things I still can't understand

It is a smallish bird, bigger than a canary, smaller than a thrush. A bulbul, I think. And somehow it's on the floor of the doctor's surgery, on its back, and people are laughing.

I'm trying to work this out. I think that the bird "belongs" to the maid of the woman who's wearing stilettos and a cordoroy suit and studying a file on "International Best Practice in Labour Relations" (I read it over her shoulder). The maid took the bird out of her handbag, and gave it to the toddler ("Chichi", the pair keep calling her). The toddler is fed up -- I am too, I've been waiting for two hours -- and the bird is hurt in some way. To begin with, I think it may be some kind of a pet. But as I reassess the sitation, horrified, not knowing what to do, I think that what's more likely is that the maid has found/trapped the bird and plans to eat it tonight.

The child squeezes the bird. The receptionist comes out from behind her desk to see what the squawking is, joins in the laughter.

Chichi runs outside with the bird and when she comes back, it's nowhere to be seen. Then the maid zips up her handbag. There are tiny little downy feathers on the waiting room floor.

I give the wailing child a plastic pink pocket mirror I got as change in a zhing-zhong shop (Better she plays with that, why on earth didn't I give it her before?) and stare out of the window. There are things here I still can't understand.

peculiar state

"That's another one in there," the pharmacy assistant says, pointing to my bump. I nod. She laughs, delighted. Her colleague looks at me over the nail polish, bends her head to one side quizzically: "Am I seeing right?" she says.

In OK stores, I hear someone calling my name. It's Mai Silitshena with B. "You are growing BIG," she says with relish. Her son, a teenager now, smiles embarrassed.

Actually, I'm not that big, not for seven months and a bit. But here in Zimbabwe, the expectant mamas contest appears to be among who can get the biggest, plumpest and roundest, fastest. Not, as in the West, who can claim the enviable: "Your bump's looking so neat." Not having seen me pregnant before, Tadiwa told me -- what, six weeks ago?: "You're as big as a house, Mai S", before telling me of her pregnancy diet (2 doughnuts per day, eaten on the trot). I had to swallow a plaintive: "Surely not. Aren't I quite little?"

Mai Silitshena fumbles in her handbag, pulls out a 5 US dollar note. "Here," she says triumphantly. "Buy something for the baby."

"No," I start to say, and then I hug her.

"It comes from the bottom of my heart," she adds.

I've been thinking about a phrase I found in an expat's account of her pregnancy in France: "that peculiar state of grace that pregnancy brings." That's what I've known here, half a world away for the tarte tatin of Normandy. While the anti-white rhetoric mounts due to the indigenisation drive and neighbours whisper of yet another armed attack and how so-and-so was abused at a traffic block (because he was white) and how somebody has hastened to Harare to finally get himself a gun, I think of the people I see each day and the friendship on their faces as they look at me. Of Sekai, whose name means laughter -- and no, she "doesn't have children yet" -- who rushes to push my trolley for me in the supermarket and urges me to consider Tawananyasha (We have found Grace) as a first name. Of the newspaper vendor whose name I do not know, who calls out from above the muffled bundle of her own baby (on the streets all day): "But are you pregnant?" and smiles indulgently.

I feel...privileged.

wedding blues

"We can understand where she's coming from," Mai N says.

She lives in the the dale-dailies, the plush leafy suburbs of Zimbabwe's towns and cities. Her oldest son, a research engineer just got married. That's married in the true Zimbabwean sense: he paid lobola, or bride price. That's no mean feat these days: the official Herald reports that the going rate is around 18,000 US these days.

Have a daughter, make some money. Nothing like being innovative.

New daughter-in-law is well-liked. She's degreed, has agricultural experience in China. She sends Mai N text messages while she drinks tea on my verandah. Mai N worried about this son-who-would-not-marry. The groom is 31, the bride 29. Western ages for marriage, I'd say. Or maybe just modern ages.

But now the bride wants a white wedding too.

"The whole thing," sighs Mai N. "We said to N.: keep it simple. Don't use all your money. He wants to buy a car."

"But she wants the 200-guests-at-Mutare-Hall, the triumphal parade through Main Street (Saturday: bakkies blaring: beribboned bridesmaids hanging out the windows, that sort of thing). Oh yes, and the dress."

What does N say, I wonder? "He says, you've got to see why she wants this. She's a ghetto girl."

N grew up firmly esconced in the middle classes. His parents moved into the plush suburbs in 1980. They have a nice house, a large garden. Roses in the beds. Vines trailing over the walls. The car might have have been in the garage for the last five years -- but that's because of Zimbabwe's crisis.

But as for the bride: she grew up in Damgamvura, an eastern township. "She wants to show she's finally Got There," says Mai N ruefully.

