by Arushi Raina
My father didn’t say anything for a while then. “You know my warehouse? Broken into. Overnight, cleaned out of my entire stock of Trident.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“There’s no insurance on it, Jack. There’s nothing in hell I can do.” He ground his cigarette into the flower bed, as my mother always told him not to. “Jack, you can’t get shot to pieces. Not now.” He walked back inside, and I wondered how he managed that faint trace of irritation in his voice.
In low voices, I heard them talking about me. “Oliver and he don’t speak anymore. And he hasn’t even talked to Megan. She says they broke up suddenly. I don’t know what to do, James. I just don’t know why he’s acting like this.”
Meena
It was ten on a Saturday morning. Papa was doing the bills upstairs. The shop phone rang and I picked it up. “Pillay’s All Purpose. How may I help you? Hello?”
No reply on the phone. Just a breath, then another one.
“Hello.”
“I need a place to stay.”
I knew the voice immediately. “Where’ve you been?”
“Hiding. What else? And, Meena?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell Jack.”
Zanele peeled off layers of clothing in our storeroom, that old blue jacket, sweaters, an ugly brown-and-yellow beanie. Under it, her hair had been shaved off.
She was much thinner and if she noticed I was staring at her, the smallness of her, she didn’t say.
“Papa will come in here to check things,” I said. “Tomorrow he does stock taking.”
“I know,” she said. “I won’t stay long.”
I put my hands on her shoulders but didn’t hug her, she looked too fragile for that. She closed her eyes. I went to the other side of the storeroom, opened cans of condensed milk and packets of biscuits. I put them down in front of her. She ate the biscuits, three at a time, crouched against the dusty wall of the storeroom. She tipped the can of milk to her mouth, wiping her lips off with her sleeve when she’d finished.
I decided not to tell her about Mankwe.
But then I did anyway. “Mankwe—”
“What about her?”
“The police have arrested her—instead of you.”
Zanele lifted her head up slowly from the wall. Her eyes wandered around the room with its dark cans and dusty shelves, then settled on me.
“Thabo was there. They said you killed a policeman.”
Zanele leaned her head back against the wall.
“Is it true?”
“Yes. Where did they take her?”
“Why?”
Zanele ignored my question. “When did this happen?”
“Two days ago. Mankwe didn’t say she wasn’t you.”
Zanele got up, pulled on her beanie. And I thought she was going to go right then.
“I have a better idea,” I said, running between her and the door.
She stopped. “Tell me quickly. In a minute, I go to the police station.”
Thabo
The next time I came to the shop, Meena’s father was facing her across the counter, looking angry. He was holding up a man’s blue jacket that looked familiar. “Someone has been in our storeroom. Is anything missing?”
“No,” Meena said.
Eish, the girl was bad at lying.
“You’re sure, you’ve checked?”
I cleared my throat. “Give me two packs of cigarettes. Yes, that means you,” I said, pointing at Meena. She looked irritated. I looked at the jacket. The number 729.
Meena passed them over and held out five rand.
The father turned to me. “That is ten rand minus five for the cigarettes. As per our agreement.”
I waved off the money but took the cigarettes. “I don’t need your people’s money anymore,” I said. “Baie dankie, meneer.”
The father crossed his arms and frowned at me. Good for him.
Zanele was back, alive. Just like her to come to Meena first.
Jack
I got the call from Meena late afternoon. I picked up the phone because my mother was out, and the new maid was not allowed to answer calls. I lifted the receiver, dangled it in my fingers. Then I put my ear to it.
“I told you not to call here,” I said.
“Come to the shop,” Meena said.
Zanele
Meena kept telling me her plan would work. That they would release Mankwe. That this was safer. She was taking pictures of me with her father’s old camera. This was part of the plan. I kept thinking of Mankwe, of the shack with Mama in it. Maybe she understood why Mankwe had done that for me, when I didn’t.
But maybe Mankwe was already dead. After waiting outside the police station every day, we would be told she had died of influenza, she had slipped in the shower or she had thrown herself out the window.
Yesterday I got a message out to Mama and Thabo through Meena. It was short—I am alive.
I would wait three days, and then turn myself in if Mankwe wasn’t released. That was our plan. I trusted her so much now. Maybe it was because she was all I had left.
I tried to sleep, facing the hole in the wall of the abandoned shack. Through the hole, you could see the dump, and the smell was everywhere. I started thinking of Jack instead. I imagined him eating breakfast on his patio, the kudu heads waiting on the dining room walls. I tried to imagine the flow of his thoughts, tricky—Jack rarely showed what he felt. I’d only seen pieces of him.
He probably thought I was dead.
And the dead policeman changed things even more—a policeman burned alive.
I could tell Jack that I pulled him out of the car but that the others dragged him away. Then someone came with the petrol and a lighter, and it just happened. I had to pull that policeman out of his car to stop him shooting us.
