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.

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.

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.

mothers

The woman is well-drawn, for a 10-year old. A floaty purple dress, high heels, black hair. Yollanda lingers over the hair. She makes it curl up at the ends.

"Is that your mummy?"

The children have been asked to draw things that are special to them. Most of them have drawn family members and friends. There are cats and dogs (Foxy, Spicy and Spider, Ruvimbo’s dogs are called). Baisel has drawn a cellphone, another child a flat-screen TV.

I know very little about Yollanda’s mother, except that she’s not there very often. In the days of the diamond rush, she disappeared to the Marange fields. She reappears every so often with a bucket of maize, the neighbours say. And sells the cast-off clothes Yollanda’s been given.

"Best not to give the clothes and the bath-soap to her," says Mai Caroline. "Give it to N, who lives across the road."

The women wonder what to do about Yollanda. How can you report her to Social Welfare when the department is barely functioning, they say, when state orphanages (and even private ones) are struggling to feed the children in their care?

"If she runs away from a home, she’ll be a street child and that’s worse," says Mai D.

But Yollanda is fast turning into a problem child. She steals, the neighbours say. Teenage boys – friends of her half-brother Courage – hang round the house.

"Have you drawn your mummy, Yollanda?" I ask again.

She looks at me shyly. "No. It’s you."

one year on

"Miss - " The girl comes running towards me in the deepening dusk. For a moment I think it is H., the girl across the road who's studying in England but back for the holidays. Trucks come to her family's house and unload things at night, never in the daytime.

When the girl gets closer, I see it's not H. This one is younger, 19 or 20 maybe, with straightened hair (which costs money).

"We are selling clothes," she says. "Shorts, tops. Come and see."

How do I explain that though I'm white, we're struggling like so many others here in the middle-class, wondering where to get school fees from, whether the 'phone will be cut off over unpaid bills, hitching a lift to Mozambique with family, eating spinach-from-the-garden-stuffed pancakes from mix sent from the UK, making tea from 'leaves' in the garden?

As we near the house -- it's the big tiled house on the corner, a double-storey building that looks as if it's been transplanted from Coventry rather than built for the tropics -- another girl emerges. She's wearing hipsters, a strapless top. I can make out the plastic -- they're supposed to be invisible -- straps holding up her Chinese underwear. Zhing-zhong bras, we all wear them.

The clothes are in a sports bag. The girls pull them out: shorts (favoured by masalads but certainly not traditional Zimbabwean wear: Girls La Musica dance group causes a furore each time they don skimpy shorts), tops ("8 dollars each," the girl says. "But we can negotiate"). Some still have the Top Shop price tags. Others are clearly second-hand. Has someone left a bag behind and the girls are disposing of the contents? Or has one of them just come out from England and she's selling off her stuff to raise some cash?

"I don't have cash at the moment," I say (which is true). "I'll have to ask my husband."

In Zimbabwe, that's a perfectly good get-out clause.

....

"My mother's sister has gone," she says. "Last week. They tried to 'phone but there was no-one there." She looks at me reproachfully. There was no-one in the house last week. I imagine the 'phone ringing unanswered.

"Was she old?"

"Not so old," she says. "She had problems - there." She points to her chest.

"Heart problems?" "No, BP. Her younger daughter was working in Harare so they took her to that hospital there. Sakubva Hospital. No, Mabvuku." She names a township to the north of the city.

"If I had money, I would go to Nyanga." The aunt must be buried by now, but I know the ritual: the sitting with the bereaved family through the night, the food gifts that will be expected. "All my money is gone."

"Gone?"

"I send money to Nyanga for my father," she says (her English is a thousand times better than my Shona). "40 dollars. Then my brother's wife wants money for thatching grass, 1 dollar for a bundle. I buy them 25. Then there is no money for my sister's child to buy school books. So I buy books for Khumbulani, 1 dollar 70 a book."

"They are all taking money from you," I observe.

"They say I am their mother, now that our mother has died," she says with a sniff. I am not sure if she is cross with me -- a not-wealthy employer she has the misfortune of working for, a Madam who does not even have enough money to get her hair done each week (or month, or six months) or buy a DVD player or a plasma TV or drive a car that doesn't belong to her in-laws -- or with her desperately-poor family who have fastened onto her as the only one with an above-average income in US dollars. Both, I guess.

.......

"How is school?" I ask A, a teacher.

There was a teachers' strike before we left, 10 days ago. Something has shifted though, because yesterday pupils were streaming out of St Dominics, a government secondary school.

"Some of them are back," she says. "At the junior school, they held a meeting. The parents must pay 50 dollars a term. With the 'incentives' -- localspeak for parent topups -- the teachers will get 330 USA." She uses the local slang: you-sah.

Happy told me about the junior school arrangement. She has a daughter there. "Honestly, we're so fed up," she says. "We want to put M in private school next year. Some of the parents were complaining, they say they can't afford 50 US." Happy can afford it. But many of the parents are civil servants, earning less than 150 a month. They can't.

"At the teachers' college, they are having a sit-in," A says.