heist

Scraping together the money for T's fees for her social sciences degree at the University of Zimbabwe is always something of a challenge. She's in her last year now. First she comes to visit, bearing baby and a raft of exam results. Problem is: I haven't got the fee money together yet. My father is still trying to raise it, and I've been crafting desperate bios of T to send to my former English teacher who edits a parish magazine in the town I grew up in, in the hope somebody, somewhere will dig deep. Visit over, Dad texts. He's raised some -- but not all -- of the required (desired?) sum. Shall he send it? Yes, I say. Something, surely, is better than nothing. T does not have a bank account. Her husband (it's official, note: he's paid lobola), mired in the depths of rural Gokwe for 20 days per month carrying out a pre-Census mapping project, does not have a bank account either. Neither do her parents (this may not be true: I think it's rather that T knows she wouldn't see the money if it went to them). We settle on Western Union. Text messages bat to and fro between England, Harare and other locations, setting up secret questions, reference numbers, Union offices where she'll go to collect the cash. Then I wait. And wonder. For 24 hours. Were those sms-es intercepted? Has somebody withdrawn the money without our knowledge? Was it her brother's cellphone I was using (I have a whole handful of cellphone numbers to use for her, most of them belonging to other members of the family)? Late at night, my 'phone pings. "sorry 4 th late reply my 4n was off the whole of yesterday we only got power @ 1 this morning thank u 4 the money & ve a blessed day." Phew...Except, this morning. Last-but-one item on the ZBC news bulletin. "Police are investigating the theft of 83,000 US dollars from the University of Zimbabwe." Apparently an official was walking the 100 metre distance between the accountant's office and CBZ bank's campus branch when an armed gang of six pounced on him. "The money was part of what students have paid for this term's fees...."

death by diamonds

From where I am (by the bananas), the noise from the street is deafening. Trucks race up and down the high street -- 10 of them, or is it 20? Youths hang out of the windows, shouting and gesticulating.

Shoppers move cautiously to the open front of the store to watch. Pedestrians stop. I wonder whose demonstration it is. Probably ZANU-PF. MDC marches are rarely allowed. Maybe this is something to do with indigenisation? I look for flags, banners -- anything that'll provide some sort of a clue. The BEE minister has been upping the I'll-grab-your-firm rhetoric recently, even taking on the (also ZANU-PF) central bank chief who's warned against his use of "verbal gunpowder." I know of at least one white businessman who skedaddled down South for an extended 'holiday' after ruling party stalwarts tried to test his 'patriotism' by ordering he attend -and contribute to - local celebrations to mark Heroes Day.

No-one in the store knows what the demo's for. I forget about it until I see this week's paper.

The demo is actually a funeral procession for a local diamond dealer named Bothy. A former street-kid, according to the lengthy obit (diamond dealers get star treatment here from the local press) who used to sleep in cardboard boxes, Bothy (/ie) was killed in a car crash (aren't they all?) and died at the local private clinic. "Police were just overwhelmed by the event," said the Manica Post. The rumour is that he'd duped gwejas (diggers) of their gems. The crash was his reward.

why not to eat French fries in Zimbabwe

Vandals are stealing oil from state-ZESA power authority transformers and selling it on to -- wait for it - fast-food outlets in the capital. The official Herald says the oil "is being used by unscrupulous businesspeople operating fast-food outlets mainly in Harare as cooking oil for frying chips and other food items." Not too good for one's health, especially in a country with such a compromised health system (Harare's in the grip of a rotavirus diarrhoea outbreak at the moment, apart from all the rest).

Apparently transformer oil is stable at high temperatures which makes it great for frying. Crippling power cuts have been the order of the day for most of the last 10 years: partly they're blamed on Zimbabwe's broken-down generation equipment, which means the country can't meet demand. But the cuts are also blamed on vandalism. The authorities have recently introduced very stiff prison sentences for anyone caught stealing ZESA cables or siphoning off transformer oil (you get a lot more years in jail for doing this than for murder).

Not surprisingly, the oil-for-chips story has upset a few parents. "I am a father of three; it disheartens me to think that each time my kids get into town they seek those chips. Imagine how many litres of transformer oil my kids have swallowed through these fast foods," wrote one man in today's paper.

will you wash my socks (or worse)?

The test of real love in Zimbabwe is...whether you'll wash his underwear. The recent case of a 30-something man who left his young wife for a 55 year old in Zimbabwe has got tongues wagging. Apparently the drawcard was that the 55 year old shebeen queen knew how to treat her man AND she washed his underwear. (By hand, it's understood). Which the liberated 20-something lady refused to. It's an absolute no-no to let your maid wash your underwear (or your husband's): in fact, press reports have speculated on the number of career women who've lost their husbands to their maids simply because the maids washed the man's underwear. Quite how this works in post-shortage Zimbabwe -- where you can buy washing machines in OK supermarkets (power to the people) -- is unclear. Though, come to think of it, the number of people I know who actually own a machine (a snip at 700 US..not if you're earning <200 per month) is tiny.

a second time

It happens a second time.
This time we have been stopped at a police roadblock, one of many on the main highway between the capital Harare and Mutare.
A policeman, rotund in his winter fluorescents, peers in through the driver's window. "Where is the Daddy?" he asks my husband.
"The Daddy?" This time it's my husband who is stumped. "My father is back at home."
The officer considers us. The thought of a fine keeps my lips clamped together like wheel locks.
"Well, look after the Mother," he says, before waving us on.
"He thought you were my son!" I explode, as soon as the driver's window is safely sealed. I round on my husband. "Can't you stop looking 16?"
"I don't look 16," says he. A trifle too innocently for my liking.
I study his side profile. Not the hint of a wrinkle. I suspect he may have been secretly smoothing on my imported-at-great-expense sun cream. Which clearly works better on him than it ever has on me.
"You do," I say crossly. "17, max."
"Oh." Is that all he can say? When his longsuffering wife -- who he dragged across continents from a carefree existence in Paris to Africa 10 years ago -- gets mistaken for his mother?
My husband ponders for a minute or two.
"Maybe you should dye your hair red," he says finally as pyramids of tomatoes piled high in Kango dishes flash past us near the town of Rusape. "You know you’ve always wanted to."
I choose to remain silent.

mazoe orange

"The nurse said to bring her Mazoe Orange," Mai A says. "I buy it. But in the rural areas, it is very expensive. Four dollars seventy. In OK it is three dollars."

