Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Rhodesia, 1975 Mum says, "Don't come creeping into our room at night." They sleep with loaded guns beside them on the bedside rugs. She says, "Don't startle us when we're sleeping." "Why not?" "We might shoot you." "Oh." "By mistake." "Okay." As it is, there seems a good enough chance of getting shot on purpose. "Okay, I won't." So if I wake in the night and need Mum and Dad, I call Vanessa, because she isn't armed. "Van! Van, hey!" I hiss across the room until she wakes up. And then Van has to light a candle and escort me to the loo, where I pee sleepily into the flickering yellow light and Van keeps the candle high, looking for snakes and scorpions and baboon spiders. Mum won't kill snakes because she says they help to keep the rats down (but she rescued a nest of baby mice from the barns and left them to grow in my cupboard, where they ate holes in the family's winter jerseys). Mum won't kill scorpions either; she catches them and lets them go free in the pool and Vanessa and I have to rake the pool before we can swim. We fling the scorps as far as we can across the brown and withering lawn, chase the ducks and geese out, and then lower ourselves gingerly into the pool, whose sides wave green and long and soft and grasping with algae. And Mum won't kill spiders because she says it will bring bad luck. I tell her, "I'd say we have pretty rotten luck as it is." "Then think how much worse it would be if we killed spiders." I have my feet off the floor when I pee. "Hurry up, man." "Okay, okay." "It's like Victoria Falls." "I really had to go." I have been holding my pee for a long, long time and staring out the window to try and guess how close it is to morning. Maybe I could hold it until morning. But then I notice that it is the deep-black-sky quiet time of night, which is the halfway time between the sun setting and the sun rising when even the night animals are quietas if they, like day animals, take a break in the middle of their work to rest. I can't hear Vanessa breathing; she has gone into her deep middle-of-the-night silence. Dad is not snoring nor is he shouting in his sleep. The baby is still in her crib but the smell of her is warm and animal with wet nappy. It will be a long time until morning. Then Vanessa hands me the candle"You keep boogies for me now"and she pees. "See, you had to go, too." "Only 'cos you had to." There is a hot breeze blowing through the window, the cold sinking night air shifting the heat of the day up. The breeze has trapped midday scents; the prevalent cloying of the leach field, the green soap which has spilled out from the laundry and landed on the patted-down red earth, the wood smoke from the fires that heat our water, the boiled-meat smell of dog food. We debate the merits of flushing the loo. "We shouldn't waste the water." Even when there isn't a drought we can't waste water, just in case one day there is a drought. Anyway, Dad has said, "Steady on with the loo paper, you kids. And don't flush the bloody loo all the time. The leach field can't handle it." "But that's two pees in there." "So? It's only pee." "Agh sis, man, but itFuller, Alexandra is the author of 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood' with ISBN 9780375507502 and ISBN 0375507507.