And that was all true.
Jack would list my actions like a sequence of logical points, and then pause, check if they made sense to him. And maybe they would. Maybe they wouldn’t.
I could choose not to tell him how angry I was—how when I pulled the policeman out of the car, I wanted him dead.
It was better for it to end this way. We will never see each other again. That was the way it was meant to be.
Jack
Across the counter, Meena handed me an envelope. “What’s this?”
“Rand Daily Mail —you know their editor. Make sure he gets this.”
I tossed the envelope back on the counter.
“It’s for getting Zanele’s sister free. But don’t open it.”
Meena reached forward to stop me, but I picked it up and stepped back. Then I slipped the photograph out—Zanele with all her hair gone, holding up yesterday’s paper, smiling. She was standing in front of a fruit stall. Zanele’s signed statement, her passbook.
I slipped them back in the envelope. “Where is she?”
“It’s not safe for you to know.”
“I didn’t get a message from her. Nothing.”
“No one got a message.”
“She’s upstairs, isn’t she? You’ve hidden her here.” I went behind the counter and went up the steps, fast. I rounded the corner, opened the door—to her father. He looked up from his papers. His eyes blinked behind gold-rimmed glasses.
“Sir,” he said. “Can I help you?”
Meena
“The policeman from the papers, the one who died—it’s true,” I said.
Thabo shrugged.
I looked up from scanning the newspapers for a report on Mankwe’s arrest. Nothing yet.
Thabo was wearing a new suit. He was back to walking around like he owned the streets. I didn’t ask how he’d done it. He looked out the shop door and flipped the sign to Closed. “We need to get her out of h
ere.”
“She can’t stay with me, my father will find out.”
“I mean across the border, domkop.”
“How do you plan to do that?”
“I have some money. And I know who to talk to.” Thabo dismissed me with his hands. “I just need time.”
“These people—” I leaned forward and whispered, “—are they ANC?”
“They aren’t hard to find.”
“How do I help?”
“You pass messages, you don’t get caught. Otherwise—” Thabo slid a finger across his throat.
“Oh, please.”
“You be careful.”
“So if we get her out,” I said, folding over the paper, “what about me?”
“What do you mean, what about you?” Thabo looked at me like I was crazy. “You concentrate on this plan. Nothing else. Nothing. I will have it all ready in three days. You tell her.” He took his cigarettes and left.
If the tsotsi didn’t understand that I wanted to go with Zanele, no one would.
But there was nothing left for me here.
Nineteen
Jack
“I’m surprised you called.” Megan put her purse on the table.
My mother, fidgeting, placed a tray of biscuits and fruit juice in front of us like we were back in prep school. Then she retreated.
“Let’s go into the garden,” I said.
“Okay.” She followed me out onto the patio. Shafts of light glinted on the tiles. I stepped out onto the grass. It crackled underfoot. The gardener hadn’t come for a few weeks. I walked to the weeping willow, the old slide and swing set.
I took the envelope from my jacket pocket and handed it to Megan. She slid out the pictures, the letter, the passbook. “I need you to take that to your dad. He needs to make it public—the police jailed the wrong person.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Read the letter, it explains most of it.”
Megan brought the pictures closer. There was something startling about Zanele’s smile, it looked as if she was about to laugh. And I didn’t believe it. “Who is this?”
“You can talk to Oliver’s dad, he’ll tell you about it. The Immorality Act case that links me to her.”
Still Megan didn’t say anything, her eyes fixed on my face.
“If you have the convictions you keep talking about, you will do this,” I said. “That’s it. That’s all I wanted to say.” And then I turned back to the house.
I could have apologized to her for all of this, but I didn’t. She would’ve disliked me more for it, I think.
Next I drove to Ricky’s house. The driveway to their place was long, littered with his mother’s attempts at trees. Stunted branches that had lost their leaves sat next to fat evergreens.
Ricky was in a deckchair next to the covered pool. A Harvard sweater over his stocky body, his eyes closed, his fingers laced behind his head. He opened his eyes slowly, like he’d been sleeping, even though he’d accepted the call to let me in.
“Jacky,” he said. There was a note of affection in his voice. Maybe I’d only noticed it now. He probably liked the recent version of me better, the one that said nothing and sat with him in the dark, and drank.
“Your parents have a house up by Magaliesburg,” I said.
Nothing.
“Can I have the keys?”
Ricky adjusted his position on the deckchair, squinted up at me. “Sure thing, Jacky, but, like any normal person would ask, why?”
“It’s better you don’t know.”
“Better I don’t know,” Ricky repeated, pretending to consider the words.
“And better to say nothing. Even if people ask questions.”
“It isn’t like you to hold me to things like that, you know.”
“Just give me the keys.”
“You’re not acting rationally. I hope you know that.”
“Are you giving them to me or not?”
“If I give you the keys, something is going to happen. It better end whatever meltdown you’ve been going through these last few days. You’re becoming boring.”
