oxbridge

"Auntie, what do I have to do to go to Oxford?" A asks.

He appeared in the kitchen a little while earlier, a rucksack full of books in his hands. We sit at the table, green bananas in a bowl in front of us. He declines tea. I know there is something he wants to ask me.

I will have to wait to find out.

So I ask first after his mother, his sister, his grandmother. He asks after my baby, my son, my husband.

I ask how his lessons are going, at the private academy next door to his grandmother's that offers a better -- very slightly better -- education than the strike-plagued government boys high school.

He tells me about his old school in Matero, the township in Lusaka where he lived for five years with his parents. "I always wanted to come home, Auntie," he says. "They were so rough there."

(Later I will look up Matero on Google as I try to picture him there: "a section of populated place in Lusaka", travelingluck.com tells me. Barclays bank has a branch there. There's a football team called the Matero Tigers. Greataupair.com tells me to find "all Housekeepers available near Matero, Lusaka" and then it tells me to find "all Senior Caregivers available near Matero, Lusaka. Redemption Shalom Church is somewhere there: 'Peter' has a strong heart for evangelism and community development, apparently. A crime wave is haunting residents after the murder of a female student, says the Lusaka Times two days ago).

"I took up martial arts," A tells me. "I loved it so much." I wait.

"Auntie, if I get 25 points at A-level, do you think I can go to Oxford?"

I take a deep breath.

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.

leaving

"I've been meaning to call you," S. says.

I nearly walked past my pharmacist-friend, hurrying along this busy street on my morning errands. I have plastic bags filled with bread, milk and -- unusually -- a bottle of wine. It's a gift, meant for our host tomorrow night. I know from experience that Shona women (the respectable, older kind) do not approve of women drinking.

I resist an urge to make sure the cork isn't poking out (It is).

"We're leaving," she says.

When?

"This weekend. The youngest has been ill. I was in Harare all week with him last week. He's got asthma. It was terrible, terrible. And S- said: 'You have to move here.'"

It makes sense. S-, my friend's husband, has been in Chitungwiza, Harare's dormitory town, for months now. He travels home at weekends but the bus trip -- if bus he takes -- is five, six hours, double the length of time it takes in a car. Term finishes next week: it's a good time to leave. Still, I'm genuinely sad.

"I'll call you when we're in town," I promise. I move to hug her. Is it me - or do I sense an imperceptible holding back? She and I often hug (Shona women do, a special style of bottom-sticking-out hug that means only your shoulders and the top part of your body touch) but not on a street, I realise.

Walking away, I think that I am the only murungu (white person) on the street. Although many people recognise me, they still watch. Maybe she felt the eyes.

"Look after your marriage," she whispers as a parting shot. "However bad it gets, look after it."

lodge

"It's such a shame," she sighs. "The place is ruined."

They lived in the manager's house at a well-known hotel on the Mozambican border. Lived, that is, until the owners mysteriously fled to Spain and the hotel changed hands. They -- they're close relatives of mine by marriage -- were told that "an Asian" had bought the place.

The story seemed to stick. The new owner ordered all pork out of the hotel freezers. The bar was no longer to sell alcohol, workers were told. The workers predicted a grim future: the hotel was a popular drinking spot for locals (read diamond dealers) from the nearby city of Mutare.

Then the Castles reappeared. GG (the bank chief) had bought the place, the whisper went. For 2 million US. A new sign went up outside. My relatives were told to pack their bags.

She went back to the hotel this week, walked down the dried mud path to the house she and her husband lived in for seven years after they lost their farm. In six months the place is unrecognisable. The grass is knee-high. The wooden struts holding up the walk-round verandah have disappeared. Baboons have pulled out thatch from the roof by the fistful, leaving gaping holes for the late rains to fall inside.

"Don't even walk round the front," said next-door's cook, who'd followed her down. "You'll be too upset."

She filled a plastic bag with grapefruit and limes from the (now unfertilised and untended) orchard and slipped away.

racing

"Shall we leave?" I ask for the hundredth time (this week? this month?). Zimbabwe always looks worse in the dark minutes before sleep.

"Don't keep saying that," he says. "It's like running a race. Every time you say that it's like we're slowing down and stopping for a second."

"It only makes it worse."

fireworks

Cars line the dark verges, bumper to bumper. St John's private school is holding its fireworks display and le tout Harare is here.

This is an annual event apparently, though we've never been before. Commemorating Guy Fawkes has never seemed the right thing to do, not in a Zimbabwe still so furious with its colonial past.

There's little sense of unease tonight though. There are teenagers with blaring stereos and halter-neck tops that can only come from South Africa and cellphones that glow in the dark. (They are not all white, these kids, by the way). Brisk mothers in tight jeans with long blonde hair trail pre-teens. An expensive sound system is in place. Little Luke has lost his parents: can someone come to the front to collect him?

The rich and the want-to-be-seen go through the gate. Tickets are 20 US a head and they've sold out, B. tells us. Twenty US would buy a bag and a half of mealie-meal.

We sit among the rocks in the ditch beyond the fence, our friends and I. Our boys, both four, press their noses to the wire. They will see just as well from the outside.

B has the offer of a job in Botswana, which is -- as we say over and over again -- only a car ride away. "Not the other side of the world." But it is a long car ride. B and his wife are good friends: we met shortly after our boys were born. I had banked on us growing middle-aged in the same place, two couples comfortably swapping stories of our kids, the books we're reading, our leaky roofs.

