The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  ‘Lion is my favourite animal!’ He grinned now, trying to laugh it off.

  ‘We know that,’ said Carol. ‘And mine is kalulu. And he tricks lion, HAHAHA.’

  ‘Not all the time! He tricks njovhu sometimes!’ Lee argued bitterly.

  He was too young to understand that his older sister was rescuing him. Carol often instigated ‘argy-bargies’, as Mummy called them, as a distraction from the darker rifts between their parents. Brother and sister debated the beastly tales until Ba Grace shushed them both.

  After supper, still fretful, Lee picked a different fight with his sister, this time over a toy.

  ‘It’s mine, Daddy bought it for me!’ Lee cried, trying to wrench the action figure from his sister’s bigger, stronger hands. They were sitting on the floor of their shared bedroom.

  ‘It’s. My. Turn!’ Carol groaned between gritted teeth. She was eleven, far too old to play with this kind of toy but still committed to the righteous ethos of Bags I. She tugged at He-Man’s bulging legs as Lee tugged at his big-jawed head. The talking figurine slipped and fell with a clatter, then began its mechanical self-affirmation:

  ‘I…have…THE POWER! I…have…THE POWER!’

  ‘The battery’s gonna die!’ Lee yelled, grabbing He-Man by the sword and switching off his power. Lee glared at his sister, his vision sparkling with tears of protest, but Carol had frozen. She raised her index finger, her neck straining like a hare as she listened. Shouts were coming in muffled spurts through the wall that separated their bedroom from their parents’. Carol scrambled across her unmade bed to hear better. Lee joined her in the tousled sheets and pressed his ear to the wall, too.

  The shouting had a pattern. Daddy would go first, his voice rising one indignant step higher with each word. Mummy would reply with a clipped sentence, calm and resolute. It was almost like he was calling out, ‘I…have…THE POWER!’ and she was responding with that conclusive reply: ‘He-Man.’ After a few minutes of this fight, during which Lee thought he heard his full name uttered more than once, there was a silence.

  All of a sudden, Carol jumped on him and started pummelling. Lee fought back eagerly. Their cries as they punched and grappled were so loud that he didn’t hear the door open or the stern voice asking what was going on. He just felt his sister’s fists rising off his ringing bones and his mother’s hands replacing them. Mummy lifted him, arms and legs scurrying in the air, and carried him over to his neatly made bed across the room, the smooth pond to his sister’s messy waterfall.

  Tears, more of injustice than pain, starred Lee’s vision again. But he could still see Mummy’s smile lines, and he could smell her powdery sweat like wet clay, and he could sense the liveness of her freckles, those tiny eyes in her skin that made it seem like she really could see, and that let him see himself in her – that brown speckling exactly the colour of his skin. My golden boy, she called him…

  ‘My golden lion,’ she whispered now. ‘My sweet boy. I named you for my dear friend, a wonderful man named Lionel Heath.’

  * * *

  As the years passed, Lee learned to track the seasons of his father’s animosity. Sometimes, Dad would lob insults like bombs with timers. The words would tick along innocuously – ‘foolish’, ‘soft’, ‘small’ – only to explode later into their full meaning: that his son was stupid and weak, a runt and a disappointment. Dad’s cruelty was not restricted to Lee. He would sometimes be dismissive of Carol and sarcastic to Mum and rude to Ba Grace, dropping cutting remarks about ‘the ladies’ to Lee behind their backs. Lee was befuddled by this. He hated his sister and loved his mother and took Ba Grace for granted. The idea of treating them all with the same contempt made no sense. It especially wounded Lee to hear his father speak ill of his mother. Lee worshipped her. He wanted to be a doctor when he grew up, just so he could cure her blindness.

