by Gaile Parkin
The eldest boy from the other house was quiet and serious, like the eldest boy in Madam’s house. Vusi wanted his own bedroom, he didn’t want to share with Fortune and Fortune’s noise and mess. He wanted a desk in place of Fortune’s bed so he could be serious about his schooling. Madam and Doctor had told him maybe next year he could have the downstairs room that was for visitors, because next year would be his last year of school and he was going to work hard for his exams and do well so that he could make something of his life. Meanwhile, he was supposed to be a good example for Fortune, and meanwhile Mavis still cleaned Vusi’s nice, tidy part of the room and still picked up all the mess in Fortune’s part so that she could find the floor to clean.
Vusi was the same age as Petros, who would be asleep now in the dairy-workers’ hostel at the bottom of the hill, unless there was a cow that was sick. Then he would be curled up with the sick cow inside the shed, with that dog of his that slept in the shed anyway because the other workers didn’t want it inside their hostel, and he would wait there until Doctor came in the morning to check on the cow. Doctor had offered him schooling but he had said no, he just wanted his job with the cows.
Mavis stilled her hands and rested them on her blanket. Flattening her back against the wall, she closed her eyes tight. She shouldn’t have let her thoughts wander all the way down to the bottom of the hill. She shouldn’t have let them go to Petros. She should have made them stay inside the main house with Vusi, Vusi who was nothing like her own boy would have been.
Eish, thoughts about her own boy were sometimes too hard. Sometimes they twisted her stomach tight, in the same way that her own hands used to twist washing before there was a machine to spin the water out. And sometimes the thoughts spun round and round inside her head until they squeezed water from her eyes.
Sighing quietly so as not to wake Lungi, she opened her eyes and assessed the baby-jacket. In just a few minutes it would be done. She would start another immediately. Meanwhile, she needed something to help her to still her mind before it started to spin.
Slipping silently out of her bed, she went to the wardrobe, quietly opening the side where there were shelves rather than hanging space. The top two shelves belonged to Lungi, who was taller, and Mavis needed to sit on the end of her own bed to get at her own two lower shelves. At the very back of the upper of the two, further back than her deodorant and her comb, safely stored behind her underwear and her thick winter jersey so that they couldn’t accidentally drop and spill, were the two small bottles that Madam had given her, both of them dark brown.
The one called Rescue was for if she was panicking or if she’d had a fright or a shock. She didn’t need that one, not tonight. No. She would just use the other one, the one that was called Lavender, which was for if she was worrying and finding it hard to go to sleep.
Lying back across her blanket, she held that bottle firmly in her left hand as she stretched her right arm back, just managing to reach the edge of her pillow and pull it towards her. Then, sitting up again, she put two careful drops from the Lavender bottle on a corner of the pillow-case. It was oil, but that didn’t matter: in the cupboard next to the inside washing machine she had a special spray to use before washing that was good with oil like this. But it didn’t work so well with dirty oil, like if Doctor had done something to his bakkie and then wiped his hands on his clothes. That kind of oil needed some of Lungi’s corn flour and then some Sunlight liquid.
Back in her bed, she was about to begin work on the baby-jacket again, when she saw that one of the threads from her blanket was coming loose. It was her own special blanket from home, Lungi had nothing like it on her bed. Her mother had made it for her from squares crocheted in bright colours, each square outlined in black. It was old now – almost seventeen years – and Mavis had repaired it over and over, sometimes replacing whole squares. Now a bit of black was unravelling, but she would leave it till tomorrow to fix. Her black wool was under her bed in a supermarket bag that would make a crinkly noise when she opened it, and she didn’t want to wake Lungi.
Until the oil on her pillow-case did its work, she would finish this baby-jacket, and start on the next.
FOUR
AUNTIE RACHEL HADN’T YET COME TO FETCH THEM from under the thorn tree outside the high-school gate, and Benedict was starting to long for the tea that would be waiting for him at home. He had wasted the sandwich that Titi had made for his lunch by accidentally dropping it in the sandy schoolyard, and his slice of cake hadn’t been enough to fill him. As he waited, he found himself imagining that he was going home to a plate of delicious, warm ugali. It wouldn’t quite be ready yet: Titi or Mama would have boiled the pot of water, and they would have stirred in the maize meal, put the lid on the pot and left it on a low heat to cook. Now they would be stirring a simmering sauce of tomatoes and onions, sampling it to see how delicious it was going to taste with the ugali.
In Swaziland ugali was called lipalish, and maize cobs were called mealies. There was a lady selling mealies at the school gate now. They had been boiled still wrapped in their green leafy covering, and Benedict knew that if he bought one and unwrapped it, a little puff of steam would rise off it and the plump seeds would be warm and tasty when he chewed them off the cob, even though the mealie had been out of the pot for a long time in air that said that winter was on its way. But Benedict didn’t have any money to buy a mealie.
Another lady was selling bunny-chow, which was a quarter of a loaf of bread with its inside scooped out and replaced with curry. In Mr Patel’s shop they sold banana bunny, which was bunny-chow with a banana sliced in half lengthways sticking up out of the curry like a rabbit’s ears. Sometimes Mr Patel came to check on the bunny-chow sellers outside the school, and sometimes he shouted at them and chased them away. Mama said it was on account of his own curry business being just down the road, but Baba said Mr Patel just wanted to be sure it was only food that they were selling.
