The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  * * *

  Lee Banda had always been beautiful. It was clear even in his baby pictures, where his lashes curled more voluptuously than his mother’s. This beauty meant that Lee knew himself only through other people, who held up mirrors to him, different ones depending on the person. Women on the street wore their mirrors in their eyes and shiny teeth: Pretty man. Chops. Fit. His guy friends carried mirrors in shades of envious green. His father’s mirror was cloudy, his mother’s a sheer plane of gold. His son’s mirror reflected his body parts in gargantuan proportion: shoulders beyond the frame, a bulbous Adam’s apple, massive thighs on either side of an equine member. His wife’s mirror reflected him exactly as he was.

  Only the mirror that Sylvia Mwamba carried was in motion: it spun around in her long fingers, alternating images of his naked body and hers so rapidly that they seemed to merge together like a Kenyan sculpture or a Picasso painting: his eyes above her nose, her breast bulging from his stomach, his toe protruding from her vagina, a perverse quadralabial mouth. It was not beautiful, this image of their mating, but it was the picture of himself that most fascinated Lee, perhaps because it had not yet taken place. Or had it? He had mulled over that first alleged encounter between them. He had checked his records and found nothing. Maybe if they had sex now, it would come back to him, like when you retrace your steps to find a lost thing. But Sylvia was making him wait.

  One time, he thought he remembered it. On a visit to the salon to scope out test subjects, he had lit a cigarette and she’d scolded him.

  ‘You are busy burning fake hair, why can’t I burn nature’s leaves?’

  ‘Do you not see these wigs on display? I cannot be selling hair that smells like old men.’

  ‘I’m not old,’ Lee huffed. He was thirty-one.

  ‘You’re not young, either.’

  ‘You’re six years older than me!’

  ‘That’s not the point. Saat. Put it out.’ She sucked her teeth and walked off.

  ‘Sylvia!’ Lee called her back to the argument.

  Still moving away, she glanced over her shoulder and answered vaguely: ‘Anh?’ And in that moment, Lee felt he recognised her. Not from these past few months – not from his visits to the salon, their rendezvous at the shebeen, their lunch dates at Chicken Inn. No, Lee felt he recognised her from before. Behind that vision of a retreating shape, calling to him as a child might, was a memory. Of the first time they’d had sex? Ten years ago, on his birthday, as she claimed? Maybe it had happened – that difficult year before his wedding had been a druggy blur. Maybe it was déjà vu. Either way, it changed shape as soon as he grabbed it, like one of the morphing stone animals from his dreams.

  Lee Banda was not a man to be swayed by visions. He needed subjects for his lab and Sylvia would give him access – her salon was clearly a front for a brothel. These were precisely the women who might have the genetic mutation he sought. As he courted her, he took samples from her and her girls, and sent them off to be tested. And in the end, he found his holy grail – not just one mutation but two. The instinct that had made him turn around and knock at her door had proven correct. Now he was getting impatient. Sylvia said anh? like a child, yes, but not an obedient one. She was the kind of child that says no just to say no, to suck on the word like a lemon drop.

  * * *

  Sylvia wanted to say yes, but she delayed. Holding it over Lee, out of reach, stirred a swarm of power in her. Despite his obvious desire for her, that sprung arrow thrusting towards her, Lee was not just another customer. He was a fancy, rich doctor. A real prize. And not easy to win. His marriage seemed unhappy but unassailable. He loved his children at home so much he even brought one of them to the salon sometimes, a sallow boy of about nine. Joseph always sat in a corner, as far away as possible from Jacob. The two boys were cagey around one another, as if each begged the question of the other.

  Things had slipped many times during Sylvia’s career – her resolve, her guard, the condom. Ten years ago, the police had again started cracking down on ‘unaccompanied women’ in the hotels. Loveness had fled east to work at a cousin’s bar in Chipata. Alone in Lusaka, Sylvia had neglected herself, working only when she felt like it, and in a haze of alcohol. She remembered Lee, though. He’d been with a bunch of coloured med students at a bachelors’ party at the Ridgeway – a sloppy night, everyone drunk and handsy.

