Monkeys in My Garden Read online

  MONKEYS IN MY

  GARDEN

  Unbelievable but true stories of my life in Mozambique

  Valerie Pixley

  Copyright © 2013 Valerie Pixley

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park

  Kibworth Beauchamp

  Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK

  Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299

  Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  ISBN 9781783068715

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: THE NIGHT THE BANDITS CAME

  CHAPTER ONE: HOW IT ALL BEGAN

  CHAPTER TWO: AFRICA!

  CHAPTER THREE: AN ENGLISH JAILBIRD

  CHAPTER FOUR: CHUCK AND EILEEN, AND MITZI, OF COURSE.

  CHAPTER FIVE: BIASSE

  CHAPTER SIX: A GHASTLY AND A GHOSTLY EXPERIENCE

  CHAPTER SEVEN: AT HOME IN THE NHAMACOA

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE BEGINNING OF THE INVASION OF THE NHAMACOA

  CHAPTER NINE: CAETANO AND MR. GONCALVES THE WITCH DOCTOR

  CHAPTER TEN: ANIMAL FARM!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: KANDONGAS ACROSS THE BORDER

  CHAPTER TWELVE: BABES IN THE WOODS

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: NORA SWETE AND THE NIPPA DEMON

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE DROUGHT BREAKS

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A SITTING TENANT CALLED UWE

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE RETURN OF NORA SWETE

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: BLACK KITTY

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: MR. YING, MR. CHANG AND MR. DELIGONG

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MATAQUENHA AND OTHER WILD ANIMALS

  CHAPTER TWENTY: A DREAM IN THE NIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE: THE WORLD’S BIGGEST PARTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO: BRENDA, THE MONKEY LADY

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE: MURDER IN THE NHAMACOA FOREST

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR: BETTER EYESIGHT WITHOUT GLASSES

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE: THE TRIAL OF JAN WESTH

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX: THE FUNERAL

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN: THE PISTACHIO GREEN JUDGE

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT: BIASSE TAKES OFF HIS APRON

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE: MOZAMBIQUE UNMASKED

  CHAPTER THIRTY: GOD’S RADIO STATION

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE: THE NHAMACOA FILM CLUB

  EPILOGUE: THE NIGHT THE BANDITS CAME

  PROLOGUE

  THE NIGHT THE BANDITS CAME

  Saturday, 4thDecember, 2010

  We were happy that day, I remember. It was a day of sunshine, of laughter, and perfect for filming. The sky was a pure, pure blue and light danced and sparkled all over the leaves of the Nhamacoa forest around us.

  I remember the simple pleasure on Douglas´ face when he spotted the female bushbuck in the trees right in front of our house and came to call us. “Quick, quick, get the camera before she goes back into the forest!” I remember our laughter while we were filming the little Mupupu tree and the hundreds of insects feeding on its beautiful mauve-pink flowers rained their water down all over us. “Don´t let them pee on O’D’s camera, Lee,” I had told him. “It´s the only one we´ve got!”

  How innocent and carefree life had seemed … and how naive we had been. Completely unaware of the danger that was on its way to our secluded little forest … completely unaware that in a few short hours our lives were going to be turned upside down.

  Actually, Lee had sensed the danger but had been side-tracked by something very strange and almost supernatural that had happened to him.

  One evening, earlier in the week, he had been overcome with a premonition that something terrible was about to happen. The premonition had been so dark, so powerful that he had even phoned his mother in Zimbabwe to tell her about it.

  Then, a few evenings later, when he had been opening the gate to his rented cottage in Chimoio, he had felt something moving under his right foot, something wriggling and struggling under his shoe. He had looked down and had got the shock of his life. He had been standing on the head of a black mamba!

  Leaping high up in the air with terror, he had made a wild dash for his cottage and had locked himself in. Peering through the window he had seen the snake coming after him, as if hunting him down, but then his landlord´s cat had appeared on the scene and launching a series of attacks, had sent the snake slithering off.

  “I don´t think that snake could have been a black mamba, Lee,” O´D had told him.

  “It was a black mamba,” Lee had insisted stubbornly. “I know what a black mamba looks like. I saw one in the Harare Snake Park.”

  Overwhelmed by his narrow escape from death and convinced that the snake, a symbol of the devil, had been sent to take him out, Lee had relaxed, thinking that the danger was all over. But he had been wrong.

  His premonition hadn´t been about the snake. It had been about a dark blue Toyota Mark II that was about to set off from Chimoio that very afternoon for the drive down to our forest and whose occupants were to prove just as deadly as a poisonous snake.

  It was late afternoon when Lee and I finished editing the last of O’D’s films about the little genet he had raised. We were working at the table in the sitting room and the chairs were hard.

  “We need a break,” I said, standing up and stretching my stiff back. “What about a Coke, Lee?”

  “Thanks, Val,” he said. His eyes were bloodshot from the long hours we had spent working at his computer. “But I think I´ll go for a walk first.”

  We didn’t know that the dark blue Toyota had been cruising around the area asking questions about us and that while Lee was walking around under the trees, it was pulling up next to the ramshackle little bancas at the entrance to our forest.

