The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  Matha nodded at the skinny black blur topped with a squat white blur – a hat, she assumed.

  ‘Your relative is always complaining about you,’ he laughed. ‘I am Mr Sakala, the cook.’

  Where was Grace? Where was Sylvia? But Mr Sakala was still talking.

  ‘It cannot be so bad, my dear. Have you had some tea?’

  Was he trying to cheer her up? No, no, no – there was no time for such sentiments!

  ‘It is very important to keep the body nice-and-warm. There is a special root I use for Dona Agnes. She is from abroad’ – here he paused to measure job security against the relish of gossip – ‘and she is blind. This root, it is good for the eyes. She is improving. I know she will play tennis again…’

  Matha tried manoeuvring herself in around him. Mr Sakala stopped her, wedging her against the gate with a long wiry arm.

  ‘You cannot come in!’ he said incredulously. ‘You will not find Grace here at any rate. She sent a message this morning to say she is not well.’

  But my baby! Matha held her elbows and rocked them in the universal symbol.

  ‘Oh-oh! That piccanin hyena is pregnant?! I’ve cotched her!’

  Matha hung her head as Ba Sakala gloried in the prospect of a Grace further disgraced. He didn’t understand who Matha was looking for and she could not explain. When she turned away from him, the light in the sky was already blunter. The day was retreating. Everything was running away from Matha, even time.

  * * *

  Sylvia had been in the thick of sleep when it happened. Someone gently took her arm, raised her to her feet, and led her stumbling out of No. 74. Only when they were already on a bus, bouncing along the road, did she become aware of who had taken her. She immediately tried to slip from her grip, but Aunty Grace held her. When they got off the bus half an hour later, Aunty Grace dragged Sylvia, fiercely kicking the whole way, down a road and through the gates outside a tall concrete building, then up the outdoor steps to the second floor, holding Sylvia in a chokehold while she wrestled the key out of her pocket and into the lock. Once they were inside what looked like a kitchen, Aunty Grace kicked the door closed, threw Sylvia on the floor, knelt on her and started hitting her, so hard that Sylvia stopped resisting out of sheer shock.

  After a few minutes, another woman came in the room. Aunty Grace was panting in the corner, Sylvia in a ball on the floor, staring between her fingers at the enormous purple trousers hanging from a line over the sink. The woman sat at the table, upon which, Sylvia now noticed, breakfast was arrayed: a glass of orange squash, a plate of golden vitumbua, and a bowl of nshima porridge that wafted a silky sweetness into the air, banana coins dimpling its surface.

  ‘Your mother will be very happy that you’re here,’ the woman said in English.

  ‘Iwe! You don’t want vitumbua?’ Aunty Grace shouted loudly from the corner, also in English. ‘Show some thank yous! It is good food.’

  ‘Come here, love. Sit. Eat.’

  As the day went on, Sylvia heard many such words of comfort and promise from this new aunty, words about the toys awaiting her in the next room, and about the party they would throw for her tomorrow. But in the end, it was not the words that did it but the food, the squash and the vitumbua and the porridge and the unchecked decadence that followed: toffees and lemon drops and chocolates and mints. These were like stones that you could put in your mouth, where they would melt at different rates and with marvellously different flavours. At first, Sylvia had trouble distinguishing them from the brightly coloured presents in the bedroom – the little plastic bricks and the little glass balls with swirls in their centre. Aunty Grace frowned but New Aunty laughed and clapped her hands as Sylvia tore open the wrappings and placed the toys on her tongue, just to test, just to taste.

  * * *

  After Handsworth Park, Matha’s next stop was Rhodes Park. She was not welcome here either. Aunt Beatrice had paid to send Matha to Kasama, had offered to help with her child’s schooling. Matha had refused it. Instead, foolish girl, she’d run away again, stolen a car this time, and cut off ties with everyone, all for a muntu who had disappeared anyway. And now, this crying-crying business? The servants looked at her sideways. Even the dogs disdained her. Matha sat on the steps of Aunt Beatrice’s bungalow, awaiting a hearing that would never come, watching the sun set. She felt empty and rattled with loss, like a dried seed husk. Yet Matha did not barge her way in. She did not kneel beside those big red dogs and scream for Sylvia.

