Travel Light, Move Fast, Page 3

  “I think so,” I whispered.

  Time was suddenly revealed to be utterly surreal, an impossibly demanding reality; there’s no turning back the clock; there’s no way to shove the minutes behind you, or to drag out an end. Everything is always starting and ending all the time, without cease. It was only the stories we told that gave time the impression of shape, or meaning, or prospect.

  “Nearly home,” Dad always said once we could see the little bridge with the crumpled guardrails a dozen miles west of the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. The bridge was usually choked with goats. Also, it had taken several structural hits, eighteen-wheelers trying to make the border before dark. Crossing that little bridge was a reminder of the impermanence of everything.

  But “nearly home” meant if the little bridge collapsed, or if the car broke down, or if we hit a goat and had to begin negotiating compensation with the goat’s many sudden owners, or if the road was washed away in a flash flood, we’d be able to walk from here. “Nearly home” meant you were among your people; you were understood, your passage was assured, and your word was good.

  By Dad’s standards, “nearly home” meant you were safe.

  “Yes, I think it’s the final stretch,” I said.

  I forced open the windows next to Dad’s bed; a flurry of houseflies blew in on a current of hot, petrol-scented air. There were blackbirds in an elm tree twenty feet from the window. Their irrepressible chatter and squabbling broke through the droning buzz and hum of the ICU.

  “Oh, listen to their happy racket,” Mum said, smiling gratefully. She put her hand on Dad’s arm then, and leaned forward. “Thank you, Hon,” she said. She spoke slowly and clearly, as if trying to get through to him on an old telephone line. “That was quite a ride.” Then she looked up at me, blinking rapidly, her SOS eyes. “Do you think he heard me?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure he did,” I said. “Of course he did.”

  There was a long pause; the blackbirds chattered and squabbled uninterrupted; it made the room less lonely and Dad’s impending death more commonplace, as if he were merely resting in a garden somewhere, waiting for a meeting. Death would gently settle next to him then, slide into his place, surely; Death wouldn’t alter the mise-en-scène unduly.

  The birds would keep up their chorus.

  Then night would fall.

  Mum sighed. She put her hand on Dad’s forehead. A slim rim of tears brimmed in her eyes, but did not fall. “Good-bye, Hon,” she said very softly. She stared and stared at him, and then blinked at me again. “I suppose we should go now,” she said. “We can’t stay here forever.”

  Then quite suddenly but slowly, very slowly, Dad’s hand moved, as if the weight of his still powerfully muscled arm were extraordinary. Slowly, slowly, he reached up for Mum’s face; the way he must have done hundreds of times in their fifty-one years together. Mum sat utterly still, her eyes closed.

  He touched her hair first. Then he worked his way down her forehead, her arched brows, those cheekbones, that chiseled nose; as if her legendary beauty were one of his beloved old maps he’d pored over, tracing every river and contour, before heading out into the bush and getting completely lost anyway.

  From her jawline, he ran his forefinger across her chin until he met the little cleft in the middle, then he gave a tap. “Chin up, Tub,” he may as well have said the words, his final instruction to her. And at last her lips, he slowly ran his fingers over her lips, back and forth until she smiled; her final gift to him.

  * * *

  —

  I GOT THE CALL in my hotel room at dawn, Dad’s favorite time of day; it was the very sunburned young doctor, I recognized his voice. “The father is dead,” the very sunburned young doctor informed me. The father. The definite article seemed correct. I was already out of bed, and running toward Mum.

  The young doctor had sunburned himself waterskiing at a lake near the city. I’d gleaned that piece of information, as I’d surreptitiously learned everything, from the enemy, Jazmin; he was burned behind the knees, shoulders, everywhere. But I’d never been able to figure out his name. Mum, ever the helpful storyteller, had dubbed him Little Péter, to distinguish him from the old doctor, Old Péter. We liked Old Péter. “So dedicated,” Mum said. “So sympathetic.”

