When Hoopoes Go to Heaven (17 page)

They were quiet for a while as Henry pulled back onto the road and picked up a bit of speed. But the noise and rush of the king’s cavalcade seemed to have shaken Mama from her low mood, so
that when they passed a small group of worshippers ambling home after a Church of Jericho service, she clapped her hands together and said how beautiful they always looked in their bright red robes
with their wide collars of royal blue.

‘Titi would look too nice in that red!’ Henry adjusted his mirror again to look at her.

‘Me, I prefer the full blue,’ said Titi.

‘Ah! You say that only because you know I’m a Zionist! You should come to church with me one day, I’ll get someone to borrow me a lovely blue robe for you.’

Titi looked down into her lap, but Benedict could see that there was a very big smile on her face.

Henry turned off the road and entered the large, open-air car park of The Gables shopping centre, where there were very few cars. The supermarket there was still open but almost empty. There was
a lazy, Sunday-afternoon feel to the couple of restaurants, and there was very little activity in the car park. He pulled his Corolla into a parking bay far from the other cars, and they all got
out.

‘Right, my friend,’ he said to Benedict. ‘See that mountain to your left?’

Benedict looked. ‘It’s Nyonyane. Execution Rock.’

‘And what did I say was opposite?’

Benedict swung his head the other way and breathed in sharply as he saw the mountain there. ‘Is that...?’ He had no breath to finish his question.

‘
Yebo.
Those are Sheba’s Breasts.’

Benedict stared at the mountaintop. ‘But I see only one!’

Henry opened the boot of the Corolla and took out a number of orange traffic cones. ‘They’re side-on, nè? The other one lies behind.’

This wasn’t the perfect view that Henry had promised, but Benedict hid his disappointment. ‘Do you see, Mama?’

‘I see.’ Slipping her hand down the neckline of her blouse, she pulled out some folded emalangeni notes and peeled off a couple, handing them to Titi. ‘You two have some sodas
while you wait.’

Henry stopped positioning his cones and reached for his wallet from his back pocket. ‘There’s a nice place behind the butchery across the road, nè? Get some meat for a braai
tonight while you’re there.’ He smiled at Titi as he handed her some money.

‘What kind of meat?’ Titi slipped the notes inside the top of her dress.

He shrugged. ‘Some chops, some
wors.
Whatever you think. Enough for two, nè?’ He winked at her, and she dropped her head and smiled.

‘Be careful crossing the road!’ said Mama, who was buckling herself in to the driver’s seat.

‘We will, Mama.’

Benedict turned and gave her a small wave as he and Titi headed towards the gateway out of the car park. Part of him wanted to give her a hug as he always used to when saying goodbye to her, but
hugging her was starting to feel a bit awkward these days. Of course, he still did it when he was ill or upset. But he certainly wasn’t going to hug her now in front of Henry, who saw that he
was big.

Titi took his hand as they waited to cross the road, and he let her. He didn’t want to get an accident when he was so close to finding where the treasure might be. Auntie Rachel thought
the treasure was pretend, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be real. He wasn’t exactly sure how he would go about finding it, but he knew from a storybook that there was a way of
finding water that just needed you to hold two sticks, and the sticks knew where the water was buried. Maybe sticks knew treasure, too. Baba would be so proud of him if he came home from the
conference and found the dining table covered with gold and diamonds! It wouldn’t matter that Mama’s business wasn’t doing well, and Baba would be able to retire without worrying
about the children. They could all go home to Tanzania, and Mama and Baba could relax. Imagine!

Inside the butchery at the end of a small row of shops next to the Why Not Disco Night Club – where people said ladies who weren’t polite took all their clothes off as they danced
– Titi took her time choosing the meat for the braai she would enjoy with Henry that night. While he waited, Benedict looked around. The large chunks of fresh meat hanging up on hooks behind
the butcher, and the smaller cuts of dried beef, kudu and ostrich suspended above the counter reminded him of the shrike’s butchery he had found one day in a tree near the dam. The bird had
killed a lizard and hung it up on a thorn for later.

Braai
was another word from South Africa, and it was the same as saying barbecue. Behind the butchery you could braai your meat over a fire inside half of an old oil drum lying on its
side on top of the metal frame of an old school desk. Then you could sit and eat it at one of the plastic tables in the shady courtyard.