  A big man climbed out of the Toyota. “I´m a friend of the foreigner who lives here,” he told the staring locals. “How do I get to his house?”

  After he and his companions had walked off along the path to our shop, the locals examined the shiny Toyota with wonder. Cars like this never drove around rural areas.

  “It´s a Mercedes,” they decided. “It´s foreign. Look at the number plate. It´s not Mozambican. AAM 201 MC. It must be from Alemanha, Germany.”

  In the shop, Douglas was busy setting up the television, DVD player and speakers. Saturday nights were the nights we showed free films to the local people and tonight he had chosen ´Special Forces U.S.A.´ It was an exciting film, full of action. Just the kind of film the locals enjoyed.

  He didn´t know that the big man who walked up the steps into the shop had been asking questions about him and had come to look him over.

  “Four GTs,” the big man ordered, handing over a 200 meticais note, “and a Fanta.”

  Everyone stared while the big man lit a cigarette and then drank some Fanta. No one in the rural areas bought four cigarettes and a drink with a 200 meticais note!

  The staring made the big man uneasy. Halfway through the Fanta, he put the bottle down on the counter and abruptly left the shop. Douglas and the locals
stared after his retreating back. No one bought a drink and then left half of it to go to waste!

  When dusk fell, I plugged in a lamp and put it close to Lee´s computer so that he could see his keyboard. Douglas had turned on the generator to show the film so we had electricity.

  “Look at this, Val,” Lee said, “look at what I´ve done to Amelia in Images of How We Live.”

  He had speeded up the film of Amelia ironing with the charcoal iron and now she ironed away furiously, flipping O´D´s socks down one by one onto the ironing table in what looked like a very petulant manner. At the end, there was a shot of me holding up the ironing blanket which was full of iron-shaped burn holes.

  I burst out laughing. “Oh, I like that. Let´s see it again, Lee.”

  Suddenly, the cats began to growl. They had been lying all over the chairs, the sofa and the carpet but now they ran out of the room in a small bunched herd, growling and milling around uneasily in the corridor.

  “That´s strange,” I said. I stood up and walked to the door. There was nothing to see and nothing to hear. “It must have been the male buck,” I told Lee. “They always growl when they hear it bark. For some reason they don´t like the sound.”

  We didn´t know that while we had been bending over the computer laughing at Amelia, men had crept silently up the back stairs and had been watching us through the window. Watching and making a note of Lee´s computer, O´D´s camera, the solar inverter and the batteries.

  We went to bed around about half past ten. As I drifted off to sleep, Douglas turned off the generator and I heard the large crowd of filmgoers making their way down the path through the forest to their huts. They were talking and laughing at the top of their voices … loud … always so loud. My eyelids closed and I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep … until about three o´clock in the morning …

  BANG!

  O´D and I started awake.

  “What the …” he said.

  The loud bang was followed by smashing, crashing, cracking sounds as our back door shattered.

  O´D jumped out of bed, and grabbing his torch, ran to the door. He opened it and stepped into the corridor. The light of his torch picked out a horrifying sight and his heart quailed.

  Men, armed men, were storming down the corridor towards him!

  Running back into our bedroom, he slammed the door shut and locked it.

  “Four of them,” he told me grimly. “Armed with an AK-47, a pistol and machetes! Bandits!”

  Aah! Icy dark terror flooded through every fibre of my being and my heart speeded up wildly, thumping erratically and painfully in my chest. Bandits! Everyone´s worst nightmare in Mozambique! They were going to kill us! We were going to die!

  I scrambled out of bed and fumbled around in the dark for my pepper spray I had so carelessly left on top of my dressing table.

  The bandits began to attack our door and while they smashed and hacked and kicked at it, I could hear more of them in the bedroom next to ours where Lee had been sleeping. There was the sound of a gunshot and then the acrid smell of cordite.

  “Where is the computer?” they shouted at Lee, hitting him with a machete. “Where is the camera?” They kicked him in the face.

  Our bedroom door lock suddenly splintered out of the wooden frame and the door burst open. I froze, all thoughts of my pepper spray forgotten. The bandits were in! But … no! O´D threw his weight against the door and slammed it shut. The bandits kicked it open again. Again he threw his weight against it. Open! Shut! Open! Shut! The struggle went on until finally the bandits kicked the door open with such vicious violence that it slammed into O´D´s face and hurled him back against the wall.

  I dropped to the floor and slid under the bed.

  Mistake! Mistake! A voice in my head told me. They´re going to find you. Why didn´t you jump out of the window? You had the time.

  A strange and sudden hush fell over the house. A stillness filled with menace, with evil.

  Under the bed, I watched the feet of a bandit walking into the room. Watched his feet walking over to my dressing table, heard him opening drawers, pulling things out and throwing them onto the floor.

  Hardly daring to breathe, I lay still, feeling tremors of terror vibrating through my body from head to foot.

  “Jesus,” I prayed silently, “Jesus, please don´t let them find me …”

  The bandit walked over to the cupboard and opened the doors, pulling clothes out, throwing them onto the floor, searching for hidden money, hidden valuables.

