by Sarah Hall
The blood beneath the body slows to a trickle and stops. It makes a slow return inwards. There’s an infinitesimal shift of air pressure, causing fibres on the fallen baseball cap to sway like seaweed; no one sees this motion. There’s a hush in the air. Sound evaporates. The body begins to stir.
One by one, the people leave. They do not hurry. They simply step into the dusk from which they came. The eyes of adults widen, jaws drop, mouths gape and snap closed. Children’s faces rise from shoulders, hands are removed from their eyes and they see it all. They crane their necks, tiny hands splayed starlike on adult shoulders.
The crowd step back. The uncertain suits, the puzzled office workers, the angry retail assistants. Chicken shop stewards, the cabbie, Bluetooth blinking in his ear. They step back until there is no one left but a trio of young men, Polo emblems on their chests, hands aloft, calling in the direction of the police.
The police shimmer and stir, lift and separate. Arms and legs piston hard, five officers backstepping faster than the crowd. They speed away from the body until they enter a parked ARV, three in the back, two in front. The vehicle gains life and roars into the distance. One of the remaining officers, a tall, gaunt woman, reels in blue-and-white tape, eyeing the young men with a glare veiled by an invisible sheen. When the tape is a tight blue-and-white snail in her hand, she also retreats, climbs inside a car with her partner, starts the engine and they roll away backwards. The visored officer joins his visored colleagues, where they gather like a bunched fist, semi-automatics raised and pointing.
The body lifts, impossibly. Ten degrees, twenty degrees, ninety; the fallen baseball cap flips from the ground, joins the head, and the man is half crouched as though he might run. He holds his left arm up, fingers reaching for sky, one bright palm facing the officers while his right hand clutches his heart. Drops of sweat fly towards his temples, as his head turns left, right. Thicker beads of red burrow into three puckered holes in his Nike windcheater, exposed beneath his fingers. He blinks one eye, as though he’s winking.
He is not.
Tiny black dots leap from his chest like fleas. Three plumes of fire are sucked into the rifle barrel. He stands and raises his right hand to his blinking eye, almost wipes, and then both palms are raised. He is shaking his head. His mouth is moving fast. His eyes are shifting quickly. Streetlights turn from orange to grey.
The young man is stepping into the Civic. The police officers are stepping across the street. The Polo youths on the opposite side of the road turn their heads, beginning to brag that road man’s time has come, and seconds after, of Wiley’s tweets about Kanye. They’re laughing. They have no idea. On the street, the young man drops his palms and crouches inside the Civic. He sits, puts his hands on the steering wheel and waits. The police officers stop shouting, they back further away. Beside the empty ARV, they lower their semi-automatics until the weapons are pointing at the dark street. Three get into the shadowed rear seat. Two climb in front. They roll backwards, away. The Polo youths reach the nearest corner. A flash of illumination from Costcutter lights, and they are gone.
The young man reaches down, starting the Civic. He puts the car in gear and its tyres turn anticlockwise, following the ARV; he could almost be in pursuit. He is not. He’s looking into the rearview, chewing on his inner cheek, a habit he has learned from his mother. He’s trying not to look at his blue-faced Skagen. A prickling disquiet, palms sparkling like moist earth; his hand lifts from the wheel and he marvels at this. He remembers; he must watch the road.
He wants to text his girl, but he’s afraid to pull over. He wants his right foot to fall, but knows where it will lead. Yards roll beneath him, and he stops paying attention, ignores his rearview mirror. There’s a song he doesn’t recognise on the radio. He taps the steering wheel in time. His palms are dry. He might even be singing; it’s impossible to tell. There are blue lights in every mirror. He hasn’t noticed.
Noisy blue dims into black silence, but he doesn’t see this either. Few pedestrians notice the ARV rolling backwards, or the baritone engine. Baseball-capped youths follow its passage, only tearing their eyes away as it leaves. Broad slabs of men duck towards the blank wall of shops, hide their faces, relax shoulders and return to upright positions. An elderly woman tries to loosen her spine, swivels too late and frowns, sensing a presence she can’t quite see, pulling her trolley towards her stomach. Schoolgirls in askew blazers and stunted ties, pink Nikes and petalled socks, lift their gaze from the pavement and become grim portraiture, before they retreat into a dusty corner store. The warped door shudders closed.