She shakes her head. "But I buy it," she insists.

Months ago, I bumped into an acquaintance in Spar scanning the shelves for "red juice." Red juice (also made by Mazoe, among others) is a preservative-, sugar- and colourant-laden version of squash or cordial. There's probably not a berry of real fruit in it. "I'm getting it for my father," she told me proudly. "The nurse says he needs red juice for his blood."

I think about these prescriptions, bought so diligently by locals. Mai A disappeared to the clinic yesterday to visit her sister 'from 22' (I presume this means she's the housemaid at Number 22, Some Road). "She's bleeding from the nose," Mai A told me, face contorted at the fear of yet another family tragedy. "And she has a bad headache. People die from those headaches."

This morning she tells me the sister does not have malaria. We look at each other silently for a few seconds. "It's the cold," I say unconvincingly.

"Yes," she agrees. "That Mazoe was too expensive." And I finally understand: when there's nothing else to prescribe a patient, Mazoe squash becomes something for the relatives to cling to. The essence of hope, perhaps.

older than you look

This is to keep me humble.

Supermarket scene. Have dragged husband so we can do a whole-week shop for once, instead of me trawling the store every morning with my basket. The shop assistants - who know me well - watch quizzically as I take a big red trolley and he pushes.

I arrive late to the till after foraging for raisins. My husband is already unpacking. This is always the worst part. We shop in OK (Where Everyone's a Winner). Traditionally whites don't, preferring the more upmarket Spar or - at the very least -- TM. A shopping trolley total of 50 US raises eyebrows here and lots of silent studying from the rest of the till queue (and requests for us to pay for their tea-leaves/bread/sugar too). Even though we are far from the only shoppers in the store with a trolley.

The security guard smiles at me as I pack.

"Amai," he says. "Is that your boy? Your son?"

"Son?!" I manage to keep my voice down. "He's my husband."

Now what does that mean?

what I thought then

I never dreamt I'd stay a whole decade in a troubled southern African country, much less raise a child here. I grew up in rural England, the oldest of three girls. We wore Laura Ashley dresses on Sundays. I kept rabbits -- pedigree Himalayan dwarfs -- in the backyard. The nearest I ever got to any kind of a snake was a sign saying 'Beware of Adders' in the Chambers Woods in Lincolnshire. After university, I moved to Paris. If I ever thought there of having kids (and I don't think I did much), I imagined a bigger flat avec vue sur la Tour Eiffel. A jeune fille au pair. Saturday afternoons sailing those wonderful boats with big white sails on the pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Chic ensembles from Petit Bateau. Arriving for Sunday afternoon tea at Tante Marie-Jeanne's bearing one of those beribboned white boxes full of dainty little multi-coloured patisseries. This was not the life I got.

They Will Use Machetes

Oh, and they play with machetes.

Scene: Child delivered home from playdate. Dusk in an African garden.

Me (absentmindedly, crouching over hole my son is digging): "Did you have a lovely time with X?"

Him: "Oh yes. We cut down a tree."

I look at my husband. He seems...shifty.

"It was a giant strelitsia. Hanging down over the drive. Had to be cut down, the mother said."

"What with?" enquires the Wary British Mother.

"We used a machete," my son, 7, says proudly.

mind the cobra on the verandah

- A tale of mothering in Africa.

This is what being an (accidental) mother in Africa has taught me:

- There will be snakes and they will be of the deadly poisonous variety.
- You can't rely on a (pirated) DVD to keep your child away from your snake-infested jungle of a garden because there's probably a power cut.
- Your child will learn to munch stalks of the local brand of clover, yanked out of said snake-infested garden by the handful. You will vaguely wonder about toxiplasmosis. Because you didn't properly listen to your mother when she spelt out the perils of creature-peed-on weeds back in your sedate childhood but the bits you can remember sounded scary, you will decide not to Google it. You will tell yourself that clover -- known in my part of Africa as donkey weed -- must have some vitamins in it. Also, it's one way of getting greens down him. For free.
- You will not weigh up the merits of brown/white/wholemeal/sesame-seed-speckled bread as your glamourous friends in functioning Western countries do. After several years of food shortages, you will just be glad there is some bread to buy. The amazing thing is that your child will never notice the cardboard taste (while you will reminisce ruefully about your days on the rue Brancion, just down from the Boulangerie Poulain).
- Boys will make do with mud if they haven't got Nintendos (much cheaper). And sticks and stones and lizards' legs and wasp stings. Just about everything Health and Safety would ban anywhere else.
- You can bath your child in a baby bath 'til he is...well, probably geriatric. Actually, you yourself are still bathing in a plastic baby tub (the one your mother-in-law gave you when you were first pregnant) at the ripe old age of 38. One baby bath = 3 saucepans of hot water. You won't have the patience (or the gas) to heat any more.

birthday

On the bumpy mud track leading to the homestead, blue plastic bags hide each bunch of bananas so that each tree is dotted with huge gaudy baubles.

"I took my grandchildren up the hill the other weekend for a birthday party," says a farmer. "Seven kids, all under the age of 10."

We're sitting in a shade-dappled garden, sprinkler going and that chill in the air you get - despite the sun -- when the Zimbabwean winter's about to set in. I look at the wine and the curry and the perfect rice and dhal and poppadums and Greek cakes and good books and a huge floppy dog. Not for the first time, I get that trapped-in-time feeling I often get on still-white-owned farms.

"When we came back down again, the army trucks were waiting." He takes a sip of wine. "Wanted to know what political meeting we'd been holding up there."

