first pizza

"Do you think they're really coming?" he says.

It was a spur-of-the-moment invitation: come and have tea if you've nothing else to do. "That'd be nice," Mr M says. "Bring the boys," I add.

I set out tea-cups, boil the kettle. Take out the tray. Bang icing sugar through a sieve on a sponge cake (and scrape off the burnt bits from the bottom). Put more chairs on the verandah.

There's a hoot at the gate. Finally. Mr M appears, bearing a hexagonal box of pizza. "We always have pizza on Sundays," he says.

My son is excited. "I've never had pizza before," he says. That's not strictly true: Mai C baked pizza on Friday. Pizza and polony sandwiches and sponge cake, at four o'clock on the afternoon. She kept the cheese off the slices reserved for her husband: he has a stomach ulcer and BP. Like so many in Zimbabwe. Mai C sent slices of pizza back with me in an empty ice-cream tub. But fast-food pizza from Nandos, no, my child hasn't tasted that before. "They know us so well in Nandos," Mr M says. The pizza is in halves: clockwise from 12 to 6 it has lots of meat, from 6 to 12, it's pineapple and green-pepper dotted, vegetarian. We eat pizza and drink tea outside and talk of Mr M's plans to become a life-coach. The kids play football on the drive. A memory stirs -- was it really 15, 16 years ago? -- of an Italian verandah, sunflower fields beyond, eating pizza from the oven cut into the hillside.

My son eats the pizza like kids do everywhere in the world: nibbles off the topping, leaves the crust.