It's one year exactly since the unity deal was signed. Some things haven't changed.

dish

The man's shirt is threadbare but he's worried about more important things."Where's my dish?" he asks. "I'm sorry, Mr M.," the girl behind the desk says. Mr M is obviously a frequent visitor. "It's still not arrived." "How am I supposed to eat then?" Mr M chortles. The dish Mr M wants isn't actually a flat enamel one. He wants Dish, the TV guide for DSTV, the satellite TV service for much of Africa. I've been thinking that Dish is an apt name. Because in times of scarcity, crisis and economic hardship, people here still want stories almost as much as they want food. New stories aren't easy to come by: the shelves of the government-owned Kingston's bookstore are as empty as the shelves in TM supermarket were last year. The local library is "seasonal": it closes for much of the 8-month-long rainy season because the tin roof leaks, so the books (what's left of them) have to be packed away. Friends beg me for used magazines. An official from the Education Ministry sends in a letter to the local paper: "I am appealing to anyone out there to give me a book or books for distribution...We welcome any book or magazine" (When I trek up several flights of stairs to the dingy government offices with my meagre pile of ancient Woman and Homes, the official's wife looks up from her typewriter. "We don't even have paper," she says.) While I've learnt to substitute where food's concerned -- to make my own tea from the rosemary bush outside the door, to fry the stalks of the spinach leaves, to use donated pancake mix to make spongecakes (they turn out doughnutty) -- I still battle with story-hunger. Which is why my mother-in-law tries to deliver a couple of loaves of bread and a fresh DSTV video twice a week.

abandoned

"Don't ask," says Mai C, shaking her head. I thought maybe their mother was back because Yolanda, (8, 9?) has a dress on. When I look closely though, I see that it's an ancient dress.The lilac is faded, the frills torn. Yolanda used to be a bookworm, grabbing my old Woman and Home magazines and tucking herself away in a corner to read them. Now she drops her head when you speak to her, refuses to answer.

Yolanda's mum left six weeks ago. She left the children -- Yolanda, Igno and two-year-old Polite -- in the care of an 11-year old brother. For food, she left half a bucket of maize. The brother slipped across the border to Mozambique to try to buy cheap dried kapenta fish. I don't know if he's still doing that. Now the children rely on charity -- donations of beans, cooking oil, rice, salt. There's been no word of the children's mother since, though Mai C says she's heard (through a complicated network of contacts) that the woman has been seen. "In Marange," she says. "Digging for diamonds."

embarrassed

"I'm embarrassed to ask," Mrs D says. "But I've asked A. so many times. Do you think I could borrow 5 dollars? That's all I need.

"I'll get Mai J to replace it when she comes," she says. I'm embarrassed too. Because this time I can truthfully say I don't have a cent. We haven't been able to lay our hands on a cent (a rand, a penny) for eight days now. We haven't bought bread, 'phone cards or even desperately-needed newspapers. Trying to finish a diamond piece on Friday, I spy a new diamond headline in a state weekly and have to lurk by the newspaper pile on the pavement to skim the piece.

A friend takes pity on us on Monday, arriving with a parcel of dry groceries and two Buddie cards. We start weighing up petrol use. If I go to the court hearing this morning, will there be fuel for the school run tomorrow? How long will the car run on empty? At 11 pm I realise I have nothing for a school lunchbox. I comb through cookery books looking for a biscuit recipe that doesn't require eggs. Lunch is now baked rice, roast pumpkin and avocado -- if there's power to cook. Yesterday's blackout lasted 15 hours. I grate green soap to use to wash...everything. Then we get a promise. This afternoon, our supplier says. He should have "supplies" by then. Our hopes rise. "Sorry," reads the text message. "I haven't received any payments yet. I'll let you know when I'm ready."

I'm still not sure Mrs D believed me.

second cup

Hanging on the living room wall in A's house, there's a framed cross-stitch picture in white and pink. "Home is where the heart is." The house is scrupulously clean, but there's no sign of the sideboard filled with trinkets - glasses, ornaments -- that used to have pride of place as you walked in. Sold?

There's tea, served in the thick Willsgrove pottery you'll find in every Zimbabwean home, every hotel, every cafe. It's then that I make my faux pas, when A offers a second cup and I nod quickly, without thinking.

She's used up the last of her powdered milk to fill the tiny jug that splashed the bottom of our four cups, first time round. There is no more milk, no sugar and there will not be when we leave the house. Embarrassed, A pours out black tea.

These days in Zimbabwe, it's bad manners to ask for a second cup.

lunch

There's enough dry bread for two slices of toast for lunch. Two between three of us. In traditional Shona culture, Tadiwa told me, Baba (father) gets served first, then Amai (mother). She was embarrassed when she came for supper and saw we serve guests first. Children are last in line, getting whatever's left.

I'm English though. My child gets the first slice. That leaves just one slice.

"I'll go without."

"No, you have it. I don't mind mouldy bread."

If there is some, that is.

sadza stories

I'd never had sadza before I came here. It's the staple food for Zimbabweans, made with mealie-meal (maize-meal). The maize is ground down into a white powder of a consistency somewhere between sand and Johnson's Baby Powder, if you get the top brand.