The authorities -- or rather those loyal to the president -- have been clamping down on all gatherings, revving up, no doubt, for elections Mr Mugabe is determined to hold before the end of the year, despite widespread fears of violence. A History Society meeting was recently broken up in Harare: too many whites in one place made the gathering "suspect" (read: likely pro-opposition MDC).

"I said to them: Why would I take kids to a political meeting? If I wanted to hold a meeting, why wouldn't I just hold it in my house?" He sighs.

"And I'm going to have the same problem next month, when the Tree Society of Zimbabwe come."

pillow talk

It's the very last pillow in the shop. At US 4, I think it is a real bargain. I stand in line at this shabby zhing-zhong shop, near the fuchsia-pink dustpans and the plastic towel hooks, waiting to pay. I've been looking for pillows for ages. These days my son uses a cushion sheathed in a cotton case, his head dangerously wobbling off the corner when I check him late at night. "You're only taking one?" the cashier wants to know. This isn't a shop many (any?) whites patronise, cue all sorts of attention since I walked in. "There aren't any others," I say innocently. "It doesn't matter: I'll bring my own," he says. He looks at me slyly to see how I'll take it. After 10 years in Zimbabwe and four in libertine Paris, I'm still pathetic when it comes to being provoked. "I don't think my husband will be too happy," I squeak -- and remember all the times I vowed never to hide behind a man.

bottom enhancers

"They're called apetitos but they enlarge one's butt," texts Tadiwa. I've just read about Zimbabwe's latest craze -- bottom-building pills -- and sms'ed her worriedly.
The pills are called Super Apetito, Power Apetito and General Apetito. They're smuggled in from Angola and Mozambique and -- according to Kwayedza, the Shona-language daily -- they're selling like hot cakes. Zimbabwe is, after all, a country where a recent survey concluded "men are looking for women with huge behinds." (You can count me out then, and probably Tadiwa, since she fits into my cast-off Paris trousers)
At around 60 pence a packet, the pills are eminently affordable, even for working girls struggling to get by on Zimbabwe's standard monthly salary of less than £120.
But there are side-effects: sleeplessness, strange gait (one woman said her client was now "walking like a crab") and goodness-knows-what-else in the future. Local doctors are urging women to stop buying them but it's an uphill struggle: the standard wolfwhistle here translates to (and I've got this on state media authority): "This woman is very attractive, she wiggles."
"Don't use those pills, girl," I text Tadiwa. "You've got a beautiful figure."
She doesn't reply.

wedding fever

-- The (white) Zimbabwean version: 120 guests (OK, so not 2,000). Booked into Mana Pools, a rapidly-regaining-in-popularity tourist resort in western Zimbabwe for the only free weekend in weeks. Camping for three nights. The bride's parents must provide food -- and loo-roll -- for all of them during that time. Wedding at sunrise (so coffee and rusks first) on the river (Zambezi) banks. ( Slight possible problem: last time crocodiles were feasting on a just-dead hippo. Do you really want that as background for your vows?). Ablution blocks seriously not up to scratch: no plugs, no toilet seats, no shower roses (Bride's father has had to redo the lot at his own expense, but National Parks and Wildlife Authority who run the place won't give him a discount). Another problem: the monkeys. They've been fed by ignorant tourists so now they're unafraid and vicious. The bride's mother is currently working on a huge gauze creation, not -- as you might imagine -- for her daughter's veil, but to slip over the thatched gazebo that's housing the food to keep the monkeys out (a kind of giant black see-through four-poster thing). Caterers -- for caterers there are a plenty -- want 1,000 US just to get themselves from Harare to Mana Pools. Another possible problem: water levels. Lake Kariba is spilling. If they open the floodgates (as they did in Jan/Feb), the bit of Mana the wedding's being held at will be.. wait for it... underwater. "I'd have put my foot down," sniffs my mother-in-law.

-- A prospective groom legged it from the wedding ceremony late last month when he spied his current wife in the congregation. Wife Mercy Ncube had come to watch Inspector Resistant Ncube wed his lover Sergeant Faith Kaseke in Kuwadzana township in April. When Resistant spotted Mercy he pushed aside his best man, "panicked and bolted out of the venue." She'd been tipped off by -- amazingly -- his relatives. Resistant Ncube is the editor of the police magazine The Outpost.

waiting

"Talking of the General Hospital..." she says. - "One of the hotel clerks went there two days ago." The baby had gastric 'flu. It's been spreading fast round the town: the suspicion is -- as always -- that it's linked to water quality. When the clerk got to the hospital she paid for her admission card (7 rand). Then she sat down to wait. She quickly realised there were lots of other mothers like her with similarly-stricken babies. They waited. And waited. The babies got sicker and smellier. "No-one came until the baby two in front of hers died. In the queue," she says. "The nurses sent the parents straight to the mortuary." "Mucha said to me in wonder: "The father was crying like a woman." We're silent, a group of youngish white mothers chewing through cheap plates of chicken curry.

there for each other

"Are you shopping?" I say. I saw her standing on the side of the road next to OK. She wears a flowered skirt I've seen many times before and a smart blazer. "Only for medicines," she says. "I was thinking," she adds. She fumbles in her pocket, thrusts a note into my hands. "Take this to buy a drink." I look down. It's 10 dollars. "It's too much," I say. (Her husband earns 200 US a month, maximum). "No," she says. "You are my daughter. I know you have always helped me. So, so much. We must be there for each other." She has stood beside me, this 60-something Shona woman, during a miscarriage, my father-in-law's cataract-op-gone-wrong, my son starting school. I take the note, afraid to offend. And then find that the international VISA system is down - it still is, six days later and I still can't withdraw any money -- and actually my purse has only another 12 US or so in it. That 10 dollars makes a dinner's difference.