The young man palms the steering wheel anticlockwise, turns left. The sad-eyed windows of unkempt houses within an inch of dilapidation. The regressive spray of thick green hoses inside a hand car wash, a dormant hearse and driver. Mustard brick new-builds and the glow of a Metro supermarket, tired women stood on corners the closer he gets to home. They try not to stare in; he tries not to stare out. He does not see the green Volkswagen van creep behind him for another half mile. He palms the wheel left again, backs into a dead-end street. The green Volkswagen slots onto the corner of his block. He passes by its idling rumble, eases into a resident’s bay, and shuts off his engine. Pats his pockets ritually to make sure everything is there. He gets out and stretches, bent backwards, reaching towards sky.
The sun on his cheeks, the occasional chilled breeze. Patchwork blue and grey above. The tinny chatter of a house radio, shouts of neighbours’ kids playing football. His windcheater flutters like a flag. There is tingling warmth inside him. It’s bathwater soft, soothing, and for one moment he smiles. He waves at the kids, who leap to their feet, yell his name.
Ray.
He is.
He doesn’t see the man on a street corner talking into his lapel. He misses urgent eyes that scan the road and fingers pressed against one ear. The lonely intent.
He enters the house, back and further back, immersed in turmeric walls, imitation pirate’s maps of back home, studio photos of himself, his mother and troublesome sister. He slows in the narrow passage. Smiles wider. His phone is pressed to his left ear, he’s grinning. It makes him look younger. The phone drops into his jeans pocket. He enters the kitchen.
His mother holds him close like a promise, one hand grasping the back of his head. Her eyes are shut. She rocks him in silence, as though he were still a boy. She knows and does not know. He is muttering about being late, but she refuses to listen. On the dining table a plate is dotted with rice shards and pink slivers of curried mutton, dull cutlery laid prone, fork cradling knife, a smudged glass sentry beside them. He wrestles from his windcheater and throws it onto the back of a chair. He sits.
THE NEWS OF HER DEATH
Petina Gappah
By the time Pepukai emerged from the kombi at Highfield, it had just gone half past nine. She was thirty minutes late. Kindness had said she should come at nine or just before. She had followed the directions in the text message: take kombi to Machipisa, get off at Gwanzura, cross road, walk past Mushandirapamwe Hotel, go left after TM, go past market, saloon (that is how Kindness had spelled it) is next to butcher.
She found the salon with no problems. On one of the French doors that led into the place was the picture of a simpering woman whose hair flowed out and curled into the letters ‘Snow White Hairdressing’. From the butchery next door came the whirring sound of a saw on bone. Everything about the salon spoke of distressed circumstances, the peeling paint outside, the worn chairs and dirty walls inside, the faded posters for Dark and Lovely and Motions hair relaxers. This place made her usual hair place in Finsbury Park look like the Aveda in Covent Garden. Then again, none of the Nigerian or Kenyan women at her salon in London would have done her hair in long thin braids that lasted four months and cost only fifty dollars. If they had, it would have cost her £500 and two days or more, if she was lucky.
There were five women inside. Four were standing talking together in a huddle, while the fifth swept the floor.
They could have been a representative sample of the variegated nature of local womanhood. One was large with a big stomach and bottom and skin like caramel, another was her opposite, thin and sallow with long limbs and dark gums, the third was medium-sized in everything, height, breasts, bottom, complexion, while the last was short and slight with delicate hands and bones and skin so light it was translucently yellow.
The one thing they all had in common was their hair. It was dressed in the same weave, a mimicry of Rihanna’s latest style with dark hair tumbling to the shoulder, and reddish hair piled up over one eye so that they had to peer out of the other to look at anything. It was a hairstyle that neutralised features rather than enhancing them; it suited none of them, giving them all the same aged look. Pepukai thought back to the Greek myths she had loved as a child. They looked like the Graeae might have done, had they had one eye each and had there been four of them.