Sadza comes in different forms: bota, which is the watery porridge-form we eat most days for breakfast, power permitting. Then there's full-on sadza, a stiff white paste you're supposed to eat in pinchfuls, a wodge of sadza squeezed between the first three fingers of your right hand. Sadza tastes best with a vegetable relish made of tomatoes, onions, "leaves" (rape or spinach), salt and peanut butter, or with meat. These days in Zimbabwe though, peanut butter's a scarce luxury and price controls mean there's precious little meat. So it's sadza wejongwe (sadza with salt water) for afternoon tea and sadza nemajuru (sadza and dried termites) for supper. That's what the weekly Manica Post said on Friday in a front-page story. And that's a government paper.

I'm fascinated by the stories about sadza, how traditionally Zimbabwean girls were taught to grind it, how good Shona wives make sure there's never a pasty white lump in their husband's plate, how you can be sent back to your in-laws simply because you haven't mastered the art of sadza-making. In the past, if a man married a woman who turned out not to be a virgin -- and he wasn't the one responsible -- he could let his in-laws know by returning a plate of white sadza with a hole scooped out in the middle. The sadza said it all.

Mealie-meal's been in short supply for several weeks now, which makes tempers short. So I was elated when I got down to the grocer's shop this morning and found her workers unloading a bakkie full of white Ngwerewere super refined. A few seconds earlier there'd been no-one there -- the shop's pretty bare -- but now customers appeared from nowhere. Marii? How much?

The grocer lets her assistant Simba do the talking. His name means power, strength or authority and he's going to need every ounce of authority he's got to sell this stuff. Nine point six, he says. That's 9.6 million for just five kgs. The grocer's going to have to move this lot fast, before a gang of hungry National Price and Incomes Commission (NIPC) inspectors arrive. The gazetted price -- the one fixed by the government in September -- is just 145,000 dollars. At 9.6 million a bag, a teacher working on last month's salary would only be able to buy two and a half bags: just 12.5 kg. No wonder my teacher friend Mai Nigel told me yesterday she was "taking leave" this term. There's not much point working these days, not if your salary won't stretch to your sadza. They reckon 10 kgs will do a family a week and a half.

"Where'd you get it from?" I ask, counting out wads of blue 100,000 notes. Today I'm lucky: I have cash.

"From a new farmer," the grocer says and she looks up at me through her fringe.

New farmer is such a loaded term these days. It might mean old-style war vet, who invaded a white-owned farm, terrorised the former white owners, slashed a few cows and made off with the family silver and a few tractors. Or it might mean something different: someone a lot less violent, someone genuinely interested in a new career, someone driven to the land as a way of fending for his family in Zimbabwe's worst-ever economic crisis. This new farmer is an army brigadier's wife, says the grocer.

"Such a nice woman," she says defensively. I nod.

"Her husband's been transferred to Gweru," she says. (What, for the elections?) "I never knew an army brigadier could be so nice."

Nice is such a convenient word, despite Mrs Cuthbert's ban on it in our News books at the bottom end of primary school. "Nice means nothing, children," she said. Now sometimes that's a good thing.

red dress

My husband says that if we have another baby he will D-I-E. He spells this out because we are at the table with a four-year-old with big ears.

I will D-I-E and be D-E-A-D, my husband says in case I didn't quite get the message. Zimbabwe with one child is bad enough, Zimbabwe with two of the things will be much worse. It's a definite no, darling.

So I plot and I plan and I buy a new red dress from my favourite Chinese shop in the arcade next to Wimpy. It is knee-skimming and bust-skimming and full enough to twirl in seductively. I have not had a new dress for some time because a) there are very few clothes shops in Zimbabwe b) the clothes shops that have anything half-decent are wildly overpriced c) there are cash shortages. Bad ones. The sort that should stop you buying a new dress. I have been trying to feed the whole family -- two adults (one a meat-eater), a calcium-craving four year-old, two dogs and two cats -- on around £2.50 per day for some weeks now. We eat spinach, by the way.

Next morning I float into the dining room nonchalantly, as if this were Paris and I donned a new dress every day. My four-year-old has already learnt how to twist his mummy round his little finger.

"You look SO pretty, mummy," he says. "I want you to wear that dress everyday." And then -- just in case I haven't got the message -- "I want you to throw out all your other dresses and only wear that one."

"What about when it has to be washed?" I ask.

"I want you to wear it wet," he says.

My husband looks up from his mealie-meal porridge. There is no honey today. "Did you know there are cash shortages?" he asks politely.

"It's only zhing-zhong," I say. Zhing-zhong is the word Zimbabweans use when they talk about cheap poor-quality Chinese imports. It was one of the first words my child learnt.

I am having second thoughts about the dress though. Once, when I lived on a different continent, I read a piece about riots somewhere in the East. The police scanned the angry crowds and then picked out and shot someone in a red T-shirt. Our dear leader loves the East. Note to self: do not wear red dress in public, not in the next two months anyway. There are elections in March and people are getting restless. I do not want to be D-E-A-D, not for a red dress.

"So how do you like it?" I give my husband a twirl.