The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  The salon girls glanced at each other. Aunty Loveness shouted to Jacob in the corner:

  ‘Iwe, get your mother.’

  He stood up from his project reluctantly and ducked behind the chitenge to the back of the salon. The customer stepped deeper inside but a shadow remained behind her – there was someone with her, a boy. The girls raised their eyebrows – it was the son of Sylvia’s dude, Lee. Joseph looked even sulkier than usual, his eyes on his green trainers as he dragged his feet over to a corner to sit. Sylvia flung the back curtain aside and stomped barefoot into the salon, knotting her chitenge under her armpits.

  She had been out late last night drinking heavily with Lee and his colleague, Dr Musadabwe, celebrating some new discovery of theirs. She had spent all morning in bed behind the back curtain, sipping at water with Eno and Disprin dissolved in it, and thought she had made it clear to everyone that she did not wish to be disturbed.

  ‘You cannot tell people that I’m bathing?’ she groused at Loveness, then turned and shouted to Jacob in the back. ‘The water will get cold, just drain it.’

  She marched over to stand behind the customer, who was now seated before the mirror.

  ‘I am the boss here. My name is Sylvia Mwamba. But my girls are very good, Madam,’ she said to the customer’s image. ‘You do not need special services from me—’ Sylvia stopped. She had noticed the reflection of Joseph sitting in the corner behind them.

  ‘I’d like—’ Lee’s wife croaked. She cleared her throat. ‘I’d like a relaxer, please.’

  Sylvia swallowed and nodded. Mrs Banda removed her auburn wig as gracefully as possible, revealing a reddish afro underneath. Loveness stepped forward to take the wig and stretch it over a wire bust to keep its shape. When Sylvia looked up from the terrain of kink to be conquered and saw that copper helmet sitting on the stand, she blinked for a moment. She reached under her own chitambala and scratched. Then she called for Jacob, still in the back, to bring a box of Dark & Lovely relaxer from the stash there.

  After a moment, he came in with it, wearing the exasperated look of a child who has been given too many instructions in a row. His eyes immediately found Joseph, who had started picking through the entrails of the electric fan that Jacob had been trying to fix.

  ‘Futsek, iwe!’ Jacob seethed as if Joseph were a dog.

  ‘Go outside with that boy and play,’ said Loveness. Jacob’s eyes bulged and he started to protest. Sylvia cut him short with a look as she struggled thin plastic gloves over her fingers.

  ‘It’s okay, baby,’ Mrs Banda said to Joseph. ‘Go on and play.’

  Jacob turned with disgust and swept through the curtain to the back, where there was a door leading to the yard behind the salon. Joseph followed, his feet dragging.

  Sylvia gave Mrs Banda a tight smile – solidarity in motherhood at least – and began parting the reddish afro in horizontal lines from ear to ear. After the harrowing of those trenches came the dabbing of cool white fire into them, then the gentle combing to spread the chemical agent across the battlefield. Mrs Banda closed her eyes. Sylvia did her job. Loveness counted kwacha. The salon girls stood in a cluster across the room, watching and whispering, classing and contrasting.

  This one even has green eyes. Iye. But look at how big the other one’s eyes are. And the eyelashes? Maybe she is Maybelline! Kikiki! You people, light is right. Ah-ah, but they are the same colour! Almost, yes, but Ambi-light and coloured-light are different, mwandi. Nooo! Same-same. Ambi it works very well. It means Africans May Be Interested. Hehehe! But on Bana Joseph, you can see tuma dot-dot-dots like a muzungu. Fleckos? Me, I think she just has too much face. Mmhm, and with those skinny lips. Did you see the gap in the teeth? Bana Jacob has such a nice figure. This other one is fat. But look at her high heels, they are very spesho and…

  And so it went, the salon girls trying to solve the mystery of a cheating man by trying to see with his split vision. Loveness finally disbanded their gossipy circle by snapping her fingers at them. They scattered about, attending to pointless tasks – polishing bottles, cleaning brushes. The room brimmed with silence. Even the two boys outside in the back were suspiciously quiet. When the lye was fully applied, Sylvia pulled a shower cap over Mrs Banda’s whitesmeared hair and released its ruffled edge with a conclusive snap.