  But I’d disliked Little Péter on sight for all sorts of reasons: For a start, I didn’t trust a doctor who’d fry himself like an egg this late in the summer. Also, he’d seemed to be in cahoots with Jazmin; how else would she know exactly how he’d sunburned himself, and where? But Mum was inclined to show a kindly disposition toward Little Péter. I thought it was simply that she hadn’t been around him enough to establish a proper prejudice.

  I put her in a taxi, her hand tiny around a cup of sweet tea. She never took sugar, except for shock. She looked so alone, so terrified.

  “I’ll see you there,” I said.

  Her eyelids fluttered at me, dash-dot-dash-dot. I wished I’d had a comforting pet I could throw onto her lap.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll have it all sorted by the time you get there.”

  Then I ran the four miles from the hotel to the hospital. There were so many refugees now, thousands of people walking through the streets, the city was in gridlock even so early, no one talking. It didn’t sound like people on the move. It sounded like the clattering of pigeon wings, or like fat raindrops on a tin roof.

  What grief.

  I couldn’t even begin to fathom what grief. Grief upon grief, I imagined; I couldn’t comprehend how a body can withstand losing so much at once, and more with each step, nationless, homeless, unpeopled by force. But in my own untethered newness to this fresh loss, all I could hear was Dad’s insistence; he’d made sure the words would stay in my head.

  He’d been a lucky man.

  No, not just lucky, a very lucky man.

  He’d been very lucky, and I was very lucky too.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When in Doubt, Have a Cigarette

  Even this early, people were already smoking in the streets. Budapest, city of smokers; people working a long preoccupation out of their lungs, that’s how it seemed. Not the refugees; they were moving, heads down, a people in a terrible hurry to get nowhere. I was moving with my head down too; I wasn’t smoking either.

  I had quit several days earlier; we were all supposed to have quit. “You should all stop smoking,” Dad had suddenly declared in the middle of dying. He had said this quite clearly, although it had taken some effort for him to come to the surface of his comingled worlds to the one in his section of the ICU ward in Budapest; there were visitors unseen to me with whom he was also holding conversations.

  Everyone talking at once, Dad hated that; he’d blown out his hearing in the war. He preferred one person talking at a time, or ideally, silence. “Bobo?”

  “Dad?”

  Dad had motioned me closer; the BBC productions of royal family shenanigans have this part right, everyone straining to hear the last directives of the dying monarch. Dad paused magnificently. He had my full attention. He’d always had my full attention, from the beginning of my awareness he’d had my full attention.

  “You must all stop smoking,” Dad had said. Then he’d sunk back against the pillows with a sigh. “Make sure you tell them, Bobo.” The directive clearly had exhausted him, because Dad closed his eyes for a while and appeared to be resting; then the other worlds washed back in, and Dad resumed mumbled conversations with visitors invisible to me.

  You must all stop smoking.

  It wasn’t a huge ask, all things considered. We didn’t have to restore our father’s lost fortunes, defend his character, or redeem his reputation: That might have taken some doing. We simply had to stop smoking.

  We’d all smoked like whores on fire, Dad, Van, and I. Rich could outsmoke us all when he showed up; that was worth noting. Mum had tri
ed smoking a few times, valiantly; she stained her fingers a greasy yellow and nearly died of asthma each time. “Oh no. I was forced to quit smoking years ago, thank you,” she’ll tell anyone who offers her a cigarette. “It nearly killed me, but you go right ahead.”

  We smoked in the car, we smoked in the sitting room, we smoked in the kitchen, we smoked in the bathtub. There were ashtrays everywhere; that was Mum’s contribution, she collected them, she bought them, she stole them. “I refuse to be one of those boring ex-smokers who becomes holier than thou when they stop,” Mum said, holiest of them all.

  My father smoked one cigarette after the other; a pungent grey ribbon of burning tobacco followed him wherever he went; he could light a cigarette while driving a motorbike in deep sand, you don’t see that very often. I smoked like my father, although after I married Charlie—“An American,” Mum said with grim satisfaction, “she’ll be forced to quit”—I quit.

