tRuth

November 2017

Revolution songs. Tanks at the gates. Eighteen years of waiting, stuttering over rumours of his death, thumbs poised at the hips of champagne corks. She wonders what time zone Maria is in, whether she’s watching. The kernel of herself, the Truth of Ruth as it were, shivers beneath its shell. Her father, who had longed for this moment, is in fragments, probably dissolved by now, scattered as he was over the Kariba Dam wall. Ruth should call her mother.

She scratches at her elbow where eczema is starting to flare.

If it’s not a coup, what the hell is this? Army tanks at the gates of the presidential compound. The military has taken over the national broadcaster. Major General Sibusiso B. Moyo, loyal comrade of Emmerson, how calm he seems. Words clear, meanings indistinct; much like the poor resolution of a Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation programme. Assurances of principles of democracy that snag on the red and gold of his lapels: the blood of Gukurahundi; the blood of John Cunningham.

She closes her laptop and allows her gaze to stray outside where rain is smacking down at an angle and russet leaves sway and tumble from dark branches. She clicks the orange pen on the desk surface, but only once.

In 1970, John Cunningham taught his daughter not to click a pen repeatedly. Ruth had discovered his Parker on his desk in the office at the back of the house. It was orange, and the resin was cool and smooth against her fingers. She was five years old, and intrigued by the instrument she wasn’t allowed to use at school until she mastered pencil writing.

Every day the Cunninghams’ driver took Ruth and her best friend, Sharon, to Amandas Primary School. It was an hour’s drive in a Citroën that heaved awake on arthritic hydraulics and cruised them over the dirt farm roads and curling tarmac between Mazowe (Mazoe in those days), and Concession. John Cunningham said the car was so ugly she was beautiful. Every day, Miss Martin, teacher of Kindergarten One, assured Ruth that she would be writing in pencil until Standard One, when she would be permitted an attempt at a pen licence.

The balance of Kindergartens One and Two stood in her way.

Ruth clicked her father’s Parker.

“It’s annoying to listen to a pen being clicked repeatedly,” he said, not raising his head from his invoices.

Ruth knew they were invoices because that had been the answer to an earlier question. The pen was now open, and she wondered whether to click it shut. He was bent over his paperwork, spectacles distorting part of his face. Inspired, she reached up and tried the pen out on the closest piece of paper. She made a wobbly R, the pen gliding faster than a pencil would. Breathing in, she gripped tighter and made a tense little u, followed by a t and an h. Then a snail, its shell curving in a satisfying twist. Next, she formed a flower, then started on a horse.

“Ruth!”

The pen dropped, and her eyes strayed to where it rested on the floor.

“Go and play outside. For crying out loud, that’s an invoice you’re scribbling on.”

She ran into the dusk, his words smarting. Sharon had already gone home, so she sat in the dust of the driveway, scooping her hands through the dirt on either side of her. It was soft, and brought to mind her mother’s talcum powder. The boiler fire crackled and the orb of the sun had left the sky, leaving only its auburn shadow.

The pen was lying on the floor of her father’s office. Would he be more annoyed when he discovered it there? She dusted her hands, a puff of grey rising and making her sneeze. Rubbing the remnant on her shorts, she retraced her steps, slowing as she reached his office door. He was on the phone, his back to her as he swivelled in short movements, the rear of his chair flicking left and right. Theirs was a party line, and had recently been upgraded so that anyone who picked up a phone on the line wasn’t instantly able to listen in to the conversation currently in play. John and Sarah Cunningham said this was a great improvement; Sharon and Ruth thought it a pity. She moved into the room with a stealth she didn’t find easy, and peered around the chair on her side of the desk.

Her father’s voice made her start. “She’s already writing in pen, can you believe it? In such a hurry, she tried out my pen on the back of an invoice just now.” He laughed.

Ruth held her breath, her heart pulsing out toward him.

“Yes, I know,” he continued. “Education is everything. Those little buggers in the compound and the township will jump at the chance to learn, they’re much hungrier for it than our kids. She can write over all my invoices if that’s what it takes…”

Ruth abandoned the pen, her head full of the bloody little buggers she needed to out-learn.

Chapter One

The first black girls to board at Beaven hostel arrived in January 1982. A pair of twins from somewhere near Karoi, according to the whispers. It seemed they’d been shuttled in before anyone else arrived at the hostel. The first reported sighting was of them sitting together on a trunk at the end of one of the beds on the furthest end of the Form One Dormitory. Their eyes were downcast, their knees faced out at the rest of the world.

The arrival of the twins was part of the general but vague disruption that Ruth Cunningham had experienced with Zimbabwe’s independence. They were not a part of her immediate world and once the scandal of their arrival had blown over, she hadn’t given them much thought. It was her parents who brought it up most often, and they hadn’t even seen the twins. 1982 was a year of rupture for Ruth for other reasons. She was in her M level year, and hoping that her results would be good enough to take her to university in South Africa without having to stay on for a further year and write her A levels. Her best friend, Sharon, was supposed to be doing the same, but … well, that had been the year’s first true trouble.

