Next day a gang of workmen came and stretched the razor-bladed coils all round the walls of the house where the husband and wife and little boy and pet dog and cat were living happily ever after. The sunlight flashed and slashed, off the serrations, the cornice of razor thorns encircled the home, shining. The husband said, Never mind. It will weather. The wife said, You’re wrong. They guarantee it’s rust-proof. And she waited until the little boy had run off to play before she said, I hope the cat will take heed… The husband said, Don’t worry, my dear, cats always look before they leap. And it was true that from that day on the cat slept in the little boy’s bed and kept to the garden, never risking a try at breaching security.
One evening, the mother read the little boy to sleep with a fairy story from the book the wise old witch had given him at Christmas. Next day he pretended to be the Prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss the Sleeping Beauty back to life: he dragged a ladder to the wall, the shining coiled tunnel was just wide enough for his little body to creep in, and with the first fixing of its razor-teeth in his knees and hands and head he screamed and struggled deeper into its tangle. The trusted housemaid and the itinerant gardener, whose ‘day’ it was, came running, the first to see and to scream with him, and the itinerant gardener tore his hands trying to get at the little boy. Then the man and his wife burst wildly into the garden and for some reason (the cat, probably) the alarm set up wailing against the screams while the bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws, wire-cutters, choppers, and they carried it — the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid and the weeping gardener — into the house.
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That night our mother went to the shop and she didn’t come back. Ever. What happened? I don’t know. My father also had gone away one day and never come back; but he was fighting in the war. We were in the war, too, but we were children, we were like our grandmother and grandfather, we didn’t have guns. The people my father was fighting — the bandits, they are called by our government — ran all over the place and we ran away from them like chickens chased by dogs. We didn’t know where to go. Our mother went to the shop because someone said you could get some oil for cooking. We were happy because we hadn’t tasted oil for a long time; perhaps she got the oil and someone knocked her down in the dark and took that oil from her. Perhaps she met the bandits. If you meet them, they will kill you. Twice they came to our village and we ran and hid in the bush and when they’d gone we came back and found they had taken everything; but the third time they came back there was nothing to take, no oil, no food, so they burned the thatch and the roofs of our houses fell in. My mother found some pieces of tin and we put those up over part of the house. We were waiting there for her that night she never came back.
We were frightened to go out, even to do our business, because the bandits did come. Not into our house — without a roof it must have looked as if there was no one in it, everything gone — but all through the village. We heard people screaming and running. We were afraid even to run, without our mother to tell us where. I am the middle one, the girl, and my little brother clung against my stomach with his arms round my neck and his legs round my waist like a baby monkey to its mother. All night my first-born brother kept in his hand a broken piece of wood from one of our burnt house-poles. It was to save himself if the bandits found him.
We stayed there all day. Waiting for her. I don’t know what day it was; there was no school, no church any more in our village, so you didn’t know whether it was a Sunday or a Monday.
When the sun was going down, our grandmother and grandfather came. Someone from our village had told them we children were alone, our mother had not come back. I say ‘grandmother’ before ‘grandfather’ because it’s like that: our grandmother is big and strong, not yet old, and our grandfather is small, you don’t know where he is, in his loose trousers, he smiles but he hasn’t heard what you’re saying, and his hair looks as if he’s left it full of soap suds. Our grandmother took us — me, the baby, my first-born brother, our grandfather — back to her house and we were all afraid (except the baby, asleep on our grandmother’s back) of meeting the bandits on the way. We waited a long time at our grandmother’s place. Perhaps it was a month. We were hungry. Our mother never came. While we were waiting for her to fetch us our grandmother had no food for us, no food for our grandfather and herself. A woman with milk in her breasts gave us some for my little brother, although at our house he used to eat porridge, same as we did. Our grandmother took us to look for wild spinach but everyone else in her village did the same and there wasn’t a leaf left.
Our grandfather, walking a little behind some young men, went to look for our mother but didn’t find her. Our grandmother cried with other women and I sang the hymns with them. They brought a little food — some beans — but after two days there was nothing again. Our grandfather used to have three sheep and a cow and a vegetable garden but the bandits had long ago taken the sheep and the cow, because they were hungry, too; and when planting time came our grandfather had no seed to plant.
So they decided — our grandmother did; our grandfather made little noises and rocked from side to side, but she took no notice — we would go away. We children were pleased. We wanted to go away from where our mother wasn’t and where we were hungry. We wanted to go where there were no bandits and there was food. We were glad to think there must be such a place; away.
Our grandmother gave her church clothes to someone in exchange for some dried mealies and she boiled them and tied them in a rag. We took them with us when we went and she thought we would get water from the rivers but we didn’t come to any river and we got so thirsty we had to turn back. Not all the way to our grandparents’ place but to a village where there was a pump. She opened the basket where she carried some clothes and the mealies and she sold her shoes to buy a big plastic container for water. I said, Gogo, how will you go to church now even without shoes, but she said we had a long journey and too much to carry. At that village we met other people who were also going away. We joined them because they seemed to know where that was better than we did.
To get there we had to go through the Kruger Park. We knew about the Kruger Park. A kind of whole country of animals — elephants, lions, jackals, hyenas, hippos, crocodiles, all kinds of animals. We had some of them in our own country, before the war (our grandfather remembers; we children weren’t born yet) but the bandits kill the elephants and sell their tusks, and the bandits and our soldiers have eaten all the buck. There was a man in our village without legs — a crocodile took them off, in our river; but all the same our country is a country of people, not animals. We knew about the Kruger Park because some of our men used to leave home to work there in the places where white people come to stay and look at the animals.