  ‘Sylvia,’ Mrs Banda began.

  Everyone turned their eyes towards her.

  ‘Anh?’ Sylvia said, very quietly.

  Just then, there was a commotion at the front door. Everyone turned their eyes towards it.

  ‘Odi?’ The greeting was muffled. A shadow crept over the threshold. ‘Anyone home?’ called the hairy white woman as she rustled into the Hi-Fly, holding a little brown girl by the hand.

  Weeeee​weee​EEEE​weeeeee​EEE​eeeeee​EEEEE​eeee​WEEEEEE​eeeeee​EEE​eeee. We.

  On we drone, annoying on, ennuiing on with our wheedling onomatopoeia. Udzudzu. Munyinyi. Vexatious pests! But better than your barking with wet, pungent holes! We? We sing with our dry, beating wings. A plangent vibration adrift in the air, a song as gracile as the swarm itself, our buoyant undulant throng. Why do we sing? For love, naturally.

  At dusk or at dawn – the tipping of the day – our males hover over a chimney or a steeple. Around this post, they form a grey haze, a swirling mass of seduction. One by one, the females fly in, braving the entomological gauntlet. With quickspinning wings, each strums a keen air as she swoops through the chaos of men, and with their hairy antennae, they track her.

  Then comes the chase, the grapple, the fall – you humans have these rituals, too. The male on the bottom, the pair tightly lock, and after a minute or so, they part ways. On occasion, her grip is too tight and he’ll pay for a life with his nethers! If he escapes unscathed, he’ll do it again, six to eight times in his lifespan. But the female is done now – she has loved and lost once – and she has all that she needs for the breeding.

  A puddle, a pond, a lake, a river: she moves over the face of the waters. Hovering, she curtsies, and thrusts from her bottom a hundred fertilised eggs. She dive-bombs the surface with babies-to-be until a battalion awaits there. She gathers them into a small tapered craft, a canoe half the size of a rice grain. Then with nary a glance, our mother departs, leaving us to hatch without her.

  We are like Russian dolls of metamorphosis, each phase of us hatched from the previous. Split the shell, breach the slit, then shed the old husk. From egg to larva, the comma-shaped pupa, then the wingèd and wobbly imago. Step onto the water with delicate feet. Pause as the soft spine stiffens.

  Not too long! There are threats all around! It’s a cesspool, this puddle of Eden: birds and bacteria, fishes and ants, nematodes, whirligigs, lizards. One of our species, Toxorhynchites – their larvae even eat one another.

  Sylvia knows well, love can be hell: familial, romantic, maternal. Oh, lovers are murder! They’ll cast you aside, they’ll run you out quick as quicksilver!

  Isabella

  1984

  Isabella was eleven years old before she learned that she was white – white in the sense of being a thing, as opposed to not being a thing. It wasn’t that Isa didn’t know that her parents were white. Of course with her mother, this was largely a matter of conjecture, as a layer of dark hair kept her face a mystery. Though as she aged, this blanket of hair would turn grey, then silver, then white, a definite movement towards translucence, Isa could never properly make out her mother’s facial features. More distinct were her legs, the tufts of fur running like a mane down each thick shin, and her laugh like large sheets of paper being ripped, then crumpled. Isa’s father, the Colonel, was white, but it often seemed more like pink and grey were battling it out on his face, especially when he was drunk.

  Isa’s parents had settled into life in Lusaka the way most expats do. They drank a lot. Every weekend was another house party, that neverending house party that has b
een swatting mosquitoes and swimming in gin and quinine for more than a century. The Corsales hosted their sundowners at their one-storey bungalow in Longacres, under a veranda with generous shade. Isa’s mother floated around in a billowy boubou, sending the servants for refills and dropping in on every conversation, distributing laughter and ease amongst her guests. Purple-skinned peanuts that had been soaked in salt water and roasted in a pan until they were grey cooled and shifted with a whispery sound in wooden bowls. There was soon a troop of Mosi beer bottles scattered around, marking the tables with their damp semicircular hoof prints. Full or empty? The amber glass was so dark, you had to lift each bottle to find out. Cigars and tobacco pipes puffed their foul sweetness into the air. Darts and croquet balls went in loopy circles around their targets, loopier as the day wore on.

