Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller Page A

of you and I’ll have you both for bloody mutton chops,” says Dad.
    That’s that. Mutton chops is not what we want to be. We shut up.
    Vanessa and I eat our chips slowly, one at a time, dissolving them on our tongues, and the vinegar burns so we swallow Coke to wash down the sting. We each feed Shea three or four chips. She missed her supper too.
    Dad drives wildly, but it’s not children-on-the-roof-wild which is fun and scary all at the same time and we’re singing and the saliva is stringing from our mouths in thin silver ribbons. This is the way a man drives when he hopes he will slam into a tree and there will be silence afterward and he won’t have to think anymore. Now we are only scared.
    Mum has gone to sleep. She is softly, deeply drunk. When Dad slows down to take a corner, she sags forward and hits her forehead damply on the dashboard and is startled, briefly, awake. The car is strong with the smell of cigarette smoke and stale beer. Burped-and-farted beer. Breathed-out beer. In the dark we watch the bright red cherry from Dad’s cigarette. It lights his face and the lines on his face are old and angry. Vanessa and I have finished our Coke’ n’ chips. Our tummies are full-of-nothing-aching-hungry. Shea is asleep on Vanessa’s lap.
    If we crash and all of us die it will be my fault because Olivia died and that made Mum and Dad crazy.
    That’s how it is after Olivia dies.

Bus stop
    VACATION
    The house is more than we can stand without Olivia. The emptiness of life without her is loud and bright and sore, like being in the full anger of the sun without a piece of shade to hide under.
    Dad has said we’ll go on holiday.
    “To where?”
    “Anywhere. Anywhere that isn’t here.”
    So we drive recklessly through war-ravaged Rhodesia.
    A green Peugeot rattling along the desolate black strips of tar with toilet paper flying victoriously from the back windows (where Vanessa and I were seeing how long it could go before it tore off and lay behind us on the road like a fat, white run-over snake, twisting in agony). As the roads of Rhodesia uncurled in front of our new, hungry sorrow, we sang, “One man went to mow, / Wenttomowameadow,” and “One hundred baboons playing on a minefield. And if one baboon should accidentally explode, there’ll be ninety-nine baboons playing on a minefield.”
    And when we stop singing, Dad shouts, “Sing!”
    So we sing, “Because we’ re” —pause— “all Rhodesians and we’ll fight through thickanthin, / We’ll keep this land a free land, stop the enemy comin’ in. / We’ll keep them north of the Zambezi till that river’s runnin’ dry / And this great land will prosper ‘cos Rhodesians never die.”
    And we sing, “Ag pleez, Daddy won’t you take us to the drive-in? / All six, seven of us eight, nine, ten.”
    Until Mum says, “Please, Tim, can’t we just have some quiet? Hey? Some peace and quiet.”
    Mum is quietly, steadily drinking out of a flask that contains coffee and brandy. She is softly, sadly drunk.
    Dad says, “Okay, kids, that’s enoughofthat. ”
    So we sit on each side of the back seat with the big hole in the middle where Olivia should be and watch Mum’s eyes go half-mast.
    We are driving through a dreamscape. The war has cast a ghastly magic, like the spell on Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Everything is dormant or is holding its breath against triggering a land mine. Everything is waiting and watchful and suspicious. Bushes might suddenly explode with bristling AK-47s and we’ll be rattled with machine-gun fire and be lipless and earless on the road in front of the burned-out smoldering plastic and singed metal of our melting car.
    The only living creatures to celebrate our war are the plants, which spill and knot and twist victoriously around buildings and closed-down schools in the Tribal Trust Lands, or wrap themselves around the feet of empty kraals. Rhodesia’s war has turned the place back on itself, giving the land back to