“I need the keys now.”
“Easy, boy, easy.” He got up from the deckchair, slowly. He sighed and went inside the house, the dirty soles of his bare feet marking the beige carpet. The back of his mullet haircut untidy.
Zanele
The sound of the engine was powerful, a slow thrumming sound. I could hear it from down the street. It was coming for me.
I skirted to the back of the shack and waited on the side that faced the dump.
The car stopped. Then started again. I waited.
I saw it come up on the small dirt track, a wide-breasted silver car, the interior dark. I started running. Boots against the gravel on the road.
“Zanele.”
I stopped and turned.
I looked at the shack again. The rusted walls were curved inward, bending but not cracking. My eyes lingered there, at the eaves. Then I looked at him. I had forgotten how pale he was, had forgotten how some of the lines of his face were like his mother’s.
“That isn’t your car,” I said.
“Meena gave me the pictures to get your sister released.”
“Of course she did.”
“Meena told me a lot of things.” His hair was uncombed and the top buttons of his shirt were undone.
“So?”
Jack tossed the car keys in his hand and gestured toward the car. He got inside and I stood there, the gleaming metal between us.
“You need to tell me what’s been going on—you owe me that much,” he said.
I got inside. “Why don’t we talk about you first. What’s new with the Cravens?”
Meena
“See? They printed it. Now it’s only a matter of time till they release Mankwe.”
Thabo snatched the paper and looked at the picture. “Where’s Zee?”
“Safe. Everything set for tomorrow night at eleven?”
“Yes, wena. And not so loud.” He tossed the paper on the counter. “Where is she? Tell me.”
“With the mlungu, I think.” I scanned his face. His expression didn’t change. “She wouldn’t go with him if she didn’t want to. You can’t be making the plan and making sure she’s safe. I told her where and when to meet.”
“Learn something,” he said at last. It was the tsotsi’s voice, threatening, impersonal. “Be quiet when you make a mistake.”
I thought he would break things. Just the sound of his shoes across the shop floor until he swung the door open and left.
Thabo
It was bad luck that just after I came back from the shop, Sam Shenge, with his best green bow tie, was waiting in the shebeen.
It was bad luck that he said, “Thabo, you have something for me?”
“Gaan blaas,” I said.
He didn’t go anywhere, asked me to get him another beer. “I know there’s a package going to Swaziland, going through here,” he said. “A package that the abo gata won’t like.”
“Why are you calling them abo gata? You’re just like them.”
“So are you, my friend, so are you. So tell me. Where is that girlfriend of yours?”
“Why don’t you ask her mlungu?”
“Her mlungu?” Sam asked.
“I have nothing to tell you.”
“You never have.”
“Drink it and leave. And don’t come back here.”
“You can say what you want, my friend.” Sam stepped away from his glass of beer. “But the abo gata rule Soweto. You tsotsi just like to pretend.”
Jack
I stopped the car in front of Ricky’s house. I went around to her side of the car, but she’d opened the door already and was standing, looking up at the French windows on
the second floor. A stream wove itself around the house.
She looked thinner. I wanted to hold her, but I walked past and unlocked the door. She followed me in, and we faced each other across the kitchen counter.
Outside, the last flecks of sunlight on the branches and her face.
“I went to the police to find out if you were in jail. They know about us. You know that.”
“Then they’ll find me here.”
“They won’t look here.”
Zanele turned away and looked out the window. Dry bush and grass pressed against the glass. A three-hour drive separated us from the city and the police.
“There’s a bedroom upstairs, on the right. You can sleep there,” I said, turning away.
“They’re taking me across the border tomorrow. You know that?” she said, coming up behind me. She pulled my shoulder and turned me around. “You’re angry.”
“I thought the police had buried you, and you let me believe that.”
“So why did you bring me here?”
Hours later, I put some pasta from the storage cupboard on the stove and added some sauce. I brought it up to Zanele’s bedroom, nudging the door open with my shoulder. I found her curled up on top of the sheets. Her breathing was slow and uneven.
I put the bowl down on the chest of drawers next to the bed. Then I took the gun I had taken from my father’s study from its holster and put it next to the bowl.
I put my hand on her head, where all her hair had been shaved off. It was bristly and uneven. She shifted, opened her eyes and looked at the gun.
“Why do you think I didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me,” I said.
“It was cleaner that way,” Zanele said, leaning up against the headboard. “You go to England, I go to Swaziland. No goodbyes, that’s it.” For a moment I glimpsed something pleading in her expression. She wanted me to let go.
“That’s not how these things work,” I said. “And I’m still angry.”
“I know.” She moved her face away from my hand and sunk back into bed.
“Here’s some food.”
“I’ll have it later.”
“I’ve been reading the papers more,” I said. “Seems like your riot started something. It’s all over the country. And it looks like Botha is backing down on the Afrikaans.”