Give me a mammal – even a crop-raiding elephant! – any day. Just spare me the insects, please…
I feel sick, I feel excited, I feel sick. What the hell is happening to me?
I’m getting excited at the thought of T coming over tonight so I set about cooking – for a change. Living on my own has made me lazy and I realise how I miss cooking for someone, how the thought of having him around is good for me.
2 ring gas cooker. my kitchen in Kampala
Time to cook dinner.
I picked up our heavy wooden chopping board and placed it on the counter. I didn’t like the look of that side so flipped it over: SCREAM! What? How can that be?
Stuck to the wood, squashed paper thin is the biggest – and certainly the flattest – cockroach I’ve ever seen. I scream.
Now what?
Luckily Simpson is home so he does the honours and scrapes the offending insect off the board and scrubs the board clean for me. I quickly put the scene behind me – see how I’ve grown up since I arrived in Uganda? – and dinner’s soon bubbling away on the stove.
A little later, I hear the telltale sign of the tank (a.k.a. T’s diesel engine) in the compound. In walks T with an enormous and beautiful fish, a Nile Perch “introduced into Lake Victoria by your grandfathers” he says. I wasn’t sure if T would definitely turn up so I’m delighted to see him and quite touched that he’s decided to surprise me with this beautiful fish.
It’s over a foot long, glistening silver and beautiful. We stand there admiring it – and then I freeze. Cockroaches. Cockroaches?! They’re coming from everywhere, they’re running all over the counter, jumping in the drawer, scurrying under the cooker.
I feel sick.
“You’ve brought them in with the fish!” I accuse, in the nicest way I can find.
“No way. They can’t have been in the fish, you must have them in your kitchen.”
“They must’ve been in the cavera (plastic bag),” I say and he doesn’t argue with me.
T quickly kills most of them, mashing them into the wall with a spatula, and I try and forget about them, kicking their bodies out of sight for Eva to pick up in the morning. (It’s ok, she and I have an understanding).
We can’t agree on how to cook the fish. I try and explain how I’m used to having an oven and that I don’t know how to cook a big fish like this on the gas ring. I feel pathetic: I can’t cook fish on the gas and have never cut up or prepared a big fish like this. I think of the sanitised individual portions I used to buy back home in the UK. T’s been trying to persuade me to start eating meat again, and I’m wary of discussing the subject of ‘what to do with this big fish.’
I feel sorry for him. He’s hardly talking, he’s still ill (suspected Malaria is now suspected Typhoid) and I expect the last thing he wants to do is hack up a big fish, but I cannot do it. I’m still reeling from the explosion of insects and I’m upset that communicating with T seems to be getting harder for some reason. I would really have to be in the right frame of mind to tackle this. A blunt knife doesn’t help – he’s not getting it done quickly enough for me! I don’t want to be around this.
I try to button my lip (who wants to hear the moaning mzungu?) The sight of blood and scales blocking the sink makes me go pale but I’m relieved and grateful that he’s almost done, now washing the chopping board and the knife.
Then, when I think the worst of the carnage is out of the way, and he’s about to start frying the fish, he decides to cut the head in two. For God’s sake. It’s quite normal for Ugandans to eat the head but he does this transverse section, slicing directly though the brains. I have never seen so many shades of red. I couldn’t suppress one “YUCK!” I think I earned it.
I screamed that this was a cockroach but this lookalike is apparently a cicada that lives in the trees in our compound
So all in all quite an evening: that big cockroach that Simpson insists isn’t a cockroach (it’s just got enormous wings and can’t run like one but it IS one), then the many little ones.
Let’s not forget the mosquitoes – the house if full of them. Every room. T spent the rest of the night with the mosquito bat investigating every nook and cranny of the house. Twice. As he finishes sweeping one area he moves back to where he started : he’s a man on a mission, especially now he thinks he’s had Malaria.
