My mum, who hates planes, who has a fear of flying, who at this very moment is lying in a hospital bed in the endgame of life, did something reckless and caring and got on a plane and landed in Harare and found me at the priest’s house up to my neck in painkillers, sleeping pills and whisky. The priest, large and fat, who liked to make out his pillar-ness in the community, had a wife who was small and nice with bobbed hair but who turned a blind eye, she must have, how else could she stay with his wrongness, his plying young girls with champagne when they were upright and drugs and whisky when they couldn’t get out of bed. I told my mum that he wasn’t the nice guy he said he was but she didn’t believe me, which was more to type than jumping on a plane, and the three of us, leaving his wife behind, went to his farmhouse in the countryside. That night he crept into my room carrying his bible and lay on top of me while my mum slept in the room next door. I remember the weight of him. I remember the heat of his breath. I was asked recently by a young woman who hasn’t had experience of these things (is she one of the few?) why I didn’t do anything, say anything, run. I explained this: there are four responses to a traumatic event – fight, flight, freeze and fawn – and which we choose is a matter of pathology. Any one of them is an answer to the question of how, in that moment, to survive. Mine was to freeze. I did nothing, I said nothing, I waited for him to leave, which he did, shuffling out with his bible under his arm. We returned to his house in town the next day where his bob-haired wife waited, probably baking, being small, finding her own answer to that question. My mum and the priest had supper in the garden together. I watched from the kitchen, unable to join them. Then my mum and I went on a tour of Zimbabwe, getting soaked at Victoria Falls, having picnics on dry yellow grass in the shade of Acacia trees, marvelling at Baobabs, weaving along roads rutted with elephant tracks and then she delivered me back to the priest’s house and flew home. She lies in a hospital bed now, forgetful of all these things and if she remembered them, would remember them differently. She is seeing snakes curl the curtain runners above her head, she is seeing rats run across the ceiling and draw pictures with their eyes.
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