  As the dogs began their nightly row across Aunt Beatrice’s yard, Matha lay down instead. Truth be told, there was a tiny doubt in the midst of her grief. Over the course of the day, Sylvia’s disappearance had become a temptation. Sylvia had always been a reminder of everything that Matha had lost. Every day, she woke up, felt her daughter’s small squirming body beside her, remembered, and despaired. Yes, truth be told, before the panic had set in this morning when she found the girl missing, there had been another feeling – a flash of relief that, for once, there was no skin pressed up against hers. What would life be like without Sylvia? Lying there on Aunt Beatrice’s steps, thinking on that question, Matha drifted to sleep. For the first time in a long while, she was at peace, alone and gladly dreaming.

  She dreamed of a messy mass of blood slipping back inside her with a suctiony sound. A thick cord ravelled into tight loops. A baby clambered up feet first, bestowing weight and tightness to her belly. Her swollen breasts ebbed, their milky tide receded. Tears travelled up her cheeks, tickling into her eye ducts. There was a gradual, deep unwrenching. Then streams of pleasure surged together, imploding with a swallowing action. She hiccupped a moan as sperm sprang back into a penis, which withdrew from her and deflated. A pair of hands left her cheeks. A pair of lips drew away. Matha saw him clearly. Godfrey. Those lips as plump as her tomatoes, the keloid on his neck as thin-skinned, his tightcurled lashes like the tendrils on their stems. ‘Comrade,’ he whispered and vanished into the dark.

  * * *

  Grace felt bored and distressed. She had been hired to put the little girl at ease as she was transferred from Matha’s care to Nkuka’s. But Sylvia’s unexpectedly fierce resistance had forced Grace to slap her into submission in the kitchen. This had stirred up some long-forgotten curdle in Grace’s stomach. It had felt both too bad and too good to strike a small person. Maybe it was because the small person in question was such a dullard. No surprise there. Grace had long thought that, while salt water was a fine thing – she longed to see the sea that her Madam Agnes was always talking about – it had to do funny things to a child to be soaked in it all the time.

  Over the years, watching Matha dribble tears into her baby’s mouth along with the milk, watching Sylvia toddle around Kalingalinga, playing pitifully with her own shadow, Grace had more than once thought about rescuing the child. But it had always seemed too much trouble, especially when The Weepers had started coming around No. 74 like some kind of cult. Grace had reconsidered only when Matha’s sister, a decent and smart woman if a little snooty, had proposed that they save the child from Matha’s abuse – and offered Grace money for expenses. Maybe if she did this favour for the family, Grace had reasoned, the aunties would finally forgive her for what she’d done all those years ago.

  But now, watching Nkuka’s face light up at Sylvia’s stupid antics with her fancy new toys, Grace felt disgusted. The child needed a bath, she thought sullenly. She certainly wasn’t going to give her one. Grace’s job with the Bandas involved childcare – she was responsible for bathing baby Carol for instance – but Madam Agnes’s daughter was clean and bright, not a dirty little muntu. Besides, hadn’t Grace done enough? She had brought Sylvia to Nkuka. A strange sum but it added up: a neglected child plus a barren woman, a woman who was now whispering to Grace, asking whether Matha knew yet that her daughter was gone.

  ‘I do not even think Matha will care,’ Grace shrugged. ‘She hates the girl
.’

  Sylvia looked up from the spinning top before her, but Nkuka distracted her by declaring that tomorrow, they would throw a birthday party, and wouldn’t that be fun? Sylvia grinned and clapped her hands like a monkey. Grace rolled her eyes. Yes, she had done plenty for these two. And she had done it quickly, and quietly, without much violence. She had done it in a crowded compound, without being spotted. Grace had always thought she would make a good spy.

  * * *

  How great is the distance between what we are and what we think we are. Grace had been spotted, of course, by one of The Weepers. That morning, Bonita, a mawkish girl with the look of a goat – pointy-chinned, bony-legged – happened to be on the bus when Grace pulled a sleepy Sylvia onto it by the wrist. Canny enough to recognise wrongdoing in action, Bonita had trailed them. She’d got out with them at the Inters stop, and stood behind a tree to watch as Grace dragged Sylvia up the outdoor steps of the Indeco Flats and opened a door on the second storey.