sadness of a seven-dollar toothbrush

The outrage ripples down the line of shoppers. Seven dollars for a single toothbrush? I had been idly watching the man, standing three ahead of me at the till, for some time. He is well-dressed, in a suit. He chatted politely to the man behind him, whose small daughter clutched a bottle of orange juice. She said something to her father -- the way children do about people they think they recognise -- and he waited a second before turning to glance at me. We look furtively in each other's shopping baskets. Do people do this in other countries, I wonder? Or is it a reflex born of the days when there was so little to buy that you didn't even need a basket, when you could walk to the till clutching your "leaves" (bundle of rape) and your soya mince? My basket -- for the record -- has nothing special in it: pilchards, cucumber, some biltong. No more, no less than most of the people standing in this lower-end supermarket, enjoying the buzz of payday. This city has its rhythms and the the 23/24/25 of each month are the 'high' days, when crowds sit in the banking halls to wait for the government to pay its civil servants. Then they flock to the supermarket. Earlier, I watched a boy a bit older than mine check a shopping receipt excitedly for his mother, who was wearing the turquoise blue uniform of a senior nurse. She watched him fondly for a second, in the private way that mothers do. What supper was she cooking for him tonight, I wondered? The suited man is only buying a toothbrush. I hear him talking to the cashier -- quietly first. She calls a supervisor. The supervisor confirms. Yes, the toothbrush costs seven dollars. It is a plain toothbrush, the sort that gets sent to me in parcels. Worth about 90 pence, I reckon. "No," he says and he looks at the rest of us for confirmation. "I just paid my rent." "You can keep your toothbrush!" he says and he stalks off. At the opposite end of the spectrum: a friend of the family who's charging monied expats -- and locals -- in Harare 30 dollars per flower-arranging lesson. That's without the flowers: she goes to the 'student's' house to give a guided tour of the garden to show which flowers said student can pick. So many people want to sign up that she has a waiting list.

Mr Old Mutare

"So is Mr Old Mutare real?" Mr Old Mutare is 30-something's Mr Darcy-equivalent: they got together more than a year ago, then they split up. Now, after various non-serious dalliances on both sides, the two of them are finally engaged. There's just a small problem with paying bride-price, which is making the 30-something Lady have second (or is it third) thoughts...

"He could be but he doesn't really exist," she says enigmatically.

"Look," she explains, hugging the book I've just given her ("Can I keep it? I like to highlight things with a marker, you see, and I can't if I have to give it back"). "I have about five people who do exist and who I write about. Not too closely, of course."

"And I'm always listening out for ideas, for things people are talking about," to get inspiration, she adds. (Don't I do the same?). Some of what she writes is to alert people to things going on - the Small House issue, the way you can exploit phone recharge cards on New Year's Eve, before the computer system's been updated. "I want to say: Hey this is true and things shouldn't be like that."

"I write too," I tell her.

"You do? I have seven novels I've written at home, and I don't know what to do with them."

tracking down the 30-something lady

"It's you, isn't it?" I can't hide the triumph in my voice. "You are the 30-something Lady!"

I've been looking for this writer for months. She writes a column in the local paper called Diary of a 30-something Lady. I know I'm not the only one who looks eagerly for the tell-tale red heart on the leisure pages: other readers text in advice and comments to Zimbabwe's Bridget Jones. ("Diary of a 30-something needs more sugar in it:" someone suggested last month).

Through the last years of Zimbabwe's crisis, she's written faithfully about what it means to survive as a professional 30-something singleton when your salary doesn't arrive in the bank at the end of the month and when the power keeps getting cut (but the bills keep going up). She writes about dress dilemmas, her love of shopping, the problems of styling her hair, weekends away in the Vumba mountains, about watching her married friends with kids ("I would just like to have lunch one day with my friend without the kids or the maid or relatives tagging along. Now every conversation is interrupted by small voices,") She writes about her men dilemmas -- Mr Gorgeous, Mr IT, Mr Old Mutare, Stan: which should she marry -- and dealing with prospective mothers-in-law who are intensely suspicious of her (why isn't she married and yet she's past 30?). She observes friends who've got into relationship messes: her Small House friend (who's dating a married man), her friend who's HIV-positive -- and talks about the refuge of church on Sundays. Her column's a refreshing lively look at life in Zimbabwe's vibrant, never-cowed middle-classes, struggling to better themselves instead of crumbling in despair.

And it's that struggle that helped me to find her. She writes anonymously --"90 percent of it is true," she tells me now, standing on the steps of the church-building. "Ten percent isn't. I don't want to get sued."

I've had my suspicions for a while. I'd noticed that a column on dress sense that appears in the paper was similarly well-written (though prescriptive rather than descriptive). I'd wondered if it was the same woman, Ann R. But how to prove it? Then the author of the dress column was interviewed by an English lit. teacher who publishes study guide-pieces on Animal Farm in the paper. In that piece, Ann R revealed she was "setting up a coffee shop." I cut out the interview, and asked around for new coffee shops in town. No-one seemed to know anything. There were still three cafes"up-town" -- and goodness knows the ladies-who-lunch would have surely have heard of a new one. Meantime, the 30-something Lady had spoken of her new coffee shop, and her plans to take time off from work to get the business off the ground. Curiouser and curiouser...or maybe closer and closer. I put a book I thought she'd like into my car: The Dress Doctor, by Bessie Head (an autobiography of a dresser-to-the-(film)-stars) and drove around with its plastic cover glinting at me on the passenger seat for a few days. Then I took my child to his sports club, organised by enthusiastic 20-somethings at a local church on Wednesday afternoons. Normally I drop him at the door but today, I had to pay. I walked inside... and found a new coffee shop, the inside draped in vibrant blue. And there, inside, was a girl (30-something, definitely) wearing bouncy orange tear-drop ear-rings and the kind of wedge shoes that befit a fashion critic. I felt like I was meeting a friend.

