Hatchings

Chapter One

1 Chapter One Elizabeth Fawkes was turning sixteen. She was going into her Lower Sixth year at a co-ed private school called Black Rhino High. She was a scholarship case. Initially, the Board who started the school wanted to call it White Rhino High but the Ministry of Education, according to Board Member and garage owner, Strontium Twot, accused them of racism. This was in 1986, when the school opened its doors, in competition with established institutions like Falcon College and Girls’ College, to those sons and daughters of businessmen, commercial farmers, successful criminals, and senior civil servants who could afford the astronomical fees. The school badge had been designed by the wife of another Board Member, a commercial pangolin farmer called Sudbury Bauls, an immensely rich man who had provided most of the finance to start the school - a school which would ensure that the high standards of ‘Rhodesian’ education - the highest in Africa, if not in the entire world - would be maintained. Sudbury himself had been educated at Pawpaw School in Matabeleland, where he had distinguished himself in those aspects of Rhodesian education that mattered: rugby, water polo, bullying, and geography. He was adamant that his own children, Zayne, Drakensberg and Lace, would enjoy similar standards in independent Zimbabwe. It was largely through the efforts of Sudbury Bauls and his profoundly religious wife, Matilda, that Black Rhino High had come into existence and that, in a few short years, it had become one of the most sought-after schools, if not in the world, certainly in Bulawayo. It had been Matilda’s privilege and pleasure to design the school badge. She prayed to Jesus for inspiration, and came up with the motto: ‘To Them That Have Shall Be Given’. The colours she chose were red, orange and, with great reluctance, black. She, it was, who had initially mooted the white rhino. It seemed such an appropriate symbol for the fast dwindling white citizens of Zimbabwe. It wasn’t a question of being racialistic. Not at all. But you know what these people are like. Blame everything on the Europeans. No, it was this animal’s - one of the Big Five, mind you - strength, courage and endurance; its… yes, why not? its ‘whiteness’, and its being threatened with extinction. It was these qualities of the white rhino - not its stupidity, its ugliness, and its enormous sexual appetite - which appealed to Matilda (neé Knolvoer) Bauls, and which convinced her that it was a fitting symbol for the new school. So the school badge was designed with a black rhino, head- 2 on, on a red background trimmed with orange. Matilda gave out publicly that the colours had no symbolic value, but privately - only to her closest friends, mind you - would she confess that the red was the blood of Christ, and that the orange, her favourite colour and her favourite fruit, was her homage to the place of her birth: Bethlehem in the Orange Free State of South Africa. Unfortunately, the manufacturers of the badge didn’t do a very good job of the rhino and it turned out to look, according to the handful of iconoclasts in the school - spurred on, no doubt, by that nasty little man, Boland Lipp - less like one of the Big Five - than an enormous, erect black penis. One of these iconoclasts, secretly loved by Elizabeth, was a boy in Upper Sixth called Jet Bunion, who watched Monty Python videos and read Kurt Vonnegut. He admired Vonnegut for his remark that, any day now, somebody was going to take a photograph of God and sell it to Popular Mechanics. Jet was good-looking and clever and all that, but his main attraction for Elizabeth and the other Born-Again Christians, who made up the bulk of the school, was his sinfulness. Sinfulness in itself is no big deal, but when it comes with baby-blue eyes and a tight little bum; when it comes with a guitar and a tortoise-shell plectrum; when it comes with a Yamaha 750 and a torn leather jacket - then it is a big deal, one of the Big Six, as Jet’s fellow rugby players called him - a dangerous animal. Fair game. Elizabeth Fawkes, turning sixteen, was thinking of Jet and only halfconcentrating on her father’s story about the Asil Khan. They were fishing from the wall, a shady spot on the far side of the camping area. Mrs Fawkes would be joining them shortly, with...