  “It’s frowned upon in America,” Mum expounded; much of what she knows about the United States she’s picked up from the BBC World Service and from the advertisements in American airline magazines when she’s come to visit the children and me in Wyoming. “They’re very keen on their health over there. And they’re fanatical about white teeth.”

  I still smoked in my dreams, though. And I smoked when I came home to Zambia. Also I smoked on assignment for magazines and newspapers, when I was out of the country. Angola, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Mozambique, South Africa; wherever there’s suffering, there’re cigarettes. I bought the roughest, the cheapest. I bought cartons; I bought to share. We were always up against it, deadlines, dust, and failing light. We smoked when we were tired, hungry, or anxious.

  “Lung snack anyone?”

  The health warnings on the back of the cigarette packs and tobacco tins didn’t deter us then; we read them at roadblocks, in hotel rooms, and in our camps—hours kicking around waiting for an interview, or waiting for something to happen, or hoping nothing would. Dad didn’t heed the health warnings either. “Well, Bobo, if smoking’s what finally kills me it’ll be a bloody miracle,” he said.

  There were so many alternatives; it would be a miracle.

  Nicotine Tim they’d called Dad at the expensive, mediocre English boarding school he’d attended in the fifties. But smoking for my father was never just about the addiction, although there was that too. “Filthy habit,” he’d say occasionally, but he’d never quit for long, only temporarily, when forced by regulations, say, or a very high fever.

  In my father’s world, tobacco was a way to get around. It was bribes to policemen and customs officials. It was solace to soldiers. It was instead of a meal when food had run out. It was a way to meet a stranger. It was how to defuse mistrust. Cigarettes were what you did when there was nothing else to be done.

  But there was something unnatural about it too. “Never forget that tobacco is a fourteen-month crop,” Dad told me once. “There’s no time to rest.” It was an aberrant harvest; hard on soil, untethered from time. And for him, everything was about time, burning through it the way he did.

  Smoked properly, a cigarette to my father was a way to slow time down. At a dinner party, a cigarette between courses was companionable; a way to permit the food to settle, an interval to allow conversations that may have overheated to cool and those that may have cooled to warm up.

  “Anyone care to join me for intercourse?” Dad would ask, pushing himself back from the table after the soup but before the meat. Or after the meat but before the pudding he’d shout, “Garçon!” As if all waiters—even waiters in Zambia—were French, regardless of the more likely scenario, which was that they weren’t. “Rectify this drought! We’re all going outside for a breath of fresh air!”

  Then we drifted outside, following Dad, our glasses refreshed, fresh cigarettes lit; and the air in the car parks, or gardens, or streets felt suddenly invigorating, our perspectives renewed, everything a little more romantic; insects calling, frogs, always something scuttling off into the undergrowth in that part of the world, small mammals up trees, or a gecko laughing from the walls beneath electric lights.

  “Let’s have a party!” That was Dad’s war cry.

  Mum would stiffen slightly. “Someone’s restless tonight,” she’d observe, but the corners of her mouth would be twitching with happy anticipation.

  “Olé!” Dad would shout from across the lawn.

  “Olé!” Mum would cry, head thrown back.

  Then after a while, someone sensible would notice the mosquitoes were out in force, and that we were all being chewed to death. We’d all clatter inside, another round of drinks! “Join us! Have a drink!” my father would shout to patrons at other tables. “Bring your women!” That was a dinner party with my father, a wonderful host, and a siren call to a crashing hangover.

  Or the way my father called it, a proper religious experience.

  * * *

  —

  THERE’S ONE IN EVERY PROPER FAMILY—or there should be—a black sheep. There are also aunts in every proper family, or there used to be. Dad had five; one behind every rock in England, he complained. “Tim Fuller went to Africa and lost everything,” the aunts had lamented. It wasn’t what they’d hoped; it wasn’t what he’d given them to expect. He’d had his larks.

  He’d done the usual spell in Paris before college; he’d sown a wild oat or two on the Continent, where no one spoke proper English and everyone was foreign, so it didn’t matter. He’d earned his diploma, barely. He’d kidnapped the Dairy Queen on graduation day.

