* * *
Every day, the compound kids who didn’t go to sukulu followed the pattern of the rich in cities: they started off in the centre but, eventually, the promise of freedom and wider spaces had them moving towards the outskirts. That’s how, one afternoon, Jacob found himself with a group of six boys, walking beside the verboten airport fence. The boys were chatting about the electric pulse that supposedly throbbed through it now to keep them out. Mabvuto, the eldest, witty enough to appreciate the irony of his ‘Kiss Me, I’m Irish’ shirt, said this had to be a rumour. Who would bother making an electric fence in Lusaka?
He reached out to touch it, then began thrashing around wildly. ‘Zzz-zzzz! Aahhh! Aaahh!’ He paused and patted the leafy fence dramatically. ‘Ah?’
‘PAWA CAT!’ the other boys shouted and laughed.
Power cut or no, the fence was clearly safe enough to climb. Mabvuto hoisted himself up one of its metal poles. He didn’t get far – the peeling white paint got under his nails and there was razor wire at the top – but he got a glimpse of the airport grounds before he dropped down.
‘There is construction just there!’ he exclaimed as he healed the leprosy of paint on his thighs with picking fingers. ‘There are materials!’
The boys’ eyes sparked entrepreneurially. They often scavenged in the dump to find scraps to sell to Kalingalinga residents looking to add a new roof or wing to their homes.
‘But we cannot go in there!’
‘How can we even cross the razor wire?’
‘I know a way in,’ Jacob said, his voice dropping like a stone into their excitable chatter.
The other boys glanced around at each other daringly. Mabvuto gave an authoritative nod, as if this was all his idea, and off they went. Jacob led them along the fence to a tree that had grown enmeshed with its metal loops. The tree’s crown barely crested the fence but its roots, in their tumbling sprawl, had partially unearthed the base. Jacob had tried in vain to wrench the warped weave back by himself last week. Now, six pairs of hands finished the job and six pairs of legs wriggled through into the airport grounds.
A few metres away they could see an entrance road, a straight grey bridge over a yellowbrown sea of grass. Just beyond it were the materials Mabvuto had spotted. In the distance gleamed the tarmac runway where, they knew, aeroplanes dozed and landed and, astoundingly, took off. But between there and here was a roadblock: a metal bar with red and white diagonal stripes lay across the road, supported by squat pillars. There was no way to skirt that bar or hop the fence on either side of it – there were two guards sitting outside a hut, monitoring it. They wore green uniforms and knee-high boots, and casually propped beside one, and over the lap of the other, were big black rifles.
The boys approached cautiously, crawling in a ditch beside the road. Shading their eyes, they saw a red sedan drive up the entrance road and slow to a stop. One of the guards sauntered over to it, gun swaying from his shoulder strap. He scanned the sky as if rereading protocol, then leaned down to talk to the driver. The muzungu passenger closer to the boys looked out of her window but did not seem to notice the crop of brown heads in the ditch. She turned back to face forward and suddenly Jacob was running. Chipolopolo! Fast as a copper bullet.
In seconds, he was squatting under the car’s back window, as if he’d mushroomed from its side panel. His friends could see the white woman’s profile, chin lifted, her skin blue inside the car. Below it was Jacob’s profile, chin tucked to his chest, his skin metallic in the sun. He was hidden from the guard, but the boys stirred uneasily at the thought of angry bazungu, an angrier muntu, plus a car, plus a gun. The guard stepped away and raised the candycane bar. The car pulled forward, a parasitic Jacob clinging to its side. Still hunched over, he broke into a trot as the car accelerated, then darted behind a bush on the other side of the roadblock. The car sped on. The guard went back to his post.
In their ditch, the boys whispered their boasts. Each boy claimed he would be the next to try Jacob’s trick. They were just waiting for a bigger vehicle to hide behind. A Land Rover, maybe. Or a lorry.
* * *
Jacob raced on, his head down. He kept to the side of the road, looking for a safe place to stop. The sun was simmering like a coppery soup, the trails of woodsmoke like its steam in the distance. His panting breath competed with his thudding feet and the creaking chorus of crickets in the grass until all sound was engulfed by a roaring deluge from above. He froze and looked up but he couldn’t see the plane. He headed in the direction of its rushing sound.
