Rotten Row

by Petina Gappah

  As it happened I did have another name, my second name, Hester, a duty name, named for my father’s second oldest sister, my Vatete Hester Muponda who was to die of grief while I was in Australia many years later, just one of the many funerals I would miss. It was a name I hated. I was lucky, I suppose. Emily in Grade 3Red did not have any name other than Pepukai, so her mother plucked Emily out of the air of Miss McConkey’s office. She sometimes forgot her new name and got into trouble.

  I left Zvamaida behind in Glen Norah, and Hester took her place, a Hester who missed the old school, where the voices of children in unison could be heard chanting the twelve times table, or ‘Sleep baby mine, the jackals by the river are calling soft across the dim lagoon where tufted rows of mealies stand aquiver under a silver moon.’ I missed the noise and clamour of the township, and the made-up skipping games, with their invocations of ‘Vasco da Gama, Vasco da Gama, Vasco da Gama Gama, Prince Henuri!’, references that incorporated into our narrow lives the incomplete knowledge we gained of a wider world.

  In March, all the five black children who had started school on the same day were called to Miss McConkey’s office. A missing book had been found in the bag of Gary in Grade 5Red who was Garikai at home. One of us had been found to be a thief and a liar, she told us. She gave a long talk about standards, and when we looked down at our feet, in the manner of respectful African children trained not to look adults in the eye, she talked about the importance of not being shifty.

  Gary’s theft came to define our relationship to one another. Until more black children joined the school much later, among them my cousin Melody and her sister Precious, the five of us were linked by the hard fact of our colour, but separated by the greater gulfs of sex and age, and above all, by an urgent need to show that we were not all like each other. We wanted white friends because they had all the nice things we did not.

  Their mothers knew to put different things on their sand wiches, like Marmite and polony and cheese, not just eggs, eggs and eggs. They went to South Africa on holidays, and brought back Smarties. They knew all the Van jokes and what you got when you crossed a kangaroo with a ball of string, what was black and white and red all over, what the biscuit said after it got run over and why the one-handed man crossed the road. For Christmas, they didn’t get clothes from the Edgars Red Hanger sale that they wore to school on Civvies day, they got annuals, like Misty and Jackie, and the Beano and Whizzer and Chips. They got Rubik’s cubes, and yo-yos, and Monopoly and Ludo.

  They could hold their breaths for two widths underwater, and sometimes, like Evan Smith who later swam for Zim at the Commonwealth Games, for two lengths. They had their own hockey sticks, tennis rackets, and cricket bats, and did not use the old worn ones belonging to the school. Their mothers got their nametags from Barbours’ Department Store; they did not sew them on with uneven hands. And their fathers’ radios did not say, ‘Ndikati nzvee kwaAmato wandiona’, or have the Jarzin Man’s exhortations to shop at Jarzin ‘kune zvekudya zvine mitengo yakaderera.’

  The only white children who befriended us, at least in that first lonely year, were the misfits and outcasts. Gary took up with Keith Culverton whose family was large enough to be African, whose two dogs were said to have rabies, and who often came to school dressed in the big shorts of his older brother. After Ian Moffat’s mother came to the school and threw her shoes at the blackboard because her husband ran off to live with Miss Adamson, who taught Grade 5Red, Ian Moffat turned from the humiliation his mother’s scene had caused him and became friends with Vusani. When Antonia de Souza dropped the baton and made Kudu come last at the inter-house race, no one would play with her because, said Tracey Collins, she smelled like a munt, ran like a spastic and besides, she was not really European, just Portuguese, so she talked mainly to Emily who had made Eland come first in the same race but was only given the shared cup long after we had forgotten that it was she who had led Eland to victory.

  I had Lara, Lara van Tonder, the only ‘Van’ in a class addicted to ‘Van’ jokes, Lara whom everyone began to call Blubber after Mrs Crowther taught us about whales. She was too fat to run or swim and when she walked fast her breath came quickly in little hisses. Lara had mud brown hair. She wanted it to turn gold, like her mother’s. Her mother was so thin you could see her veins under her skin. She smoked Madison Blue cigarettes and told me to call her Stacey and not Mrs van Tonder. She was a famous person, she said, she had been Miss Gatooma before Lara was born.

