The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  Good students, poor students, students who had never spoken in class before, students who were scared of teachers – they all joined in. They were excited to speak freely with Mrs Makaza, a teacher so formal that the first day of class she hadn’t even introduced herself, simply writing her name on the board before launching into the first drill. Sylvia sat silently as the show went on. It was as if her heart were hanging in the air, as if her classmates were dogs lunging casually to shred it. How? How did they all know?

  * * *

  Mercifully, school holidays came the following week. It was June, a season of hot dry days and cold dry nights. Dry in feeling all the time: Sylvia was soon dead bored. She had nursed her wounds. She had spent a great deal of time thinking about what she should have replied when Mwaba had said, ‘Checkit, I’m gonna bounce.’ Then she had passed more time elaborately ‘forgetting’ Mwaba by dwelling on his flaws. She had just about resigned herself to being loveless and alone for the remainder of her days when she fell in love for the second time.

  Mutale had invited her to come to the Agricultural Show with her family. That morning, Aunty Cookie dropped Sylvia at the Phiris’ house in Ibex Hill. The girls got ready in Mutale’s gigantic bedroom. Sylvia borrowed her friend’s white patent-leather pointy-toed sling-backs, stuffing tissue inside to make them fit. Then she handsewed a skirt out of an old bedsheet – the thread was a thicket at the hem, but it had swirly white buttons along the side. She pulled on a teal t-shirt she’d bought at salaula with tuck-shop money. She didn’t like its bubble letter logo – a peeling heart – so she turned it inside out and tied a knot on one side to make it tight. For her part, Mutale wore stonewashed jeans that gaped like fins at her hips, red and black leather flats, and a red crop top that she concealed under a loose black shirt she planned to take off once they ditched her family at the show.

  After applying make-up for each other, the two girls stood together in front of the full-length mirror. Sylvia could read the words of her own shirt, doubly reversed: inside out and reflected. JumpRopeForHeart. Mutale’s outfit was nicer, but she wore it like a child – her breasts were just swollen nipples and her lip gloss made it look like she’d been eating fried kapenta.

  ‘You look so much better than me, Muta,’ Sylvia smiled, lying through her scarlet lips.

  * * *

  Mutale was no competition but the other girls at the show certainly were. Wherever Sylvia’s eyes landed in the ticket queue outside, she found yet more items to add to her ‘Wishful List’. Silver hoop earrings. White leggings that hooked under the arch of the foot. Black fingerless lace gloves. Purple stretch belts with gold-rimmed butterfly buckles. As for the butas, it was Michael Jackson season, and every boy who could afford one was in a red leather jacket. Heady with aspiration, Sylvia barely noticed her friend’s eagerness to get away from her family. As soon as they clunked through the turnstiles, Mutale grabbed her hand and dragged her into the murmurous crowd.

  The Agricultural Show always took place at Showgrounds, a 140-hectare expanse of land off Great East Road bounded by white walls on all sides. These were painted with ads for Dettol and Lifebuoy and Strike, for Maltesers and Maggi and Milo. There were redundant ads for car dealers (BENZ BENZ BENZ) and unlikely ones for salons (ASTOUNDING INDIAN HAIR) and it seemed every other wall bore a black and yellow ad for Harvey Tiles, with some skew Zinglish analogy: A ROOF WITHOUT HARVEY TILES IS LIKE A FACE WITHOUT A SMILE – IT MIGHT BE GLOOMY. A ROOF WITHOUT HARVEY TILES IS LIKE AN AEROPLANE WITHOUT A PILOT – IT WON’T FLY. A ROOF WITHOUT HARVEY TILES IS LIKE A SCHOOL WITHOUT TEACHERS – THERE WILL BE ILLITERACY.

  In the off months, Showgrounds was an odd little leisure city. There were polo fields – sometimes green, sometimes brown – where in the old days, people had actually played that strange game that seems like a drunken bet about golf and horse riding. Next to the fields was the Polo Grill, an open-air restaurant specialising in sundowners, where over the years, whites and coloureds and blacks and now a motley crew of apamwamba drank and flirted away the afternoons. A handful of businesses operated year-round: a flower shop; a gift shop; a vet; the cylindrical Henry Tayali Art Museum; and the Gymkhana club with a peacock farm behind it – two species of preening males competing with each other. The grounds were otherwise empty, a concrete maze of stalls awaiting its annual raison d’être.

