The Very Edge of New Harare
Tony Richards
I can still remember seeing my first ever free giraffe.
I must have been about, oh, six years old at the time, and was driving back from the town center with my father, along the Mutare Road. Do you remember that old urban wildlife area that used to be there, with the observation platform, and those woods, the Mukuvisi Woodlands, at the back of it? It’s all a Zim-World Shopping City these days, of course. It was a process that was already in full swing back then, but... Africa has become fully modernized since I was a young child.
Anyway, we were driving past the north of it, just talking and laughing, when this... shape, it didn’t register as anything more than that, at first. This spindly, skinny, totally unworldly shape comes stumbling out from between the trees, and runs across the railroad tracks and then through the municipal campsite. And almost tripping on the crash barriers, staggers out onto the road, which was already a six-lane freeway by that stage. Steps out right in front of us.
I begin screaming my head off, you see. I was perfectly convinced that the aliens had landed. But my father? I can still conjure up, with exact clarity, the look on his face, the huge disparity between what his eyes were doing and what the rest of his features did. I’d never seen his eyes so wide, so totally astonished. But the rest had set itself into that grim, determined hardness that I certainly had seen a hundred times before, when a heavy job around our house needed doing, or when I came home with a less than perfect school report.
He practically leaned over sideways as he swung the wheel around. I realize now that he was going into a controlled skid, the way we are trained in the police. And we skewed away from this apparition, almost clipping it, and wound up at a dead halt on the hard shoulder, with our car turned back-to-front.
We were still looking at the creature, therefore, through our windscreen. And I could see in an instant how far from dangerous it actually was. How pathetic, lost. I stopped screaming at that point, and asked, “What is it, Pappy?”
He murmured, in a voice so awed, so dreamlike I can still hear it quite clearly, “It’s a giraffe, Abel.”
I had not been taken to the zoo, at that age. Nor to any of the few nature reserves that still remained — the nearest, Lake Chivero, had been closed for redevelopment the same year I was born. But there was a photo of a giraffe pasted to the window of my classroom. You’d never have believed that this thing and the creature in the photo were of the same breed.
This thing? The colors of its hide looked faded, as if they’d been slowly bleached away. It had mange, and even gray patches of fungus, and one of its eyes was blind. So skinny it could barely stand. Its long neck was so chronically bent that you wondered it could still lift its tiny head at all.
It was still a living thing, however. And still trying to remain alive.
Its good eye stared around at its surroundings. All the thousands of cars around it, all the smoke and noise. It seemed uncertain what to do. The sensible thing would have been to head back to the woods. But it had already come from that direction. Had it been hiding there for years, now? Was it trying to escape?
Nearly all the cars behind us, in our lane, had done the same thing as my father. The next lane, and the ones beyond that, though? The traffic was still moving fast, cars wobbling as they went by.
When the giraffe tried to get further across, then, the inevitable happened.
It only got three paces before an Assegai Roadster hit its front right leg, smashing it so brutally that you could see the shattered bone. The giraffe looked like it might stay up on three legs, for a few seconds. Then, it toppled over like a big, unbalanced pile of twigs.
I remember it trying to lift its head from the pavement. And can still recall the miserable look in its good eye. I suppose it would have died of shock before much longer. But the next vehicle, a massive truck, went straight over its neck.
I looked away as the airbrakes shrieked.
And my father...?
My father was ever so quiet during the rest of the drive home. And solemn the remainder of the evening. Even at that early age, I sensed that it was because he felt that he had... what exactly?
Lost something. Or rather, been given something back for a few seconds, only to have it snatched away again.
That’s the story. I should wind it up. Dad died three years later, his great frame devoured by cancer, leaving just my mother to finance me through school, college, and finally the Academy. Then twenty-six years later, history repeated itself back-to-front, when my wife died of the same disease, leaving me with my own small boy to bring up.
I never visit Zim-World Shopping City, which is a shame because my neighbors tell me they have wonderful bargains there.
And that’s my first — and my last — free giraffe.
There’s plenty to keep a homicide lieutenant of the Zimbabwe State Police Division busy in today’s New Harare. We have a crime rate comparable to Greater Los Angeles, which means, not terrible, but it could do with some improving. And my jurisdiction covers the entire Highveldt Province, which means on top of liquor store shootings and gangland hits, I have to deal with housewives who’ve done in their faithless husbands in the sticks. I was entering the details of one such into my sat-com, when Captain Maalu came walking toward my desk and asked me, “Hard at it, eh, Enetame?”
“Always,” I said, without looking up at him.
He threw a thin file down beside my screen. “Something might have happened out at Binaville.”
Right out by the Mvurwi Mountains. That’s about as far-suburban as this city gets.
“One of those little farms out there. The owner lives alone. This morning, his neighbors notice that his door is hanging open. He’s not there, but there’s blood all over the hallway and the porch.”
“Could have just got drunk, bashed his scalp, and gone wandering off?” I suggested.
“In which case, this will be one of those all too rare assignments with a happy ending. Go out there and give it a look. Take Petrie with you.”
Which was fine by me. Steve Petrie’s a Caucafrican, which is to say, of distant European origin. There are a few of them on the force, and they’re hardworking although generally unimaginative detectives. I put on my jacket, got him from his office, and we went down to the parking lot, where my brand-new toy was waiting for me.
An Impala Terrain ZF 400, semi solar-powered, and as sleek and quiet as a well-groomed cat. Within minutes, we were on the Julius Jones Elevated Highway, speeding out toward the suburbs.
Petrie — blond, broad shouldered, and seven years my junior — kept on calling me “sir” until I told him to drop it. I didn’t know too much about him personally, and so I asked about his home life.
He’d been married eighteen months, as it turned out. Had a baby boy, just three months old. And he grinned massively when he conveyed that information, which made me rather like him.
“You’ve a son, too, so I hear?”
“Oh, yes,” I nodded, still watching the road. “Joshua. He’s seven.”
Petrie’s whole manner became a little awkward at that point. Everyone at the station house knew about Kissi’s death.
“It must be tough, bringing him up on your own?”
I could feel my shoulders hunching up, but I had got used to questions of that kind.
“It can be. But when you have no choice, you simply get on with it.”
Petrie turned his attention to the windshield and said, “I don’t know. I’m not sure I could cope. I’d be completely lost without my Trish.”