MY MOTHER DIED BEFORE I COULD MURDER HER

CHAPTER 14

A miserable time.

The loss of Alice and Morris in the space of a few months left me feeling really low and empty. I realized how I was more attached to them than to my mom and dad, and now, just like that, they were gone and nobody cared.

     I was angry with my father, always remembering, “We have another boy.” I was mad at my mother for not making more of an effort on the telephone with those bastard border cops. Hell, I was even mad with Myrna for going out on a date with that short Cyril who turned out to be a real loser, and being out of the house at the time the call came in. There’s no question in my mind that if she had been at home and had told my father that someone should drive up to Beit Bridge, he would’ve agreed; more than likely he’d have driven up himself. I was even angry with Alice, angry that she died when she did. I needed her here now with me, and anyway if she hadn’t listened to Puleng, the sangoma, and had gone to the doctor as my mom suggested, she may have survived and we wouldn’t have subjected Morris to that stream of useless maids, driving him around the twist and in desperate need for time off. So now Puleng was also on my shit list, and by the way my mother should’ve insisted that Alice go to doctor, but once again she showed little interest, although she made the excuse that we should always respect their traditional medicine.

     I can’t for the life of me understand how my parents, as liberal and so-called caring for the oppressed, as they were, could be so dismissive of Morris and his effort to get back home. I could’ve throttled my mother for giving in so easily to my father. Who knows, maybe she thought that shouting at the border police was enough effort. Well, she was wrong and it really didn’t help. I suppose when you get down to it, they just didn’t care.

     I was also angry with Morris. He obviously never tried hard enough at his end and must have accepted that he was never coming back to us. I asked my mom for his address in Rhodesia but, would you believe it, she didn’t have an address for him. “Why would we have his address? He was always here, and the only information we have is that his pass book and other papers listed him as coming from the Urungwe District in Southern Rhodesia.”

     I wrote to him. I must have sent the letter to about four or five addresses. To Mr. Morris Chipo Nenguke, c/o the Urungwe District Post Office, or c/o the Urungwe District Police Station, or c/o the Urungwe District Hospital, and who knows if there was a hospital in the district. I even wrote c/o the Magistrate, Urungwe District, but Morris didn’t reply. I was devastated. It was bad enough losing him, but losing all contact was almost more than I could bear. Patience and I collected all of the belongings that Morris had left behind in his room. There was one T-shirt with ripped off arms that he wore during his muscle-building workouts, his weights, a couple of pairs of socks, and the white jacket and white trousers he wore when serving at the table. Morris owned very little and what he had he could fit in the small suitcase he packed when he went home.

     He had taken the photographs he kept in an envelope in the drawer next to his bed. He had taken them all except for one small black and white picture of the two of us, taken at the Zoo Lake one Sunday afternoon. Morris was sitting on a wooden box and I was standing next to him with my arm around his neck. I must have only been about eleven years old, but I loved him and it showed. I wondered if he had left the photograph because it had just dropped out of the envelope. Or had he left it for me? Or maybe he didn’t care and hadn’t bothered to take it with him? I was confused. If he had just left the photograph not caring who would have found it, or had especially left it for me, then it meant that he had known that he wasn’t coming back. I couldn’t accept that. I didn’t want to face the fact that maybe he had decided to leave forever.

     I was going to keep the photograph, but thought that maybe he’d want it, that he had lots more and as soon as we’d made contact, he’d send me others. I mailed it to him in the letter addressed to the Urungwe Post Office. What an idiot! Now I didn’t have any pictures of Morris. Damn him! Why didn’t he contact me? Why didn’t he write to me? Why did I have to try and reach him? He knew our address and could easily have written.