Benedict had taken Mama to meet Mrs Patel, and Mrs Patel had agreed, as one professional somebody helping another, to try selling Mama’s cupcakes in the shop. But it hadn’t worked out. Mama had gone back there hoping to get her empty plate and a regular order, but instead she had got stale cupcakes that smelled of curry and that were only good for Benedict to crumble in the garden for the birds.
‘There are no any customers here for sweet,’ Mrs Patel had told Mama sadly, handing back the still almost full plate. ‘They are coming here for spicy, isn’t it? For salty. Fried. Sorry, nè?’
Mama had said it was okay, then she had put on one of her smiles and asked Mrs Patel how her family was. Mrs Patel had stared hard at the counter-top before reaching for a paper serviette and pressing it to her eyes with trembling fingers. Benedict had known, without Mama even needing to give him any kind of look at all, that Mama and Mrs Patel wanted to be confidential, and that it wouldn’t have been enough for him just to look instead at the pictures of gods on the walls inside Mr Patel’s shop. He had waited patiently outside until Mama had come out with her plate of stale cupcakes, and he hadn’t asked because he knew that when something was confidential, Mama would never tell.
Outside the school now, he thought he might not say no to one of those cupcakes, no matter how stale they were or how much they tasted of curry. Today he hadn’t even been able to get any chips as a gift from Mrs Patel, on account of Mr Patel being there supervising new glass being put in the shop window. It was the second time Benedict had seen him do that, and once before he had seen him scrubbing at rude words that somebody had sprayed there.
Everybody loved Mrs Patel’s curry, but not everybody was nice to Mr Patel. Sometimes, if the wind was strong and coming from the side, it would blow at Mr Patel’s hairstyle so that long bits would hang down on one side and the top of his head would be bald. Benedict thought it looked funny, but nobody really seemed to mind, and it couldn’t be why people weren’t nice to him. He wasn’t a kwerekwere. Nobody could be a kwerekwere without being an African from
another African country.
Mrs Patel had told Mama that the Patels’ ancestors had lived in Swaziland since before the British and the Afrikaans people called Boers had finished fighting about who owned the land, and long before the Swazis had said no, this land is ours. Both of them were the children of the children of indentured labourers. Benedict wasn’t exactly sure what indentured meant, but old Auntie Geraldine in Bukoba had dentures. Mrs Patel had two teeth missing at the side at the top, so if she had dentures they weren’t very good. Mr Patel never seemed to smile, so it was hard to tell.
Back in the days of belonging to Britain, Mr Patel’s ancestor had helped to build the railway line between Mombasa on the coast of Kenya and Kampala in Uganda, and when he was free he had travelled south to set up a shop for the people who had come to look for gold.
Mrs Patel’s ancestor had come to work on the sugar plantations where the Zulu people lived. The British had had to bring people from India to do the work on account of the Zulus refusing. Then Mrs Patel’s ancestor had become a trader, and at last the two families had met in the same place, which was one day going to be Swaziland.
So the Patels weren’t really from anywhere else, not any more. But Benedict understood that if you looked or sounded – or felt – different, it was sometimes hard to feel welcome even when you belonged. Anyway, what kept happening to Mr Patel’s shop might not be about belonging or not. Mama said maybe it was about somebody else wanting Mr Patel’s shop, but Baba said maybe it was about Mr Patel interfering in other people’s business. Benedict had certainly seen him interfering in the business of the ladies who sold food outside the high school.
Most of the children from the high school who walked home had gone now, but quite a few of the ones who were fetched in cars were still waiting, so Benedict knew that there must be a roadblock somewhere. The army liked to do roadblocks. They stopped all the cars and looked in the boots and the cubbyholes for guns, and made people prove that they hadn’t come without papers from Mozambique. Mozambique had a border with Swaziland, and the Tungarazas had driven through it in the red Microbus on their way here from Tanzania.
Benedict couldn’t help smiling whenever he remembered that journey. Baba had asked him to help with navigating, and he had sat up front with Baba the whole way while his brothers and sisters had played or slept in the back with Mama and Titi. Mama preferred to sit in the back anyway, on account of her skirts being too tight for her to get in comfortably at the front, so usually the children took turns to sit in the front seat. On that trip, though, they never had a turn, even though they had tried.
‘Please, Baba!’
‘Can you read a map?’
‘Uh-uh.’
‘Can you stay awake?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then how is it that I’ve watched you in my mirror going to sleep after only half an hour?’
‘It’s not fair, Baba!’
‘Fairness is not going to keep me awake at the wheel with a sleeping child next to me. Fairness is not going to tell me which road I need to be on and where I need to turn. Fairness is not going to tell me how far away the next town is so that I know when I need to buy fuel. Is fairness what you really want, or would you prefer it if we actually arrived at our destination?’
