Little Stones Read online

  We continued walking until we reached the borehole, at which point we reversed direction and headed home. The sun had almost completely set, the tobacco barns in the distance creating black silhouettes against an ink-blue sky.

  I used to love visiting the barns during the harvest, gazing at the leaves as they lazily hung from the wooden frames in darkness like brown and yellow fruit bats, allowing my lungs to balloon with the sweet stench. If Ephraim was working, he would lift me onto his shoulders so I could touch the drying tobacco. Ephraim was the second son of Joseph and Asenath, which I knew because the tale of Joseph was my favourite Bible story.

  I have always found names fascinating. Why some things are called one word and others aren’t. And how strange it is that we alter the names of the things we consume, how ‘tobacco’ evolves into a ‘cigarette’, or ‘cattle’ morphs into ‘beef’. When I mentioned this to Grandpa recently, he said I was pretty smart for a ten-year-old.

  Mum and Nana were lagging behind, Mum’s arm placed around Nana’s side as they walked. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, whispering as if not to wake the sleeping plants past their bedtime. Grandpa maintained a steady stride ahead, his long gait making it hard for me to keep up.

  ‘Hey, Grandpa,’ I called out to get his attention. ‘Remember that time at the Floors when I jumped on one of the trains?’

  ‘Sure do, poppet.’

  The Tobacco Sales Floor – or the Floors, as we called them – was a magical playground, full of energy and life. After a week or so in the grading sheds, the tobacco would be stripped and sorted based on the size, colour and quality. Then it would be tied in great bundles for transport to the Floors in Harare. Here, the bales would be weighed and inspected, then finally auctioned off to cigarette manufacturers. The Floors were always teeming with men: buyers and sellers sifting through open bags, raising leaves to their noses and inhaling; workers, two at a time, lifting bags onto the big red scales. Miniature trains wheeled bales of tobacco in hessian sacks, stamped with numbers, in fifty different directions.

  One time I jumped on the back of one of the trains and sat atop the tobacco bale, managing to get transported into an entirely different section of the building before the driver noticed. He gruffly informed me that ‘these aren’t toys’, and took me to the woman who made announcements over the loudspeaker. Grandpa was annoyed but not for too long, so it was worth it.

  ‘When do you think we’ll go to the Floors next?’ I asked, quickening my step to catch up to Grandpa’s side.

  ‘Maybe in a few weeks,’ he said, as he threw aside the stick he had used for the walk and strode towards the front of the house.

  After the evening stroll, we sat on the white plastic chairs on the verandah, listening to the wind move through the jacaranda trees and the branches of the msasa. Once, we discovered a wasp nest in the far corner, and Ephraim poked at it with his badza until it fell onto the cracked concrete, the buzz of billions of insects leaving him unperturbed as we watched in horror through the closed sash windows.

  Many of my memories of the farm feature the verandah in some way. During the evening it was a place for quiet reflection, but during the day it was a hub of activity. It was a meeting point: for friends dropping by the farm, after parking their cars alongside the great green tractors in the sand driveway; or for workers forming a line on payday as Nana sat on a chair, her red biro and wads of cash bound with rubber bands at the ready. The verandah was the vantage point of the farm: from there we could observe the vegetable garden, the borehole, the tobacco barns; everything Grandpa and Nana had worked hard to build. And it was from there that Nana would first spot trouble.

  On the last day of the farm trip, Mum and I were putting our things in the car when Nana burst out of the front door carrying two large boxes under her arms.

  ‘Jane, if you have room … can you take these back with you?’ she asked.

  Mum nodded, taking them and laying them down on the back seat.

  ‘Ooh, what’s in them?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, it’s a few sentimental things. Just in ca—’

  Mum interrupted. ‘I said to Nana I’d help her sort out some old photographs and things, put them in albums.’ With this, she embraced Nana in a big hug.

  ‘Alright now,’ Nana said, pulling away. ‘Drive safe.’