Extended chaos was waiting in the sixth form dormitory for Ruth. There had been no consultation, no real warning; unless she’d been attuned to the whispers behind pale cupped hands as she climbed the stairs one afternoon early in the second term. But Ruth’s soul was heavy with other things.

The girl was black.

Ruth’s hand clenched the curtain she’d pulled back in the doorway of her cubicle, and the resultant dust fairies played a screen between them. The girl was sitting on Sharon’s bed, her hair shocking out from her scalp.

“My name is Maria.” The girl leaned, as if to stand.

“You’re on Sharon’s bed.”

Maria stood and blinked as the scent of floor polish curled between them. Ruth thought of Sharon skating across the hostel floors in her socks, kicking up one reddened sole when she stopped.

“Get off her bed.”

Maria’s eyes narrowed. “They said this is my bed.”

Ruth stepped in, releasing the curtain, her eyes falling on a trunk that stood at the foot of Sharon’s bed. It was the standard metal black, with Maria Sibanda stencilled on in white. She walked out, her palms sweating. Down the red staircase and along the passage to the superintendent’s office. No one was there. She scaled back up the stairs and strode to the sanatorium where the fat matron, Mrs Noble, sat at her desk, fiddling with a letter opener and staring across the sick bay dormitory to the windows beyond.

“Matron, there’s a girl in my room. A black girl.”

Matron turned, eyebrows like pencil tips.

Ruth continued, “She’s on Sharon’s bed.”

Matron licked her lips and her eyebrows relaxed.

“Ah, yes. You see, Ruth, Maria is our new girl. She’s a late arrival as it’s the second term of course. And well, she’ll also be in Lower Six, you see. Starting tomorrow.”

“But she’s on Sharon’s bed.”

A flash of tongue. “Yes, well, this is something you need to discuss with Mrs Robertson.”

“She’s not here.”

The lunch bell rang.

Mrs Noble’s face pinked. “Well, my dear, you run along to lunch now, and I’m sure Mrs Robertson will be along shortly.”

“But I…”

“And if I see her in the meantime, I’ll mention you’re looking for her. Off you go.” She fluttered a mottled hand in the direction of the sick bay entrance, and turned back to face the window.

Mrs Robertson was waiting for Ruth outside the dining hall after lunch. Her Labrador sat at her feet, its tail buffing the floor. Her hands were clasped together, her head slightly inclined, her lips moving around the rebellion of her teeth.

Maria was in fact Ruth’s roommate. There was no other space for a Lower Six girl in the hostel. Sad as she was to say it, Sharon wasn’t coming back, and they needed the space for Maria. She smiled at Ruth and placed a hand on her shoulder. Ruth’s heart ignited, threatening to flame up at the superintendent’s face, where those words had been so casually released.

Ruth said, “Thank you, Mrs Robertson.”

As she scaled back up the stairs, her left hand sliding up the wooden banister that gleamed from decades of the same treatment, Ruth considered what a truthful conversation with Mrs Robertson would have been. The world would not tolerate that sort of honesty, it betrayed what decent society demanded. She needn’t have thanked the woman though. Conditioning, that’s what Sharon would have called it.

Pulling the cubicle curtain open again, Ruth observed the black girl removing items from her trunk and placing them in the small cupboard squashed against the wall across from Sharon’s bed.

“Ruth, are you okay?” Alice’s voice came from behind.

“Leave me alone, Alice.”

Ruth headed up her usual table that evening, slopping sago pudding onto plates and handing them to the fourth former on her right to pass down the hierarchy. Sixth Formers received first, then Fifth, then Fourth, and the First Formers were lucky if there was anything decent on their plates. The stench of overbaked carbohydrates fogged the room. Floorboards creaked, pots and kitchen instructions were a muted clatter behind their own sounds.

Maria wasn’t at Ruth’s table. At the end of the meal, as the rattle of stainless steel on thick crockery subsided, Mrs Robertson entered the dining hall.

“Good evening, ladies.” Because after all, that’s what they were learning to be.

They stood, a body of feminine well-mannered uniformity, their chairs scraping back against the wood.

“Sit.”

The reverse scrape.

“As some of you may have noticed, we have a new addition to our family: Maria, please come up.”

A single scrape. Alice’s table, that’s where she’d been. Her head was enormous with hair, it seemed to float her to the superintendent’s side. Mrs Robertson curled her lips back across the shambolic teeth, but kept her hands crossed in front of her.

“Maria, welcome to Beaven House, and to Queen Elizabeth High School. All the girls you see here are your friends, and will do their best to help you settle in and become part of the hostel family. Ladies, I know you will show every kindness to Maria.”

Ruth wondered whether there was a single person in the room who believed her.

