by Gaile Parkin
Her boy would be the same age as Petros now, almost seventeen. She couldn’t stop herself wishing that her own boy was alive, and that he was Petros. How lovely it would be to have her boy working on the same hillside where she could see him every day though he was grown and working and not living with her.
The cows were already down the hill now, and yesterday they had been with somebody else, the one who always waved and called cheekily to Mavis. She wasn’t going to bother with that one, he wouldn’t bother with her when he found out about her womb. Or maybe he would bother with her, meanwhile he was looking for a woman who could give him a baby, a woman worth marrying. Mavis didn’t want to be somebody a man just passed his time with while he looked for somebody else.
She hadn’t spoken to Petros for three days now, and she wondered how he was. She had found a new doctor for him, a doctor who was advertising in one of madam’s newspapers. She had cut the piece out of the newspaper with the kitchen scissor and given it to Petros, but he hadn’t gone at first because of money. Eish. So she had given him some money from her Cobra floor-polish tin, and now he had gone. Now his cough could start to get better. Madam’s doctor wasn’t any good, he was like the doctors in the hospital who hadn’t been able to save her baby or her womb.
Hearing a car starting up and some voices shouting goodbye, she stood up and swallowed the last of her tea. It was time to go in and clear up the last of the party mess.
THIRTEEN
BENEDICT FELT LIKE HIS WORLD HAD TIPPED OVER – and it wasn’t just because he was staring at the TV while lying on his side on the couch.
Looking back at everything that had happened, he tried to make sense of it by doing what Miss Khumalo always told them to do when they were writing a composition: give it a beginning, a middle and an end.
Beginning
Auntie Rachel was stuck in another roadblock, and Benedict waited outside the high school with the Tungarazas, the Mazibukos, and several other children.
Moses needed the toilet.
Benedict told him to wait.
Then Daniel needed the toilet, too, so the three of them ran to the far side of the school grounds, terrified of bumping into Mr Thwala. Instead of waiting outside the toilets where Mr Thwala might see him, Benedict went in with his brothers. Moses was too nervous to go, so they were in there for some time.
When they came out, they were glancing around quickly to see if it was safe to run back to the gate, when a classroom door opened. They froze.
To everybody’s relief, it was Nomsa who came out. Pulling her schoolbag onto her back and heading off without noticing them, she sniffed loudly.
Benedict called to her, but she didn’t hear. Running after her, he called her name again, but she began to run away from him towards the school gate.
And then a large hand grabbed at the back of Benedict’s collar, pulling it up and back in a movement that stopped him dead and tore the top button off his shirt.
The angry voice of Mr Thwala boomed above him. ‘Why are you small boys here again? Did I not tell you to stay away?’
When the teacher released his grip, Benedict struggled to get back his balance before turning to face him, respectfully avoiding looking him in the eye.
‘Sorry, sir. My brothers needed the toilet.’ He hated that his own voice sounded so small, so childish, after Mr Thwala’s. His brothers stood very close to each other, their eyes big. Moses looked like he needed the toilet again.
Mr Thwala’s large hand forced Benedict’s chin upwards. ‘You!’ he declared. ‘Nomsa’s friend from the party!’
Without looking at him, Benedict nodded as best he could with the man’s hand under his chin.
‘Are you spying on me?’ Falling away from his chin, the hand balled into a fist and jammed against the teacher’s hip. ‘Did she tell you to spy on me?’
‘No, sir.’ Why would he spy on Mr Thwala? He didn’t want to be anywhere near the man!
Daniel spoke up bravely, as Moses began to cry. ‘We needed the toilet, sir. Auntie Rachel didn’t come for us yet.’
‘You didn’t look in the classroom?’ he boomed angrily.
All three boys shook their heads, keeping their eyes on the ground as Mr Thwala paced up and down. Benedict was aware of his heart hammering inside his chest.
At last the man spoke. ‘Come with me.’ Benedict stooped quickly to pick up his shirt button, and the boys walked nervously towards the school gate behind the teacher.