  2

  The last afternoon of my summer holidays was spent lounging in the pool, back home in Harare. Grandpa had given us the inner tubes from tractor tyres he’d replaced: one for me, one for Mum. The big, black doughnuts drifted up and down the length of the pool, periodically bumping into each other and changing direction, like a pair of disoriented tourists.

  Grandpa also gave us the tyre that was currently hanging from a branch of the leadwood tree in the corner of the garden, its inside filled with dirty rainwater and fallen leaves. The swing was identical to one he’d crafted on the farm for me, but this was right here in the city, so I could play on it whenever I pleased.

  After baking in the sun for hours, the tubes would be hot to the touch, and you would need to flip them over in order to lounge on the cool, wet underside. I lay on my back as I floated, my fingertips dipping into the water as I tried to name the animals I saw in the sky. But the clouds were sparse, wispy white lines against a bright blue sheet, and there were only so many worms and chongololos and snakes before I ran out of cloud.

  I could hear the neighbours playing a game of tennis, the soft thump of the ball hitting the clay court, and the occasional calls of ‘good shot!’ But the thick durawall and tall trees that skirted the boundaries of our garden blocked sight of their match, and the rest of the outside world. Even when jumping on my trampoline, I could only just glimpse what might’ve been a floodlight poking through the leaves of the trees nearby.

  One day last year the neighbours brought home two puppies. The new arrivals sent our dog, Oscar Wilde, crazy, and he barked endlessly. I climbed into the branches of the white oleander to discover a pair of adorable Yorkshire terriers. Mum caught me in the act, chiding me for scaling an incredibly poisonous tree, but I had a feeling she simply didn’t want me being nosy.

  The white oleander was pretty, but my favourites were the cluster of African oil palm trees that provided shade around the pool. I called them the pineapple trees because of the way their leaves erupted from the thick base, like a pineapple’s spiky crown. They couldn’t be climbed, but when their great branches fell they made perfect building materials for garden forts or accessories when I was pretending to be a Grecian princess.

  The tyre was getting hot again; the rubber was searing the skin of my arms and underneath my knees. I dutifully flipped it over and resumed my position on its other side. Usually Mum would be in the pool with me. We would race each other down its twenty-five-metre length, or I would practise my dives in front of her, and she would rate them out of ten, putting on a loud sports broadcaster voice: Hannah Reynolds approaches the diving board, representing Zimbabwe in the under-11s. Here today, sporting a fantastic purple swimming cossie, let’s see how she fares.

  But Mum wasn’t with me. Instead, she was cooped up in the spare-bedroom-cum-home-office, the constant high-pitched screeching of the fax machine surely drowning out the sounds of splashing water. In her place to supervise me was Gogo, who didn’t know how to swim, but would pull her dress up above her knees and dip her legs into the water, as she did today.

  Gogo was short and old with a few soft wrinkles. Her husband had red ribbon disease. Reflected in her eyes were the faces of the six children she had raised alone: Faith, Beauty, Power, Charity, Joy and Learnmore. Gogo wore the same thing every day (a yellow floral dress, a blue bandana and black canvas shoes) except on Saturdays when she dressed up for church. She also had a sprinkling of dark, bristly hairs on her chin that I always found myself staring at.

  ‘Gogo, what’s the Shona word for clouds?’ I asked, kicking the side
of the pool to propel myself into the middle.

  ‘You know this one, Hannah. Just think.’

  ‘I don’t know it,’ I insisted.

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  I gazed upwards, hoping the lines in the sky would shift to spell out the word for me. We had learnt the weather and the seasons last term, but that felt like so long ago, and I wasn’t even sure we learnt clouds …

  ‘Oh! Oh! Makore,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes, very good. And what is sky?’

  ‘Denga.’

  ‘Now, tell me, Hannah, what is the Shona word for sun?’

  I realised I had somehow invited Gogo to help me practise Shona. She often helped me with Shona homework since Mum had learnt only French in school. But there were just a few more precious hours of school holidays left, and I was not prepared to start working any sooner than necessary. Pretending I didn’t hear her, I let my body fold into itself and slip through the hole of the tyre, into the lukewarm water.

