The Boy Next Door

by Irene Sabatini

  “Just for tonight.”

  “Why? No.”

  “Lindiwe, I just want to have someone, you, with me. Jeez, it’s coming out funny. Like friends, we’re friends aren’t we? It’s been a helluva long time, six, seven years….”

  “Yes.”

  “So, come on. Look, I’ll move the beds way apart. Check.”

  “Okay. No, okay. Just for tonight.”

  “Yebo mama.”

  I wake up in the middle of the night.

  “What?”

  “I’m cold.”

  “It’s all the vegetables.”

  “What?”

  “Move over here.”

  “What?”

  “Body heat.”

  “What? I just need a blanket.”

  “You’ve already got the two blankets.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “Push your bed here, and we’ll warm each other up.”

  “What?”

  “Jeez man, not like that. I mean, it’s warm my end of the room, just move. Come on, I’ll even push the thing for you.”

  “Better now?”

  “No.”

  “Give it ten minutes.”

  In the morning I wake up and my head is on his shoulder.

  “You’ve got one heavy head, Lindiwe,” he says, shaking his hand. “What the hell is in there?”

  “Gray matter.”

  “Heavy-duty lead, more like.”

  “So, why didn’t you move it?”

  “No worries.”

  “You look cute in those pyjamas.”

  I can’t help it, I start smiling.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Last month was my birthday. This is a deferred celebration. Thank you. Being here is really great, Ian.”

  “Don’t start the waterworks. Wait, stand there, like that.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. You look lekker. It’s a great picture. Tell you what. I take you out to a real fancy dinner tonight. Troutbeck Inn. I reckon they have vegetables there.”

  “No, you don’t have to. This is fine. More than fine.”

  “Troutbeck Inn.”

  “Look,” he says pointing to the map. “We can walk to the falls. Slow and easy.”

  We’re drinking coffee and eating toast inside. Outside, a shroud of mist covers the lake. I rub my shoulders.

  “Cold?”

  “A bit.”

  “I thought you had a jumper.”

  I point to what I’m wearing.

  “That? Here, take mine. It will get warmer soon.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Take it, woman.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Twenty-three. I can’t believe.”

  I want to tell him something. Some thing. I want to begin. I want a word. A single word. A way of saying it. “Ian, I…”

  “Yah?”

  And I can’t do it, I can’t.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t get cross now, but why weren’t you celebrating with your Frenchie?”

  “He was working.”

  “Working, on a Saturday?”

  “He’s a doctor. He works with the Tongas.”

  “Shit. So how did you two meet, if he’s way up there?”

  “At the Alliance Française. I go for French classes. There’s a café there and I bumped into him, spilt his coffee all over him, and so that’s how we met.”

  “A doctor, heh?”

  He starts drumming the table with two fingers.

  “He must be a bit older than you. Doesn’t it take yonkers to train? Cough up, Lindiwe, how old is the fossil? I can tell you’re mahobo embarrassed.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Yah, yah, how old?”

  “Forty-five.”

  “Jeez man. Old enough to be your—”

  “Shut up.”

  He leans back on his chair, his hands under his head, a broad smile plastered on his face.

  “You look very satisfied with yourself.”

  “I bet he’s got white hair and I reckon bad teeth.”

  “Could you leave it please.”

  “Touch touchy.”

  “Okay, tell me about your—what do you call them?—birds, all those suburban madams throwing themselves at your feet.”

  “Few are chosen.”

  “Few want.”

  Then he becomes serious. “I reckon I’ll never get tied down.”

  “Why?”

  “Way too many spooks on my back.”

  And that’s all he says.

  “Tired?”

  “A bit.”

  “Worth it though, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  We’re standing at the foot of the falls.

  The light catches the water as it splashes and spills over the stones, and yellow butterflies slip and float out of the streams of falling water. I read in one of the pamphlets from the national park that the air in Inyanga has been described by well-heeled travelers as “dry champagne”; I’ve never drunk champagne, but standing here now, I think I must know what it tastes like.