‘Straighten your shirt,’ Mr Thwala said to Benedict. ‘Untidy boy!’
Outside the gate, Mr Thwala addressed all the children who were waiting in the shade of the thorn tree. ‘This small boy,’ he said, pointing at Benedict, ‘came into the school looking for his girlfriend.’ Benedict’s face became hot as he felt everybody’s eyes upon him. ‘Who does he think he is to have a girlfriend big enough to attend high school?’ Then he began to laugh in a way that wasn’t about finding something funny but about wanting to hurt somebody.
One by one, the other children began to join in the laughter. Then Mr Thwala walked away, leaving Benedict feeling smaller than ever.
‘Benedict has a girlfriend,’ Grace announced at supper that night.
‘Eh!’ said Mama and Baba.
‘She’s not my girlfriend!’ he said, for what seemed like the hundredth time that day.
‘It’s okay to have a girlfriend,’ said Titi, giving him her widest smile, the one that told him he had done something very good. ‘A girlfriend is a nice thing to be.’
‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ he said again.
‘Nomsa,’ said Grace. ‘She’s in class with Innocence.’
‘Eh!’
‘She’s not my girlfriend.’ He really didn’t feel like eating his tinned pilchards and rice. His stomach hurt, and his head didn’t feel right. He looked at Mama, his eyes begging her to make it stop.
‘Eh, did I tell you?’ Mama said to everybody, clapping her hands together. ‘They loved my cakes! More especially the treasure chest for the family of the casino man.’
After supper he sat staring through the book that lay open in his lap, feeling miserable. Mama and Baba were talking in whispers.
‘Are you not concerned, Pius?’
‘Why should I be concerned? I cannot tell you how happy this makes me!’
‘But he’s just a boy. She’s older—’
‘She’s a girl, Angel. It’s been a worry to me that he doesn’t like sports like a normal boy, that he prefers to hang around you talking about colours and cakes. Then today I came home from work and I found him sewing a button on his school shirt. Sewing!’
‘Pius—’
‘No, Angel, I’m proud of him for getting a girlfriend!’
Tears splashed down onto his book.
The next day, Nomsa made it worse by rushing up to him outside the school gate, handing him a folded piece of paper, and telling him to read it later. Everybody saw, and everybody said that she was giving him a love letter. Of course it wasn’t a love letter, but he put it in his schoolbag and said nothing. And just to show everybody that he didn’t care, he left the letter there for two days.
Then Nomsa came to find him. ‘Well?’ she asked breathlessly, even though other children were watching.
‘Well what?’
‘Did you...? My letter...’
‘Oh,’ he said loudly, to everybody who was listening rather than to Nomsa herself, ‘I haven’t read it yet.’
Tears welled in the hard eyes that stared at him until he looked down, ashamed of himself, the dull pain that had been in his head the past couple of days feeling so much worse.
Before bedtime, he hid the torch under his bed, bringing it out only when he could hear from his brothers’ breathing that sleep had taken them. As quietly as he could, he dug the letter out from the bottom of his schoolbag, so aware of how badly he had behaved. Thanks God Baba was away for the night in Pigg’s Peak, in the northern part of Swaziland, and wasn’t there to be as
disappointed in Benedict as Benedict was in himself.
In the round beam of the torch, the letter surprised him. It wasn’t what Miss Khumalo would call a letter at all. There was no address, no Dear Benedict, no proper ending. It was just a question and a name: Can you get me some weevil tablets from the Mazibuko farm? Nomsa
Eh!
What?
Switching off the torch, he climbed into bed to think about it.
Okay, she wasn’t his girlfriend, and the way he had behaved today, she couldn’t even think of him as her friend. But she had given him the letter before he had behaved badly, when they were friends. Friends who both liked rescuing small creatures and looking at books about snakes.
But this letter was more like one of Mama’s shopping lists. It wasn’t like one of Mama’s phone calls to Baba asking him to stop for more bread on his way home from work; those calls always had a please and a thank you. This letter was not polite.