  There had been other men that night, that week. It didn’t matter. Sylvia knew she just had to plant the seed of possibility in Lee’s mind and see what sprouted. Clients had made propositions to her before, all with that temporary, almost impersonal passion that possesses men when they’re fucking. But it would take a snare of a less obvious kind to capture Lee. So Sylvia stalled, holding just out of his reach something he believed he’d already had.

  She knew he was hooked when, one day at the Hi-Fly, he confessed something seemingly insignificant to her, a trivial thing really. Sylvia was washing a customer’s hair. Lee was sitting in a chair tipped back against the wall, smoking, his legs stretched out so that she had to step over them whenever she reached for the hose. Every time she passed, he grabbed at her with his free hand, and she flung droplets in his face. The customer kept sighing and complaining that the rim of the bucket of water was digging into the back of her neck. Sylvia didn’t care. Her thighs were wet, her cheeks sore with smiling. She felt like a young girl again.

  ‘You know, Silly,’ Lee said, ‘I have to tell you this story about my wife—’

  ‘Heysh!’ Sylvia glared at him.

  The customer raised her head, her look somewhere between mortified and mortifying. Sylvia murmured a reassurance and pushed her head gently back over the edge of the bucket.

  ‘A couple years ago,’ Lee went on, ‘my wife had this rotten tooth. It was bad. You could smell it on her breath.’ He shuddered and took a drag of his cigarette. ‘She had it pulled—’ Here Lee became so overcome with laughter he couldn’t speak, spurts of smoke puffing from his nostrils, ash raining over everything. ‘So now,’ Lee chuckled and wheezed, ‘now all her other teeth are starting to shift! And she has a gap in the front.’ He dissolved again into laughter, tears bejewelling his lashes. The customer shook her head subtly.

  ‘Ah-ah, that’s your story?’ Sylvia snapped. ‘Rubbish, that’s not even funny.’

  ‘But you, my dahrring,’ he swiped at her bum and she swivelled her hips out of reach, ‘you have beautiful straight teeth. Shiny and white. No gaps!’

  Sylvia sprang water at him with her manicured nails. ‘Ach, stupit,’ she said softly.

  But that evening, as she closed up the salon while Lee waited outside in his pickup, Sylvia caught a glimpse of her face. It was dark inside but for scattered glints across the room from the pickup’s headlights. She stepped towards the mirrored wall into a sliver of light and gingerly lifted her upper lip. It was neither a smile nor a grimace. She looked coolly at her perfect teeth. Lee honked the horn and started a round of compound dogs barking. She let her lip drop. Her left eye quivered. She watched herself decide.

  * * *

  To Jacob, the Hi-Fly often felt like a ship floating on a lake of boredom, its crew shifting about restlessly. The day wove and unwove itself across the salon in rays of light and shadow as the girls plaited and unplaited their own hair to pass the time. Any customer at all was welcomed in with giddy relief, especially the old white woman, Ba Sibilla. Every few weeks, she crouched in through the doorway, covered in a hijab’s worth of shawls, and one of the girls would rush off to fetch the boss. Mummy would hasten in to give Ba Sibilla a queen’s welcome, placing a stool for her feet, fixing her a cup of rooibos, radiating grace while Aunty Loveness sent the other customers grumbling away, their hair in various states of disarray.

  As soon as the salon was empty, the girls would gather around and unveil Ba Sibilla, revealing the long white hair stringing down her body like a Nyau dancer’s raffia. The
girls would grease her hair with the special olive oil she always brought with her and pull combs through it until it was a smooth, silvery sheet cascading over her. Mummy would carefully cut it, leaving wavy piles on the floor. When she was done, Ba Sibilla, a tiny creature without her hair, would shake herself off, wrap herself up, and make her exit.

  Jacob sometimes helped the girls gather up the hair on the floor and carry it out to the yard behind the salon to distribute between three big buckets. Mummy would come out with her precious hair-dye kits, Clairol and Crème of Nature, black-market boxes with battered corners. She would pour the chemicals with their searing smell into the buckets, one for each colour: brown, red, yellow. Wearing thin plastic gloves, the salon girls would stir the hair with the dye for ten minutes, rinse it, then string it on the clothes line to dry. The next day, Jacob would wake to find it already wrapped in plastic for sale on the counter.