  In the beginning, the Lusaka Agricultural Show had been literal: farmers from rural districts came to the capital to display their cows and goats, their bulldozers and sprinklers. Then the farmers started bringing their wives and children too, and the show became a fair. Candyfloss and popcorn vendors cropped up. A miniature train was imported, its tracks carving a long, twisty double scar across the grounds. Then radio stations began to set up dance floors. Alcohol crept in. The youth swarmed in to drink it. By 1984, the Agricultural Show had become a city-wide party.

  Sylvia and Mutale held hands and walked around together. Mutale looked at the exhibits. Some of these were schoolish – signs and pamphlets with sciencey talk, unsmiling UNZA students giving brief lectures. Others were farmish – smelly, twitchy animals standing or kneeling in makeshift stalls. Sylvia looked at the people. Men in suits clapping each other’s backs, their wives fluting ‘hallos’ as their eyes darted discerningly over each other. Toddlers greased with Vaseline trotted around in the dust, their weirdly adult outfits – skirts and suspenders, hats and bow ties – in various stages of collapse. Babies rode their mothers’ backs, gazing at strangers or ducking their heads shyly. Sylvia focused mostly on the people her age, the young sweating bodies clad in shiny metal and bright colours, featuring.

  A tall boy with skin dark as pencil lead walked by, his stride collapsing and catching itself in a 5/4 tempo. He glanced Sylvia’s way with casual grace, then paused his stroll and looked back, running his hand over his fade. Mutale pulled Sylvia away from this situation so roughly that Sylvia left one of her borrowed shoes behind. They both caught their breath as it tumbled away in the dust. Mutale rescued it just before a man trod on it, but just after a little girl dripped a gob of ice cream onto it. Mutale sucked her teeth, picked it up gingerly by the ankle strap, and used a mango leaf to wipe the muddy pink mess off. She skulked back to Sylvia, who was now standing with her bare foot perched on top of the other shoe. To keep her balance, she was holding the tall boy’s arm, which flexed whenever her weight shifted. ‘Chops,’ she mouthed with wide eyes.

  The boy’s muscles were indeed on prominent display on either side of his black net shirt. His name was Daliso, he told them, then proceeded with a long and detailed chuffing routine, his voice dropping into false delays and slurred consonants in order to sound American: ‘Am a deeshaaay, you know, riiide?’ Daliso’s bloodshot eyes looked like they’d been popped out, rolled around in the dirt, and popped back in. He smelled like ma sawa sawa. Otherwise, he was perfect. If only the shoe in Mutale’s hands would disappear, Sylvia could keep holding his muscular arm and keep her feet in this sexy pose.

  Naturally, Daliso the DJ had an entourage of boys, who crowded around as soon as they saw what his net shirt had caught. Sylvia had already been claimed; Mutale was now targeted. Too bewildered even to repulse their ‘Hi swit-haats’, Mutale stayed silent, tugging at the edge of Sylvia’s hidden JumpRopeForHeart and making let’s go! eyes. Annoyed by Mutale’s reluctance, the guys started calling her a Jelita – the little girl who runs and jumps in kids’ books. Sylvia laughed along with them. After a few more minutes of this flirtatious bullying, Mutale gave up and walked off alone, looking pitiably over her shoulder. Sylvia barely noticed. She had just met Daliso’s brother, Francis, who had a hightop fade and a real leather jacket, and she was beginning to thrum with proximity to so much maleness.

  For the rest of the day, she wandered around with this new crew, which lost and regrew members like a lizard as it moved deeper into the exotic delights of the show. At Lusaka’s 58th Agricultural and Commercial Show, Sylvia Mwamba
saw for the first time: a man in bumshorts and a boa; a headless woman in a dark tent; an albino woman walking around in a chitenge just like someone’s mother; one zombie and his nation, dancing on a makeshift stage – a ‘Thriller’ performance; a woman who slapped a man’s face, then gasped at herself, a smile stealing to her lips; and a live penis. This last was by far the most riveting.

  The sky was a dusky rose by the time Sylvia and Francis sought some privacy between two stalls. In one, a man was emptying out unsold helium balloons. In the other, a young woman in a bow tie was selling groundnuts in front of a diagram of legume root systems. She sucked her teeth when Sylvia and Francis squeezed past.