  Lara liked me to brush her hair a hundred strokes in the school playground, and she made me count each one. ‘If you brush it enough, at least three times a day,’ she said, ‘it will become golden, like Pauline Fossil’s in Ballet Shoes.’

  I did not believe this really, but I did it anyway, because Lara had a pool at home that she could not swim in, so she sat with her legs dangling in the pool. I loved the water, and it was like having my own pool. I dived in and out of the water, picking up five-cent coins from the bottom of the pool and I was happy because Lara and I were just like Darrell and Mary-Lou in Malory Towers.

  *

  Miss McConkey lived two streets away from our house, in Bridgewater Close, and she often passed me in her Datsun 120Y. I made sure to straighten my shoulders when I saw her car, or when I walked past her house to take the short-cut home. One time, as I walked down Pat Palmer Owen Drive with no shoes on, enjoying the hard heat of the road under my feet and pretending that it was the desert at Omdurman and I was Gordon, I saw her car and hid in the ditch until she passed.

  At school, I saw her every day at assembly, and in the corridors when she saw us walking in clusters she said, ‘Single file, children.’ Only in the third term, as Prize Giving Night approached, did I see her frequently. It was the school tradition, we were told, for HMS Junior to celebrate on that night the discovery of David Livingstone by Henry Morton Stanley. There was a poem that the school recited, a long and active poem in which there was a Livingstone and a Stanley, lots of concerned people in England wondering what had happened to Livingstone and lots of natives doing dances and naming all the places Livingstone had discovered.

  The star was Keith Timmons, the captain of Roan. He was Stanley in an explorer’s hat and declaimed, in a voice loud with concern: ‘Oh, where is Dr Livingstone, Dr David Livingstone, who went away to darkest Africa to tread the track unbeaten?’ Then twenty children, who were supposed to be the people in England said: ‘We haven’t had a letter for so long, perhaps we’d better send Mr HM Stanley, just to see if he’s been eaten.’

  ‘And sing with me in chorus,’ said Stanley, ‘while the natives do a romp-o.’ The five of us, the five black children, were to be the chorus. In loud voices, we chanted, ‘Nyasa and Zambezi and Cabango and Kabompo, Chambese and Ujiji and Ilala and Dilolo, Shapanga and Katanga, not forgetting Bangweolo!’ We danced and stomped and beat our drums like our lives depended on it. Emily and I added a little flourish by trying to ululate like we had seen our mothers do.

  ‘Well done, my girls, well done, my boys,’ Miss McConkey said. We were the finest natives that the school had ever seen, she said.

  *

  It was my uncle Gift who changed everything. He had fought in the war as Comrade White Destroyer, and returned with little patience for what he called diehard renegade elements. He worked in the Department of Youth Affairs and Employment Creation, and he told his boss about our poem and his boss called someone at the Herald, and Miss McConkey was in the news and then she was not the headmistress any more. There was another headmaster, a Coloured man called Mr Marchand and the teachers, said my parents, would not work under him so they would all go to the private schools like Cisi and Hartmann House or go all the way to South Africa. Uncle Gift said there was no place for people like that in the country, but my mother was worried about the white teachers leaving because she wanted me to have a good accent.

  I was never called to Miss McConkey’s office again. She was no longer headmistress but she stayed on, teaching the
remedial class for the slow learners, playing the piano during music lessons, she stayed on until there were no white teachers left at the school and only a sprinkling of white children. I became so afraid of Miss McConkey that I took to going the long way home, down Pat Palmer Owen Drive and into Cotswold Way, and thus managed to avoid Bridgewater for the rest of my life at HMS Junior.

  When I left to go to secondary school, she was still teaching the remedial class, never knowing that it was I who had changed her life forever. I did not see her again until yesterday, when I saw her looking small, frail and utterly defeated as she tried to steal two packets of candles and dog treats at Bon Marché.

  *

  I carried her bag of groceries for her and walked her to her car.