  The Colonel sat in his permanent chair just beyond the shade of the veranda, dampening with gin the thatch that protruded from his nostrils, occasionally snorting at some private or overheard joke. He was only in his fifties, but his skin was already creased like trousers that had been worn too long. Budding from his arms were moles so large and detached they looked ready to tumble off and roll away. And, as though his wife’s condition had become contagious, his ears had been taken over by hair – the calyx whorl of each had sprouted a bouquet of whiskers.

  The Colonel liked to drink from the same glass the entire day, always his favourite glass, decorated with the red, white and green hexagons of a football. As his drunkenness progressed, the glass grew misty from being so close to his open mouth, then slimy as his saliva glands loosened, then muddy as dirt and sweat mixed on his hand. At the end of the evening, when Isa was sent to fetch her father’s stein, she often found it beneath his chair under a swarm of giddy ants, the football spattered like it had been used for a rainy-day match.

  * * *

  Isa had no siblings, and when the other expat children were around, she was frantic and listless in turns. Today, she began with frantic. Leaving the grown-ups outside, propping their feet on wooden stools and scratching at their sunburns, she marched three of the more hapless children inside the house and down the long corridor to her bedroom. There, she introduced them to her things. First to her favourite book, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Second to the live, broken-winged bird she had found in the driveway two days earlier. Third, and finally, to Doll. Bird and Doll lived together in an open cardboard box. Isa stood next to it with her chin lifted, her hand pointing down.

  ‘This is Doll. She comes from America. She has an Amurrican accent.’

  Due to the scarcity of imported goods in Lusaka in the early 1980s, Isa was allowed only one doll at a time. This one had already gone the way of all Barbies: tangled-haired then patchy then bald. Ever-smiling Doll, denied a more original name by her fastidious owner, sat with her legs extended, one knee bent at an obtuse and alluring angle, a tiny plastic pink stiletto dangling from an arched foot. Her perforated rubber head tilted to one side. She seemed interested and pleasant.

  Bird, also on its way to bald, cowered as far away from Doll as possible, looking defeated. Isa bent down and poked at it with her finger. Bird skittered lopsidedly around the box until, cornered, it uttered a vague chirp. Alex and Stephie, prompted by Isa, applauded this effort. But Emma, the littlest, thinking that Doll rather than Bird had made the sound, burst into startled tears. She had to be soothed (by Stephie) and corrected (by Isa). Isa felt annoyed.

  So she sat the other children down in a row on her bed and taught them things that she knew. About fractions and about why Athena was better than Aphrodite. About the sun and how it wasn’t moving, we were. But soon, Emma’s knotted forehead and Alex’s fidgeting began to drive Isa to distraction. Then came the inevitable tantrum, followed by a dark sullen lull. The other three children hastened from the room in a kind of daze. Isa sat next to the cardboard box and cried a little, alternately stroking Doll’s smiling head and Bird’s wary one.

  When she’d tired of self-pity, Isa went to the bathroom and locked the door. She took off her shoes and climbed onto the edge of the bathtub, which ran parallel to a wall about two feet away. Only by standing on the edge of the tub could she see herself in the mirror on the wall, which hung at adult height. She examined her grey eyes, closing each of them in turn to see how she looked when blinking. She checked her face for hair (an endless, inevitable paranoia given her mother’s condition) and with a cruel finger pushed the tip of her nose up – she felt it hung too close to her upper lip. Then she let herself fall into the mirror, her own face rushing towards her, her eyes expanding with fear and perspective until, at the last second, she reached out her hands and stopped herself. She stayed in this position for a moment, angled across the room, arms rigid, hands pressed against the mirror, nose centimetres from it.

  Finally, bored of her own face, Isa jumped down and explored the floor. She unravelled the last few squares of toilet paper from the roll and wrapped the chain around her neck like a scarf. She opened the cardboard cylinder of the empty roll into a loose brown curlicue – a bracelet. In the musty dust behind the toilet, she discovered some of her mother’s old plastic o.b. wrappers, which were twisted at each end like sweets wrappers. She stood them on their twists to make goblets. They were about the right size for a cocktail party Doll might host. Ignoring the knock at the door, Isa pretended to offer drinks to her bare toes, which wriggled with pleasure. The tentative knuckles against the door became a flat palm, then a clenched fist.

