Little Stones Read online

  Elizabeth Kuiper grew up in Zimbabwe before immigrating to Perth with her mother. In 2016 she graduated from the University of Melbourne with a degree in politics and philosophy. An early extract of Little Stones was longlisted for the Richell Prize, received the Express Media prize for best work of fiction, and was published in Award Winning Australian Writing. Elizabeth is currently studying law at the University of Melbourne.

  For my mother, Adele

  1

  Someone had scrawled mugabe must go in black paint across the large yellow shell in the distance. My mother, who had previously punished me for using wax crayons to adorn my bedroom wall with love-hearts and flowers, was in awe of the graffiti.

  ‘How did they even get up there?’ she mused. It appeared to be quite a feat; in order to write those three words, the culprit must have found a way onto the flat roof without suspicion, and dangled dangerously over the side, painting upside down and left to right. ‘Very impressive.’

  It had been almost two hours since we parked on the grassy embankment one hundred metres away from the petrol station. Gogo had prepared a thermos of hot chocolate (for me) and coffee (for Mum), along with two peanut butter sandwiches wrapped in foil for breakfast. I had made the mistake of eating my sandwich as soon as we arrived, and was now enviously eyeing the portion Mum had left untouched on the dashboard.

  I gazed past the sandwich and out the windscreen at the SHELL GARAGE sign and tried to see how many smaller words I could make up from the letters contained within it. It was like one of the puzzles Dad would do in the newspaper, but better because you didn’t need a newspaper, and you could play it anywhere.

  I got the easy ones out of the way first: She, He, Rag, Rage. Then I came up with Ear, Leg, Are. After five minutes, the best I could think of was Rash. I asked Mum if she made out any. Without skipping a beat, she replied with, ‘Eager.’ Sometimes I believed Mum was the cleverest person I knew, even more than all my teachers at Bishopslea.

  ‘How did you think of that?’

  ‘I’m just very eager to get out of this queue,’ she joked. Mum had figured that if we arrived just after dawn we would surely be one of the first to get fuel. And while there were certainly fewer people in front of us than there were behind, we were far from the only folks who knew that the garage on the corner of Samora Machel and Park was expecting a delivery today.

  ‘Hell,’ Mum said suddenly. ‘In Shell. Hell.’

  When the green digits on the dashboard clock flicked from 07:29 to 07:30, Mum sprang from her seat and out of the car. She walked over to the window of the blue Honda in front of us and started talking to the driver, his bald head the only physical feature I could see. Mum placed one hand on her hip as she spoke, using the other to gesture towards the station, periodically glancing back at me. Our car was a white Mazda we affectionately called Chitty, like in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, not because it had aeronautic or marine capabilities but because of the clunky noises it made as we drove, which kinda sounded like chitty-bang, chitty-bang. I remember Mum once telling her friend John that it was a ‘really Chitty car’ and how he howled with laugher.

  After a few minutes, she returned to our car, slamming the door shut behind her. She fumbled through her purse for her phone and punched a series of numbers into the keypad.

  ‘Hi, Mum. Hi. Hi. Listen, we’re still in the queue, it’s probably going to be a couple of hours more. No-one here knows how long. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get up to the farm after lunch.’

  There was just under a week left of the summer holidays, and this was going to be our final trip to Nana and Grandpa’s farm before I started Grade 6. Over the past two months, I had spent more time with my grandparents on their Karoi farm than my home in Harare, only returning twice for my scheduled visits with Dad.

  ‘Hi, Nana!’ I leant in to shout into the receiver.

  ‘… No, of course we’re still going to come up. Don’t be silly. Alright … Okay … Yep … I’ll ring you again once we’re out of the city … Okay …’

  As the phone call drew to a close, the line began to move. People who had left their parked cars to talk to friends further down the line, or to buy packets of crisps and stale confectionery from the dingy service stall, now excitedly scurried back to their vehicles. However, the sudden movement was a false alarm, because we had not gone two car lengths before it became a standstill once more.