  “Jesus,” I prayed, “please make me invisible, hide me …”

  “What´s this?” the bandit asked, his feet turning away from the cupboard and the beam of his torch lighting up the floor under the bed. “Come out of there!”

  I slid out from under the bed as far away as I could get from him and stood up, wrapping my capulana more tightly around me. He was tall and wore a shirt the colour of blood. A white cap was pulled down low, shadowing his face.

  I backed away from him and as I backed away, he lunged across the room and dug his hand into my hair. Twisting me around against him, he half dragged and half pushed me down the corridor towards the sitting room.

  The sitting room was a mess. They had ransacked it, overturning bookcases and smashing lamps. Books and papers and files from O´D´s desk lay scattered all over the floor. They had broken the sofa and it sagged on one end, the end where they had thrown O´D.

  O´D …

  As Red-shirt manhandled me towards the sofa, I stared at O´D with shock. What had they DONE to him? His face was a mask of blood. Blood streamed down from a deep wound in his forehead and dripped steadily down onto his shirt, drenching it. He looked dazed, out of it.

  Red-shirt let go of my hair and shoved me down onto the sofa, at the other end from O’D. Numbly, my eyes took in the scene. They had turned on the light of the solar inverter. Two bandits stood in front of the dresser, sifting through the contents of the drawers and throwing the things they didn’t want onto the floor. One of them was wearing a dark jacket and trousers. Chillingly, the other was dressed in police uniform. As I watched, the one wearing the jacket found my memory sticks and put them into his jacket pocket.

  Another bandit, who appeared to be the leader, prowled restlessly around the room. Armed with a pistol, his off-white shirt strained too tightly around his short and stocky body. His shaven head gleamed in the light from the solar inverter and his eyes in his round face were the eyes of a dead fish.

  The blow when it came surprised me. “WHERE. IS. THE. MONEY!” Red –shirt shouted, punctuating each word with a hard blow on my left shoulder with the flat of his machete. “WHERE. IS. THE. MONEY!”

  “I don´t know,” I said.

  The leader walked over to us. “Take the Senhora back to the bedroom,” he told Red-shirt, “and rape her.”

  Red-shirt hauled me roughly up from the sofa and holding me tightly around the ribs, began to push me forward, at the same time trying to tear my capulana off me.

  A terrible black despair engulfed me at this new and hideous turn of events. Rape! I would rather die than this! “No!” I screamed. “No!” I began to struggle, desperately digging my bare feet into the floor and letting my legs cave in so that I became a dead weight. “O´D! Help me! Help me, O´D! O´D!”

  The leader came over to help Red-shirt and grabbed me from the front and together, pushing and pulling, they began to drag me towards the corridor.

  O´D stood up slowly. “Deixe a Senhora! Leave the Senhora! Deixe! There´s some money in a cupboard.”

  While Red-shirt went off with O´D, the leader pointed his pistol into my face at point blank range. “Shut up,” he ordered, “or I will kill you!” He shoved me back down onto the sofa and put a cushion over my face, pressing the barrel of his pistol into it. I pushed the cushion away. If he was going to shoot me, he could look into my face when he pulled the trigger.

  The bandits who had been with Lee came into the room, carrying the safe. It h
ad been well hidden in the bathroom cupboard, but they had found it all the same.

  “The key!” the leader called to O´D. “Bring the key … and if we find money in this box,” he added illogically, “we´re going to kill you!”

  O´D brought the key and opened the safe while the six bandits stood around him, hardly able to contain their excitement. Then, like pigs at a trough, they bent over it and began to fight each other with their fingers for the treasures they found inside.

  While I sat on the sofa watching them scrabbling greedily around in the safe, I had the dreadful feeling that when they left they were going to take me along with them as a hostage. The thought was terrifying, horrifying.

  Without even thinking about it, I stood up, and as if in a dream, began to walk across the room. My bare feet were silent on the cement floor and the bandits´ greed made me invisible.

  As they tore at the delicate gold and diamond pendant Marion had given me, grabbed at my wedding ring, snatched at the Pixley bracelet, made up of ancient 24 carat gold Greek coins that were stamped with the heads of Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedonia, I walked past their bent backs. My right arm inadvertently brushed against Red-shirt´s back but he didn´t notice. Down the corridor and into the front room, out of the front door and into the night.

  Douglas … I had to get to the shop and Douglas. He had a phone I could use to call for help.

  It had turned into a very dark night, cloudy and rainy and without moon or stars to light the way and so I and the seventh bandit who was walking up from the Nhamacoa River didn’t meet each other.

  Hidden by the night but not able to see anything either, I used my bare feet to find my way. O´D´s Toyota pickup had made two wheel tracks down to the shop and as long as I walked in the tracks and not on grass, I wouldn´t lose my direction.

  Light was shining from Douglas´ windows but when I crept quietly up to his room, I saw that it was eerily empty. The green double doors had been flung wide open. His small paraffin lamp glowed orange. “Douglas?” I called out softly. “Douglas?”

  There was no answer. Had he heard the noise and run away? Or … had the bandits killed him and dragged his body into the bushes? I turned away from the shop. There was no help to be had here after all. I would have to hide.