And it didn’t even make sense. Farmers used weevil tablets to gas the weevils that were living in the grain they were storing. Uncle Enock’s farm didn’t grow or store grain. It was a dairy. If there were weevils in Nomsa’s mother’s flour or rice, she needed a sieve or a flat basket to separate them out.
He had thought the children in Nomsa’s class were unkind to her because she was a little different. But maybe what Innocence said about her was right. Maybe she was mad.
Shaking his head against his pillow, he was aware that the ache was still inside it.
Then a new thought rushed into his head, bringing with it stories from the Times of Swaziland, stories that Mama and Baba talked about at the far end of the dining table, stories that pressed against the ache and made him sit up quickly.
Eh!
Could it...? Could she...?
No. Not seriously.
But still.
Mama was watching a film on TV, and when he showed her the letter and told her about Nomsa, her face turned from its lovely deep brown to grey. With Baba away and Titi out with Henry, Mama had no choice but to phone Auntie Rachel, even though it was late, to ask if Lungi or Mavis could come and sit in the Tungarazas’ house.
It was Mavis who came, straight from her bed with one side of her hair sticking up in the air and a blanket of brightly-coloured squares outlined in black wrapped around her. With her was Uncle Enock, taking the keys to the red Microbus from Mama’s shaky hand and telling her that he wasn’t going to let her drive in the night to a part of Mbabane without any lights, more especially with such a new licence.
They went in Uncle Enock’s bakkie, Benedict sitting between him and Mama, directing him as best he could from the little that Nomsa had said about where she lived. They went very fast, Mama telling Uncle Enock she had lost count of the number of stories in the Times of Swaziland about people suiciding themselves by swallowing weevil tablets, and Uncle Enock telling her, in between shouting at vehicles, that, yes, it was what Olga’s mother had done.
Once they were in the right part of Mbabane, where the houses weren’t very nice and many were more like shacks, somebody told them exactly where to go, and they found Nomsa living alone with a mother who couldn’t get out of her bed on account of being too sick to do anything for herself. She could barely open her eyes to look at the visitors in the night who were there with their torches, hugging her daughter. Benedict had never seen anybody so thin in his whole entire life.
Nomsa said it would be too painful for her mother to try sitting up, she needed to be lying down. It took no strength at all for Uncle Enock to pick her up and lay her down gently in the back of his bakkie, but it was another matter entirely getting Mama in there.
‘Rather sit inside, Angel.’
But Mama insisted. ‘It is not a child’s job to comfort the sick, Enock. No, let the children sit inside with you.’
Nomsa brought a chair from the house, a neighbour managed to find a low stool, and together the neighbour and Uncle Enock got Mama from the stool onto the chair and then into the flatbed of the bakkie, where she settled herself next to Nomsa’s mother, straightening her blanket and holding her hand. Benedict was glad that Mama wasn’t wearing one of her smart, tight skirts that would have made getting her in there so much more difficult, but he felt bad for her, knowing that she must feel ashamed for having come out wrapped in a kanga and with her flat house sandals on her feet.
With Nomsa’s mother admitted at the government hospital, they headed back down the Malagwane Hill, Mama in the front this time with Benedict half on her lap and Nomsa between the two grown-ups, the small bag of her things in the back of the bakkie. Uncle Enock had told her that she would stay with the Mazibukos until her mother was well again.
Benedict was sure that everybody in the bakkie knew that Nomsa’s mother was never going to come home from the hospital, but nobody said. His own first baba had taken his first mama to stay in the hospital in Mwanza until she was well again, but she was never well again, and she had never come home. It was easy to become late in a hospital, even if the hospital was nice like this one, where the nurse had given Nomsa’s mother a mattress on the floor instead of making her lie head to toe in the same bed as a woman she didn’t know.
Uncle Enock said there weren’t enough nurses on account of many of them going to England to do the same job for more money, but he was sure that the few who remained would do their very best for Nomsa’s mother.