  Lee only came to understand how tenuous his parents’ relationship was – and to suspect he had a part to play in that – when he was thirteen years old. At the time, he was attending Falcon, a boarding school in Zimbabwe. Lee had grown more confident since entering that parochial schoolboy world, with its petty rivalries and incidental friendships. Coloured and foreign both, Lee felt superior to the black Rhodies, the majority in Zim but the minority at Falcon, and to the bazungu with chips on their shoulders and doubts about whether they were really smart or just rich. All the students wanted to talk like the coloureds – calling howzit exay? or ’sup own as they slapped a hand into a grip – and to dress with their sloppy grace: half-rolled sleeves, neckties loose as nooses. Lee enjoyed being neither at the top nor the bottom – after all, even reversals of fortune pivot safely around the middle.

  The September of his third year at Falcon, Lee’s father decided to make a holiday out of driving him to school for Michaelmas term. The family would cross the border at Chirundu, then swing down to see the ruins of Great Zimbabwe before dropping Lee off in Matabeleland. Tours of the ruins had dwindled as President Mugabe had started to make his stance on foreigners clear. So the Bandas were alone as they panted up the Hill Enclosure and mounted the rocky set of steps inside. Their guide, wearing threadbare hang-em-high trousers, no socks, and businessman shoes, walked ahead of them, sending facts over his shoulder.

  ‘This is the Great Stone House from which our nation, Zimbabwe, has taken its name. It was built in the eleventh century or somewhere there. You can see the stones are packed in this kind of ziggyzag pattern. No binding mortar.’

  Lee looked around at the crumbling towers and corridors. The morning sun spoked through odd gaps here and there, rending the air with gold. Great Zimbabwe reminded him of his childhood hero, He-Man, and his fortress on the planet Eternia called Castle Grayskull – the same dull grey bricks, the same chaotic turrets and curving arches. Carol, standing next to him, her neon clothes casting tinted shadows on the walls, seemed bored. She stared at the guide, smacking bubblegum, her giant headphones humming like bees in a hive.

  ‘You can see from the shape,’ the guide said, ‘this place was a palace. It quite definitely housed many kings, who had many cattle and many wives.’ He grinned. ‘Not to say that they are the same.’ Only Dad laughed.

  ‘The poorer villagers lived on the outskirts of the city down there.’ The guide gestured to the valley. They turned. Carol grabbed Lee’s arm, her head still bopping to the beat in her headphones, and pointed at a troop of vervet monkeys scampering around and staring from the trees.

  ‘This architecture is very advanced. The archaeologists said it could not have been built by Africans,’ the guide said bitterly. ‘They said, no, the white man or yellow man must have built it.’

  Something bubbled in the base of Lee’s throat. White man. Yellow man.

  ‘They even found art. Shona totems,’ the guide said emphatically. ‘Beautiful carved soapystone birds sitting on top of these monoliths,’ he pointed at a man-sized column a few yards away. ‘Cecil Rhodes stole our totems! Just like his murungu settlers stole our land.’

  Mum whispered something to Ba Grace. Dad’s eyes were hidden behind self-tinting glasses.

  ‘But they could not carry away those boulders. That one with the sloped back, you see? It is also a Shona fish-eagle totem. Can you see it? That is our national bird.’

  Lee frowned, trying to map the long neck and lion-like paws of the bird on the Zimbabwean flag onto the tumble of giant rocks. He could picture the little stolen birds – the shiny black statuettes glowering down from their plinths – but he could not make out this biggest, greatest bird, the one that had been left behind.

  ‘What were the totems for?’ Lee asked his father.

  Dad raised an eyebrow sardonically. ‘Probably had cameras in the eyes. Empire is always watching! You should know that from your muzungu mother.’ He jerked his head at Mum.

  She was standing behind them, oblivious, holding Ba Grace’s hand, her hair plastered to her pale
face. Always watching. Muzungu mother. Tick. Tick. BOOM. Bile stung the back of Lee’s throat and instinctively, he spat. It zipped diagonally from his mouth and landed by his father’s shoe in a frothy globule that sank slowly into the dirt. Lee looked up. Dad hadn’t seen it but Ba Grace was staring at him, aghast at this rudeness. Lee smiled and strode away into the ruins, heart pounding. He knew Ba Grace would never say a word against her Madam’s golden boy.