  Elixir, I say quietly to myself and imagine a knight from King Arthur’s Round Table standing there, a goblet in his hand; Maid Marian sitting languidly on the grass, the pale mauve flowers grazing her legs.

  I think of Ian laughing out loud if he knew what was in my head.

  “Jeez,” he might say, “you’re full of mush, Lindiwe. Lead and mush.”

  I imagine running, stripping myself of clothes, and diving into the wide pool, skinny-dipping, yelping and splashing about, something I’m sure young white people, exuberant and fearless, do when they come here, playing games. I watch Ian duck his hand into the water. I watch him lift his shirt from his body, tug and pull, and I wonder if he will be one of those white people. He stands there, bare chested. And I see that there is nothing wasteful about his body. I notice the flick of a scar on his right shoulder blade. And I quickly look away.

  I watch him soak in the sun; its rays fall on the hairs of his chest, glisten gold.

  He bends down again, splashes water over his head, onto his skin.

  I think for a moment that he will not be able to resist it. He will let himself go, dive smoothly into the cold water; already his jeans are wet up to his calves.

  He turns to me with a grin, flicking water at me. “You should try it.”

  He shakes the water off his head. “Nice. I needed to cool down a bit. That was quite a hike, huh?”

  And I think of how many times he took my hand, helped me over a log, a rock, a ledge, cleared the path for me, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. How we both stood still when we came to a little meadow with a stream running through, and just as he had done with the birds so many years ago, he named the flowers and grasses for me. The ferns and orchids at the edges of the crystalline water. Bushes of sweet peas, traveler’s joy, purple lassandria, and the sugar pink Rhodesian creeper with its fragile bell flower. (When I said “Rhodesian?” he charged back, “Jeez, Lindiwe, when I was a lightie they were Rhodesian.)

  He pointed out to me the woodland of dwarf msasa trees further away on the slopes of the mountain.

  And birds, so many of them, calling out to each across the rolling hills and granite cliffs.

  Blue duiker and samango monkeys, he told me, only found here.

  There was a quiet pride and satisfaction in his voice. I could tell he felt home.

  He flings his T-shirt over his shoulder and rubs his hands. “So, stand there, picture.”

  “Oh please!”

  “Oh please what? There. Done.”

  We sit on some rocks, under the shade of a tree, eat our cheese sandwiches, drink some water.

  “Tell me about the six years. What have you been up to, Lindiwe?”

  I think of the letter I wrote at the end of that Christmas day. I’d spent the whole day hoping and hoping. Hoping and fearing. That I would hear a car at Number 18. He would be there standing b
eside the yellow Datsun Sunny, looking over the fence at me. And then he would know. But he didn’t come. He didn’t come for six years.

  “School, studying, that’s about it.”

  There is everything that is unsaid between us. He knows it, feels it.

  “So,” I say. “Let’s talk about the next six years.”

  Which, of course, is a mistake. I want him so much to know. And not to know.

  “Jeez man, who the hell knows? Could be jolly well dead.”

  Where (from whom) did he pick up that word, jolly?

  “What kind of fundie are you going to be when you finish, when is it, next year?”

  “Yes, I don’t know. I’ll have a bachelor of science in psychology. I don’t want to get into personnel which is what most people are doing, and I don’t know if I even want to practice as a psychologist.”

  “So why the hell are you studying this stuff?”

  “I’ll probably go into personnel actually. That’s where the money is. I’ve got a part-time job with an advertising company, three afternoons a week. Last week I had to go around Harare looking for a dozen doves.”

  He looks at me in a way that suddenly makes me feel shy.

  “And what you’re reading these days?”

  “Reading, oh, for pleasure you mean? She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir.”

  “Simone de who?”

  “A feminist, a French feminist, she wrote the first real book about the condition of being female, The Second Sex, how women are born under subjugation and—”

  “Does this chick even have a boyfriend?”