Away from the group of four, the youngest of the women, not a woman at all, Pepukai realised, but a teenage girl of maybe sixteen or seventeen at the most, was sweeping the floor, leaving more hair behind her than she swept before her. Her hair was not in the Rihanna weave of her workmates, but was half done, with her relaxed hair poking out in wisps from one side of her head, while the other half was in newly plaited braids.
All five looked up as Pepukai entered. She was the only customer. She felt their eyes on her, giving her that uniquely female up-and-down onceover that took in every aspect of her appearance and memorised it for future dissection.
‘Can we help,’ the largest of the women said.
‘I am here for Kindness.’
‘Kindness?’ they exclaimed together. The large, caramel-skinned woman threw a hand to her mouth. The sweeping girl stopped, her hands on her broom, and looked at her open-mouthed.
‘Yes, Kindness, I had an appointment with her at nine.’
Almost simultaneously, they turned to the right to look at a hairdressing station above which the name Kindness was written in blue and red glitter. Pepukai’s eye followed theirs. There were bottles and brushes and combs, but no Kindness.
‘Kindness is late,’ said the large woman.
‘I am also late, quite late in fact,’ Pepukai said. ‘How late do you think she will be?’
‘No, I mean late late. She is deceased.’
‘I am sorry?’ said Pepukai.
They did not hear the question in her tone.
‘Yes, we are all very sorry,’ the black-gummed woman said. ‘She passed away last night. We are actually waiting to hear what will happen to the body.’
‘She has gone to receive her heavenly reward. She is resting now, poor Kindness. May her dear soul rest in peace,’ intoned the small slight woman.
All five of them came to her and, one after the other, offered her their hands to shake, as though they were condoling with her. As she shook hands with them, Pepukai did not know what to say. Things were now more than a little awkward. She was sorry, of course, that this woman that she had never met was so suddenly dead, she was about as sorry as she could be at any stranger’s death, but, after all, she had not known Kindness. She had never even talked to her – she had only exchanged a series of texts arranging the appointment.
The truth was that she was feeling slightly panicked at this news. Her flight to Amsterdam was at ten that evening. Her afternoon was to be given to a whirlwind of last-minute shopping at Doon Estate and Sam Levy’s and farewells that would see her criss-crossing the city. She had only this morning left to get her hair done, and, according to her sister, the now late lamented Kindness was one of the rare hairdressers in the city who had both the skill and the willingness to do the kind of braids she wanted.
Even as these thoughts pressed on her, she did not think that she could be brutal enough to say, effectively, that the death of this unknown woman was a major inconvenience for her, but she need not have worried because the women came to her rescue.
‘What did you want done?’ said the black-gummed woman.
‘Braids,’ Pepukai said. ‘I would like long, thin braids like this.’
On her phone, she showed them her profile picture on Facebook.
‘Oh, you are the one who wants the Shabba?’
‘The what?’
‘Kindness told us that there was someone who had sent a text to say she wanted those Shabba Ranks braids. We could not believe it, they are so old-fashioned, why not just get a weave like this?’ The black-gummed woman caressed her own hair as she spoke.
‘Well, I like my hair done that way.’
‘We can do it for you that way if you really want,’ said the large woman. ‘We would have finished off your braids even with Kindness here, she would never have finished alone in one day. It would have been the five of us doing your hair at the same time. It will be eighty dollars, and it will take all of us three hours. Do you have your own extensions?’
This was not the fifty dollars and two hours that Kindness had promised her, but Pepukai did not have the heart to argue. She handed over the extensions she had bought at Daks in Finsbury Park. They settled her into a chair at a station belonging to Matilda, who, Pepukai gathered, was the largest woman. The others introduced themselves. The black-gummed woman was MaiShero. The small, slight one was called Genia, and the medium-sized everything one was Zodwa. As MaiShero combed out Pepukai’s hair to prepare it, the other three separated and prepared the extensions.