  Sometimes, when Mum and I swam together, she would dive underneath me and flip the tube over when I wasn’t expecting it. I often tried doing the same to her, and sometimes it would work and she’d collapse sideways, and sometimes she would continue reading her magazine.

  I swam to the side of the pool and jumped out. I ran to the deep end, my wet footsteps instantly swallowed up by the hot red bricks.

  ‘Ah, slow down, Hannah!’ Gogo shouted.

  ‘Watch this,’ I commanded, ignoring her calls for caution. I threw my arms into the air and clasped my hands together, before bending my knees and casting myself back into the water. I resurfaced to the sound of Gogo clapping and praising me.

  ‘Very good, Hannah, very good jump.’

  I dove a few more times, each time rising to hear Gogo say ‘very good, very good, Hannah’, until out of the corner of my eye I noticed a honey bee struggling in the water near the filter. Getting down onto my knees, I scooped it up with both hands, trying not to scare it and provide it an opportunity to sting me. Once I had set it down on the warm ground, I watched closely as it tried to shake the water off its wings.

  ‘Hannah, are you finished swimming now?’ Gogo asked, interrupting my important entomological observations. ‘I have to go start cooking supper for you and your mum.’

  I told Gogo I was, and together we began to re-attach the blue safety net onto the pool. It was days like these I wished for an older brother, or maybe three sisters, like those in Little Women. Or parents who lived in the same home, so I would always have someone to play with.

  We had to pull the netting taut to hook it onto the other side. It was such an ordeal putting it back and I often wondered why we still bothered, especially since I was a really good swimmer for my age.

  The day after the pool was built, Mum deliberately fell backwards onto the net, as though she were a born-again Christian at a baptism. The net supported her weight, but left her back covered in a criss-cross of rope-burns. Gogo had laughed and laughed, telling her how silly, how pusa, she looked. Now, as we hooked the final hoops of the netting, I reminded Gogo of Mum’s painful dive.

  ‘She’s such a weirdo,’ I said to cap off the story.

  Gogo let out a hum of agreement. ‘Yes … but she just wants to keep you safe.’

  3

  The first day of the new school year always wreaked minor chaos on our household. On the morning I started Grade 6, I spent twenty minutes hunting for my brown-leather school shoes before finding them outside, next to Oscar Wilde’s sleeping mat. As a result, Mum and I became stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, prolonging the inevitable for a little while longer.

  Mum tapped her index finger on the steering wheel like someone delivering Morse code, while a man on a bike carrying another man on his handlebars glided through the standstill.

  ‘Now they’ve got the right idea,’ Mum said.

  Everything was different in the city. Even the street names. In spite of the new tarmac that poured over the land in 1980, specks of colonialism cracked through. You could be in the middle of Dzivarasekwa, on Kambuzuma Road, then make a sharp right turn onto Churchill Avenue or King George Road. Bishopslea, the small, single-sex primary school I’d attended since nursery, was located on Bishop Gaul Avenue in Belvedere. Of course, there was also Robert Mugabe Way and Robert Mugabe Road as a counterweight.

  We were on Robert Mugabe Road now. From the second we turned off Cameron Street and onto the road that ran alongside Mugabe’s city mansion, I would try not to breathe. It was a silly superstition, akin to holding your breath when passing a graveyard to prevent ghosts from filling your lungs. Perhaps it wasn’t that unreasonable – people had died there. Not for failing to hold their breath, mind you, but because they had stopped their car or had taken photographs. Sometimes just because they had looked at one of the security guards funny. The guards carried long, brown hunting rifles despite being miles away from the nearest game reserve. I was scared that one day we’d run out of petrol there and they wouldn’t give us time to explain.

  Lungs straining, I watched as the cameras atop the fence swivelled, with minds of their own, following the cars that crossed their paths. I stared at one small camera, lost in thought.

  ‘Did you practise your spelling over the holidays?’ Mum asked, as she flicked on the indicator.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No, but I knew the words before anyway, so I don’t need to learn them.’