  As soon as she saw the door shut, Bonita took the next bus back to No. 74 Kalingalinga. Matha was nowhere to be found, so Bonita hurried over to No. 78. She found Mrs Zulu sitting on the ground, her granddaughter standing over her, tying her grey hair into knots.

  ‘They have taken Sylvia!’ Bonita cried breathlessly.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The aunty has taken Sylvia. I saw it with my own eyes. Ba Matha is missing too – and No. 74 has been ransacked!’

  Mrs Zulu rose, so slowly that her granddaughter kept trying to finish the hairdo, her chubby arms rising up and up, until the head finally slipped from her grasp.

  ‘It is a state of emergency,’ Mrs Zulu declared.

  She sent word to The Weepers to gather immediately. When all nine stood before her in various states of frowse and undress, she announced the situation. Someone wondered if Matha and her daughter were together at the Indeco Flats? Mrs Zulu doubted it, she doubted it extremely! Mrs Zulu had her suspicions – she had always had her suspicions! – about that misnamed cousin of it. Grace! The Weepers clucked in concert. Should they go back to the flats? No. Not yet. Mrs Zulu decided they should camp at No. 74 Kalingalinga and wait for either the victims or the perpetrator to return.

  None of The Weepers wept that day. And that night, scattered in groups in the dirt yard, none of them slept either. They sipped tea and slapped at mosquitoes and shared their blankets and kept vigil. And when Matha returned alone from Aunt Beatrice’s the next morning, they rejoiced. They wrapped their arms around her and lifted her onto their shoulders. They sang her name in the melody of a hymn.

  Matha did not protest. How was she to tell these loyal women that in the night, in the exile of Aunt Beatrice’s steps, she had given up on her daughter? That she had followed in her mind a trail from Sylvia nowgone to Sylvia neverbeen? That she had come home this morning without even trying to search for her. Matha was too ashamed to confess. She let The Weepers carry her along, let them cry tears and sing songs on her behalf, as Mrs Zulu led the charge to the Indeco Flats.

  * * *

  Sylvia woke up with a small person’s hangover, a dizzy, fuzzy feeling born of sugar and adrenaline. Yesterday had ended in a way she had never thought possible. She had been permitted to bounce on a bed. An actual bed. With actual springs. Up in the air and down again and right back up once more! Sylvia had never felt so light, so tossed. She had never imagined a ceiling that she would want to touch. And New Aunty had not spanked her for any of this. This beautiful woman had just sat smiling on the other bed in the room – two beds! in one room! – and watched, spots of brightness in her eyes, as if she had just stopped crying, or was about to start.

  Sylvia kept expecting New Aunty to cry, maybe because she resembled Ba Mayo – there was something familiar around the dip between the eyes. Plus New Aunty was doing all the things Ba Mayo always did, bathing Sylvia and feeding her and plaiting her hair into mukule. But although Sylvia kept checking all day, she never saw New Aunty cry. This was wonderful because when New Aunty wrapped her arms around her, it wasn’t damp or sticky. But it was also confusing: wasn’t crying just what one’s mother did? All day, every day? This tearlessness was both a respite to Sylvia and a dry, empty space.

  Sylvia soon forgot about it, though, so busy was she living her new life. There was the food she had never tasted – the sweets that stung her mouth with riotous pleasure – and the toys and the clothing in colours she’d never seen. She was still wearing the sparkling pink dress that had ballooned around her as she propelled herself up and down on this actual bed in this actual room that New Aunty had said could be all hers, hers alone. Sylvia assumed this was a lie – who in the world had a room all to herself? – but things like truth were starting to seem rather flexible. For instance: who in the world knew that she had more than one aunty?

  * * *

  Cookie had got herself in a bind. Most girls run off as soon as they have taken advantage of an affair with a schoolteacher. Not Cookie. Cookie had kept track of Mr Mwape’s promises (a Panasonic TV, a Sony hi-fi) and demands (no babies, no men) over the years, as if in a ledger. After she’d graduated from Evelyn Hone, Mr Mwape had found her a job at the National Registration Office and secured her an Indeco ‘bedsitter’, with three rooms and a full kitchen. Most of the tenants here shared flats, coming in and out of each other’s rooms, cooking and cleaning together like village women, swimming in a stream of gossip. Cookie alone could insist on a flat of her own.