In the communal bathroom, Ruth bathed and changed into pyjamas after supervising prep. Junior girls bathed before supper, that was the rule. They brushed their teeth after eating, then proceeded down to the prep room to do their homework before bedtime. Television was a privilege for Fifth and Sixth Formers once a week when Dallas was on. Ruth’s brushing action felt hard against her teeth, and she paused, looking at her reflection in the mirror. Sounds of bath water being splashed by senior girls slipped beneath the rows of doors on either side of the basins.

Would she tell her parents?

She resumed more slowly, then spat into the basin. If she told them, would they take her out of the school? Move her to Arundel, as they’d always threatened to? Mind you, Arundel was private, so they’d had black girls there for ages. They’d probably send her Down South. Ruth rinsed, the mint a cold heat in her sinuses. She spat again. Absolutely no way was she going to school Down South. They all had to study Afrikaans.

“You got the short straw there.” Adele drew alongside in her dressing gown, and placed her toiletry bag on the shelf between their basins.

Ruth met her gaze her via the mirror. There wasn’t much she could say to Adele of all people. Just a month before the end of the war her brother was killed in a landmine explosion on a dirt road. Adele had then limped through school and just the year before, failed her O Levels; she was now assigned to the Fifth Form so she could have another go. Ruth doubted even Adele’s parents thought she’d make a success of it. They probably couldn’t muster the energy to care.

Ruth packed her toiletries and smiled at the other girl through the reflection. “It’ll be okay I reckon.”

“I wonder what Sharon would have thought.”

Sharon and Ruth got horses within months of each other, because their birthdays were that distance apart. For years they took riding lessons together and cherished dreams about ponies and becoming vets. Topsy was Sharon’s twelfth birthday present and Cherokee was Ruth’s. Topsy and Cherokee lived on the farm and the girls rode every day in the school holidays, and every weekend they were home from school.Topsy was a fifteen-year-old Basuto pony with ears too large for his head and hooves like serving dishes. He was old and reluctant to move with any urgency. Cherokee had nerves at the very edge of her creamy skin. Before Ruth returned to the farm for a weekend or for school holidays, Sarah and John Cunningham would instruct Smart to saddle her up and take her for a run on the grass verge of the main farm road to “get the tickle out of her hooves”. All Smart had to do was hold on and rein her in before the public road. The sight of Smart disappearing down the road, his purple beanie pom-pom flashing, was a subject of hilarity in the family. That bouncing blur of purple, the milky stream of Cherokee’s tail.

Sharon and Ruth started together at Brayford, the riding school in the northern suburbs of Harare. They also got their riding gear at the same time. They’d got new ones at the same intervals as they grew, even though Sharon grew earlier and faster than Ruth did. They never discussed the jodhpurs that sometimes reached to about an inch above Sharon’s ankles when stretched.

Only as a teenager had realisation dawned. Before then Ruth hadn’t thought about what it meant that Sharon’s father managed her father’s farm; she had somehow thought of them as partners, if she’d thought about it at all. But hormones ushered in recognition on a few fronts. Sharon was taller and prettier. Her father earned a salary that was paid by Ruth’s. Her horse was inferior to Ruth’s. They spoke about none of these. Instead they discussed becoming equine vets and camping in the stables with their first ponies, which they never did. Their parents said it wasn’t safe.

Sharon died in the April of 1982. She fell off Topsy when he shied at a full gallop, and in the process her left foot was trapped in its stirrup. Then Topsy tripped. Her foot was still hooked when they pulled her from beneath the horse whose neck had broken in the fall.

After lights out, Ruth strained for signs of Maria. Crickets rasped from the hostel garden. Sighs and coughs sputtered from other cubicles, but from the bed next to hers there was no sound. No hiss of breath, harsh or soft. No creak of the bed springs that betrayed everyone else. Perhaps she didn’t sleep. Maybe she too was straining for sounds, for evidence of Ruth. Perhaps she was just a ghost after all.

Chapter Two

Mrs Robertson was outside the dining hall after breakfast the following morning. Hands clasped: a request of some sort was coming. Or bad news about to be delivered.

“Good morning, Mrs Robertson.”

“Ah Ruth, the very girl I’m looking for.” She extended a hand to Ruth’s shoulder and turned them both in the direction of the stairs. “I need you to take Maria to Barbours this afternoon.”

Ruth stopped. The hostel superintendent’s hand remained on her shoulder.

“She has decided to try hockey, you see, and she doesn’t have any of the kit. You’re a player, and of course you know her the best…”

“Alice…”

“Alice is your senior and the head girl of the hostel, Ruth. I understand there’s no first team practice this afternoon, so you can take Maria after lunch. I’ll write you a pass.”

“But I have a project…”

“Ruth, let me be clear. You are taking Maria to Barbours this afternoon, and you are going to assist her in getting whatever she requires for hockey practice. Her father has set up a taxi account, and an account at Barbours. Come to my office after lunch and I’ll help you with the details.”

“Yes, Mrs Robertson.”