"You're not supposed to know it's me," she laughs. "But people are guessing."

leaving sale

"I think this year's going to be bad," she says as her children play on the rug. End of the afternoon. The sun dapples on the freshly-cut grass. Kids swing on the home climbing frame to the chink of wine glasses. Idyllic, non? "You know, that man you told to clear out of the playground M?" She turns to a friend. He was selling pirated DVDs inside the walls of a local playgroup. M, a mother of two, had asked him to move. "He said, you're racist. He said he's a war veteran - " "Rubbish --" says M, who's hosting a leaving sale (crockery, tired baby towels, crocheted blankets, braziers: how many of these sales have I attended willingly or unwillingly in the last 10 years?) -- "He's not old enough." "But that's what he said," she insists. "And he said: just wait for the elections. We're going to sort you whites out." It's there so often on both sides, that hatred, so near the surface, waiting for the trigger.

still happening

They've been given 2 days to get off the farm, Mrs G says. "Drunken mobs" are at the gate. Someone caught and killed a buck and pinned it to the farmhouse fence. The warning: If they speak to the media, things will be worse for them. How can this still be happening, 10 years later? The embassy official says he can't help: in theory the family is protected by a BIPPA - an investment protection agreement -- but "there is no law and order." So...you're on your own. I sit here and type less than an hour away from where all this is taking place and a family is pulling out its suitcases and scrabbling for the photo albums and think: the story has not changed. Only now, no-one is interested, outraged, bothered. Not even those supposed to protect you. And I too feel weary with it all.

splodge

I linger by a shop window filled with fluorescent Smartie-coloured shoes, sandals, flip-flop things with satin roses on. Sometimes I'm brought by a standstill by visions of plenty here. The memory of --well, nothing -- is still fresh.

The woman leans against me conspiratorially."You've got a mark on the back of your skirt."

I whip round. It's true, some sort of a damp-looking splodge. "Thanks for telling me," I say but I'm mortified: how many other passers-by have seen it? I grasp my basket and -- with my free hand -- try to manoevre a box of Cornflakes round my behind. It's a fair walk back to the car (past the parked black Mercedes with the Zimbabwe flag flying and the armed riot policeman in the back and the two businessmen in black suits who may or may not be visiting white businesses today as the indigenisation drive hots up: that's what they've been doing for the past week in this town) and the Cornflakes box is bulky and yellow and I'm not sure if I'm actually drawing attention to myself but what else am I supposed to do? How do other people manage or do they never get splodges? Will I be known forever more as the white-woman-with-the-splodge-on-the-back-of-her-dress?

Back in the car, I examine my skirt. The splodge I trace to the inside of my dress. And yes, it is my son's glow putty - the remnants of -- that didn't come off in the wash. You buy eggs of the plasticine-like stuff in OK supermarkets. It looks worse than it actually is.

But I'm glad that she stretched across the gap and told me.

missing 'phone (or worse)

"He's lost his 'phone," I tell my mother-in-law. I need the number of a woman last seen at the swimming pool where my husband went to pick up our son (and presumably dropped the thing).

Losing a phone is a nightmare in our line of business. It's not so much the handset -- which can be replaced easily these days -- but the number. In a country where suspicion is rising, contacts often only answer the 'phone if they recognise your number.

It could take months to rebuild the trust -- and the phone book. My mother-in-law can hear the desperation in my voice.

"I just heard a terrible story," she says. "You remember DT? He used to come to stay with us."

"He was on a houseboat in Kariba," she says. Turns out he'd taken a small boat out fishing with other holidaymakers. As often happens, the boat drifted into weeds. He leant over to pull the motor into the boat ("As you have to," my mother-in-law points out. My father-in-law has done it lots of times) -- and a crocodile grabbed him by the arm. The boatman grabbed him round the middle, they tussled...and the crocodile got away with the hand.

"You get blase," she says. There was a time when somebody got their hand taken dipping their fingers in the way to get the maggot juice off. "After that happened we all put pails of water inside the boats. But then we stopped."

Sometimes I wonder if it's just us whites who get blase, who underestimate the ferocity of Zimbabwe's wildlife? I stayed in a lion park last year with Shona friends -- two middle-aged women -- who were extremely suspicious of game drives.

"Better to lose a 'phone than a hand," she finishes.

Later, we find the 'phone (under the passenger seat) and I'm doubly grateful.

trust

"Come on," he says. "We've been watching you. "

"I've run out of fuel," I say stupidly, swinging my jerry can. Bad time to run out of fuel. Shortages are rife once more. I have just run to the nearest garage to find they have only diesel. My child needs to be picked up NOW at a bus stop a good four kilometres away. I have no money on my cellphone. My husband's car is out of action because his tyre was spiked.

"Get in and we'll take you to the garage," he says.

The car is a black Merc. Three youngish guys inside. Everything my mother ever told me screams no. So I make a snap decision, and climb in.

The driver snaps down the central locking. But the windows are open. I think I could scream, if I needed to. I gabble worriedly about miscalculating how far 5 dollars of fuel will take me.