  ‘Sorry, ba sista,’ Francis grinned. ‘We just gonna rap for a beat.’

  The alley smelled like urine and burnt nuts and helium. At their feet were the dregs of the day – a blue-stained lollipop stick, a red puddle of candyfloss vomit, a torn crisp packet, a trail of gumdrops. Sylvia could hear the rubbery whine of the draining balloons, the tired panic of vendors shouting out their clearance prices, and the wailing of babies, who always know first when it’s time to go home. Francis was standing very close to her. She raised her eyes to his.

  ‘Chillax, swit-haat,’ he murmured. ‘Iss arright.’

  He kissed her. She let him, slightly bewildered by his inability to control his lips or his tongue. She started to kiss him back and the lightning in her began to melt and run liquid through her veins. After a minute or so, Francis pulled his penis out and put her hand on it. It was darker than she had imagined it would be, and it grew as she held it, as fast as a mushroom that springs from the earth during rainy season. It smelled like a mushroom too, a dank earthy scent, and its skin was as thin and soft as a mushroom’s gills. Francis’s eyes were closed. He had seemed strong when he had handed his penis to her like a gift or a greeting. Now he seemed weak. The springy weight in her palm was vibrating – his knees were trembling and his breath was uneven, as if secretly, without letting on, he was already running away.

  * * *

  Sylvia carefully penned her name and number on a piece of paper for Francis that night when he dropped her home at the flats. He never called. Nevertheless, she mentally pitted her two loves against each other for months. Francis was older but Mwaba was taller. Francis had kissed her but Mwaba sometimes smiled vaguely at her. She had touched Francis down there but she still got to see Mwaba’s handsome face every day at school. Mwaba soon lost this advantage, however. Like most students in Zambia, Sylvia failed the national Grade 7 Exams that November.

  ‘Foolish girl!’ Aunty Cookie scolded her. ‘Wasting other people’s time and money!’

  ‘I have tried, Ba Aunty,’ Sylvia said. ‘My brain is just not strong. I fall asleep too much.’

  In truth, Sylvia was relieved to have failed out of school for good. She had never understood why the teachers taught what they taught. Sediment, tectonic, archipelago. Hypotenuse, equilateral, isosceles. What was any of it good for? No. She did not miss those useless lessons or her only friend – after the Agricultural Show, Mutale had shunned her, masking her hurt with a stagey disdain. But Sylvia did miss the casual crowdedness of school, the brush of skin on skin, the feeling of being amongst many people doing many things – typing or netball or even just standing in line at the tuck shop.

  Without school, she grew lonely and listless. To step outside her aunt’s flat was to be sent – the neighbours always had an errand for an unoccupied teenager – so she stayed in all day. She perused old Ebony magazines and painted her nails with polish eked out from old bottles. She waited for the cartoons to come on the Panasonic TV, staring at the prison of thick coloured bars until they dissolved at 1700 hrs. Sometimes she tried on the home-made dresses hanging in purgatory at the back of Aunty’s closet. Too small for Cookie, who had put on a stone over the last decade, they fit Sylvia’s figure beautifully.

  One afternoon, she was turning and posing in front of the closet mirror, pouting her lips, when the bedroom door unexpectedly opened. It was Mr Mwape, his head hovering over her shoulder in the mirror. She stared at him. He stared back with frank admiration, then smiled.

  ‘Are we being naughty?’

  ‘No,’ Sylvia said, refraining from rolling her eyes.

  Mr Mwape was a familiar visitor at the Indeco Flats, but he had been stopping by more often recently. He was in his forties now, working for the Ministry of Education. He had started shaving his patchy afro, so he had a shiny bald head to match his taut round belly. Sylvia still called him Daddy out of habit but she had no delusions about this ‘patron’. She watched as he sat on Aunty Cookie’s bed with a proprietary air.

  ‘Come.’ He patted the duvet cover next to him, a twitch under his left eye.

  Sylvia approached in her bare feet, her nipples scratching against the inside of the low-cut sequinned dress, its pleated skirt swishing at her thighs.

  ‘Sit,’ he said, shifting his patting hand from the bed to his knee as if she wouldn’t notice the difference.

  Sylvia looked at his pinstriped thigh. She looked at the oblong bulge where it joined his body. Her ears felt hot. She gingerly hitched herself onto his lap, not quite relaxing into a seat. Mr Mwape smelled of aftershave and pipe tobacco.