At each step through the sea of yellow grass, the crickets sprang forward in overlapping arcs, reminding him of drops splashing from a puddle. Furry whips of grass lashed at his legs, embedding seeds in his skin, like the worms that burrowed into his feet and that his mother plucked out with tweezers. Would she be worried? She didn’t pay much mind to his whereabouts these days but he’d never strayed this far from home. Jacob was just considering turning back when he caught sight of the monstropolous beast.
He slowed and crept up to it. Its gargantuan nose, an orange cone with a black tip, pointed down like it was sniffing the ground. Above the nose were four square eyes, one intact but clouded with sunset sky, the other three empty. As he neared, one of those blank eyes gained sight: a black oval appeared, balanced on its bottom edge. The eye blinked and the oval vanished – it was a crow. Jacob tracked it as it took flight, beating its wings up and up, going from a splotch to a cross to a speck to nothing. Then he turned back to the beast that it had fled.
It was a wreck. Not the whole aeroplane, just the cockpit. The body and wings must have been cleared away already. The grass around the plane was short and black and stubbly. Jacob stepped carefully over it, picking through ruptured, melted metal, burnt seats, white stuffing, fragments of plastic, a plastic pamphlet. He found a blue seat belt with a silver buckle, which he tied around his waist. He was strong and limber for a ten-year-old, but he slid down several times before he managed to scale the nose. Finally, he smeared spit and dirt on his feet for grip, backed up to get a running start, and dashed up the incline. Just as he was about to slip off again, he grabbed the frame of a broken window. ‘Tchah,’ he winced as the glass cut his palm, but he kept his grip and clambered gingerly inside.
The floor of the cockpit was a nest of grass and wire and glass. There were dirty puddles and green and white bird droppings everywhere and a blue curtain fluttered in the back. The pilot chairs sat like thrones before the array of buttons on the console. Jacob sat in one, damp seeping into his shorts, the cuts in his palm whistling with pain. He looked straight ahead, surveying the land before him and the sky above. The sun had been swallowed by the ground but its last gasps of light were turning the clouds a neon pink. Jacob tapped at some crudded buttons, pulled at a rusted lever, and roared…
An echo from below: a shout. Jacob stood and looked down. Two men stood in the black grass underneath, looking up at him grimly. One of them was pointing a gun.
* * *
Dr Lee Banda got tangled up with the missing boys by accident. He had stopped by the Kalingalinga clinic to see to an infected mother whose infant had croup. Lee showed her how to feed the baby with the dexamethasone syrup, angling the spoon past the lagoon of saliva-snot around its mouth. Lee fought the urge to wipe the baby’s face – Musadabwe had scolded him fiercely the last time he had shamed a mother this way. Instead, Lee turned to the patient and asked after her older son, who was Virus-negative but had looked malnourished the last time Lee had seen him.
‘Mabvuto? Ah, who knows?’ the woman said sadly, then went on to complain. ‘He acts up when he is not at sukulu. He runs around! How would it be if only I had money for the school fees?’
The baby barked softly in commiseration. The question the woman was asking had an answer – it was in Lee’s pocket. Out of a misplaced sense of indignation, he offered a different one: ‘Why don’t I go and
look for Mabvuto and bring him home in time for supper?’
‘Oh-oh? Okay, thank you please,’ his patient replied with dull eyes.
He left her soon after and walked around the compound, making a survey of the place – the church, the woodyards, the dump – but there was no sign of Mabvuto. Lee was walking back to his pickup, resigned to doling out charity money to his patient, when he came across a circle of worried mothers. Their boys were missing too. Mabvuto was no doubt among them. They directed Lee to the airport, the source of all their fears, and the likeliest temptation for the boys.
Lee’s triumph at finding the runaways in a ditch on the side of the entrance road into the airport wilted the moment he learned that one was still missing – the boy had somehow jumped the roadblock. Lee put his hands on his hips and scrutinised the sky. It looked like tea-time and his stomach thought so too. He was beginning to wish that he had paid his Hippocratic tax and been done with it. To save time, he stashed the other boys in the bed of his pickup and drove to the security hut. He leaned his head out of his window and grinned. The guards remained unamused until he obliquely offered them a bribe and even then, one of them insisted on accompanying him.
