers make him look as if he has been tempted too close to a fire.

 

As I scurry through the gates and towards the front door, shielding my eyes from the glare, an officious looking woman instructs an askari, lounging on a stool by the entrance and reading a paper, to tell me to move my car. I pretend not to hear and keep going.

 

Inside I hand over my money and my daughter’s telephone number. Please load this I say. I like the staff at TTCL. They are very helpful. And quite bored I think. Rattling around in their enormous yellow submarine they welcome any distraction and I, with my obsession to window shopping at Amazon.co.uk, provide plenty. When I have a glitch with my internet connection at home the entire office staff comes out to proffer assistance.

 

The askari shambles in behind me.

 

Go and move your car, he tells me, it’s blocking the gates.

 

I’m going, I say, just now. This will take one minute I tell him, indicating the lady behind the counter who is already beginning to load the talk time.

 

But a lorry needs to get through the gates; you are blocking it.

 

I look outside, towards my car. It’s the only vehicle I can see and though it is, I concede, blocking the gates, I have never seen them opened in the year I have been here nor have I ever seen a vehicle even attempt to pass through them.

 

There’s no lorry, I point out.

 

The askari gives up with me and turns on the TTCL employee instead, ‘tell her to move her car’.

 

I understood you the first time, I retort crossly.

 

The lady behind the counter giggles.

 

Then tell her to turn her car off and close the windows, the watchman says to her, ignoring me entirely. We are not unlike recent Africa statesmen, using a mediator to resolve a spat; the reluctant mediator behind the desk is Kofi Annan, wishing the problem would go away.

 

If I turn off my car I say – to Kofi now because this is clearly the way forward in this particular contretemps – it will not start again and then it will be blocking the gates forever and ever. And if I close the windows, my daughter – who is inside – will cook in the heat and die. You don’t want that do you?

 

Everybody in the office, which is open plan, collapses with laughter. And the askari who has at least made important show of doing his job, wanders back to his post and his newspaper.

 

I leave triumphant and join Hat in the car.

 

“I’ve decided on Bubbles’’, she says.

 

I look blank.

 

‘The snow leopard, Mum; I’ve decided to call him Bubbles’’.

 

Lovely, I tell her.

 

Later I get text from other daughter, ‘gt da cash ma, thnx. Lol’.

 

It was worth it then.

 

 

 

Christmas in April

There is a fundi working on the house. He is wearing a Father Christmas hat. He has worn it every day since work began. Red and white. Though the white a little grubby now.

It’s not the fact that it’s April that bothers me; it’s not the fact his attire is about eight months too early.

It’s because it’s too damn hot for wooly hats.

 

Come to the Party (Line)

My little sister reminds me, when I write about Hat’s fascination with the old phone she unearths in the house we are renovating, that we grew up with an instrument even more antiquated; on the farms where we lived as children there was nothing so sophisticated as a telephone with rotating face and numbers and holes for digits, only a weighty black object with receiver and handle.

 

In order to make a call we’d be obliged to crank the handle long enough to alert the local telephone operator in some distant rural Post Office. Sometimes this was an exhausting task; sometimes the operator had gone for tea and your hand grew tired before he finally shuffled back to his post to doze and you’d have crossly given up on making the call altogether.

 

In small communities like ours – farms and ranches and tiny towns strung across the Rift Valley - the telephone service was organized into party lines. In that happy case the energies of the apathetic operators were not required. In that case you could call up a neighbour yourself. Not by dialling a number, of course, for there were, as you recall, none, nor indeed a dial.  Besides, our telephone number was Naivasha 56Y6 which came attendant with its own characteristic ring. On a party line, each of us knew our own ring and everybody else’s: crank a long, two shorts and a long for the farmer across the lake. Everybody on the party line would hear the phone trilling, you’d have to strain your ears to distinguish whether the ringing was to alert you or somebody else.

 

Party lines – as the ‘party’ suggested – were open to everybody (hence the importance of your own distinctive call tone: if everybody had the same ring, like today’s incessantly permeating Nokia Tune we’d all have dived for our phones simultaneously, much, come to think of it, as we do today?). It meant that, if you were 10 years old and you and your brother had grown bored of the long summer holidays and tired of nobody calling you on your own Long Long Short to invite you out for the day, you could entertain yourself, providing your mother wasn’t around, by eavesdropping on other people’s conversations, snorting mirth into your hands as you clutched the receiver trying not to be heard by Mrs. X and Mrs. Y who were busily bitching about Mrs. W and the fact the lime peel in her marmalade wasn’t cut nearly finely enough.