  ‘Good girl,’ he said gummily. ‘You must show respect. You must not say no.’

  Mr Mwape didn’t do much that day, nor in the weeks that followed. But Sylvia felt torn about it: the sly touches, the near kisses, the nuzzling, even dressing up in Aunty’s clothes, which she felt somehow obliged to keep doing because of that first time. She couldn’t pinpoint why all of this felt wrong. She knew he wasn’t really her father and, though he was an older man, he tapped a current of curiosity in her. Did he love her aunt? Did he love her? Could she love him the way she loved Mwaba and Francis?

  * * *

  Sylvia found herself avoiding the flat, ducking Mr Mwape since she could not quite bring herself to push him away. She hung around outside the complex instead, on the side of the road where various kantemba sold food to people who worked in that part of town – cleaners from the hotels down the way, taxi drivers, road repairmen. She would sit on a big flat stone, not really thinking, just letting life in, listening to the song of all this anonymous busyness: the authoritative shouts of unmonitored children; the relay and laughter of greetings and bargains; Michael yelping or Whitney belting from the chimanga boy’s boombox: How will I know…

  ‘…if he really laafs you…’ sang a voice beside her, whirring as if from inside a bottle.

  Sylvia looked up. The girl was tall and dark, pretty with a pointed chin. She had just ordered her lunch from the chimanga boy, who shook his brazier to keep the current batch from burning, then started peeling a fresh cob for her. A bulging plastic bag swung from the girl’s fingers as she rocked to the music against the post of his stall. She wore a white t-shirt, a waxed wrapper, and patapatas – all shiny and pristine, even the rubber sandals, which gleamed like snakes on her feet under her chitenge. A crisp chitambala cut across her forehead.

  ‘Nice polish,’ she purred and stepped closer to examine Sylvia’s sandalled feet.

  The chimanga boy called out, thinking he was about to lose a sale.

  The girl turned and spat, ‘You can wait if you want my money, idjot!’ Her hand slapped the air and rose vertical.

  Shocked and pleased by the girl’s rudeness, Sylvia smiled in solidarity. The girl smiled back, the kind of almost-smile that made you want to finish it for her, with a joke or a compliment or the tip of your finger if need be.

  ‘I need to resurrect mine,’ the girl said, raising her chitenge so that her foot emerged from its shadow. Her toenails were indeed a mess, the remnants of polish like the jagged outlines on the maps Sylvia had once gazed at blankly in geography class. But Sylvia was more struck by the fact that the girl was not wearing a skirt under the chitenge she had just lifted. She was so scand
alised by that flash of smooth dark thigh that she almost didn’t hear the girl’s request.

  ‘Borrow me your polish?’

  Sylvia nodded and jumped up. The decision was simple, quick, and entirely obscure to her. She ran over to the Indeco Flats, wriggled between the locked gates, jogged up the outdoor stairs, pulled her key from the knot in her chitenge, and unlocked the door. She quickly found the polish – the rich colour of the darkest menstrual blood – in her stash of Aunty’s old bottles, locked up again and ran back to the kantemba, smacking the thick glass bottle against her palm along the way, hoping the dregs weren’t too dry.

  The chimanga boy was back to droning his prices at passersby and at first Sylvia thought the girl had already gone. But no, there she was, hunched slightly, biting into the scorched maize inside the newspaper cone, wincing at its heat. Sylvia, a little out of breath, handed over the polish. The girl swallowed her mouthful, wiped her hand on her chitenge and took it. She held it up to the light, then picked up the plastic bag at her feet and sauntered off, patapatas flapping.

  ‘Ta muchly! Ciao!’ she sang.

  I’ll never see that polish again, Sylvia was thinking when the girl looked back over her shoulder with her incomplete smile: ‘See you,’ she called. ‘And it’s Loveness, by the way.’

  * * *

  Sylvia never invited Loveness inside the Indeco Flats. Once, when Sylvia was eight years old, she had stayed out after sunset, playing with the neighbourhood kids around a street light outside. Under its orange glow, Sylvia had put her hands on the other girls’ shoulders and circled her little hips, chanting: two-by-two-cata-pilla-by-two! Aunty had discovered her there, snatched her up by her collar and walloped her buttocks. Not for dancing like a grown woman, but for consorting with the poor. Sylvia made sure to keep her new friendship confined to Loveness’s abode.