  Mum turned the ignition off with more force than necessary, and threw her head back onto the headrest, as though she had just crawled into bed after a long day at the office.

  ‘How come Dad always has petrol?’ I asked.

  ‘Your father has his ways,’ she replied.

  ‘Why don’t you ask him to get some for you?’

  ‘This shortage won’t last much longer. It can’t,’ she said, her tone becoming marginally more upbeat. ‘Besides, I love any excuse to spend time with my little munchkin. Now, do you want to play a game of I-spy or your find-the-word game?’

  ‘Okay, um … I spy with my little eye … something beginning with … P.’

  ‘Petrol?’

  ‘No. There isn’t any petrol, remember?’ I said, gesturing out the rear window to the line that had wormed its way up the street and disappeared around the corner.

  ‘Alright, clever clogs. People?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Parking spots?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Peanut butter sandwich?’ Mum asked.

  I nodded, picking at the foil package hosting Mum’s half.

  ‘You can have it, I’m not going to eat it.’

  Not only was she smart, but she also possessed an incredible telepathic ability to know exactly what I was thinking.

  ‘Why don’t you want it?’ I asked, after taking a bite, the peanut butter coating the roof of my mouth and muffling my words.

  ‘Gogo always spreads butter with the peanut butter. I’ve asked her not to. It’s too rich. And, as Gogo keeps telling me, I am getting akasimba,’ Mum said, blowing out her cheeks.

  Akasimba is the Shona word for fat, but it doesn’t really mean ‘fat’; instead, it means healthy and well fed. Gogo, who was herself rather akasimba, doled the word out as a compliment, much to the chagrin of my mother and her friends.

  ‘Well, I like the way Gogo makes sandwiches,’ I retorted, licking my thumb. Gogo was our maid. Her real name was Ruth Karemba, but I had always called her Gogo. Mum often said that Gogo was one of the best things that had happened to her, in spite of the occasional comments on her weight. Indeed, it was because Gogo’s son, Power, had heard about the fuel shipment that we were in the queue in the first place.

  We continued the game of I-spy until almost everything in sight had been guessed and we had resorted to finding obscure items like the stray used tissue in the back seat or the empty Fanta bottle that blew across the road in front of us.

  When we finally reached the front of the queue, the man wielding the pump informed Mum that they were capping supplies at twenty litres per person.

  ‘But I’m driving up to Karoi today … I need more than that.’

  ‘Other people are in line too, madam.’

  ‘I know that. Please, just thirty litres at least … twenty-five?’

  The man shook his head, and Mum gave a defeated nod – she was going to take the twenty litres and be happy about it.

  ‘Well, we’re just going to have to hope there’s a station on the way, and we don’t break down in the middle of a country road,’ Mum said, half to me, half out the window to the man at the pump. We sat in silence, listening to the glug of petrol entering the car and the sudden click-clack as it came
to a stop. The man asked for two billion dollars.

  ‘Here.’ Mum handed him the money, and then some. ‘I’m sorry, I know it’s not your fault.’

  ‘Thank you, madam,’ the man said, tipping the edge of his well-worn baseball cap at her.

  And with that, we were on the road again, leaving the hundred or so other cars behind in a plume of exhaust smoke.

  A few hours later, I was sitting on the back of Grandpa’s motorbike as he revved the engine with a firm turn of his hand.

  Mudhudhudu is the Shona word for ‘motorbike’. That’s what we learnt in Shona class during the term we spent on transportation. It was easy to remember, because the syllables mimicked the sound of the engine starting up. Mudhudhudu. My grandpa always took me on motorbike rides when I came to the farm.

  ‘Hold on tight, Hannah.’

  Mudhudhudu.

  We rode towards the nearest butcher, avoiding uneven basins of water in the road, filled from last night’s rainfall. Grandpa kicked out the stand, counted an even four hundred million from his wallet, and went inside. As I waited, I watched two chongololos – giant African millipedes – edging their way across the pavement. The chongololos always came out after the rain, often seeking refuge in our home. We’d have to scoop them up and place them back in the garden, making sure not to crush their little legs.