"We have no option," B says sadly. They can afford to live in Zimbabwe no longer. He has a good job with a local bank. By the time he's paid -- every week, at least his company has the courtesy to do that for him -- his salary amounts to no more than cents. "And Botswana is the only door that has opened." They will leave in January.

From my spot in the ditch, I watch the showers of pink and blue and green stars reflected in the windscreen of a parked car. Beside me, B's wife nurses her three-month old.

This is the picture I will take from Bonfire Night 2008: two little boys, hands locked together firmly, eyes heavenward, shouting joyfully at each fresh bang. I still believe Guy Fawkes has no place in Zimbabwe, still shudder to think of what that money should have been used for in this desperately-hungry land.

And yet, and yet..

britney

The kids are talking about places they've visited. They count off on their fingers. Harare, Bulawayo, Gweru...Only one of them, 12-year-old Dumi, has ever been out of the country: "I've been to USA, Canada, England and Mozambique. And Durban," he says proudly. Dumi's mum, a widow, drives a gold-coloured Peugeot, I've noticed. The rest of the kids walk, like their parents do. They may have cars but they're moored by the side of their houses, have been for months. No money for petrol, let alone parts.

"Why did you come back?" Tatenda is horrified.

Tatenda, 14, has an exit plan and it involves People magazine. You can buy People on the pavement here, along with a few other (fairly recent) South African glossies: Women and Home, Garden and Home, the parenting magazine Living and Loving. We might be two months late about it but at least we know that this season we shouldn't be upholstering with straight and narrow stripes (if there were any to be had). Glamour magazine is popular (May's free plastic polka-dot make-up bags got sliced out of the cellophane wrapping and resold). So is People. Zimbabwe might be struggling, but the masalads -- the trendy, urban, post-independence generation who were the first to adopt Western dishes like salad -- still want to read about Britney. Inside People, Tatenda's found a list of people seeking penpals. She brandishes a handwritten letter she's already received from her unsuspecting host-to-be, black ink on thick lined exercise book paper. "My favourite foods are pineapple (and something else I didn't catch). Do you have breaks at school? We have lots of breaks." The other kids listen in awe.

"If I had a passport, I'd go and never come back, " Tatenda says. Her mother has finally consented to take her out of mission school and let her go to the government school just down the road. The pupils do gardening. Regularly, instead of A-level classes. There's no money for groundsmen. "I've never been anywhere. Can you imagine, it's 14 years since I was born and I've never been out of this place?"

"When I grow up I want to be a mermaid," Tanyaradzwa, 8, says. "And then I'll swim away."

hellos and goodbyes

We stumble down the road in the dark, a lone beer bottle zipped inside a National Trust bag. At the last minute, we've been invited to a leaving party. It's at an old house built in 1948. Parquet floors, pressed steel ceilings. Through an unkempt hedge, there's a glimpse of a swimming pool, all greened over. Years ago, there were three kids splashing about in that pool. The owners -- retired teachers, private sector, the husband was once a schools inspector -- are emigrating to Worcester to be near one of their sons.

"We just can't survive here anymore," the woman says. On the floor two little girls play snap, hairslides in their fringes. She leans closer. "You know, to live here you've got to have a cushion."

Cushion is code for a secret source of foreign currency. No point having one declared to the government as then it has to be surrendered at the official rate of exchange, less than 100 times its street value. You're doomed if you've got only Zimbabwe dollars. A single egg -- they sell them singly here -- costs 1.5 million dollars this week. At the official rate of exchange that's £25.

The table in the dining room is piled high, despite the shortages. There's smoked salmon smuggled from Norway on sliced ciabatta-style bread. There are fritters, fried in scarce cooking oil. Crisps and a prawn cocktail dip, definitely imported. Chicken drumsticks in breadcrumbs. They've been planning this spread for weeks.

"People say: aren't you excited about going?" the hostess says. "Well, I'm not. I've been in this place for 28 years and I've got to start all over again."

My husband's old typing teacher is there, still elegantly-coiffed and delicately-fingered. She lives in the Vumba, the eastern mountainous area that borders Mozambique. There are still minefields on the hill slopes, left from the 1970s bush war. This woman's had no power at her home since December 17. She cooks on a woodstove. She's just been "caring" in Derbyshire -- looking after an elderly Lady (a real one) in return for food, lodging and a few precious pounds to keep her going back in Zimbabwe. "I don't think shorthand's very useful, actually," she says.

Some days it seems like everyone's off. The next-door neighbours are leaving for Zambia, taking the cats but not the boerbull. The twins' mum -- a tall, Laetetia-Casta lookalike -- is off to Australia next month. "I just can't do this anymore," she said to me when I bumped into her outside the supermarket a few weeks ago. We'd both been wandering aimlessly along the empty aisles, looking for something to buy. Her shopping trolley had nothing but gin bottles in. "My husband," she said with a half-giggle. "He's going crazy with no booze." My friend Sibo left in August for her in-law's home in Zambia. She came back briefly for Christmas, wafting in and out of my life in a royal blue halter-neck satin dress. Her in-laws are rural folk, with no power and no gas. Sibo and her husband had to spend all their savings on the mother-in-law's cataract operation. "My son wants to come back. He misses his grandmother," she said. "But at least there we can put food on our table."

Down the road, there are people still arriving, unfolding deck chairs in the shadows. People shaking hands, the pinprick of a cigarette. "I haven't seen you for years. How's your son -- he's in Cyprus now, isn't he?" We pick up our son and slip away. In the sky I can see the belt of Orion, three sharp studs against the black. Diamonds over a diamond-rich country where few can afford to live.