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

to her what Fanie Vorster did to me, only it was worse. But Vanessa can take care of herself. The man was called Roly Swift and he lived with his wife in Umtali. Mum and Dad left us with Roly Swift one morning while they had work to do. Roly’s wife was with Mum and Dad who said, “Be good for Mr. Swift while we’re gone.”
    Roly was drunk before lunch, and he started to follow Vanessa and me around the house and he kissed me and tried to squash me up against the passage wall. Vanessa said, “Leave my sister alone.” Roly laughed at Vanessa and then he tried to kiss her and put his hands under her skirt and Vanessa pushed him away but Roly only tried to hold her tighter. He was laughing although the look on his face was not happy and he was doing something under Vanessa’s skirt which made her face go red.
    She said, “Leave me alone!” There were tears in her voice.
    Roly pulled Vanessa into a bedroom from which I heard the sounds of scuffle, and then Vanessa emerged, her hair untidy and her clothes in disarray. She grabbed me by the hand. “Quickly, let’s run.”
    We ran outside.
    Vanessa said, “Come.”
    “But what about Mr. Swift?”
    “What about Mr. Swift? Nothing about Mr. Swift.”
    She marched me across the road and knocked on the door of a little white neighboring house.
    “We need to stay here,” she told the astonished lady who opened the door.
    The astonished lady let us into her house reluctantly. I was holding Vanessa’s hand.
    Vanessa cleared her throat and said in a big, brave voice, “We haven’t had lunch yet.”
    We were fed lunch and allowed to stay in the white neighboring house until Mum and Dad came back and then we crept over to their car, which was parked in the Swifts’ driveway, keeping our heads down—as if we were under attack—so that Roly wouldn’t see us. Mum and Dad were talking to Roly in brightly natural voices as if Everything Was Normal even though Roly had to say that we had run next door and Everything Wasn’t Normal. But he didn’t say why we had run away.
    “Ah,” said Dad, when he saw us suddenly appear in the car, “there you are.”
    There we were. There was a bad taste in my mouth and a sick feeling in my stomach. We climbed into the car, we sullied goods, and Mum and Dad drove stiffly away, grinning at Roly like skeletons. Vanessa tried to tell Mum and Dad what had happened and they said, “Don’t exaggerate.” Vanessa has a way of looking far away when Mum and Dad won’t listen. She looks far away now, as if she doesn’t care about anything.
    She has inherited our paternal grandmother’s enormous eyes; a pale, almost glassy blue and she can hood her eyes like a cat and go very still and deep and distant. She has very long, blond hair, which she wears in a wrist-thick braid down her back. She has full lips and a very proud, very African carriage (shoulders held back, languid steps, bordering on lazy) and she has stopped listening. Like an African.
    Mum says, “Why don’t you bloody people listen?” to the cook and the maid and the groom and the gardener and they are silent and you can tell they are not listening even now.
    Vanessa and I, like all the kids over the age of five in our valley, have to learn how to load an FN rifle magazine, strip and clean all the guns in the house, and, ultimately, shoot-to-kill. If we are attacked and Mum and Dad are injured or killed, Vanessa and I will have to know how to defend ourselves. Mum and Dad and all our friends say, “Vanessa’s a Dozy Arab.” But I know that they are wrong. Mum and Dad say that Vanessa won’t be able to shoot a gun. They say that she’s too placid. They don’t know Vanessa. She’s not a Dozy Arab. She’s a Quiet-Waiting-Alert Arab. She’s an Angry Arab.
    I want to be like an army guy, so I clean and load my dad’s FN and my mum’s Uzi with enthusiasm, but the guns are too heavy for me to be anything but a stick insect dangling from the end of a chattering barrel. I have