  Mum gave me a sideways glance before tilting her head and looking past me to spot the oncoming traffic to her left. I reluctantly fished out a small workbook from my rucksack.

  As we turned onto Bishop Gaul Avenue, I scanned the ten words my new teacher, Mrs Hicks, assigned in advance for this week’s spelling test.

  ‘Through. Threw. Friend. Spies. Weird. Colour. Morning. Build. Torn. Ornament.’

  ‘And you know all those words?’ Mum asked. I wasn’t given time to reply before she continued, ‘Okay, okay. Just trying to be a good parent and check.’

  She steered into the driveway and towards the roundabout where the large Zimbabwean flag flapped atop a pole. I noticed an absence of the cars that usually snaked their way around the roundabout during drop-off. I was late. I gave Mum a quick kiss on the cheek and she wished me a good day.

  ‘Bye, Mum!’

  I rushed through the horseshoe arch that had served as the main entrance for the past seventy years and skidded along the corridors that smelt of fresh floor polish.

  Mrs Hicks shot daggers at me as I burst through the door, found my desk at the back of the classroom and stood to attention. I made a point of looking just above the blackboard at the clock, where the minute hand was one notch away from pointing straight down in the middle: I was, technically, on time for the seven-thirty start.

  Mrs Hicks began the rollcall.

  ‘Anika Acharya?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Stephanie Adams?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Emily Besileni?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Amy Blighnaught?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Diana Chigumba?’

  ‘Here,’ croaked a soft voice from the desk in front of mine. Diana cleared the frog from her throat and repeated her ‘here’, deeper this time.

  I smiled reflexively and felt a juvenile urge to laugh. Standing tall, her black hair neatly shaped into eight cornrows across her scalp, was my best friend at Bishopslea, Diana Chigumba. Diana and I were placed together as reading partners because we had the highest literacy scores in the class. We read stories from the purple books while others were working through orange or yellow; some, embarrassingly enough, were still on green!

  After rollcall was completed, and the morning prayer was said, I knew there would be forty-five minutes of reading time and, because Diana and I always finished early,
we’d be able to talk and mess about.

  ‘Nikita Patel?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Hannah Reynolds?’

  ‘Here,’ I said, trying to exude as much politeness from the single syllable as possible.

  Mrs Hicks stared at me over the red rim of her reading glasses in a way that made me feel as though I had swallowed an iceblock.

  ‘Rudo Rusere?’ she continued, her gaze on me unfaltering.

  ‘Here.’

  The roll ended with Florence Zinyemba and, shortly after, the class lined up to receive our reading books from Mrs Hicks before filing outdoors to sit in our assigned reading pairs. Diana and I found a soft patch of grass next to the chapel and sat cross-legged as we alternated reading the pages aloud.

  ‘One sunny Sunday morning, Dolly and John walked to the park. Their mother had given them 5p each. Dolly chose to buy an ice-cream while John bought a bottle of Coca-Cola and—’

  ‘’Sif you could buy an ice-cream and Coke with that!’ Diana interjected.

  ‘More like two hundred thousand dollars ’cause of inflation,’ I agreed.

  Whenever we had people over for dinner, they’d discuss the ‘inflation rate’. I didn’t quite understand what it meant. I visualised banknotes being pumped up with air, like inflatable pool toys. My mum knew a lot about economics though – she worked for the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange.

  The books were relatively thin and it didn’t take us long before we had finished ours, with still twenty minutes left of the class. I flicked to the endpages and read them too.

  ‘Other titles in the series … useful tools … vocabulary … grammar … blah blah blah … Published in London, 1972.’

  ‘That was forever ago.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I rested the book on my lap, picking at the plastic covering that had begun to peel away in the corner. The reading books always seemed to have the same illustration on the front: two peach-skinned children (one boy and one girl) with rosy cheeks, usually engaged in some form of physical activity, like skipping or hula-hooping, or sometimes they would be running a lemonade stand. And all the stories followed a similar arc but with different names and slightly divergent plots.