  It was time for him to settle down.

  “But I knew I couldn’t stay in England,” Dad said. “It was already too small and crowded without me cluttering up the place.” Instead, he took off for Canada and hired on as a farmhand in Quebec. “In those days the Canadians paid the passage over plus fifty quid for anyone who’d go out and whiten the place up a bit,” Dad said. “Biting flies in summer, deadly winters.”

  When he’d had enough of the cold—“Didn’t take very long,” Dad said, “terrible bloody climate”—he found work at a hotel in the West Indies. Rum punches, sun, and goat stew; he was happy there, but when his bar bill exceeded his salary he took it as a sign he’d outstayed his welcome and applied for a job on a wattle plantation in Kenya, where he also planned to see a giraffe. He always said that: “I wanted to go to Kenya to see a giraffe.”

  But before he could see a giraffe, Dad set eyes on Mum. She’d recently returned to Kenya after a mandatory year in London. She’d hated every moment of it. She’d loathed the weather, and she’d found the people intolerant of her colonial accent. “One flat vowel and they pounced,” Mum said. “Ridiculous, of course. I have perfect RP.” She paused. “Received Pronunciation. The way the BBC used to be before they went all funny.”

  Mum had come back to her parents’ farm on the Uasin Gishu plateau, back to her beloved mare Violet, back to her unfettered life under perfect equatorial light. She was determined to make up for lost time. “Well, she’s your mother,” Dad said. “I don’t need to tell you what happens when she gets the bit between her teeth.”

  Mum had been raised with the highlands, horses, and homemade wine beneath the gaze of Mount Elgon in neighboring Uganda. “We led very wholesome, outdoorsy lives in Keen-ya,” Mum said, glancing down at her very good legs; her calves have always slid without protest into the slimmest of slim riding boots. “It was obvious to Dad right away. We were having much more fun in East Africa than anyone was having in the dreary old Home Counties.”

  Now that he was self-exiled to the ex-colonies, my father’s family hardly spoke to him or of him again, although it’s not as if he was able to shake off his past. The pettiness of the dreary old Home Counties trailed him to Kenya too, of course it did. There was always, is still, a question of one’s pedigree; a concept so British it ingrained itself and lodged and festered wherever the British were, wherever they
went. “The aunts were hoping to select a wife from the pages of the Who’s Who,” Dad said. “Although by the time I got to the West Indies, they’d have settled for anything with a double-barreled name as long as it was white.”

  Similarly, when after less than a month in Kenya, Dad rashly proposed to Mum, there were frantic letters from my maternal grandmother in Eldoret to relatives back in Britain. “Name of Timothy Fuller, mother née Garrard, the Crown Jewelers. Father’s side is navy,” Granny wrote to her sister, Flora, still living near the ancestral home on the Isle of Skye. “He seems all right. But as he’s not from any family we know, many questions remain dangling.”

  And for the most part, they remained dangling. My father’s side of the family didn’t attend his wedding nor did they ever visit him afterward in our large, loose, scrappy lives. It was as if Dad had pitched up in Kenya attached to nothing, an English foundling under his own recognizance, lost abroad. Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode, he declared himself.

  * * *

  —

  ON JULY 10, 1964, seven months after they met, my parents were married in Eldoret, Kenya. Mum a day over twenty, Dad barely twenty-four. The men wore top hats and tails, the women wore gloves, girls from the local high school sang in the choir; unremarkably conventional nuptials except for what happened next.

  “I think your father mistook the sound of a champagne cork for the sound of a starting gun,” my grandmother said afterward. “Your parents took off for their honeymoon at a hundred miles an hour, and they never slowed down for the corners.”

  By the time I was born, five years into their marriage, Mum and Dad had already lived on several farms in three countries on two continents; they’d even been jauntily homeless for a bit in Rhodesia when Vanessa was a baby and Mum pregnant, living out of a car. That baby, a son, had died of meningitis; he’d been nine months old.

  My parents were on the next train to Beira.