  ‘Out there then, are you?’ she said.

  ‘I live in Australia now, Miss McConkey,’ I said. ‘I am a paediatrician in Melbourne.’

  ‘How long are you here?’

  ‘Two weeks, Miss McConkey,’ I said. ‘Actually, I am here for my cousin’s wedding. She was also at HMS. Do you remember her?’ I told her my cousin’s full name.

  ‘Melody, with a sister called Precious?’ Miss McConkey said.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘You do remember everyone.’

  ‘That’s a name I would much rather forget, thank you very much,’ Miss McConkey said. ‘Precious. Silly name. I always thought it a silly name. A child is not a poodle.’

  I thought she would say something more and waited, but she she got into her car.

  ‘Silly name,’ she said again.

  She closed the door and said, ‘You make sure you come and get your money.’

  ‘Yes, Miss McConkey,’ I said.

  ‘Run along now, my girl,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Miss McConkey. Goodbye, Miss McConkey.’

  She started her car without another word, drove into Stortford Parade, past the Polyclinic that used to be the veterinary surgery, and past Wessex Drive. I watched her until her car, the same Datsun she used to drive, turned left into Harare Drive, the old Salisbury Drive along which my father had driven us a lifetime ago. I watched her until she disappeared from my view.

  Anna, Boniface, Cecelia, Dickson

  For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.

  – The Book of Amos –

  Nokuti ndinoziva kuti kudarika kwenyu kuzinji, vuye kuti zivi zenyu zikuru, kwazo, iyemi, munomanikidza vakarurama, munogamucira fufuro, muciramba unoshaiwa pasuvo.

  – Buku yaMuprofita Amosi –

  If you come with me this way, east of Rotten Row, walk straight past Town House on Speke Avenue, cross the flyover into Julius Nyerere Way, walk past Robert Mugabe Road and stop before we get to Kenneth Kaunda Avenue, we will find ourselves outside the downtown supermarket that used to be called Amato. ‘Ndikati nzvee, kwaAmato, wandiona!’

  They are long gone, the Brothers Amato, as are many of their brethren and indeed, there has not been a Bar Mitzvah here for more than ten years but that is all by the way. Nor does it matter what the supermarket is called now because we won’t stay here long. Inside, we will see a young woman walking down the third aisle from the cashiers’ bank, between the jars of baby food on the right and the plastic hair weaves on the left.

  Her name is Anna.

  No, she is not the tall woman pushing a shopping trolley. Nor is she the scowling beauty in the skinny jeans who is examining the hair weaves. That one is not Anna, her name is Deliwe, and we may return to her later. Look behind her. Yes. That’s her, the small slight woman, not a full woman really, a newly made woman, just out of girlhood, with a brown cardboard box in her hands and a shifty look on her face.

  Well, shifty in the eyes of the security guard, whose name is Boniface, and he should know. To his wife in their village in rural Gutu, on the dry, parched banks of the Nyazvidzi River, Boniface is the Manager of a Shop in Town, but to the Manager of the Shop in Town, Boniface is just the Shop in Town’s security guard.

  If Boniface is to tell the truth, he will admit that there is not much training to be a security guard. There was a lot of marching though. As a trainee, he marched and marched around the security company’s complex at the corner of Livingstone and Selous Avenue. He marched and shouted war chants and marched and did press-ups and marched some more.

  Chengeta chikwama chababa chine madhora, he sang as he marched with the others. Boniface could march for Zimbabwe if he had to, yes he could. Sabhuku marasika man’a haasonwiba! Marching and marching with his head shaved bald. Chenjera kunyengwa nerovha murima! There was no correlation that he could see between his shaven head and his training, no reason why one was a precondition for the other, no reason why one could not exist without the other, but it was not his to reason why. Marovha tawanda mbeva dzichapera!

  Before Anna entered the shop, Boniface’s phone had pinged a message from his WhatsApp Church Group. It was the Bible verse of the day, Romans 1, verse 28: ‘And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents.’

