head still bopping to the beat in her headphones, and pointed at a troop of vervet monkeys scampering around and staring from the trees.
‘This architecture is very advanced. The archaeologists said it could not have been built by Africans,’ the guide said bitterly. ‘They said, no, the white man or yellow man must have built it.’
Something bubbled in the base of Lee’s throat. White man. Yellow man.
‘They even found art. Shona totems,’ the guide said emphatically. ‘Beautiful carved soapystone birds sitting on top of these monoliths,’ he pointed at a man-sized column a few yards away. ‘Cecil Rhodes stole our totems! Just like his murungu settlers stole our land.’
Mum whispered something to Ba Grace. Dad’s eyes were hidden behind self-tinting glasses.
‘But they could not carry away those boulders. That one with the sloped back, you see? It is also a Shona fish-eagle totem. Can you see it? That is our national bird.’
Lee frowned, trying to map the long neck and lion-like paws of the bird on the Zimbabwean flag onto the tumble of giant rocks. He could picture the little stolen birds – the shiny black statuettes glowering down from their plinths – but he could not make out this biggest, greatest bird, the one that had been left behind.
‘What were the totems for?’ Lee asked his father.
Dad raised an eyebrow sardonically. ‘Probably had cameras in the eyes. Empire is always watching! You should know that from your muzungu mother.’ He jerked his head at Mum.
She was standing behind them, oblivious, holding Ba Grace’s hand, her hair plastered to her pale face. Always watching. Muzungu mother. Tick. Tick. BOOM. Bile stung the back of Lee’s throat and instinctively, he spat. It zipped diagonally from his mouth and landed by his father’s shoe in a frothy globule that sank slowly into the dirt. Lee looked up. Dad hadn’t seen it but Ba Grace was staring at him, aghast at this rudeness. Lee smiled and strode away into the ruins, heart pounding. He knew Ba Grace would never say a word against her Madam’s golden boy.
* * *
But the presiding spirits of Great Zimbabwe were displeased. That night, beasts made of stone the same mottled grey as the ruins haunted Lee’s dreams: giant birds and lions and even dinosaurs stood, ranged all around him in a game park – a conglomerate of all the game parks and zoos he’d visited with his family as a boy, Luangwa and Kafue and Munda Wanga and the one at Victoria Falls. Lee was puttering alone amongst these massive dream statues when they suddenly came to life and chased him. The enormous birds flew over him, looming stone bellies raising a wind over his head. The lions leapt after him, claws like hooks, teeth like scythes – swift stony creatures, their flesh crumbling to rocks as their paws slammed into the ground behind him…
Totem. Lee woke up soaked in sweat, breathing hard like he really had been running, and with a painfully full bladder. He got out of his camp bed and made his way to the bathroom of the motel room the family was sharing, nearly tripping over Carol asleep on the floor. Her Walkman headphones issued a titchy hum – she was at that stage of life when music is a pressing need at all times.
Totem. It rang like a bell in Lee’s mind as he stared down at his twining stream of piss. That was the word their guide had used, that impoverished scholar of Great Zimbabwe, so full of rage at the failed politics of his country that he had forgotten he was talking to a mixed-race family. But maybe this family was a kind of failed politics, too. Your muzungu mother. Wasn’t that word an epithet? And why had Dad used that other word about Mum? Empire.
As Lee made his way back to his camp bed, he noticed the tumble of family suitcases spotlit by the bathroom light, which he’d forgotten to switch off. Mummy’s bag was open and Lee decided to hunt for Cadbury Fruit & Nut, which she always brought for special occasions. That was how he found the book – small and red, its gold-lettered title crumbled to illegibility. He opened it. WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! He raised an eyebrow and turned the page. But after the portrait of a round-cheeked man with a Mona Lisa smile, the book was hollow. A rough rectangle had been carved into its pages, and wedged in that space with torn