Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood Read Online Free

twitching for some minutes until Mum sloshed a bucket of cold water onto his face. “Idiot!” she shrieked. “You could have killed yourself.”
    Now Kelvin looks as self-possessed and serene as ever. Jesus, he has told me, is his Savior. He has an infant son named Elvis, after the other King.
    Dad says, “Bring more beers, Kelvin.”
    “Yes, Bwana.”
    We move to the picnic chairs around the wood fire on the veranda. Kelvin brings us more beers and clears the rest of the plates away. I light a cigarette and prop my feet up on the cold end of a burning log.
    “I thought you quit,” says Dad.
    “I did.” I throw my head back and watch the light-gray smoke I exhale against black sky, the bright cherry at the tip of my cigarette against deep forever. The stars are silver tubes of light going back endlessly, years and light-years into themselves. The wind shifts restlessly. Maybe it will rain in a week or so. Wood smoke curls itself around my shoulders, lingers long enough to scent my hair and skin, and then veers toward Dad. The two of us are silent, listening to Mum and her stuck record, Tragedies of Our Lives. What the patient, nice Englishman does not know, which Dad and I both know, is that Mum is only on Chapter One.
Chapter One: The War
Chapter Two: Dead Children
Chapter Three: Insanity
Chapter Four: Being Nicola Fuller of Central Africa
    Chapter Four is really a subchapter of the other chapters. Chapter Four is when Mum sits quietly, having drunk so much that every pore in her body is soaked. She is yoga-cross-legged, and she stares, with a look of stupefied wonder, at the garden and at the dawn breaking through wood-smoke haze and the thin gray-brown band of dust and pollution that hangs above the city of Lusaka. And she’s thinking, So this is what it’s like being Me.
    Kelvin comes. “Good night.”
    Mum is already sitting yoga-cross-legged, cradling a drink on her lap. “Good night, Kelvin,” she says with great emphasis, almost with respect (a sad, dignified respect). As if he were dead and she were throwing the first clump of soil onto his coffin.
    Dad and I excuse ourselves, gather a collection of dogs, and make for our separate bedrooms, leaving Mum, the Englishman, and two swooping bats in the company of the sinking fire. The Englishman, who spent much of supper
    warily eyeing the bats and ducking every time one flitted over the table, has now got beyond worrying about bats.

    Mum, Dad, Van—Kenya
    Guests trapped by Mum have Chapters of their own.
Chapter One: Delight
Chapter Two: Mild Intoxication Coupled with Growing Disbelief
Chapter Three: Extreme Intoxication Coupled with Growing Panic
Chapter Four: Lack of Consciousness
    I am here visiting from America. Smoking cigarettes when I shouldn’t be. Drinking carelessly under a huge African sky. So happy to be home I feel as if I’m swimming in syrup. My bed is closest to the window. The orange light from the dying fire glows against my bedroom wall. The bedding is sweet-bitter with wood smoke. The dogs wrestle for position on the bed. The old, toothless spaniel on the pillow, one Jack Russell at each foot.
    “Rhodesia was run by a white man, Ian Douglas Smith, remember him?”
    “Of course,” says the unfortunate captive guest, now too drunk to negotiate the steep, dusty driveway through the thick, black-barked trees to the long, red-powdered road that leads back to the city of Lusaka, where he has a nice, European-style house with an ex–embassy servant and a watchman (complete with trained German shepherd). Now, instead of going back to his guarded African-city suburbia, he will sit up until dawn, drinking with Mum.
    “He came to power in 1964. On the eleventh of November, 1965, he made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. He made it clear that there would never be majority rule in Rhodesia.” Even when Mum is so drunk that she is practicing her yoga moves, she can remember the key dates relating to Our Tragedies.
    “So