Benedict and Titi knew without discussing it that they should drink their Cokes at a table some distance from anybody else. That way they wouldn’t be too close to somebody who might be
drinking too much beer or too close to somebody who might hear their Swahili and shout at them for being
shangaans
or
makwerekwere.
Only two of the tables were occupied anyway, so it
was easy enough to find one that stood apart under a shady tree.

Benedict picked up a couple of the small sticks that had fallen from the tree and played with them as he chatted and giggled with Titi, hoping that they might point to the treasure, if it was
real and if it was here. But they didn’t work, and he soon lost interest, tossing them to the ground and concentrating instead on a lone hadeda ibis that stalked nearby, pecking at the ground
with its long, curved beak. When some ducks flew very low overhead, quacking loudly, the hadeda took flight clumsily, its large grey body seeming awkward as it squawked its loud racket into the
afternoon air during take-off.

He looked up at the ducks. Black with orange legs and grey bills, they were the same kind as the duck that he had rescued. He imagined that his duck was amongst them, strong and happy, together
with family. If she had come back to the dam, he hadn’t recognised her – or she hadn’t recognised him.

They were chatting about how exciting it was that at Baba’s conference there were going to be people from all over Africa, including Tanzania, when they noticed a man moving from table to
table with a large black plastic bag. When he got to them he put the bag on their table, pulling it open to reveal a large quantity of chopped pieces of meat. With an anxious expression on his
face, he asked them a question in siSwati, switching to English when he saw that they didn’t understand.

‘Does this look like a cow to you?’

‘Sorry?’

‘This!’ He opened the bag a bit more to reveal more of the meat. ‘If you saw all this being served, would you think it was a cow? A whole cow?’

‘
Eh
, I don’t know,’ said Benedict. He looked at it carefully. ‘It’s hard to see when it’s all chopped. Maybe half a cow? What do you think,
Titi?’

Titi stood up and assessed it carefully. ‘Half,’ she said.

‘
Eish!
’ The man looked distressed.

‘It’s not even half!’ called the butcher, who was smoking a cigarette outside the back door of his shop. ‘I told him he needed to get at least half.’

Letting out a string of angry siSwati, the man searched through his pockets for more money as the men drinking beers at the other two tables began to laugh at him. Finding nothing, he closed up
his bag of meat by tying a knot in it and went away looking very upset.

Shaking his head, the butcher ambled over to Benedict and Titi and asked them where they were from.

‘We’re
shangaans
from Tanzania,’ said Titi nervously, and the butcher threw back his head and laughed, his fat belly jiggling up and down.

‘Why did he need a whole cow?’ asked Benedict.

‘Cleansing ceremony,’ said the butcher, dragging on his cigarette as he pulled out a chair and sat with them, keeping an eye on his shop. ‘
Eish
, these nowadays we cannot
afford. It’s one burial after another.’

‘Sorry,’ they chorused quietly.

Dropping the last of his cigarette, the butcher ground it into the soil with a shoe. He began counting on his fingers. ‘First it’s the casket, then it’s the vigil. You’ve
heard all the singing on Sunday mornings, nè?’

Benedict nodded. All-night vigils for the late usually happened on Saturdays, and on the way to church on Sunday mornings they often heard the mourners singing.

The butcher continued counting on his fingers. ‘Then it’s the funeral. Then after a month it’s the cleansing ceremony. That’s when we remove our bits of mourning cloth,
cleanse ourselves of our mourning and ask the ancestors to protect the rest of our family. Now, how can we afford to slaughter a cow for that ceremony after all those other expenses, after all
those other family gatherings where everybody needs to be fed?’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe once a year we can afford, but
eish
, these nowadays, it’s too much.’ Eyeing
his shop carefully, he stood up. ‘They come here asking for what looks like a cow. I sell them as much as they can buy, but I know – and
they
know – they’re going to
be judged. What will the ancestors think of them?’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Excuse me, nè?’

‘Times are hard,’ said Titi after he had gone back into his shop to serve a customer.

‘Mm.’ Benedict drew the last of his Coke up from the can through his straw. Baba had told him that in the whole entire world there were only seven factories that made Coca Cola
syrup, and one of them was here in Swaziland. It was in Matsapha, the industrial area close to Manzini, but you couldn’t go to visit it because it was confidential just like Mama’s
business. Nobody was allowed to know its secret.

