When Hoopoes Go to Heaven Read online

  The ground near the edge of the plateau was wet and muddy. The small dam there that supplied water to the two houses was where the dairy cows came to drink when they were grazing on the pasture just the beyond the clump of trees, and Benedict could see that they had been drinking at this edge of the dam earlier that day: the mud that was now sucking at his shoes was patterned with hoof-prints and splattered with large rounds of fresh kinyezi.

  Grace and Faith didn’t know about the cows and their kinyezi, and Benedict wasn’t going to tell. It was part of Titi’s job of helping Mama with the house and the children to make sure that every drop of water they drank had been boiled for long enough to kill any germs, so nobody was going to get sick. But if his sisters ever found out that cows and cow-kinyezi had been in their bathwater, there would be a lot more screaming than Benedict could ever rescue the family from.

  As he squatted at the edge of the water and emptied the tadpole out of the jar, he wondered how long it was going to take Grace and Faith to understand that a tadpole was a baby frog that hadn’t yet lost its tail and grown its legs, and to realise that if a tadpole sometimes slipped into the pipe that led to the water-tank that led to the house, it had to mean that they were sharing their bathwater with frogs. Eh, the frogs made so much noise at night! Where did his sisters think the frogs lived?

  On the plateau, the pipes leading to the two water-tanks were covered over by cement to protect them from the cows’ hooves, until they met in a thicker pipe that travelled under the water towards the centre of the dam, where there was a pump for just in case. Just in case hadn’t happened yet on account of good rains, but if it did happen, there was a narrow wooden bridge that led to the pump, and a person could walk to the end of that bridge and switch the pump on.

  Benedict had wanted to walk to the end himself, but much to his shame, he hadn’t been able to manage even a single step. There were gaps between the planks of wood, small gaps, gaps big enough for only a finger to slip through, but gaps that Benedict could imagine his whole body slipping through and being lost forever. Eh! He knew it was impossible, he knew that imagining such a thing made him seem such a very small boy, but still his stomach knotted itself in fear whenever he thought of trying again.

  Right at the bottom of the hill, where the long driveway began at the dairy farm buildings before winding its way up towards the other house and the Tungarazas’, there was a cattle-grid across the ground – smooth metal strips with gaps in between – that the cows were afraid to cross. Benedict didn’t know if they worried that they might fall through the gaps, but it kept them from wandering off the property and into the road where they might get an accident. What he did know, without even trying, was that it would keep him on the property, too: while going over it in a vehicle held no fear for him, he wouldn’t be able to cross it on foot.

  Perhaps the gaps in the bridge to the middle of the dam were to keep the cows off it, too.

  A low rumble of distant thunder made something move in the long grass far to the right of the dam, and he saw a skinny young man stand up. He must have been squatting there all the time, so quiet and still that Benedict hadn’t noticed him. It was Petros, who helped with the cows and lived at the dairy below the other house. The Tungaraza children weren’t supposed to talk to Petros because he smoked a lot – cigarettes with a funny smell that he made for himself – and people said that he wasn’t quite right in his head.

  Benedict had never spoken to Petros, but he liked him anyway. He liked the way Petros could be still enough to make himself invisible. He had once seen him standing next to the cowshed – only, even though he had been looking right at the cowshed, he hadn’t seen him at all. Not until Petros had raised his hand to give a small wave of hello. Petros had a way of blending in to wherever he was so that nobody noticed him, just like a chameleon did, and that was something that Benedict sometimes tried to do himself. If you blended in, nobody noticed that you didn’t belong.

  Petros gave him a small wave now, and Benedict stood up from the water’s edge to return it. Then Petros made a loud, whooping, whistling noise that brought his dog and a number of cows from the field beyond the trees. Benedict watched as the cows ambled slowly towards Petros’s repeated call, their udders heavy with milk, speeding up only as a louder, closer clap of thunder rumbled through the darkening sky. When Petros was sure that the full count of cows was there, he gave Benedict another small wave before taking the cows to the far end of the clearing and leading them, with his dog, along their well-trodden path through the trees to the shed below the other house.

  Benedict headed home himself, down his own path. Mama didn’t want the children to be out when a storm was on its way, and Benedict knew that she was right to worry. Daniel and Moses, his two younger brothers, were in the same class at school, and a girl in their class had lost her mother and her baby sister to lightning just last month. The mother had been carrying her baby on her back when lightning had struck them, and now they were both late, and the girl from his brothers’ class had never had a father, so now she’d gone to live in Siteki with her uncle.

  Safely inside when it came, Benedict found the storm glorious. Deafening thunder rattled the tin roof of the house, making all of them stop what they were doing to cover their ears with their hands, and lightning stabbed at the sky’s darkness, tearing it open with light. Rain pounded against the tightly-shut windows at the back of the house as though it was desperate to be let in to shelter from itself, and Mama and Titi, steaming up the kitchen with the evening’s cooking, pushed a towel up against the small gap between the door and the floor to stop it from finding its way in underneath.

  After the storm passed, the air felt cool and fresh – almost relieved – as if it had picked itself up after something really bad had happened to it, and was ready to start again.