  Grandpa returned a few minutes later with two grey parcels.

  ‘Some boerewors for tonight …’ He tucked one parcel into his tattered khaki jacket and opened the other, offering it to me. ‘And some biltong for now.’

  In the middle of our afternoon snack, a white sedan pulled up. It was George and Louise, old family friends of ours. George had always scared me a little. A few years ago he had been in a combine harvester accident that had left him with two lonely thumbs. After the injury they moved to a small cattle farm nearby, for less physically demanding work.

  George ambled around the car to give me a hug. I stiffened as the stumps of his hands grazed my back. He stepped away. I tried to avert my eyes, but my morbid fascination couldn’t be tamed. Two thick pinkish scars, reminiscent of the fishing worms we’d bait at Lake Kariba, lay in place of his fingers.

  I tuned into the adults’ conversation; they were discussing the ‘Mad Cow’ epidemic.

  ‘I’m not worried … I’ve been dealing with this mad cow for years,’ George joked, placing an incomplete arm over Louise, who rolled her eyes.

  Grandpa laughed politely, but I’d already heard the joke twice before. I was relieved Grandpa only grew tobacco; it felt like that was safer.

  I wrapped my arms around Grandpa’s belly as we whipped past trees with flat tops, like green pancakes, and the wind tumbled through my hair. I used to sit in the front but I was nearly eleven and was a ‘growing girl’ as Grandpa said, so I got to sit on the back of the bike.

  When I first took to the new seating arrangement, I told Grandpa I was scared I’d fall off and he’d accidentally leave me behind on the dirt road. In response to what I thought was a valid concern, Grandpa simply said, ‘No problem. If that happens, we’ll adopt another monkey and call it Hannah too.’ This was a running joke in our family, one that Grandpa had started after I demanded to know how babies were born – how I was born. Grandpa told me that he and Mum and Nana were on a camping trip and came across a cute baby monkey with big, brown eyes that they instantly fell in love with, so they cut off its tail, raised it as a human baby, and called it Hannah.

  Of course, I understood he was playing around, but in that moment, on the back of the motorbike, as I clung tightly to Grandpa’s torso like a baboon to a baobab, I felt there could be some truth in it.

  Grandpa turned off the main road onto a dirt track, and I spotted a group of men walking side by side. They looked like farm workers headed home for the day; they had removed the top half of their cobalt overalls, tying the sleeves around their waists, and were playfully jostling each other as they moved along the road. When we came closer, I recognised two of them: Ephraim and Thomas.

  ‘Hey, Boss!’ the two men called out in unison.

  Grandpa slowed down, lifting his left hand off the handlebars to wave. I wanted to wave also but was too scared to loosen my grip, so instead I yelled out a big ‘hello’ and hoped they heard me, even though we had already passed them in a trail of swirling dust.

  Grandpa revved the bike a final time as we zoomed up the small hilled driveway to the farmhouse, parking the bike near the verandah. From there, I could already smell onions frying and hear the sound of clinking crockery as the table was set for dinner.

  Grandpa got off the bike first and hoisted me up with his hands under my armpits, placing me on the ground like a pot plant. My legs were long enough now that I could’ve jumped off myself, but I still enjoyed Grandpa helping.

  Mum and Nana were in the kitchen, Mum leaning against the linoleum counter, talking rapidly about something or other while Nana nodded along, sporadically pushing onion crescents around the pan with a wooden spoon. Mum paused mid-sentence after Grandpa and I entered the room, coming over to me and smoothing down my windswept hair.

  I shook my head like a dog after a bath, trying to prevent the unwanted grooming. I wasn’t a little girl anymore; I had just been on a motorbike ride and, more importantly, I rode on the back.

  ‘You look like you’ve been through a tornado,’ Mum said, with a laugh.

  Grandpa took his cap off and gave Nana a quick kiss on the cheek.