  * * *

  But the presiding spirits of Great Zimbabwe were displeased. That night, beasts made of stone the same mottled grey as the ruins haunted Lee’s dreams: giant birds and lions and even dinosaurs stood, ranged all around him in a game park – a conglomerate of all the game parks and zoos he’d visited with his family as a boy, Luangwa and Kafue and Munda Wanga and the one at Victoria Falls. Lee was puttering alone amongst these massive dream statues when they suddenly came to life and chased him. The enormous birds flew over him, looming stone bellies raising a wind over his head. The lions leapt after him, claws like hooks, teeth like scythes – swift stony creatures, their flesh crumbling to rocks as their paws slammed into the ground behind him…

  Totem. Lee woke up soaked in sweat, breathing hard like he really had been running, and with a painfully full bladder. He got out of his camp bed and made his way to the bathroom of the motel room the family was sharing, nearly tripping over Carol asleep on the floor. Her Walkman headphones issued a titchy hum – she was at that stage of life when music is a pressing need at all times.

  Totem. It rang like a bell in Lee’s mind as he stared down at his twining stream of piss. That was the word their guide had used, that impoverished scholar of Great Zimbabwe, so full of rage at the failed politics of his country that he had forgotten he was talking to a mixed-race family. But maybe this family was a kind of failed politics, too. Your muzungu mother. Wasn’t that word an epithet? And why had Dad used that other word about Mum? Empire.

  As Lee made his way back to his camp bed, he noticed the tumble of family suitcases spotlit by the bathroom light, which he’d forgotten to switch off. Mummy’s bag was open and Lee decided to hunt for Cadbury Fruit & Nut, which she always brought for special occasions. That was how he found the book – small and red, its gold-lettered title crumbled to illegibility. He opened it. WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! He raised an eyebrow and turned the page. But after the portrait of a round-cheeked man with a Mona Lisa smile, the book was hollow. A rough rectangle had been carved into its pages, and wedged in that space with torn sides like the unmortared bricks of Great Zimbabwe was a cassette tape labelled with his name.

  * * *

  Thandiwe was not immediately charmed by Lionel Banda. It was at least four more flights before she could even take him seriously. He was younger than he looked – at eighteen, a year younger than her – and in his first term of med school at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare. He wasn’t quite as stupid as his jokes suggested. She attributed his poor sense of humour to laziness at first, then realised that he reverted to boarding school behaviour when he was nervous, falling back on chummy banter and rough-and-tumble antics to cover it up. It was only bearable because he was so handsome.

  Lee stole a first kiss from her in the middle of the third flight – not in the kitchenette or the lavatory but, humiliatingly, from his seat. When she leaned over him to clear his tray, he brushed his lips past hers, light and quivering and quick. If it weren’t for the maroon smudge that her lipstick left at the corner of his mouth and his miserable grin afterward, she might have dismissed it as an accident, like the brush to her bum the day they had met. He still denied that it had been his hand.

  ‘It was Dr Phiri!’ he laughed. ‘That lecherous old rat across the aisle!’

  ‘Don’t you mean Mr Phiri, PhD?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Some doctor.’

  Once it began in earnest, Brenda gave snide compliments about their affair, saying it was ‘destined’ – again, because of their skin colour. Yes, Lee and Thandi were both ‘coloured’, but not the same kind of coloured. Lee was Zambian, with a black father and a white mother. He had grown up in Handsworth Park, a suburb in Lusaka where university lecturers lived with their families, and was well off enough to rent his own flat in Harare. Thandi was Zimbabwean, a second-generation coloured: her parents were both goffals, her mother slightly darker than her father and with red hair and green eyes that she’d passed on to Thandi and her sister. Thandi had grown up in a middle-class coloured neighbourhood, Arcadia, as insular as Harare’s white enclaves. After decades of oppression during the colonial period – denied citizenship, their pay docked, housed in Coloured Quarters – Rhodesian coloureds had turned inward, generations of genetic mingling yielding a population with light skin, emerald eyes, bronze hair and freckles.