"You need to set your mileage clock," says the large one (Albert, he says he's called). They drive me to a garage. One of the three takes my jerrycan. I panic slightly, manage to unlock my door. Climb out. Get into the scrum by the pump. "How do you know him?" asks an attendant, gesturing at Albert. Who really is Albert, I wonder?

Should I slip away now? I climb back in. And of course, they drive me back to where my car sits abandoned, blinking on the side of the road. Help me pour petrol into the tank. Ask for my phone number, of course and 'phone five minutes later, just to check I'm OK.

No more, no less.

no claims for cholera

A local cellphone company has just launched a life insurance policy that you pay for by topping up on your airtime. Sounds great but then this is Zimbabwe, where hope is at best uncertain.* There are some very country-specific policy exclusions, as listed at the end and in small print of a glossy promotional booklet distributed with the Sunday papers:

"Any one of the following conditions will result in the Underwriter being absolved from any liability to make payment:

- if death is as a result of epidemics as defined and declared by the World Health Organisation (no claims for cholera, then)
- if death is caused by an aviation accident (roll on Air Zimbabwe)
- if death is a consequence of judicial sentence of death penalty (best not to be convicted of treason)
- if death is a consequence of illegal actions as may be defined in terms of Zimbabwean law (if you're practising as a reporter, presumably)
- if death is a consequence of war, invasion, act of foreign enemy (the West?), hostilities or war like operations (whether war has been declared or not -- what does this say about what they're expecting during the next elections?), riots, mutiny, civil commotion, civil war, rebellion, insurrections, conspiracy or siege.

It all reads horribly like a prophecy. Especially in the light of Morgan Tsvangirai's comments today that he sees "nothing wrong" with a Tunisia/Egypt style uprising...

* Valerie Tagwira The Uncertainty of Hope, novel, 2008

text message

SIMPLY TO THANK U FOR OUR FRIENDSHIP. I CAN ONLY CHERISH TH HOPE THAT WE'LL BOTH ENJOY OUR UNION AND'LL GROW STRONGER WITH TIME. MAY GOD BLESS U.

It's Fish's choice of the word union that I'm a tiny bit worried about. I'm also aware that he may be misusing it, flowering up his language to impress me. I got an email today - in fact it came through on the email address I share with my husband -- from a younger man I've helped on the odd occasion with article-writing skills: "I thought you'd dumped me", he said.

Fortunately my husband is an understanding man....

big fish

The prison officer greets me as he walks past. Stops. "I've seen you before," he says. "Last year. I work at the remand prison."

Does he mean when B was being held there? I'm cautious. "I want to be your friend," the says. He's in his -- what -- late 30s? Early 40s? "If it's convenient."

There are several things this could mean:

1) he -- his name is Fish -- is CIO, has recognised me, wants to watch me.
2) he is interested in not just friendship, eager to find out whether some of the things they say about white women (more accessible, let's put it) are true
3) he wants to show he is friendly to whites. Often when the vitriol's at its worst, people in the streets go out of their way to appear genuinely friendly, I've noticed. Like they're trying to prove they don't think like the president says they should.

"Come into the shade to swap phone numbers," he says. We stand by the telephone offices. I keep him talking for a few minutes, stressing the words "in-laws" and "child" in case it's number 2.

.

totem

"Do you know what my totem is?" Fadzie asks.

She and my son are climbing in my pantry, legs splayed out to balance on the shelves that line the walls. It's not entirely permitted behaviour but my mind was -- until now -- elsewhere.

"Mum, what's a totem?"

I look at Fadzie. "It's an animal, isn't it, that represents your family?" I'm not sure that that is everything there is to a totem, but Fadzie nods.

"It's a porcupine." She must have just seen the porcupine quills, collected when we were last in the Lowveld. They're on a shelf next to the lightbulbs and a grubby lump of plasticine. She has already corrected me on my housekeeping skills, taking the broom to sweep the floor as I wash up hurriedly in cold water: "If Gogo could see this floor, she'd say: 'Do humans live here?'"

"Porcupine is nungu in Shona," she says importantly.

"Mum, what's our totem?"

She laughs, but it's a good-natured laugh. "White people don't have totems," she says.

continuity

"Did you see what's happening in Tunisia?" he says. As in so many middle-class Shona homes, they have the widest flat-screen available plus the latest (purple) cellphones. The furniture is comfortably dingy in this 60-something lecturer's home. There are water patches on the ceiling. I have similar ones at my place.

"I was up on the roof trying to fix the leaks with wood," he says, shaking his head. Years ago, there would have been workmen to call in. Now we do our own DIY. "She (my wife) was inside, banging on the ceiling with a broom where the patches were."

Sky TV has rolling pictures of the Tunisian crisis. From my armchair, I can see tanks, wide white streets, people rioting. Outside are the green hills of Zimbabwe's east. The president was in town just last month for his ZANU-PF party's annual conference, vowing to defeat "illegal Western sanctions." Mugabe has been in power in Zimbabwe 30 years, seven longer than Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the Tunisian leader. Both have glamourous, hated wives.

"Now the protesters are saying they want all the ruling party to go," says his wife, a teacher.

"But where's the continuity? It might be worse than before." She shakes her head. I'm struck, once again, by the great gulf between my Western reading of a situation and a local -- and most definitely pro-opposition -- one.

Ngaa and the hamster

Ngaa screams when he sees the hamster.