Pepukai broke the silence by asking what had happened to Kindness. Even as she asked, she knew what the answer would be. It would be the usual long illness or short illness, the euphemism for an HIV-related disease. Wasn’t it one in four dying, or maybe it was slightly fewer now that cheap anti-retroviral drugs were everywhere. Kindness, who had gone to receive her heavenly reward, would probably be another death to add to the statistics.
‘She was knifed by her boyfriend,’ said Matilda.
‘Not knifed,’ said Genia. ‘She was shot.’
‘That’s right, sorry,’ said Matilda, ‘at first they said she was knifed but it turns out that she was actually shot by her boyfriend.’
‘You mean to say by one of her boyfriends,’ added Zodwa.
This exchange was so entirely unexpected that the only thing that Pepukai could ask, rather feebly, was, ‘Where?’
‘Northfields,’ said Zodwa.
‘Northfields?’ Pepukai asked.
‘You know, Northfields, those flats opposite the sports club where they play cricket when the Australians and South Africans come,’ said Zodwa.
MaiShero said, ‘It is that expensive complex where they pay three thousand dollars a month for rent.’
‘Three thousand, who has that sort of money?’ asked Matilda.
‘Obviously dealers, just the type Kindness would go for,’ said MaiShero. ‘She was killed right there in one of those expensive flats, you know they have lifts that open up to the whole place. She will probably be in that Metropolitan paper tomorrow.’
‘You mean you go from the lift straight into the flat? You don’t say?’ This was Matilda.
‘They call them paint house sweets but I don’t know why,’ said MaiShero. ‘They are actually bigger in size than many of those houses in the suburbs, you can have a whole floor just for yourself alone. The only thing you won’t have, being so high, is a yard.’
‘You don’t say,’ said Matilda.
‘Well,’ MaiShero continued, ‘the cleaner came at six this morning, got in the lift, went to this paint house flat, and there she was, Kindness, just lying there, all shot, with bullets and blood everywhere.’
‘You mean she was shot with a gun?’ said Pepukai.
‘She can hardly have been shot with a cooking spoon now, can she?’ retorted MaiShero.
‘All the dealers have guns now, all of the ones in Northfields anyway, they need the guns for their deals and, well, you know,’ said Genia.
From the doorway came a loud voice, ‘Ndakapinda busy MaiMwana, but listen, I have no mo
re airtime. No more airtime. I said no more . . . ende futi Econet.’ The voice belonged to a woman in her fifties who wore the blue-cloaked uniform of the Catholic Church, with a white headscarf covering her head. In one hand she had her phone, and in the other, a roasted maize cob. Her overloaded handbag seemed to drag down her left shoulder.
‘Hesi vasikana,’ she greeted as she entered.
‘Hesi MbuyaMaTwins,’ said Matilda.
‘Hesi Mati,’ MbuyaMaTwins said. ‘Kokuita chidhafinya kudaro, kudhafuka kunge uchaputika? Why so fat now, seriously, Matilda? Are you pregnant or something?’
As she spoke, she poked at Matilda’s stomach with the pointy end of her maize cob.
‘Mukawana nguva mundikwanire, ndinonhumburwa nani Steve zvaarikuSouth?’ said Mati. ‘How could I get pregnant when my husband has been away this long?’
‘There are those who are able, it is not just husbands and Steves who can do it.’ MbuyaMaTwins gave a coarse, leering laugh that shook her chest and the rosary beads around her neck.
‘Besides, I have been on Depo how long now, since my last born, you know, the one who was born legs first,’ said Mati.
‘Depo?’ said MbuyaMaTwins.
‘Yes, Depo, the contraceptive, the one you inject.’
‘So it is injections that are making you so fat? Better to be pregnant in that case, at least you get something out of the fatness. Ndigezese musoro Mati, I want just a shampoo and set today.’
‘Shylet will do that for you. Handiti you know she is now my junior?’ said Matilda. ‘Shylet!’