Hatchings

Chapter Eight

60 Chapter Eight Lunch was being served at last. Doef looked at her watch: it was half-past three. The intense heat of the day was over. Shadows lengthened across the lawn. Her husband had fallen asleep in his deck-chair, snoring like a tractor. No one, and there must have been a hundred guests at the party, was paying the slightest bit of attention to them - not even their host and hostess. The food looked good, though. There was lamb on the spit, and kebabs, and rump steak. For the more health conscious, the women, mainly, there was chicken, and fillets of bream, and lightly grilled mushrooms. There were dozens of salads and puddings. The booze flowed. Not without effort, Doef roused her husband - he of the eyes that brought to mind that memorable line from Yeats’s poem, The Second Coming: ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre…’. Coincidentally (oh, that long arm!) a baker’s dozen of people, mostly women, gathered swooningly round the preacher, Moral MacBraggert, were discussing the Second Coming of Christ. Tracey-Lay Cock, Bulawayo’s triathalon hope, wife of millionaire businessman and part time rancher, Boxer Cock, ardent Christians the both of them, had asked Brother MacBraggert if the Lord’s return was imminent. (Actually she hadn’t used that word; it isn’t in her vocabulary; she’d used the phrase ‘round the corner’.) Moral - ‘call me Brother’ - MacBraggert assured her that His return was just round the corner and that he sincerely hoped those sinners like the ‘Greens’, homosexuals, Roman Catholics, Atheists, Communists (driven to the bottom of the list by ESAP - how are the mighty fallen!), and other children of Satan were prepared to be burned in the everlasting fires of hell. This millenary talk greatly excited the people gathered round the preacher who was dressed, as Rudolph McMackmack had jealously predicted, in a powder-blue safari suit, no socks - how daring! how - I know you shouldn’t say this of a man of God - but how sexy! how of the people! Only you could get away with it, in this company, Brother Moral; only you with the handsome brow, the playful yet serious lips, the postcard blue eyes (Rudolph’s are positively grey by comparison), the shiny black Porsche, a later model than your host’s, which you’d acquired (no questions asked) from a certain Sobantu Ikherothi; the power of healing in your right foot... now where was I? Oh yes, his attire. As I was saying: a powder-blue safari suit, no socks... oh the veins, the blue blue veins on those insteps... I must go on, I really must... and matching blue espadrilles, sweetly tapered at the toes. 61 Tracey-Lay Cock, despite her peak of fitness, was breathing heavily. Only Absalom, however, the sharp-eyed chief gardener deeply ensconced in the cannas, noticed that she was vigorously rubbing her thighs together. What Absalom couldn’t have known - these people are savages after all was that this action of Tracey-Lay’s was an early sign of a spiritual visitation. Often the mere presence of Brother MacBraggert brought on these visitations, which seemed to be particularly strong among those ladies who worked out at Bodylines. At the Blood of Jesus Temple, during Sunday services, Tracey-Lay had been visited by the Holy Ghost (three times), by John the Baptist (twice), and by Samson (once). Here at the Twot’s New Year’s Day party it is still too early to tell who is about to visit her, but I’ll let you know when it happens. Boxer Cock and all the younger businessmen at the party, had become rich, and thereby Bulawayo’s cultural elite, as a direct result of Zimbabwe’s Independence. In ten years they had grown from travelling salesmen, apprentice plumbers, primary school teachers and post office clerks to managing directors who owned businesses, farms, and pretty but unintelligent wives. How did they achieve this, these (in normal circumstances) oafs? Simple: they had stayed on in Zimbabwe while the majority of their white comrades had fled, taken the gap, to other countries where people talked English, played rugby, and enjoyed barbecues. This mass exodus of people with established skills and years of experience, provided wonderful opportunities for unskilled and inexperienced men who could be trusted with the petty cash (this ruled out the blacks), if not their bosses’ womenfolk, to rise rapidly in the worlds of commerce and industry. Furthermore, property prices at...