  ‘How does my hair look?’ he asked, bowing his head down for inspection. Grandpa sported a half-circle of grey-brown hair that clung to the perimeter of his scalp. It reminded me of going to the fields on the outskirts of the farm and seeing the circular burnt patches of grass from the controlled fires he’d start to make the fields healthy again.

  Nana affectionately stroked his bald spot, and the sparse hairs along it, telling him it looked luscious as always.

  ‘And here is your payment for that compliment,’ Grandpa said, reaching into his jacket and recovering the parcel of boerewors.

  Nana removed the coil of sausage meat from its packaging, made some room in the pan next to the onions, and began to cook it. Boerewors was my most favourite meal ever. I looked forward to farm visits because of all the good food I’d get to eat, as well as the giant helpings of attention Nana and Grandpa gave me as their only grandchild.

  During dinner, Nana, Grandpa and Mum started talking about the Warvets again. The Warvets were a big family who wanted to steal farms from everyone in Zimbabwe, and these days almost every conversation would end up being about them. Well, either them or petrol. But this conversation across the dining table was the fifth time today the Warvets had come up and I was getting worried.

  ‘Mum …’ I began, but no-one seemed to hear me.

  ‘They’ve taken all the land in Norton, now they’re hitting Kadoma,’ Grandpa said.

  ‘Mum …’

  ‘Aren’t Cliff and Sharon in Kadoma?’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Mum,’ I insisted. ‘I don’t want us to give our farm away to another family.’

  ‘Another family?’ Mum sought clarification.

  ‘The Warvets.’

  Mum looked around the room, first at Nana, then Grandpa, and let out a sigh. She explained to me that the War Vets were not an extended family. They were a large group of people called the ‘War Veterans’ who mobilised to take back what they saw as their land.

  ‘What does veteran mean?’ I asked.

  ‘A veteran is someone who used to fight in an army, so … someone who used to be a soldier, for example.’

  ‘So the War Veterans are soldiers?’ Some part of me must have wondered how one family alone held the power to demand farmland, but if they were soldiers … well, that made sense.

  ‘Not quite. Well, some of them are, or were.’

 
‘Will the War Veterans come here?’ I asked.

  ‘No, of course not. Of course not,’ Mum said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They won’t come here …’ Mum looked over to Grandpa again. ‘By the way, Dad, wow, this boerewors is delicious. Is this from Rodger’s Butcher’s?’

  ‘The one and only,’ he replied.

  ‘Delicious,’ Mum repeated, cutting up some more of the sausage and placing it into her mouth, making an mmm noise of approval.

  For the rest of the meal, the only sound was cutlery scraping across plates and Grandpa asking me to pass a jug of water from the other side of the table. And the whole time I wondered what would happen if these soldiers who fought in the war ended up coming to our farm.

  After dinner, we went for a leisurely stroll around the farm. Words flowed freely outside in the cool evening air, where the trees and the tractors were taking in their last touch of sun, casting soft shadows across the dirt path we walked upon.

  Grandpa forged ahead with a large stick in hand, swinging it side to side like an inebriated blind man with a cane, making sure no snakes or rats were in our way. Our walk took us along the periphery of the tobacco crops. I was beginning to see a few of the pink – but purple in that light – tobacco flowers growing from the plants. This meant the crop would soon be ready for harvesting, but all the flowers would have to be chopped off before this could happen. When the crops were ready, the workers cut the plants down, pierced them with the end of a tobacco spear and threaded them on like a giant plant kebab. Then they carried these tobacco spears on their backs, transporting them to the curing barns.

  ‘Have you sorted out the new workers yet?’ Mum asked Grandpa. During this time of year, Grandpa usually employed over a dozen extra workers to help with the harvest.

  ‘Not yet. I’ll get onto it. Lots of folks have approached me, all out of work now. All of the boys who used to work Vinnie’s farm have been asking for something to do. Also, some of the relatives of our folks. And the fellas I took on last year. How do I choose?’