My son misunderstands, tries to put the scrabbling thing on the child's leg. Which only leads to more terror. Sid is two months old, a grey teddy-bear hamster. It's a measure of the improvement in Zimbabwe's economic situation that you can buy teddy-bear hamsters (and toy remote-controlled helicopters and Greek yoghurt and imported Vanish soap powder) in this small eastern border city. There was a time -- was it really just two years ago? -- when the shop shelves were filled with nothing but lone loo-rolls.

Ngaa, 3, writhes in my arms. "He doesn't like it," sister Fadzie says. She's not that enamoured either, but is sufficiently used to Auntie and her family's strange white foibles to remain quiet.

"It was a culture clash," I explain later to Mai C. "I don't think Shona kids have hamsters." (Strictly speaking, that's not true. The posh woman who owns the baby shop and imports Twister wax crayons told me at great length about her 6 year-old son's hamster last month).

"No - " Mai C laughs (and she's the one who read Famous Five to her boys).

"If we see a mouse in the house, we will get a broom to kill it. Just the thought of touching it -"

She shudders.

bully by name

"What a coincidence," my mother-in-law laughs. But I think I detect unease in her voice.

We've just pointed out to her that the bullying protagonist in the Costa Children's Award-winning Out of Shadows is called Ivan Hascott. His name is one syllable different to my brother-in-law's, my mother-in-law's second child.

Reports say author Jason Wallace attended the same boarding school at the same time as my brother-in-law: Peterhouse, in Marondera, Zimbabwe. Wallace -- who set his story in a post-independence Zimbabwean boarding school -- looks to have been a couple of years younger than my brother-in-law.

Who was a well-known bully.

Often, when I reveal my married name in a social gathering, someone will come up to me and ask hesitantly: "You're not related to --" and I steel myself. Some former schoolmates laugh when they recount his exploits. But we've met at least two men aged around 40 who I'd say were still psychologically scarred.

His parents knew little about his bullying: how would you, when you saw your child only in the holidays and at the most twice a term? Boarding school is a big thing here, something I find -- with my English day Grammar School background -- totally foreign. As I write, a friend's just dropped off her seven-year old for the first time. ("Not a tear shed by any of us," she texts me).

Bullying was and is a problem. An 80-something friend of ours remembers when she had to take her son out of a school because a classmate died in a bullying incident (he was locked into a tin trunk). In one of the worst cases a couple of months ago, a 19-year-old prefect was arrested for sodomising 10 younger boys in their dormitory (actually, he wasn't arrested straight away: they let him sit his exams).

My brother-in-law was, I think, pretty scarred himself at the time, as many white and black kids were in the early 1980s. He'd had an absent father for much of the previous decade (my father-in-law had to perform six-week blocks of military service, so he'd spend six weeks at home and six weeks away in the bush, and the family never knew whether he'd come back). The three brothers returned to school after independence to find other whites overnight had either fled the country or yanked their kids out of now racially-integrated local government schools. Rightly or wrongly, my parents-in-law followed suit, scrabbling around to mop up the remaining places in exclusive boarding schools. Each child ended up in a different school.

That's not to excuse what happened, but it may go someway towards explaining it.

"Who'd have thought our sweet little darling was getting up to all that?" my mother-in-law tinkles. She is, as always, nothing but brave.

not the marrying kind

"Talking about not being married --" he says. "I've got a story to tell you."

We're sitting on our oil-lamp lit verandah, crickets chirping in the blackness. He is a Zimbabwean academic, now living in the diaspora. He's come back for the Christmas holidays to visit his frail mother, 83, who -- all credit to her -- is just finishing her third book.

"I've got this colleague" -- he says. The colleague's interested in things military. When our friend sees a pair of rusted small cannon sitting in the long grass outside an apparently deserted storeroom he pulls out his camera.

A few minutes later a soldier taps him on the shoulder. "My boss would like to see you."

A six-hour ordeal begins. He's taken to the police station, then to the back offices. Why did he take a picture? How did he know that building he photographed was a disused barracks? (He didn't. My husband did. He can remember being taken there in the back of the family station wagon during the war days when his parents dined in the officers' mess. There was a waiter -- Goodson, was it? or Warrior? -- who brought cold drinks out to the boys in the night) How do the CIO (because it's CIO interviewing him now) know he wasn't trying to make a map? A map to be used for espionage purposes?

They confiscate the camera, want a print-out of the photos. Just one problem: the police (of course) have no printer. So officers accompany our friend to the market square where the outdoor photographers roam, cameras in hand. Yes, one of them can print out what the police need. The photographer disappears with the precious memory card. He returns later with the photos. It's only when the police examine the prints that they realise these are not the right ones . A Shona couple beam, resplendent in wedding attire, at the officers from Kodak paper.

We sip our coffee.

"You forget there are eyes everywhere," I murmur. I wonder again about that white car that I've seen parked outside our drive the last few nights, lights off. Roadside lovers? Probably. But in Zimbabwe, the fear is never far. The car is there tonight.

"But what I wanted to say -- " He's remarkably calm about this. That's even though the military police called at his mother's cottage earlier in the day "for fellowship purposes. To check you are alright" (ie where you said you'd be and not reporting to your colonial masters) -- "The reason why it took so long with those eight people questioning me, is that they couldn't believe I wasn't married."

He's in his 50s, our friend, a steady girlfriend (plus cat) waiting for him back home.
.
"What, not married? But why?" they kept saying. "No children?" It's unthinkable, a disgrace, for a Shona male to die childless. In the past, you could be buried with a rat on your back if you had no kids.

"What about children outside?" the CIO persisted. "Ok, so not inside marriage, but outside then?"