  They were all in their usual places after a delicious supper of stewed goat served with sweet potatoes and pumpkin leaves: the girls and the two younger boys on the two couches in front of the TV, Mama and Baba talking at the far end of the dining table, and Benedict between the children and the grown-ups, sitting on a big cushion on the floor under the lamp next to the bookshelf, his back up against the closed front door and a book open in his lap.

  The bookshelf was another thing he loved about this house. It was something completely new. Baba was an educated somebody, he was Dr Pius Tungaraza, but any books he had were about his work so he kept them at his office; and Mama always said she wasn’t an educated somebody who read books. Every second Saturday the children went to the public library in Mbabane, but borrowing and returning books was just not the same as having a bookshelf full of books to choose from at home. They weren’t the Tungarazas’ books – they belonged to the house like all the furniture and the pots and plates and sheets and towels – but Benedict could read them whenever he wanted. Amongst them was a whole entire set of encyclopaedias! Okay, not quite a whole entire set. Somebody had stolen XYZ so he could learn only as far as W. But still.

  That night he was paging through the book about all the birds you could see in southern Africa, smiling to himself as he saw the picture of the shy Burchell’s coucal, the bird with the water-bottle call that he had managed to see in the garden that afternoon, so he was already smiling when he looked up as Titi came in from cleaning up in the kitchen. She smiled back at him before quietly taking her place next to Grace on the couch. His attention distracted from the book, he tuned in to what Mama and Baba were talking about.

  ‘Only five cakes this whole time! Five!’

  ‘I know, Angel, but—’

  ‘It’s my business, Pius. I’m a businesswoman, a professional somebody. Baking cakes is what I do. It’s how I contribute to the family.’

  ‘I know that, Angel.’

  ‘But it’s not just that I’m not contributing. What am I supposed to be doing with all this time on my hands? It’s not like I have to do all the housework myself.’

  ‘I know.’

&nbs
p; ‘I’m bored, Pius! Bored!’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Eh! Boredom is a terrible thing! Terrible.’ She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh-uh.’

  ‘Well...’ Baba took a deep breath. ‘Maybe you could... learn something new?’

  Benedict knew that Baba would suggest learning something new. He had heard him suggesting it to lots of other people. If somebody was unhappy, Baba suggested learning something new. If somebody wasn’t getting very far in life, Baba suggested learning something new. Learning something new was Baba’s answer to almost any problem.

  ‘Eh! Me?’ Mama put her hand to her chest. ‘You know I’m not an educated somebody, Pius. I’m not somebody who reads books.’

  Benedict smiled, moving his eyes down to the bird book so that neither of them would notice that he was listening.

  ‘Books are not the only way to learn, Angel.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well... haven’t you taught other ladies how to bake cakes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did they need a book to learn how?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You see?’

  ‘What? What are you saying? That I must learn something that doesn’t take books? That I must learn how to milk cows? Because what else am I going to learn here on this farm?’

  Baba was quiet for a long time, and Benedict knew that he was thinking. It was Mama who spoke next, and it sounded like she had been thinking, too.

  ‘Maybe I could manage the downhill walk to the highway to catch a minibus taxi, then I could get to some kind of class in Mbabane. Those taxis are dangerous... overloaded... not looked after. But not all of them crash! But, eh, I don’t know about the long uphill walk up the driveway to get home again...’

  ‘Eh! Angel!’ Baba sounded like he’d just had a very good idea.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why didn’t I think of this before?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You could learn to drive!’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Yes! It’s perfect!’

  ‘Eh!’

  ‘I mean, I have the Corolla that comes with the job, the Microbus just sits here in the garage during the week, and you just sit here at home without your business keeping you busy—’

  ‘But am I not too old?’

  ‘What are you talking about? Your cousin Geraldine learned to drive after her husband became late, and she’s even older than you are.’

  ‘That’s true. I’m younger than Geraldine.’

  ‘I really think it’s the perfect solution, Angel. You won’t be bored if you’re learning a new skill!’

  ‘But Pius, how would we pay for lessons? In case you’ve forgotten, we have five children to feed. Five! And my business is making such a small contribution now!’

  ‘We’ll find a way to be okay, Angel.’ The sudden softness in Baba’s voice made Benedict look up from his book, and he saw Baba reaching across the table for Mama’s hand. ‘We always do.’

  Mama squeezed Baba’s hand, then let go of it to pull at the neck of her T-shirt and reach for one of the tissues that she kept tucked into her underwear. She took off her glasses and wiped a tear from each eye.

  ‘Eh, Pius! You’ve had such a wonderful idea.’ She put her tissue back and squeezed Baba’s hand again. ‘Thank you! I’d love to try learning to drive!’

  ‘It’s settled then. What’s the time?’ Baba looked at his watch. ‘Eh! News!’

  Baba got up, moved to one of the couches and began arguing with the children for the TV remote.

  Benedict watched as Mama put her glasses back on. They looked at each other, and both of them smiled their widest smiles.