  “Yes, a guy called Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote Nausea and Being and Nothingness about the existen—”

  “Another Jean, man, these Frenchies…”

  “Jean.”

  “Yah well, they’re everywhere, your Frenchies, huh?”

  I choose to ignore the comment. I think of the look on his face if I let on that it was Marie who introduced me to Beauvoir.

  “You were always into your books; I reckon the library in Bullies misses you a lot.”

  Before I know what I’m saying it’s said.

  “Please, tell me, what happened that night?”

  It’s so quiet here between us.

  I think of the lighter falling on the stone, the look on his face then.

  “Jeez man, Lindiwe. Jeez.”

  We are alone here. A man. A woman. Anything can be said, done. But I am not afraid. I want to tell him that whatever happened, we are connected; we will always be connected. I want him to trust me with his secrets; I have my own to tell him.

  I was sleeping, dreaming while Mrs. McKenzie burnt.

  “Why, why now? Like I told you, Lindiwe, I woke up and she was burning.”

  “Because I’m not fif— sixteen anymore.”

  He looks at me.

  “Because I’ll believe you.”

  I fill my head with the sound of the water falling over leaves, on the stone.

  “I went to the police station to tell them what had happened. The next thing I know is that they’re arresting me. On suspicion, they keep on saying. On suspicion. They hadn’t even checked out the house, didn’t know what was what, but they had a white boy in the stocks and they were pleased as hell. I reckon there were some CIO guys that day. Then they finally go down to the house, talk to Mphiri, and they come back and say that I am no longer under suspicion, and I’m thinking I told you what happened and next thing I’m under arrest for murder. And then it’s, ‘I’ve made a confession,’ and they change everything to sound like I did that, I did this, and all the time these guys—the ones I think are CIO—are tshaying that they have me for sure, how nice it’s going to be to see a white neck in the noose, the first mukhiwa who is going to hang, that maybe if I cooperate they can do something, appeal for mercy in view of my age, for my mother’s sake, so by this time I’m scared as hell and there’s no talk of lawyers and rights like on TV. I’m alone with these blokes, who look as fierce as hell, and then they start about how a small, white boy like me will have many admirers in the stocks, big, strong African men who have not seen a woman for years, decades even, how they will enjoy, and, but if only I cooperate they can organize a special cell. So I sign the paper. And that’s how it is.”

  I watch him push and grind his palms on the rock. I remember that day at the museum when I saw that his hands were bruised.

  He looks up, his palms flat on the stone. I move my hand that little bit across the stone, put it on his.

  “She’d told Mphiri that she wanted him out of the house. That she knew he was stealing. She was hitting the old chap. She’d lock him in the boy’s kaya, hit him with sticks, belts.”

  He lifts our hands off the stone.

  I watch him wipe his palms with a tissue, see the streaks of blood there.

  “He snapped, that’s all. He must have got her while she was sleeping. Poured the paraffin. I told the police it was an accident. That she tripped on a paraffin stove. They weren’t interested.”

  He gets up from the stone, sways a bit. He looks down at his hands and then up at me. I force the words out, unsparing and cold. I have waited so long. I cannot look at him, though. I look down at the stone, the stone that has particles of his flesh, blood.

  I try to imagine Mphiri doing something like that. The old man with paraffin in his hands bending over the sleeping woman. I try to think of how much Mphiri knew, what he saw in all those years there in that house. I think of Ian, the small boy, running away from his stepmother into the boy’s kaya, a safe haven from the shouting, the beatings. The picture wavers in my head, and it is replaced by something else.

  “What about the other woman?”

  I look up, up at the vast sky, following the arc of a bird, waiting.

  “What other woman?”

  He is standing there, his hands tucked in his jeans.

  “The police said that there was another woman who got burnt. They said you took her to the hospital before you went to the police station.”

  I watch him watch me.