  She had kept her ‘arrangement’ with Mr Mwape, borrowing her female friend’s birth control pills when she ran out, washing her vagina with diluted bleach, getting her male friends to buy condoms for her. She’d only had to get an abortion once, a few years ago. After her period had skipped town for the third month in a row, she had taken herself to a stall in Luberma market with a sign that said: SENIOR HERBALIST. IF ANY PROBLEMS CONECT YOUR CONDITION, COME IN FOR AN EXAMINE. The abortionist had been discreet but sloppy, mixing traditional and Western methods without care.

  When Cookie came to after the operation, the banakulu had told her bluntly that she could never have another baby and that she should refrain from ‘cavorting’ for at least two months. Cookie stared up at the thatched ceiling, wracked with pain, wading through her various feelings until she landed, gratefully, upon relief. No more tricks to prevent pregnancy – no more herbs or condoms or sponges. No more worries.

  Until now. A month ago, Mr Mwape had announced that he could no longer afford to pay for two households. Maybe his wife had finally caught on. Maybe he was just bored of keeping Cookie, who was no longer a young girl but a twenty-eight-year-old woman. In any case, he’d pitched up at her flat, a bottle of conciliatory Red Door in his hand, and broke it to her: he couldn’t support her any more. He needed the money for his children, who were coming of age, going to university. Cookie had been distraught but she had simply smiled and kissed him and led him to bed. Only when he left her lying there alone in the twisted sheets in the cool evening light did she sit up and put her head in her hands.

  The irony of it all! She had gone to great lengths, for a decade, to keep from having this man’s child. Now she needed one. Only a child of her own, it seemed, would balance the scales with his wife; only a child would compel Mr Mwape to keep funding Cookie’s life and lifestyle. Blood was a stronger tie than any ring. Sitting in that damp tangle of sheets, the Red Door bottle like a brick beside her – Cookie knew what had to be done.

  The very next day, she had gone to Aunt Beatrice and reported that her niece Sylvia was being mistreated. Matha was clearly mad – crying every day in the compound, gathering crying women into some kind of hysterical cult. Sylvia was stunted, malnourished, possibly mute.

  ‘Mmm,’ Aunt Beatrice had said. ‘This thing is running in the family. Your grandfather was off on the head and Bernadetta was never the straightest spoon in the box either.’

  ‘Yes, Matha is the same
as our mother! We must take the child away. For the girl’s sake.’

  ‘Are they not living with that other one?’ Aunt Beatrice had asked. ‘The one who—’

  ‘Yes, Ba Aunty. Her name is Grace. I will talk to her. I’m sure she will help us.’

  * * *

  New Aunty was putting the final touches to the birthday cake. Sylvia was sitting on a chair before it. The only other guests at her party, Aunty Grace and a neighbour’s son, were standing on either side of her. Sylvia, still dizzy from sugar and from spending so much of the last two days indoors, stared at her hands in her lap. Her fingernails had never been so clean. They gleamed against her pink dress, which was slightly worse for wear after a night and a morning of bedjumping. A chain of yellow streamers decorated the kitchen wall. Blue balloons bobbed next to a sign Sylvia had spent all morning colouring with felt-tip pens. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUTINKHE, it said, as did the cake with its single twisty candle.

  Sylvia was not in fact a dullard. She did not know her birthday but she knew her own name. She was too interested in this party to mind, though: the flowery smell of the icing and her own fresh skin, New Aunty caressing her back and calling her Tinkhe, Tinkhe – what a gentle bell of a name! – and saying, ‘It’s time to light your candle!’ New Aunty pulled a match from a cardboard box and struck it with a zip. She held it to the candle and the flame straightened up from the wick, then rolled its head – the kitchen door had swung open, banging against the wall.

  Mrs Zulu’s face was in the room, pure rage, a crowd of shouting women behind her. The Weepers. What were they doing here? Were they here for the birthday party? No – the women began stomping around, yelling insults, smacking at the balloons, tearing down the streamers. Mrs Zulu leaned over Sylvia and spat on her cake. Aunty Grace and the neighbour’s son were cowering by the kitchen door. And New Aunty was finally crying, her make-up dripping off her jaw onto the collar of her dress as she ran to and fro, shouting ‘Stop! Please stop!’