The sun was setting and Lee’s indignation with Mabvuto’s mother had festered into irritation – the low crackling burn that regret kindles – by the time they found the boy inside the aeroplane wreck. There was nevertheless some pleasure to the finding. Cotched! Lee thought. That was what he and his friends had said back in the day at Falcon, with that double glee of the hunter and the snitch. Just then, out of the corner of his eye, Lee saw the guard raise the gun.
‘Hey, hey, he’s just a kid, man,’ he frowned, reaching out and pulling the barrel down.
The boy skittered down the nose of the plane and slunk up to them. He wore what looked like a seat belt low on his hips, but he was otherwise empty-handed. He had a quiet intensity about him. Lee and the guard walked him between them to the pickup, where he climbed in the bed with the others. Lee drove back to the roadblock, where he dropped off the guard, resorting to another bribe to prevent what would no doubt have been a pointless, bullying interrogation.
Lee drove out of the airport and directly into the compound, leaving dust and curiosity in his wake. As soon as he braked, the boys leapt out of the back. But before they could run off, they were swarmed by gloating good girls, who began wringing their hands so the index finger snapped the knuckles, chanting: ‘Halifogali, nevah said a sorree, jumped in a lorree…’ Weary as an embattled soldier, burdened with his own good deeds, Lee pushed his way through the crowd of compound dwellers. He walked each of the boys to their respective homes, staving off rewards of tea and beer from their poor, grateful mothers.
* * *
Lee dropped off the one who had found the crashed plane last. The boy led him to a one-storey building painted in coral pink, with ‘HI-FLY HAIRCUTTERY & DESIGNS LTD’ in big green letters on the facade. Beneath the sign was a list of services and prices offered. A series of severed heads demonstrated the patterns you could have your hair plaited into: S’s and X’s, cul-de-sacs and labyrinths, exclamation points and question marks, hedgehogs and horns, antlers and antennae. An English garden of possibilities, Lee’s mother would have said. Lee walked up the short set of steps ahead of the boy and knocked on the wooden door.
A woman – young, pretty – opened it, tightening her chitenge at her waist. It was patterned with tea kettles, as was the chitambala tied casually around her head.
‘Bwanji? Can I help you?’ she asked.
‘Bwino, bwanji? Does this belong to you?’
He pulled her son from behind his back, gripping him by the head. Lee was pleased to note that the boy’s skull fit within the span of his palm. But the woman, still leaning against the doorjamb, did not seem impressed or even surprised to see her son. She remained motionless but for a slight lift of her eyebrow. ‘And where have you been?’ she asked.
Was she talking to him or to her son? Lee and the boy looked at each other.
‘Hmp,’ she said. They looked back at her. Lee saw now that she was, in fact, neither young nor pretty. She was in her thirties and beautiful. Indeed, her beauty had reached its richest hour. Her upper lip was two soft hills, her lower lip their reflection in a lake, blurry along the bottom edge.
‘Go inside,’ she said, pulling the boy to her and then patting his buttocks to embarrass him in. She turned back to Lee.
‘I know you,’ she said, tilting her head musingly.
‘No, you don’t,’ he laughed.
‘Yes. Actually. I do,’ she said matter-of-factly, her head slowly traversing ninety degrees until it was tilted the other way. The breeze picked up. Litter fluttered against Lee’s ankles.
‘How?’ he asked.
‘We had sex. On your birthday.’
Lee chuckled and told her exactly how impossible that was, turning the back of his hand towards her to show his wedding ring. She lifted her eyebrow a millimetre higher.
‘It was some time ago,’ she said. ‘Maybe ten years.’
‘Well. If it happened, I must have been cut.’
‘Oh, thank you. Very flattering.’
‘No, that’s not what I – I mean, I don’t recognise your face, so I must have been—’
‘Maybe you would recognise other parts.’ Laughter glimmered in her eyes, but the rest of her face was as placid as a gazelle’s.
‘You’re very forward, you know,’ Lee said. ‘You’ve got no brakes.’