 

We had a neighbour, an eccentric and spoiled Italian woman, descendent of a Roman Count and now famous so I shan’t libelously use her name, who was never off the party line. Perhaps before she attained minor celebrity she had too much time on her hands? Dad, when he had run out of patience and kind words of encouragement to please allow him to make his own call, would shriek into the phone, ‘M, get off the bloody line’. Sometimes M, because her farm was not far from us, would try to urge my father to be more ‘neighbourly’, assisting with the donation of fence posts or the loan of a tractor. M’s neighbourliness, though, was a one way affair. Dad – having had his generosity abused too often – was tired of trying to make her understand that No meant No. He began to ignore calls if he suspected they were from M. It didn’t dissuade her, though. She merely laid in wait until somebody else called dad, then, recognizing our ring, she would ambush the call and harangue Dad all over again whilst he tried, in vain, to conduct a conversation with the poor and usually quite embarrassed caller.

 

My little sister says, “I guess ‘party line’ now might refer to an  08 number where a caller can listen to a sexy man or woman’’. Considering we grew up a spit from infamous Happy Valley in a country where the joke ‘Are you married or do you live in Kenya?” prevailed, it might have meant just that back then too?

 

 

Men at Work?

We are to move house. Despite the odds on finding anything remotely suitable; we have. We are – as a consequence – immersed in a flurry of activity as we urge the contractor and his team of brickies forth.

 

The house is an untidy remnant of the days of the British administration. Husband noted, with a hint of smug pleasure, that the road where the little house is was once the residential area of First Officers. I think, perhaps, I remark to him, that the First Officers lived in the row in front of where our home-to-be stands: the row where the houses are bigger, grander and once had a view across the plains to the south of the Outpost. Not that a view is visible any longer; it’s been obliterated by fields of maize that stand higher than an elephant’s eye.

 

The house – abandoned back in the sixties – is in need of spade loads of TLC (along, naturally, with same of cement to patch up yawning cracks in walls and floors). The termites, several generations of them, have built tunnels that run top to bottom and length and breadth of rooms, a spaghetti junction wrought of mud. The electrics are a veritable death trap: wires garland the house like a noose. The plumbing, what little is left, is rusty so that taps spit water the colour of smokers’ phlegm and the ceiling boards belly with damp and mould. The colonies of cockroaches evicted when we ripped the flaking kitchen units out scowl indignantly from dark recesses around the sink.

 

The garden, which is huge so that the children and the dogs rejoiced on seeing it, is presently a field of mahindi; the corn has yet to be harvested by the family who leased the land to cultivate. I am encouraging Sylvester, please, to plant some semblance of lawn in the gaps between the crop. Before the rain abandons us, I press. He thinks I am mad. But I am used to that. I push my way between the ranks of maize to examine what gems might lie within the garden, what can I salvage. There are a couple of palms hiding there and one or two shrubs, their prettiness disguised by the collapsing stalks and cobs shedding parchment skin. There is a glorious flamboyant tree which is slowly having the life strangled out of it by an ugly purple bougainvillea, thick and knotty with age it has clambered right to the top so that the tree sags lethargically beneath the creeper’s weight. We shall chop it down, I tell Sylvester, the bougainvillea I remember to say, not the tree. But not until the landlord has lost interest in the renovations we are making and has taken his beady eye off me.

 

Hat and I visit daily. Sometimes twice. Hat discovers an old dial telephone in one of the bedrooms. She is intrigued and spends ages dialing numbers. ‘Did you really used to have a phone like this when you were little’, she asks, amazed that her mother is old enough to have witnessed – utilized – the workings of something so archaic looking.  Is technology moving too quickly? If our children dismiss the communication tools of their parents’ youth as something Noah might have placed a call on when he was ordering up all those animals I think perhaps it could be?

 

We take the dogs when we visit. They leap from the car and race about inspecting the place, pee’ing on every stone to mark a territory that isn’t theirs yet. I wonder if they understand it will be. Theirs. Soon. The labourers used to look alarmed when I first took the dogs; they used to stop leaning on their spades and cup their crotches nervously. Now that they know my fat Labradors are a pair of softies they just keep leaning on their spades.

I do wish they’d hurry up.