‘Benedict!’ Titi’s voice was angry, and he realised that he had been making a noise with his straw, sucking at the empty can for any last remaining bubbles. He knew that
wasn’t polite.

‘
Samahani!
Sorry!’ Then he gave a little burp and said
samahani
again, and when Titi burped too they collapsed into giggles.

Mama was excited on the way back up the hill. She had squashed only one cone and knocked over only another two, and Henry had declared her ready for the test. Henry laughed a
lot and Titi’s eyes were bright with expectation. Benedict was quiet, though, and he wasn’t sure why. Something was hiding somewhere in his head. He would find a quiet place later on
and see if he could coax it out.

But it was some time before he was able to do that. As Henry swung into the garage to pull up behind the red Microbus, Moses and Daniel stood up from the lowest step, their cheeks striped with
tears, and ran to the car. They threw their arms around Mama as she stepped out.

‘Sorry!’ called Auntie Rachel, coming towards them from the other house carrying the youngest of the Mazibukos, the one who had been a baby that somebody had found in a dustbin.
‘They had a falling out with Fortune. Can’t for the life of me tell you what it was about, but they insisted on waiting here for you to come home.’

Mama embraced the two snivelling boys. ‘
Eh
, I’m sorry, Rachel.’

‘
Ag
, no problem, hey?’ She turned to go back to the other house. ‘The girls are still with us, I’ll send them home later when you’ve dealt with those
two.’

‘Thank you, Auntie Rachel!’

They went up to the house, Benedict holding Daniel’s hand and Mama struggling with Moses who held on to her with both of his. They left Titi behind in the garage to plan her evening with
Henry. Benedict heated some milk in a saucepan for the boys and spooned some honey into two mugs. The jar of honey had to stand inside some water in a dish so that the ants couldn’t get to
it. Benedict felt sure that the ants would one day find a way to build some kind of bridge across the water to get to the honey; they spent long enough walking around the edge of the dish thinking
about it.

Benedict and Mama would have tea later, but what mattered now was calming the younger ones. Warm milk and honey usually did the trick.

When he carried the two mugs into the lounge, the boys were sitting on either side of Mama on the couch. She had given each of them a tissue and they had wiped their eyes and blown their
noses.

‘Dominoes,’ Mama said to him. ‘Somebody cheated at dominoes.’

‘Fortune!’ declared Moses hotly.

‘Uh-uh!’ Mama’s voice was firm. ‘It doesn’t matter who! It was just a game.’

‘Yes,’ said Benedict, putting their mugs down on the coffee table. ‘A game should be about laughing and having fun. A game isn’t something important, like real life. You
mustn’t make the mistake of taking it seriously. Tears don’t belong in a game.’

Mama smiled at him warmly. ‘You are sounding just like my Pius,’ she said.

Benedict’s chest swelled with pride. ‘But Baba would be able to give an example of countries making the mistake of going to war over a game, or families never speaking to each other
again because of something that started as a game.’

Titi came in at the front door and passed quickly through the lounge without looking at them. They heard a door slam.

‘Titi?’ called Mama. But no answer came.

‘I’ll go,’ said Benedict.

He knocked on the door of the girls’ bedroom. Titi didn’t answer, but he heard her blowing her nose inside. He opened the door a little way and called her name softly.

‘
Karibu.
Come in,’ she said, her voice wet with tears.

‘
Eh
, Titi!’ Benedict sat down next to her on her bed.

‘The meat is for Henry and his wife,’ she said, sniffing loudly. ‘He’s having the braai at home with her.’

Benedict took her hand that wasn’t holding the tissue. ‘Sorry, Titi.’

Her tears came more strongly, and she said nothing, sniffing loudly into her tissue. Henry having a wife had been making her unsure and not very happy right from the very beginning.

Benedict stood up. ‘I’m sending Mama, see?’

He changed places with Mama, leaving Titi in Mama’s care while he did his best to cheer his brothers. He wondered if he should offer the boys and Titi some drops of Auntie Rachel’s
rescue medicine, but on the whole he thought it was better not to. Mama didn’t really like to have any medicine in the house, even though this was just made from flowers and it wasn’t
pills that a child could mistake for sweets.