  ‘OY!’ came a muffled shout.

  Isa flushed the toilet as though she’d been using it, then unlocked the door and emerged. Head high, bejewelled in white and brown, her tampon-wrapper goblets balanced on an outstretched palm like a tray, she strolled imperiously past the line of drunken guests waiting for the loo. Back in her bedroom, she made Doll sip from a goblet and modelled her jewellery for weary Bird. But it was too cold and dark to play in here alone. Reluctantly, Isa removed her makeshift jewellery – too childish for her mother to see – and made her way back to the party.

  * * *

  She stood in the doorway of the veranda, blinking the sunlight from her eyes. The other children were running around making meaningless noises in the garden. She decided to avoid them, choosing instead to be pointedly polite to their parents, who were sitting in a messy semicircle on the veranda, happily insulting each other. Isa picked up snack platters and shoved them under the noses of perfectly satiated guests. She refilled their mostly full beer glasses, tilting both bottle and glass to minimise the foam, just like her father had taught her.

  Finally, Isa’s mother told her to go and sit down over by Ba Simon, the gardener. He was standing at the far end of the veranda, slapping varieties of dead animal onto the smoking brai. Isa pulled up a low wooden stool. He reached down to pat her on the head in welcome but she ducked, ignoring his eyes and his chuckle. She didn’t like how the sweet scent of his soap mingled with the smell of the burning meat. He was singing softly under his breath:…waona manje wayamba kuluka…Probably some stupit song from the shebeen, Isa scoffed, repeating in her head a condemnation she had heard a thousand times from Ba Enela, her nanny.

  There are three kinds of people in the world: those who, when they hear someone else singing, unconsciously start to sing along; those who remain respectfully or irritably silent; and those who start to sing something else. Isa began warbling the Zambian national anthem. She heard it every day at 1700 hours, when the TV came on, as the brightly coloured bars gave way to an image of soldiers standing at full salute. Stand and sing of Zambia, proud and free. Land of work and joy and unity. Ba Simon smiled down at her and gave up on his song, shaking his head as he flipped steaks he wouldn’t get to eat.

  Ash from the brai drifted and spun like the children playing in the garden. Isa watched their gangly limbs with a detached revulsion, her elbows on her knees, her cheeks in her hands. Stephie was sitting in a lawn chair, depriving a grown-up of a s
eat, reading a book. It was Isa’s D’Aulaires! Scandalised, Isa glared at Stephie for a while and then decided to forgive her – her nose had such a perfect slope. Unlike Winnifred’s, which was enormous and freckled, almost as disgusting as the snot bubbling from Ahmed’s brown button.

  Those two were trying to play croquet under the not-so-watchful eye of Aunt Greta. Younger than most of the adults at the Corsale parties, Aunt Greta always spent the day chain-smoking and downing watery Pimm’s and looking through everyone, as if she were endlessly making and unmaking some terribly important decision. Isa found Aunt Greta beautiful but looking at her for too long made Isa feel there were too many things that she didn’t yet know.

  Emma, who had cried about Doll, was all smiles now, sitting cross-legged on the ground by herself. Her eyes were slightly crossed as she observed something – a ladybird, it looked like – crawling along her hand. Emma was so small. Isa tried to remember being that small, but the weight of her elbows on her knees made it hard to imagine. The ladybird was even smaller. What was it like to be that small? But anyway, how could Emma have been afraid of Doll, Isa wondered, when she clearly wasn’t afraid of insects, which everyone knew could bite and spread disease and were far more disgusting?

  Isa had once retched at the sight of a stray cockroach in the sink. It had been a pretend retch. She’d heard from a girl in the class above her at the Italian School that cockroaches were supposed to be disgusting. But horribly, Isa’s pretend retch had become real and had burned her throat and then she’d felt ashamed at having been so promptly punished by her body for lying. Enough time had passed by now to transform the feeling of disgust at herself into a genuine disgust about small, crawling creatures. She watched as Emma turned her cupped hand slowly like the Queen of England waving at people on TV. The ladybird spiralled down Emma’s wrist, seeking edges, finding curves. Emma giggled.