‘And what is the point of brakes if you do not have petrol to drive?’
‘What?’ Lee sputtered, struggling to keep up.
‘Shame. You’ve forgotten paying me as well?’ The woman shut the door in his face.
Lee closed his mouth. He slowly turned around. He stared at the spot in the sky where the sun had burnt out, slate clouds drifting there like ash. He rifled through memories of nights out on the town: him and his butahs, slapping hands, slapping car bonnets, slapping asses. He tried the files from both clinics – the old one and the new one here in Kalingalinga – the nurses and the cleaners, the Virus patients and their morose daughters. But still he could not find her.
A breeze dragged the smell of rubbish into his nostrils. Lee thought of his wife. Across the compound, women were clapping and singing a hymn. Lee thought of his work. Flies buzzed around him, black bits of life rebounding off the invisible planes of the air. A bicycle bell rang halfway, closer to a click than a ring. Lee turned back to the door of the salon and knocked again.
* * *
Once Sylvia had forced Loveness’s hand and proven herself capable of withstanding the trade and its occasional brutalities, the two women had joined forces. For years, they’d worked the high-end hotels together: Ridgeway, Pamodzi, Intercon. When their faces had become too familiar, too faded, they’d shifted to less fancy places – Ndeke, Chachacha Backpackers. Once they had run even these tourist hubs dry, they’d decided that their best bet was to catch the apamwamba as they flew in and out of the country. So despite Sylvia’s reluctance to move back to a compound, one where her mother lived, no less, she and Loveness had chosen to land in Kalingalinga, across from City Airport. And with the help of an unexpected patron, they had finally opened their hair salon.
Hi-Fly Haircuttery & Designs Ltd was essentially one large room, a chitenge curtain hanging across it to set off a private area in the back where Sylvia and her son Jacob slept. In the front, the salon girls blow-dried and hotcombed and slathered lye on recalcitrant kink. They held lighters to the ends of braided wig extensions to keep them from unravelling, rolling them between spit-dampened fingers. The whole place reeked of burning – electrical, frictional, chemical – Sylvia’s girls sifting varieties of incineration as indifferently as demon drones in hell. There were usually five or six of them in rotation – Loveness had an itchy firing finger – but there always see
med to be more, as if multiplied by the mirror that took up one wall of the salon. The customers would sit before it and the girls would stand behind them facing the mirror, chatting to them – strange conversations where you lock eyes with someone with her back to you.
Jacob’s punishment for his airport excursion was to stay in the salon, all day, every day, ‘helping out’. This was a torture to a boy built for roaming. Grounded, he sat in a corner watching sulkily as the girls cultivated their hairy crops, carving scalps into neat mukule rows and shelling beads from braids. The girls barely noticed him. Jacob was just the boss’s son, courier of tools and creams and the fuel of their labour – endless cups of tea. The girls danced to the radio, showed each other their new panties, freely discussed their periods and lovers, giggled at dirty jokes over his head.
Jacob liked the washing days better. In the yard behind the hair salon, under the jacaranda tree he sometimes climbed, the girls would set out the metal tubs, fill them up and do the washing together. Church and radio songs bounced around the air, notes like motes. Brown fingers sloshed about in the frothy water. There were always several mumbly conversations going between the girls, who stored wooden pegs between their teeth as they pinned clothes to the line. Jacob loved those pegs, their carved rivets, the mechanics of their snap and hold. He’d clip his lips shut with them and waddle around like a duck, to make the girls laugh, to make his mother notice.
‘Too nice,’ she would chuckle. ‘A child that shooshes itself? I should have named you Chongo!’ Then she would kiss his head and go and stand next to Aunty Loveness, lean against her, their fingers linked like children.
Yes, at Hi-Fly Haircuttery & Designs Ltd, Jacob was around many people, but not necessarily with them. This was one kind of loneliness. The other kind came at night, when his mother was out with Aunty Loveness. Jacob would drag the dry linens off the line and press them with the hot iron that had given off an eggy smell ever since he took it apart to see how it worked. He would fold alone, pinning sheets to his chest with his chin, draping them over his forearms, hands moving together and apart like ground control for air traffic.
The Old Drift Page 29