All That It Ever Meant, page 2
We drive out of Harare in the front cab of the expedition truck. We can all sit there because there are two bucket seats squashed up behind the driver and passenger seat, but Tana crawls through the connecting window into the back of the truck because it’s more interesting there and he can lie down on one of the bench seats. Chichi puts her earphones on and listens to music. I sit up front with Baba—Chichi threw a greasy look toward the passenger seat and I don’t even know why because I know she wasn’t going to sit there. Even when Baba is angry like this and doesn’t want to talk, I still like him and I don’t care.
It’s early morning and the city is still a bit sleepy, not too many cars on the road. I like the freshness of mornings here. I can smell the dew on grass that grows over things, even in town-town, and there’s something about dust, real dust that rises when the heat dries out the morning and covers you, something dry and delicious. Baba hasn’t told any of us where we’re going. What I do know from deduction is that it’s going to be a long drive. Even if we were all happy and talking to each other, I would probably still be quiet because I want to tell Baba about my “visitor,” but I know that I can’t say anything.
We exit a roundabout that takes us out of town in the direction marked Bulawayo. Baba is focused on driving. I’m impressed because it’s a big vehicle and it’s the first I’ve known of Baba doing anything so manual. He’s very genteel and most of the time doesn’t even wear casual clothes. Right now he looks like someone else altogether, especially with his attention completely blocked from us. He seems a stranger. Even his face is different to me and the longer I look at him, the worse I feel. My heart starts to jump around but the smell of the ganky pipe right up my nostrils brings my attention to the thing I cannot say.
Before I go on, I need to say that a lot of things make sense to me that don’t make sense to other people. Baba says I overthink things and start to recreate. What he is really saying is that he thinks I let my imagination elope with me. He could be right, but also, I could be right. Just because someone thinks one thing is right, doesn’t automatically make the other thing wrong, and just because something isn’t real for one person, it doesn’t mean it’s not real for someone else. But also, I think it’s something of the opposite—I don’t overthink things, I let them come and settle in my head and don’t examine them too hard, then they simply find a place where they fit. Take, for example, what is happening now: Baba insisted Shona into us, I speak and understand it very well, so I know that while the person sitting behind me and Baba is not speaking English, they are not speaking Shona either, but I understand what they’re saying.
“Do you know where we’re going?” they ask. I wonder if I reply, would everyone else think I’m talking to myself?
“You don’t have to speak, just answer me.”
Oh man! I don’t know how to feel about this.
“You don’t know how to feel about anything. Isn’t that your thing?”
What?
“Not what. Where?”
What—where?
“I thought you were smart, but this is boring,” they say.
What?
“Listen, I thought this might be fun but it’s boring. Later.”
Huh?
Gone. Just like they had appeared, no fanfare, no shifting of time or space, no rip in the fabric of reality, nothing so interesting, just here one minute and not here the next. Not even a POOF!
I try to discover in my head what language they might have been using, but I can’t decipher it. Part of the problem might be because Caroline isn’t here to help me. Me and Caroline were besties. We liked to watch obscure movies, even if they weren’t in English—actually maybe especially when they weren’t in English. That was the thing I liked best about her. She got it. We just did whatever and the other got it. Like one of us was a clasp and the other the fastener and it didn’t matter which on any day because it worked. One time we watched a Soviet animation—one of the crazy-feeling black-and-white ones where lines move around a whole lot. A mother and daughter went for a walk. They got to a gulf and the mother told the daughter to wait at the cliff. She got in a boat and rowed away. The mother didn’t come back. The girl waited and waited and the day changed, the seasons changed, the girl grew up, grew old, and the gulf dried up. That’s when she finally decided to walk across it to go and look for her mother. Halfway across, in the reeds, she saw the hull of a boat. Inside it was a skeleton and it was wearing the ring her mother always had on. Then the credits rolled and I burst out laughing. Caro looked at me and laughed. “I didn’t even say it yet.” I knew, and that’s what’s so funny. She’d been about to say, “Well, that was cheerful!” It wasn’t because I knew her well even, it’s just because I knew. Like she’d already said it. Just like the one time we watched a comedy special in Dutch. Neither of us understood a word but there was a point at which both of us burst out laughing because we totally got it. The comedian hadn’t done anything slapstick or dramatic, only speaking into the mic, but it was just . . . something. So me and Caro, we knew we had a superpower. We could understand any language.
CHAPTER FIVE
OUR first stop is in Kwekwe. The town is interesting, different from English towns, colorful and not quite orderly even though buildings are in tidy rows and the streets are laid out in grids. There are lots of people walking about on the pavements and quite literally in the streets, and white vans basically doing whatever they feel like at any place they feel like doing it. One stops right in front of us without moving to the shoulder and starts to let off passengers. Baba swears under his breath. Chichi raises an eyebrow at him. He ignores her.
“Right,” he says, all business, as he finds the farthermost parking off the main street with empty slots on two sides, “food and bathroom break. What do you want?”