  * * *

  At first Sylvia was irritated by the way Lee clambered onto her like a boy, his fingers and tongue jabbing. But as soon as they were both naked and his erection made him serious, she loved him. She loved his worried face hanging over her, his frown lines twitching, his eyes elsewhere but somehow still present, his body fraught as he moved in and out of her. Tricking him with delay, she had tricked herself – the relenting was too sweet. It overwhelmed her with a feeling she’d never had before with a man: mutual desire. This sex-love spilled over to afterwards, when Lee became like a boy again – his damp head on her sternum, his lips parted and wet on her breast.

  She let him sleep for a while. Then she carefully extricated herself from under him, replacing herself with a pillow, and tiptoed over to the dressing table. They were at his house in Thorn Park, in the master bedroom, his wife away with their son on a trip to Harare. Mrs Banda’s smell still hovered over this part of the room, a sugary musk, and the makings of beauty were laid out on her dressing table: bottles of foundation, a smidge lighter than the one Sylvia used on her own bleached skin; tubes of lipstick, pinker than the ones Sylvia used; mascara and eye make-up in green shades that would never work on Sylvia’s skin. Sylvia plonked herself naked in the dressing chair, pleased to feel Lee’s semen seeping out of her into the cushion. She rolled her hand over the tubes and bottles on the table, stirring them out of place.

  In one corner, a red wig sat on a styrofoam head. A child’s hand had defaced the bust – it was pitted with bitty holes and graffitied with a felt-tip. Sylvia pulled her own plaits forward, feeling their brittle tug on her scalp, and ran her hand over the thin silky ropes. She had always assumed that Lee’s coloured wife would wear natural curls or maybe the straight perms that were so popular these days. It appeared that Lee’s two women had this in common – hair like a pet that you buy and groom and comb. Sylvia reached out to finger Mrs Banda’s wig and saw the reflection of the man in bed behind her. Lee’s eyes were open. She gazed at his face in the mirror, at her own face, at their reflections above the clutter of make-up. They were both so beautiful. How strange that such love should be born in the midst of such trifles.

  * * *

  When a real man walked into the Hi-Fly with whichever galifriend he was treating to a hairdo that day, the salon girls turned sweet and fey, cooing softly as Mr Mistah handed the cash over to Loveness. Of course, as soon as he went to wait at the shebeen next door, Miss Galifriend became just another head, pulled this way and that. Teeth were sucked, eyebrows raised over the negritude of her hair. Her head was subjected to a swarm of fingers like brown mice nibbling at her scalp. By the time Mr Mistah got back, reeking of beer, Miss Galifriend was exhausted, eyes dazed under a shiny forehead. The girls chimed sugary praises.

  ‘Now you see, she has hair that talks! Ati zee-zee-zee…’

  Miss Galifriend tossed her head feebly to swish the fine, straight strands, hers or someone else’s.

  ‘Me, mine is KWY-YET,’ Mr Mistah said, patting the archipelago of baldness on his crown. ‘Instead of zee-zee-zee, it just says Zee. Nothing!’

  The girls fluttered and tinkled. Jacob seethed in his corner, wanting to burn it all down. The only other person who received such treatment was Uncle Lee. With his bold jaw and muscles like snakes twining his bones, Uncle Lee would swing his enormous presence into the salon, trailed by the scent of expensive aftershave. He’d kiss Jacob’s mother on the top of her head. Then he’d sit with legs sprawled and regale them with stories of Jo’burg and Addis and Nairobi – the places his work as a doctor had taken him – or enquire about the salon girls, their ‘habits’, mostly.