  “You know who it is, Lindiwe, my mother. Sarah Price. I went to Ingutsheni yesterday. I haven’t been to see her since I left, not once.”

  His eyes are steady on me.

  I think of my pink handbag with the page from The Chronicle. “Murder!” it said. I touched his head with my finger, and when I looked down, I saw that his feet were bare.

  “And now I’m here. With you.”

  The first time he said my name, the way he said it: no exaggeration, not a hint of exasperation at having to pronounce an African name. My name was there, perfect in his voice.

  “I wanted to sort myself out.”

  He is standing by the gate, looking up at the house, until Mphiri comes to open it.

  “I kept telling them that I could look after her; that we could move to the house or go back south but nothing. The psychiatrist on her case was on a real power trip, a real pompous windbag—she was his responsibility; I had just been released from jail, no guarantees, couldn’t take the chance—on and on he went when I got the nerve to go to that place, you must know how it goes, Lindiwe, it’s your field.”

  He is sitting on Daddy’s chair, the car radio on his lap like a cat, white tackies on his feet.

  “Once they found out she was my mother they reckoned they had it all locked up. The two of us there. A domestic dispute, incident: premeditated.”

  Our hands are side by side on the car. He is helping me to push it.

  And here he is, wiping his hands on his jeans.

  “Okay Lindiwe, can we leave it for now? I just want to chill.”

  On the drive to Troutbeck Inn, we listen to a homemade tape of a South African band, Stimela.

  “You should see them live. They’re going to be hot. Check out Ray Phiri on the guitar and vocals.”

  The road, enveloped in mist, unwinds down the mountain; sometimes we are so close to the edge of the escarpment that one moment’s inattention a
nd we could disappear below. I don’t tell him that I’m nervous about the drive back in the dark.

  “What music do you like?”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “Come on.”

  “Dire Straits, UB40, Bruce Springsteen, Culture Club—”

  “Jeez—”

  “It gets worse. Until recently I was really into the New Romantics, you know, those British bands with lots of eyeliner and lace, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran—”

  “You’re a fricking Rhodie!”

  “And, and Julio Iglesias.”

  “Julio who?”

  “Julio Iglesias, he’s Spanish. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard ‘Hey!’”

  “No. Hey, what?”

  “Just ‘Hey!’ It’s all in Spanish and I don’t understand any of it, but it sounds so romantic. Yes. Yes, I even have the album.”

  “Christ!”

  “Oh, and Richard Clayderman.”

  “Rhodie fricking Central for sure. Culture, my child, culture. You should check out Lovemore Majaivana and those township blokes. They can really belt out a song; you can really feel the emotions, all that shit about the ancestors, it’s all there….”

  I watch him roll the window down, and I listen to his voice as it is carried away into the forest.

  He rolls the window up again, looks at me, his fingers tapping the steering wheel to the song in his head.

  I look at him with my mouth wide open.

  “Yah, yah, it’s a honky voice. No need to look like you’re going to cry. Not that bad.”

  “It was beautiful, Ian.”

  “When I was a lightie, ten, eleven roundabouts then, over at Matopos, I checked out a rainmaking ceremony like you never believe. I was hiding out in the bush, scrammed away from the troop, went right up…. And there the saddest—you want to hear beautiful, that was beautiful—scared the life out of me. Then they start blowing on the gourds and shit, the air is carrying that sound, vibrating with it, like everything is waiting, calling on God…. If God is going to be anywhere, it’s in the African bush all right.”

  I watch him turn the cassette over, press the play button and hold my breath as the car is flooded with Louis Armstrong and his magical trumpet.

  On and on we drive.

  “You know he came to Bullies in the sixties?”

  “No, really?”

  “Played over at the Queens Cricket Ground. I would have loved to see that. The guy belting out the classics, “Mack the Knife,” “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Past his prime but still delivering the goods. The place was packed, black, white. Listen. Sweet.”