  Later that night, Benedict lay fast asleep in the bedroom he shared with Daniel and Moses, the two of them in a double bunk, Benedict in a bed of his own. In his dream, he knelt on top of the silver water-tank behind the house, looking like he belonged there because his whole body was the exact same shiny silver colour. Holding Mama’s icing syringe over a hole in the top of the tank, he pulled back the plunger so that the syringe filled with hundreds of little black tadpoles. Then, turning with the syringe towards the dam, he pushed the plunger in, shooting them all in a huge arc that landed them safely in the water. Lined up on the edge of the dam, the tadpoles’ parents croaked their loud thanks, while round the base of the water-tank his sisters and some of the girls from school threw gold stars and glitter up at him, calling his name.

  Then they started pushing at one another, and the watertank began to rock, and the gold stars and glitter turned into a bright light in his face.

  And then he was awake, and Titi was standing next to his bed with the torch, shaking his shoulder.

  ‘Benedict!’ she hissed.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Chura,’ she said softly in Swahili, maybe because a language not your own doesn’t come easily in the middle of the night, or maybe because her English lessons at the other house hadn’t yet taught her the word.

  ‘Wapi? Where?’

  Crawling sleepily out of his bed, he followed her silently into the bedroom she shared with his sisters, which was the very worst place in the whole entire world for a frog to be. His sisters lay fast asleep, unaware of how close they were to screaming.

  Titi led him to the window, where she pulled aside one of the curtains very slowly and quietly, and shone the torch directly at the glass.

  Benedict couldn’t help breathing in loudly in surprise and delight, and Titi had to nudge him to remind him to be quiet.

  Stuck to the outside of the glass by the tiny sticky discs on its feet was a small tree frog about the length of one of Benedict’s fingers.

  ‘Eh!’ His voice was barely a whisper.

  ‘Shh!’

  Almost silently, by the light of just the torch, they made their way into the lounge. To open the big glass sliding door leading onto the veranda would have made too much noise, so they turned the key quietly in the lock on the front door, just next to the bookshelf on whose top sat the small basket where Baba put his car keys whenever he came home. In there was the key to the security gate on the other side of the door. It made a loud click when Benedict unlocked it, and the two of them froze.

  Just when they were sure that nobody had woken, the overhead light went on and Baba filled the entrance to the passageway.

  ‘What’s going on?’ His voice was a harsh whisper.

  Reluctant to meet his eyes, Benedict concentrated on Baba’s round middle, where a button on his pyjama top was straining to keep the two sides of it together.

  ‘Sorry, Baba. There’s a frog.’ He kept his voice to a whisper.

  ‘A frog? In here?’ Baba scanned the floor.

  ‘Outside, Uncle,’ whispered Titi.

  ‘Outside? But that is where a frog belongs!’

  ‘A tree frog, Baba.’

  ‘I see. And does a tree not belong outside, too?’

  ‘It’s on the window, Baba.’

  ‘Eh! On the outside of the window?’

  Titi and Benedict nodded.

  ‘But what are you planning to do? Bring it inside?’

  Benedict shook his head and opened his mouth to say no, but Baba went on.

  ‘The logical thing to do, the right thing to do, is just to leave it alone. Surely!’

  ‘It’s the window of the girls’ room, Baba.’

  Benedict could see from Baba’s face that he was now beginning to understand.

  ‘I see. Can it get inside there?’

  Benedict nodded. The windows were barred against possible intruders, but for the sake of extra safety the larger, lower windows remained shut at night, and just the smaller ones at the top were left open for air. While they were way too high for the average frog, a climbing tree frog could easily get in.

  ‘It woke me, Uncle. Dwah! against the glass.’

  ‘It could wake them, too.’

  Rolling his eyes, Baba led the way out through the front door and round to the wide veranda, whi
ch was flooded in moonlight. He made as if to wait there, folding his arms around himself against the cool evening air, but Titi handed him the torch and waited there herself. She was somewhere in her early twenties – at least, that’s what they all guessed – but Benedict knew that when it came to frogs, girls remained girls no matter how many birthdays they had.

  Passing the boys’ room quietly, Benedict and Baba moved towards the window of the girls’ room that bore a stud like one of the shiny jewels at the neck of Mama’s smooth satin dress.

  The enormous orange eyes of the frog seemed hypnotised by the light of the torch. It barely struggled at all as Benedict detached it gently from the glass and held it in the palm of his hand, admiring the beauty of its delicate little body. Its colours looked like peanut sauce poured over spinach with raggedy strips of dark green spinach showing through.

  He turned his hand to look at the creature from the back, and the instant the torchlight was no longer in its over-sized eyes, it seemed to remember itself. It leapt off his hand into the grass and was gone.

  Back in his bed after Titi had made him wash his hands in the kitchen to avoid making a noise in the bathroom, Benedict thought about the beautiful little frog that had wanted to come in from the outside, in to where it didn’t belong. Had it really been trying to get in, or had the moonlight made a pretend garden in the glass, a garden that the frog had thought it could hop through to get to somewhere else? Way past the stage of being a tadpole, it was still very small. Was it impatient to be big in the same way that Benedict was? Did tadpoles all come from their eggs at the same time, or was there always one male that came out sooner than the others, one that was always going to be responsible for all the others on account of being the eldest? Benedict didn’t know, but he would look for some answers in one of the books on the bookshelf.