And so Benedict had sat up front having Baba all to himself. He had felt so proud, Baba believing he was big enough to help. He knew that Baba felt sad about his son – Benedict’s first baba – being late, and Benedict always felt he should try hard to be grown up like his first baba had been. That way maybe Baba would be a little less sad. But it was hard to be grown up about everything when you were still small.
Baba must have thought him very small on an earlier journey they had made, right at the beginning of the year. The first part, from Mama and Baba’s home town of Bukoba on the western shores of Lake Victoria, to Mwanza on the lake’s southern shores, Baba kept having to pull over and stop so that Benedict could get out to be sick.
‘What is wrong with that boy?’ he had heard Baba saying while he retched into the bushes at the side of the road. ‘He’s never suffered from travel sickness before!’
‘I don’t know, Pius. Something he ate just isn’t sitting well in his stomach.’
‘Eh, I hope this is not an example that Moses and Daniel are going to follow!’
He had done his very best not to be a bad example to his younger brothers, but try as he might there was always one more time he had to ask Baba to stop. He knew he was making everything that much worse for everybody: nobody was feeling very comfortable anyway, heading towards Mwanza where the first parents he shared with Grace and Moses had both become late.
That was certainly part of what was upsetting Benedict. But more than anything, it was about Titi.
Titi had spent Christmas in Mwanza with her family and friends, having crossed the lake from Bukoba on the ferry, and they were heading there to pick her up on their way to Dar es Salaam. But what if she didn’t want to come? What if she wanted to stay with her own family instead? What if they had to go to their new home in Swaziland without her? The worry of it all swirled nastily in Benedict’s stomach and forced its way up his throat.
Titi was there, where she was supposed to be, in a pretty new dress, with her suitcase packed and a very big smile on her face, and Benedict had wept like a little child to see her. But on the way from Mwanza to Dar, the relief he felt did battle with the heaving that his stomach had grown used to, and it wasn’t until Titi herself had held him as the nothing that was left inside him bent him double at the roadside, and she had wiped his face and held him to her in the Microbus, it wasn’t until then that he had been okay again.
The journey from Dar to Swaziland had been completely different. Up front next to Baba, he had followed their route on the map and chatted to Baba as much as he could, knowing that when he just couldn’t keep himself from dozing off, Mama would lean forward from the seat behind and keep Baba awake.
There had been no possibility of dozing until they were well into Mozambique, as the final stretch of the coastal road down from Dar had been sandy and difficult, and then on the flat boat that had taken them and the Microbus across the mouth of the Ruvuma River, they had all held their breath, sure that the Microbus would slide off, taking all of them with it. Then from the river – which was the border between Tanzania and Mozambique – there had been another stretch of difficult, sandy road until the town of Moçimboa da Praia where they had stopped for sodas and cupcakes.
The memory of those cupcakes made Benedict even hungrier now, and he turned his attention away from the ladies outside the high school who were packing what food they had left into large plastic tubs which they hoisted onto their heads before moving off. Inside the school, the students who were on cleaning duty were finishing off, locking the windows against any afternoon rain.
A girl emerging from one of the classrooms caught his attention. She was carrying an exercise book away from her body, holding it flat and looking at it carefully. It was the kind of thing Benedict did when he was taking a spider outside, but this girl couldn’t possibly be taking a spider outside, on account of her being a girl. He watched her carefully as she made her way past the other classrooms, past the bare ground at the front of the school, moving slowly towards a clump of grass on the other side of the fence from where he was waiting under the tree. There she bent and tipped something off the exercise book before turning round and going back to the classroom.
Unless Benedict was mistaken, what she had tipped on to the clump of grass was in fact a spider. Eh! Girls did not save spiders!
He watched the girl as she went back into the classroom, then a few seconds later he saw the head of a broom coming quickly out of the classroom a couple of times, shooting a puff of dust along the floor ahead of it. He waited for her to finish cleaning and come out with her schoolbag, but before she did he heard the children on this side of the fence cheering and some cars hooting, and at last Auntie Rachel was the
re in the yellow Hi-Ace.
He wanted to think about the girl on the way home, but Auntie Rachel was busy apologising for being late, asking everybody if they were okay and assuring the Tungarazas that Mama wasn’t worrying about them because Auntie Rachel had used her cell-phone to call her from the roadblock. And then they went past the roadblock, which was only stopping the cars on the other side of the road, and Auntie Rachel told them about the soldier who had been surprised that there wasn’t a gun in the Hi-Ace’s cubbyhole, and kept asking her over and over where her weapon was.
Auntie Rachel didn’t have a gun, she was like Mama and Baba, she didn’t like them, even though she’d grown up with guns on her parents’ farm in South Africa. Uncle Enock had a gun, but Auntie Rachel made him keep it in the safe at his work, on account of guns being dangerous around children. Uncle Enock had to have a gun in case a cow or a horse was too sick to be made better, but he didn’t like to use it. Benedict wondered if Uncle Enock thought there was a separate Heaven for cows and horses, or if he thought they went to the same Heaven as dogs.
As they passed the roadblock, one of the soldiers winked at Auntie Rachel and gave her a cheeky smile, and the girls in the Hi-Ace giggled.
‘Ja,’ said Auntie Rachel. ‘Take me home to meet all the wives you have already, hey.’