Benedict wasn’t happy now that Nomsa was at the other house. Never mind all the business about her being his girlfriend, he didn’t even want her as a friend. He had thought he had found a girl who was very like him, a girl who loved all of God’s creatures, even the ones that were poisonous or dangerous. But instead she was just a girl who was looking for something to make her late.
But as for Benedict’s world tipping over, that was all just the beginning.
Middle
Mama was going to have a baby. Titi heard it from Mavis, who had heard Auntie Rachel and Uncle Enock talking about it.
Benedict didn’t know if Mama thought it was a blessing or trouble, but he knew for sure it was trouble for him. Okay, it can’t be nice to live by yourself with just one parent, like Nomsa. But he already had two big sisters and two little brothers. Wasn’t that enough? Did Mama and Baba want their house to become like the Mazibukos’, full of children and noise?
Uh-uh-uh.
And what about money? Baba was going to have to be a consultant for ever. He could never go back to his old job at the university in Dar, not with another mouth to feed. He would never be able to retire, and all the Tungaraza children were going to keep moving to one country after another, wherever Baba got a job with lots of money, on account of Mama and Baba wanting the family always to be together.
There was going to be a long string of first days at new schools, an endless big effort to fit in and belong, and there would be more and more struggles between wanting other children to like him and not wanting to like them too much on account of having to say goodbye to them soon.
Benedict’s head hurt.
He looked at Mama, wondering when it was going to happen. She didn’t look any different. He wanted to ask her about it, but that would get Titi and Mavis into trouble for gossiping. And him, too.
He worried and fretted about it until his head was pounding and he felt hotter than he should then suddenly cold and shivery, even though winter was over and the full heat of summer was baking their house on the hill. At last he had to know.
‘Mama,’ he said, pushing his supper around on his plate and feeling sick at the thought of eating it, ‘when is our brother or sister coming?’
‘What?’ The piece of sweet potato that Mama had been about to put into her mouth fell from her fork, landing with a splat in the small heap of boiled blackjack leaves on her plate.
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Baba.
‘Everybody says we’re getting a new brother or sister.’
‘Who is everybody?’ Reaching into the neckl
ine of her T-shirt for a tissue from her underwear, Mama dabbed at the bit of her supper that had splashed up onto her front.
‘Everybody.’ Benedict’s face was hot.
But Baba wanted to know exactly who, and Titi came to Benedict’s rescue, saying it was Mavis and Lungi. Then Mama and Baba looked at each other and Mama said it was time, and Baba nodded.
Baba took a deep breath and cleared his throat. Mama covered his hand on the table with her own.
At the conference in Johannesburg, Baba told them, somebody from the university in Dar had brought him a letter that had been sent to him there by the principal of a school in Mwanza. The letter told him that he had another grandchild, and it included a copy of the child’s birth certificate.
‘A girl,’ said Mama, sinking Benedict’s heart. ‘Josephine.’
‘Grace’s age,’ said Baba, sinking it further.
Josephine had been living with her mother, a secretary at the factory in Mwanza where Benedict’s first baba had been manager. But now her mother was very ill and had gone to the hospital – Benedict knew from when his own first mama had gone to the hospital, exactly what that meant – and another family had taken Josephine in.
‘For the time being,’ said Baba.
‘She’ll come and live with us when her school year ends.’ It was only Mama’s mouth that smiled; her eyes looked tired.
Benedict felt very tired himself, very sick. He wanted to go and lie down, or maybe he needed the toilet, but when he stood up from his chair his legs couldn’t hold him and everything went dark.
That was the last he remembered of the middle of his world tipping over.
End
It was malaria. Probably not a new malaria: they said you only got it down in the eastern part of Swaziland, though Benedict was sure he had seen the black-and-white spotted mosquitoes that gave it to you in their house on the hill. This was probably old malaria visiting him again, which could happen on account of it sometimes never fully leaving your blood.