Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller

whatsoever.”
    Dad looked up at me, his eyes crinkled against pipe smoke, eyebrows raised as if I had said something of surprising stupidity. He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “Ah, yes, but it’s all in the head, Bobo. All in the head.”
    I had a glimmering of understanding then. No, my parents are not two solitudes, as Rainer Maria Rilke would have had it, protecting, touching, and greeting one another. To the contrary, they are indistinguishable from one another, inseparably connected; they have become a single recognizable culture with its own food, its own scents, and its own private language. Even the way they have annoyed one another over the years has become part of their shared culture, the way mosquitoes are a difficult but inevitable part of the Zambezi valley, or rain has become a standard joke in Scotland. Over time, they have learned to make their foibles part of the ties that bind them, their love is
everything
about them—not only the passion and humor and resilience, but also the aggravating habits, the quirks, the flaws.
    When they were younger, Mum’s excessive love of plastic bags made for one of those plaguing marital recurring arguments that are always about more than the subject at hand. As if terrified that they would run out in her lifetime, Mum collected bags, washed them, reused them, washed them and reused them again until eventually they disintegrated into little plastic dust atoms. Until then, like neurotically beloved pets, they came with her everywhere. “Just in case,” she said.
    Dad, more worried about broken-down lorries and armed bandits in the forest than he was about a dearth of petrochemical packaging, grew increasingly impatient. “Nicola, I am leaving now,” he would suddenly declare, as if an invisible starting flag had been dropped. “We need to get back before dark.” Then he roared off in the pickup while Mum still had only one leg in the car. Meanwhile, plastic bags were strewn like wind-buffeted reprimands all over the driveway. “And my poor limbs ripped off at the knee, arms severed at the elbow,” Mum remembers.
    Now, though, Dad sits behind the steering wheel calmly smoking his pipe while Mum has a last, protracted faff in the house. “She’s getting together all her plastic bags, the bane of my existence,” Dad says cheerfully. “Just you watch, she’ll have about five hundred of them and she’ll rifle through them all the way to Lusaka.”
    At last Mum emerges from the house and gets into the car clutching her treasured cache. Dad waits for her to swat the dogs away from the car. “Don’t run over the terrorists,” she says. “Go on, Harry. Off you go, Sprocket.” Then she shuts the door and after that there’s the lengthy performance of the seat belt. Finally she’s ready, and she flashes Dad a victorious smile and a thumbs-up, like a Formula One racer leaving the pit.
    “Got all your plastic bags, Tub?” Dad asks.
    “Yup,” Mum says. And after that for a hundred or more happy miles, Dad drives and Mum rustles around making small, satisfying discoveries—“Ooh look, I found my copper bracelet. I knew I had put it somewhere safe,” or “Ah, there’s my receipt for the fingerlings, Tim. See? It had to show up somewhere”—until we reach the Munda Wanga Botanical Gardens on the outskirts of Lusaka where there’s always a chance the caged lions will be eyeing a bunch of children on their school outing. As soon as she catches sight of the huge trees that line the gardens’ walls, Mum’s attention is diverted from her plastic bags and is riveted instead on the enclosure. “Oh, no schoolchildren today,” she says, disappointed.
    “Mum can’t wait to see a schoolchild being eaten by a lion,” Dad says.
    “ I ’ VE TOLD BOBO THAT A HUNDRED TIMES ALREADY ,” Mum shouts. Then she turns back to me. “It’s like living with a sheep,” she says. “Every day’s a fresh day for Dad.”

SIGNAL FLAGS
    B y early July, I had been