LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘But now I’ve had a better idea,’ the Pretorian said. ‘I think we should grill the snake this evening. Then Carl can show us how he does his thing.’

      ‘I second the motion!’ laughed Jake-from-the-Cape, even more relieved.

      My father was no longer amused.

      ‘We can do that,’ Pa said, his eyes on the grill, ‘but I’ll have to inspect the snake first. You can’t throw any old snake on the coals.’

      ‘Come on, Carl, it’s too late to chicken out now!’

      Jake-from-the-Cape slapped my father on the back. My throat closed as though I were choking on a piece of snake meat. The man shouldn’t have said that.

      ‘Chicken!’ My father’s voice rose as it did when he was losing a court case. ‘Ha! You’ll swallow your words tonight, Jake my man! Along with a nice mouthful of grilled snake!’

      ‘Bye, bye, Miss American Pie,’ Don McLean sang over the radio. ‘Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry …’

      I sang along, moved my shoulders and kicked my feet as if I wanted to swim through the music.

      ‘Why did the guy take his car to a lavatory?’ Lovey asked, lying next to me with her eyes closed.

      ‘I’ve also wondered.’ I thought she’d fallen asleep. ‘But Simon says when you sing, the words don’t have to make any sense. He says if everyone sang more and said less the world would be a better place.’

      ‘Not if everyone sings as off-key as you do,’ Lovey mumbled.

      I pretended not to have heard. Just listen to old Bob Dylan, Simon said. Oh, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. It was actually better if the words were a bit jumbled, Simon said. Then it sounded deep.

      London

       14 July 1992

      Dear Child

      I hate zoos. But I was so homesick today that I dragged my child to a zoo. Since I started writing my story last month, I’ve been homesick all the time. Or heartsick, as I prefer to call it. (There’s an Afrikaans word that describes the feeling better, but I can’t bring it to mind.) I thought I would feel better if I saw a few other exiles from Africa but that depressed me even more.

      A rhinoceros behind bars in a London zoo is a pathetic sight. It simply stood there, immobile, staring crossly with its small eyes at the visitors. Its rough, dirty-grey skin reminded me of the heels of the children at Cape Town’s traffic lights, those begging hands and drugged eyes which used to appear behind my closed window like visions from hell. I couldn’t take it. It was one of the reasons why I fled. I didn’t want to live in a country where children looked like that. And yet, when I stood in front of the rhino today I wondered which one of us felt less at home here, in the heart of London.

      I grabbed my child’s sticky hand and walked unseeingly to the lion cage. In the innocence of his two-and-a-half years, he, in any case, was more interested in the packet of dinosaur sweets in his other sticky hand than in any of the pathetic animals his mother wanted to look at. Children are supposed to like zoos but I wonder whether that isn’t just another myth adults want to believe.

      In the souvenir shop, at the end of our visit, he asked me to buy him a plastic dinosaur. They don’t sell dinosaurs here, I snapped at him, unnecessarily impatient, fed up to the back teeth with this passion for a species that died out ages ago. Zoos are for living animals, I tried to explain more patiently. Why? he wanted to know.

      Why, indeed?

      I offered to buy him a plastic rhino. Or an elephant or a lion. He wanted a plastic dinosaur. Sometimes my son is stubborn – like any other toddler – but sometimes it seems as if his whole body becomes one solid unyielding mass. Then he becomes far heavier than he appears to be, totally immovable. That’s when he reminds me of Pierre.

      The lion walked endlessly back and forth behind the bars, its mane tattered. It looked even worse than the rhino.

      ‘Leeu,’ I said to my son.

      ‘Leo,’ my English son repeated as though speaking of an astrological sign.

      ‘Roar, Young Lion!’ I ordered the lion, but it stared at me as uncomprehendingly as my son. ‘Rrroaaa! Rrroaaa!’

      My son’s munching jaw stilled for a moment before he clapped his hands in excitement. Applause for a mother who behaved like an idiot.

      Years ago there was a zoo below Rhodes Memorial in Cape Town. I don’t know if I ever saw it. Perhaps it was before my time. Perhaps my mother told me about it. But I swear I can remember an emaciated lion in a dirty cage near a freeway.

      That is my earliest memory of a zoo. The others are even worse.

      In junior school I went on an expedition, with a crowd of fellow pupils, to the Tygerberg Zoo. All I can remember is a bunch of wriggling snakes in a snake pit. I dreamt about snakes for months on end, woke up screaming night after night. My mother was at her wits’ end.

      And then, of course, there was the visit to the Pretoria Zoo, the day the photo was taken which I told you about last month. I was a teenager, all long legs and private parts, sweating in a small cable car high above a hippopotamus enclosure with only the thin floor of the cable car and a helluva long drop between me and the hippo. With his skinny body in his ugly brown army uniform, Pierre made the car swing back and forth, laughing defiantly. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed to be in another place – any other place – when I opened them. When I dared to peer through my lashes again, I hung right above the rhino enclosure. It was probably the start of my perpetual doubt about the power of prayer.

      ‘Which is worse?’ I asked my son, a game I regularly play with him. ‘To be squashed by a hippopotamus or impaled by a rhinoceros?’

      He squealed with laughter and even offered me one of his dinosaur sweets. He loves such horrible possibilities. Give him a story with a violent ending and he smiles from ear to ear. Dwarfs who tear themselves in half through sheer rage. Witches in burning shoes, forced to dance until they drop dead. Where did this bloodlust originate?

      His African ancestors’ hunting spirit? Or the fighting spirit of his Irish forebears?

      Only an hour ago I sent him to sleep with another pitiless fairy tale. So that I can continue my own pitiless story.

      What does it feel like to be sixteen? I would like to experience that feeling again – really experience it, not just recall it superficially – so that I can tell my tale that much better.

      I would also like to believe that you are well and happy, wherever you may be.

      M.

      Nights in white satin

      It was dark in the hostel and as oppressively hot as it was every night. Not quite as dark as every night, I realised, after lying with my eyes open for a while. The moon had to be nearly full.

      Simon would’ve known. His moods always became stranger as the moon grew. It was inexplicable, Ma said, it should actually happen to me because the moon was my ruling planet, but she thought it might have something to do with his rising star. Ma took things like that seriously. Simon only laughed and said he didn’t believe in the stars, it was because he was a werewolf that he was affected by the moon.

      I turned on my side so that I could see Dalena’s bed. She was also lying on her side. Probably as soaked in sweat as I was. The smell of Peaceful Sleep hung stupefyingly in the air. As it did every night.

      I was startled when I saw the whites of her eyes.

      ‘I thought you were asleep,’ I whispered.

      ‘Too hot,’ she whispered back.

      ‘Don’t you ever get used to it?’

      ‘To the heat?’

      ‘To everything,’ I whispered,

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