  Jacob’s mother gave curt answers to his questions but the corners of her mouth betrayed her. She let him swab her workers’ cheeks once, the girls giggling awkwardly around the long Q-Tips. Jacob had participated too, just to have something to do. Uncle Lee sometimes brought his son with him, a skinny coloured boy named Joseph, who sat in a corner, reading a book, wrinkling his nose at the smells in the salon. Jacob wrinkled his nose back, at the book. Bored as he was, he refused to play with that apamwamba boy, and he did not take kindly to another competitor for his mother’s attention.

  * * *

  A few months into their affair, Lee’s head between Sylvia’s breasts, he turned his head up to her and asked about her mother’s condition. Perhaps because he was a doctor, he always asked after people’s health – her son’s, Loveness’s, the girls’. He had even brought a needle to one of their early dates at Chicken Inn. A vaccination, he had said, though it seemed like he was drawing blood rather than dispensing medicine. An odd ‘gift’, but Sylvia had just chalked it up to the ways that men expressed affection to women like her – always a little protective, always a little violent. She was surprised to hear that Lee knew about her mother’s crying, though. It turned out he had heard about it from Joseph, who had heard about it from Jacob.

  ‘Jacob?’ she frowned. ‘He doesn’t know about my mother. They’ve never met.’

  ‘So she cries constantly? She has depression?’

  ‘Ah! No. That’s just what you Westernised doctors like to think.’ She pinched his arm.

  ‘Ow!’ he flinched, grinning. ‘I actually think she has an autoimmune disorder.’

  ‘Auto-what?’

  ‘Autoimmunity. It’s when the system that protects the body turns against it, attacks it. Tears wash out foreign bodies – like dirt – from the eye but it can go too far. Your mother’s condition might be due to genetic abnormalities—’

  ‘Ya,’ she said coldly. ‘She’s even blind from this disease. But it’s just – she chose that.’

  Lee’s complicated words always made Sylvia feel bad about not finishing school. She stared at his arm where she’d pinched him. His skin was so light that she had left red marks. She felt self-conscious about the skin-lightening cream she had been using for years on her face and neck and arms. Those parts of her body were taupe, but all the rest was brown, the contrast as sharp as tea with and without milk.

  ‘You’re saying the heartbreak queen of Kalingalinga is faking it? Crying on cue?’

  ‘Ha! You should go and tell her that,’ Sylvia laughed. ‘Loveness says that if you are going to insult your mamafyala, you may as well go all the way and just kill her.’

  ‘Well, she’s not my mother-in—’ He stopped.

  Sylvia cut her eyes at him. Lee reached over and stroked her breast, as if to soften what he’d said, to persuade her that it was in fact a good thing that Matha Mwamba was not his mother-in-law.

  ‘She was never a mother to me anyway.’ She faked a yawn. ‘Why do you care about her crying?’

  ‘I don’t.’ Lee put his hands behind his head, his elbows winging his thick skull. ‘I care about you and it’s possible that you inherited something from her.’

  Sylvia rolled onto her side away from him. She wasn’t like her mother. She had no auto-tears to give. She had never cried for a man, not once, not even when they had broken her heart, her bo
nes, her spirit. Cha! Occupational hazards! Sylvia was feeling ready to retire. Her whole life had been preparing her for Lee: someone who would take care of her…

  And Loveness?’ Lee startled her from her musings.

  ‘Anh?’ she said mechanically, looking over her shoulder at him. Then she remembered that she had never used her ‘professional’ name with him – he was referring to her friend. ‘What about Loveness?’

  ‘You know that she has The Virus as well?’

  She frowned. ‘What virus?’ she asked, though of course she already knew.

  * * *

  At Hi-Fly Haircuttery & Designs Ltd, time was ticking away under the tapping of fingernails on the countertop. The girls were sitting on the floor scratching dandruff out of each other’s hair. There was a low sizzling from the corner – Jacob was trying to fix an electric fan he had found in the dump. A plump coloured woman walked in, wearing heels and a skirt suit, and carrying an expensive handbag. Her face was fully made up, her auburn bob so shiny it was like a polished bowl. She stood at the threshold of the salon, blinking.

  ‘Would Madam like a perm today?’

  ‘Mm,’ said the woman. ‘I want the boss.’ Her tongue slithered over the word – she had a slight lisp.