  He has yet to encounter this catalogue of sin in any one person, Boniface, but what he knows without a doubt and this he knows without question, what he knows and knows full well is that he knows a shifty look when he sees one. As far as Boniface can see, Anna has just about the shiftiest look he has seen in his seven-year career as a post-marching security guard.

  Boniface is particularly eager to prove himself in this job because he was lucky to get it at all. He was recommended to the shop manager by a fellow guard who has risen up a little in the world. Until two months ago, Boniface had been the guard at Corner House, a building at the corner of Samora Machel and Kwame Nkrumah Avenue, where his job had been to man the desk and write down the names of people who came in and out, along with their ID numbers. So his job had been to control access to this Very Important Building, a job he took Very Seriously Indeed, particularly as A Very Important Embassy was in that building.

  So seriously, in fact, that one Friday morning, at about nine, when a visitor to the building had come to him and asked, ‘Shasha, where can I find a toilet on this floor?’ Boniface had looked at the visitor’s dreadlocks and had smelled the stale smoke on his shabby clothing and shouted, ‘So you came all this way from wherever it is you came from just to shit here in town? Kutobva kwawabva zvako uchitosiya matoilet eko kuti uzomamira muno mutown?’

  Alas, the man he had upbraided in such vulgar terms may have looked unkempt, but he had been a Very Important Person. The Very Important Person had made a complaint to the Very Important Embassy and it had made a damning complaint to the company that employed Boniface, and within a day, Boniface had been asked to hand in his uniform and the embassy cap. Here, in the Land of the Unemployed where security guards are two a Bond Coin, another had stepped gratefully into his old place. So Boniface is keen to keep this job, and keeping this job means Utmost Vigilance, and Utmost Vigilance means that he has to watch out for people with shifty looks on their faces.

  Poor Anna does indeed look shifty, as you see, but that does not have anything to do with being in this shop over which Boniface has absolute dominion. She has no ill intentions at all towards the jars of baby food in this aisle, or the 100 per cent human hair made in Brazil, from Peruvian hair no less, opposite. She is only in this supermarket because she saw her greatest enemy walking towards her from the Mbare end of Julius Nyerere. So she had ducked into the shop to avoid coming face to face with the woman called Cecelia.

  You may not know what it is to be hated, or loathed, to be disliked with passion or to have someone wish you gone from this earth in the most horrible way possible, and if that is so, kiss your
beloveds and bless your good fortune that you are not like Anna. For she knows what it is like to be the object of the kind of hatred that comes from that corrosive combination of godo and shaisano, the poisoned mixing of envy and spite.

  Anna is a Dollar-for-Two vendor. You may have walked past her before without really seeing her, and who can blame you, the City Centre being what it is. She sold traditional medicinal herbs for a dollar for two from the Robert Mugabe end of First Street. She sells mushonga wemangoromera, powder that you mix into a potion that will give you strength like the Terminator crossed with the Wolverine, and vhukavhuka, a male aphrodisiac that reputedly has Viagra-like properties and that translates as ‘rise, rise’. It is so good you have to say it twice. Her most popular herb, though, is an aphrodisiac called Weti yeGudo, which means ‘baboon’s piss’.

  You need not shudder in that dramatic way. If there is indeed baboon’s piss in Anna’s concoctions, it is in such diluted quantities that you would not taste it if you were to drink it. Even here, in the Land of Miracles, where Pentecostal prophets offer instant weight loss, and can add extra height to a person with just one prayer, where magical snakes spit out United States dollars complete with serial numbers that follow the sequence established by the Federal Reserve in Washington DC, and where haunted lorries sigh out loud, ‘Oh I am so very tired’ at the end of long journeys, baboons are not exactly known for even-temperedly pissing nicely into containers upon request.

  Anna buys her baboon’s piss from a man who claims to make it from the soil on which a baboon has actually pissed. The idea behind it is that a woman who uses the powder on her man will find that there will be no more cheating or skirt-chasing from him, no more giving other women lascivious looks, no more spending all his wages on the temptations of hookers and other good-time girls. Instead, he will piss only on her. Well, obviously we are not talking about actually pissing, but there is no need to draw a picture.