We all ask for pizza, then me and Chichi head for the Ladies. Tana doesn’t know what to do. Baba puts a hand on his shoulder and says, “I’ll get our orders in and then we’ll go together to the Gents, okay son?” and it’s like a day dawned across Tana’s face. I don’t blame him because I won’t lie, even though he’s talking to Tana, it’s the first sign that Baba might ever talk to any of us again, and I can tell from the way her body relaxes, that Chichi feels it too. Not enough to talk to me though. We do our business in quiet. It’s okay. Sometimes I prefer it when Chichi isn’t talking to me. It’s peaceful.
Baba knows what all of us like on our pizza. He’s good like that. I like tomato and cheese, Chichi likes pepperoni and olives, and Tana likes ham and pineapple. We each get our own which is nice because I like leftover pizza, I can look forward to it for later.
Baba parks us at a backpackers’ site. I see now how this trip is going to go. It’s going to be a problem. I know Chichi saw the truck and how it’s kitted out in the back but I think she chose not to believe how it might play out.
“So Dad? Do you mean that we are sleeping in the truck?”
Baba ignores her. He does this when he needs to conserve energy, a kind of powering down in between rounds with Chichi, maybe in the hope that she will let a sleeping dog lie. Of course, he can only try.
“Dad, I’m talking to you.”
“Go ahead and talk.”
“We passed a lodge back there. Why didn’t we stop there and spend the night? It looked decent enough.”
“It did.” He’s busy securing a curtain to create a division and taking down sleeping bags from the overhead rack. Tana is happily helping. I’m looking through the connecting window from the cab of the truck. I don’t know what Chichi has been doing all the time since we left Babam’kuru’s house, but I’ve been preparing myself in my mind for this shift in our way of life. Tana hasn’t been thinking about it at all, he’s just been worried the whole time that something bad is going to happen. I know Tana.
“Do you mean that I’m to sleep on one of these benches?” Chichi asks.
“You can sleep wherever you like, but the most sensible place would be in the safety of this truck with everyone else and the benches are probably more comfortable than the floor.”
“What about inside? They have some dormitory looking things back there.”
“Sure.”
“But I have to pay for it. And also I don’t want to go alone.”
I pull my head out of sight because it’s about to get tricky. Chichi will put me on the spot in a beat.
I hear Baba sigh.
“Chiwoniso.” Uh-oh! “I’m tired, I’m organizing a place for you. You have a sleeping bag and look, even a pillow.” I saw the little pillows, like the ones you get on the plane. “You’ll be safe. Sure, you might have to put up with a fart or two and some snoring, but you’ll be safe. If the accommodations are not to your liking, and as you told me not too long ago I’m a loser and don’t get anything right, then I apologize, here’s another thing I’ve got wrong. That’s me, your father. Deal with it.”
I peek from the window as Chichi stomps away. I know that if it weren’t for the Big Fight she might have been more sassy but she knows she was way over the line then and that most of her sulking since we left England is because somewhere in there she feels bad. Dad is all we have left.
“Tell me about the Big Fight.”
Ganky Pipe is back. They’re sitting at the foot of my “bed,” legs crossed, elbow on knee.
Let me tell you more what they look like: they are kind of old in the face and I can’t tell if they are a man or a woman—it feels rude to ask because their clothing doesn’t say anything of the like even though it’s different from before. They have this elaborate headpiece of ropes and things that come down to around their chest, and a veil of rustic decorations and flowers. The clothes this time? Well, it’s a mixture and I can’t quite figure it out, but it would be on a runway somewhere and anyone could wear it and look very cool and complicated, but also like they stepped out of National Geographic Africa. The ganky pipe is long and almost bong-looking but not quite.
“Am I speaking a language you don’t understand?”
Across from me Chichi is asleep with her earphones on. It’s very long into the night. I don’t even bother to try to figure out if I’m asleep or awake because even when I’m awake Ganky Pipe is there.
“My name is Meticais. You can stop with the Ganky Pipe.”
“Meticais? Like the money in Mozambique?”
“Meticais as in Meticais, that’s all. What do you need a whole Wikipedia page about it for?”
Geez!
“So is it Portuguese you’re speaking?” I roll my eyes at myself because I feel like I would have known if it was Portuguese, but sometimes a silly question passes on through just because, and you have to accept that about the moment.
“Are you speaking Portuguese?” Meticais asks.
“Me? No?”
“How do you know? Is your mouth opening and you’re saying words?”
“No.”
“So how do you know what language you’re speaking?”
“Because I know the languages I speak.”
“So how do you understand me?”
Huh!
“Never mind that. I really did think you were smarter than this. Just tell me about the fight. I missed it.”
“What do you want to know about it for?” I ask.
Meticais makes a very dramatic sigh, clanks the bangles around their wrist, and waves their hand across their face as if a fly has bothered them. They settle into the bottom of their dramatic huff and disappear.
I was going to tell them. I wanted to know why they were interested, just because, but to be honest, when I think about it I’m not sure it was really going to be relevant to know. What’s important is, would I tell the story or not after knowing why they wanted to hear it, and the answer is yes, so did it matter?
I wait to see if they will come back but they don’t, so I guess I’ll tell the story anyway. With all that’s been happening, I’ve gotten totally sidetracked. I guess that’s why Baba says to keep it short.
CHAPTER SIX
IT all started with the day Chichi handed Tana her lunch pack as we got to school. We go to Walton Academy in Basingstoke. It has a high school and a junior school, Mama didn’t want complications of dropping off and picking up in different places so she told Dad we’d better all go to the same school and he could afford Walton because he made more than enough money as a doctor in private practice. Me and Chiwoniso, are in the senior school, because of being fourteen and seventeen, and Tana being ten is in the junior school. He’s a ten that sometimes feels like he’s still eight and a half. Some days he’s all the way nine and he only ever seems to be ten when it’s just me and him. On the day of Chichi’s lunch pack handover, he was a nine and half, smart enough to be suspicious but so out of his depth that when he looked into the lunch bag he became eight again, so jumpy and out of his mind that Davie Cross, his sometimes bestie, told him to “calm down mate” in a whisper so loud the teacher heard.
Tana asked his teacher if she would allow him to send an email to Dad and he asked her to promise she wouldn’t read it. But I mean, there he was definitely eight, because of course the teacher will look, even if she promised not to, because Tana was having a straight-out bananas panic attack. I don’t even know what Chichi thought she was doing, except that she was so busy singing “Viva Forever” over and over in the bathroom before we left that she forgot to make a proper plan for bag inspection day.
From: TanaMufanani@Walton.Prep.edu
To: DrTMufanani@basmediccentre.co.uk
Baba it’s about Chichi, she said she needed to keep her lunch in my bag bc there was a bag check today so I said yes but she told me not to look but obviously I did and It was a block i hav’nt checked that but i checked something else and i found hand made cigars and my friends saw me acting up and that pushed me of the edge so then i started to cry so i did deep breathing and ms Miles dosnt know but i cant email you so she i sharing this with you she promised not to look but Baba why cant we send Chichi away for at leats 1month and hopefully she will come back better
Tana yor son who loves you
I’ll give you three guesses what the “cigars” actually were. Baba was well mad and Chichi was suspended from school and grounded without phone privileges. Was she even sorry? Let me just tell you how that was another story. Chichi doesn’t do such a thing as sorry. Shame for you if you are not strong. Shame for me and Tana, we are not strong. She ripped through us like hail through rhododendron leaves.
“What’s the matter with you? What you got to be such a pussy for?” I’ll tell you that Tana’s eyes almost popped out of his head for this. She took him by the shoulders and looked him dead in the eye and breathed fire at him. “All you had to do was keep your big mouth shut and not look. Didn’t I tell you not to look? Didn’t. I. Tell. You? They don’t check your bags so no one would ever have known.”
Sometimes I leave Tana to deal with his own messes. Maybe he shouldn’t have looked, he knows Chichi, and more so after The Death, it’s a minefield with her. He should have refused to keep her lunch—but then again, I know Chichi, so, there’s no winning.
“It made me really nervous, Chichi, you shouldn’t have given it to me!”
“Why couldn’t you just calm down? You had to call Dad!”
Why she even gave it to him anyway? SMH. We all know Tana can’t deal with pressure.
“Why can’t you ever just have my back, Tana? Why do you always snitch? I can’t depend on anyone in this bloody house!”
“Why do you always have to drag him into your mess? Just leave him alone,” I said—to myself, of course, no point both of us being lambasted.
“And not that it’s any of your business but I was keeping it for Shaz. She’s already in trouble at home.”
Of course Chichi wouldn’t mind getting us all in trouble so Shaz doesn’t get in trouble. We’re her family, not Shaz!
“Anyway, you wouldn’t understand, you don’t have any friends, do you? And you better believe, you’re not my friend, I don’t want you to speak to me. Don’t even look in my direction for the rest of the week.”
Chichi can be so mean and sometimes I want to give her mean right back to her, but it leaves me feeling weak to have to catch the bad vibes in the first place. She’s only three years older than me and I tell myself I don’t have to be afraid of her, but sometimes she’s too much. I’ll never catch up the years, but I’ll also never be too far behind and lately it doesn’t matter at all.
Tana though, he’ll start taking her little treats and sidling into her room trying to get her to like him again. She’s made a Stockholm survivor out of him. And it’s not true what she says, me and Tana do have friends. I just don’t have a best friend. If Shaz is the nature of a best friend, I’m not doing badly to be my own friend. I could have a best friend if I wanted to. Abena would be so pleased with herself if I picked her, but after Caroline, I’m all out of the need.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHICHI was suspended from school and grounded at home. She didn’t have her phone but we have a land line so without Mama, who was there to stop her from calling her friends? Baba wasn’t used to doing the discipline grunt work because he was mainly at work making the money. If Mama had still been here, she would have made the punishment one hundred percent. When it came to misbehaving at school, Mama didn’t play.
There was a kind of peace for two days, then Baba was called out to an emergency just after supper. He said to Chichi, “You’re not to leave this house. You’re in charge while I’m gone and if there’s any trouble call me immediately.” Of course she didn’t say, “Yes Dad,” like she was supposed to, she just stomped up to her room. Tana said, “Baba, maybe I could go next door to the Mckays’.”