  To wit, Thandi had grown up with plenty of handsome coloured dudes with imported clothes and squeaky tackies and slick moves, fly butahs who took their beauty for granted and did all the usual coloured guy things – car races at homegrown tracks, bottle-service at night clubs, sundowners at brais. In short, Lee thought his body and mind were unique; Thandi knew they were not. His looks, his confidence, even the precious way he cupped her breasts and placed a pillow under her bum when they fucked: none of this practised connoisseurship appealed to her.

  Thandi was interested in bodies, though, just not in the way you might imagine. She had been having sex since she was fifteen – everyone started that young back then, even if no one talked about it – and she had always been careful. She had used condoms until one of the Zambia Airways girls helped her get a diaphragm from a free clinic in London. It was messy but its curved shape – its bendy inversion – appealed to Thandi. She was an up-close person. She zoomed in. She traced the lines between the moles on Lee’s chest and pressed the nobs on the pads of his fingers. She often asked him questions about anatomy. She liked his medical mind, the cold intensity that entered his eyes when he clicked into that mode of abstraction.

  To Thandi, bodies were shapes. Her love for maths had ended in Form II with geometry but there was a parallel universe where she had become an artist – except she was no good at drawing either, and had never tried to paint. On stopovers in London to visit her sister, she would push through her jet lag and take the Tube to visit the Tate in Millbank. A battered, pen-streaked guide hanging limply from her fingers, she would stand too close to the paintings and sculptures, then step slowly backward, letting the shapes – the smooth intricate bodies of humans and flowers and fruits – fill her frame of vision.

  * * *

  Lee had gone straight from Falcon into med school at UZ in Harare. It was the 1990s and Zim was on the brink, the newspapers clamouring about strikes and land and Mugabe’s lugubrious persistence. But Zim was always on the brink, after all, and life for a wealthy émigré remained eminently liveable. Lee continued to take comfort in his half-belonging, and started to enjoy his newly clear skin and towering stature and easy intelligence – he had finally come into his genetic inheritances. Med school itself was a blur of booze and blow and low-burning lights. Lee barely ate and went booting at Rumours or Circus and took his exams on three hours of sleep.

  Testing his endurance became addictive, a way to empty himself so that he felt only the energy of pure skill – the haptic knowledge of syringe, scalpel, intubation – singing through his nerves. The same edgy emptiness possessed him when he took women to bed. Lee chuffed them like a machine, pulled them like a machine, fucked them like a machine, and was impassive as a machine afterwards. His buddies called him Automatic, or Vicious. Even after he met the beautiful stewardess on that Zambia Airways flight home to Lusaka, Lee kept pulling chicks.

  One night, a few months after he and Thandi had started dating, Lee took a posh girl named Yvonne back to his studio flat in Harare. They sat on his leather sofa and drank Zima and smoked Pall Malls as R. Kelly’s perverse, practised yowling issued from the stereo, cajoling them to bump and grind. Lee started a gentle sno
g, cupping Yvonne’s face in his hands. He leisurely slid one hand up her shirt, the other down her skirt, expertly unlocking that complex apparatus – a clothed woman.

  Within minutes, Yvonne was naked on the sticky sofa and Lee was hovering over her, thumbing her clit, mumbling at her nipples, the three springy protrusions hardening in tandem as her breath caught and released. She moaned his name – Lee, Lee! – her British accent evident even in that single syllable. He kept one eye on her breast, trying to stay erect for the big event, but his other eye kept darting to her chin. His stubble had rubbed her make-up off, revealing a rash of raised purple bumps there, almost like burns or plaques. Before he knew it, Lee was examining Yvonne like a patient, scanning through the encyclopedia of conditions in his mind as he brought her to orgasm. Finally, just as she came, he landed on a diagnosis: Kaposi’s sarcoma.

  * * *

  Thandi fell for Lee because he was a body that handled and understood bodies. And then she fell for his mother. They met on a sunny August day in Handsworth Park. After a brief introduction, Lee’s father, Ronald – a short, dark man who smelled of expensive aftershave – left Thandi and Agnes to have tea in the garden.

  ‘So. Tendeeway,’ said Agnes. ‘Tell me about yourself.’

  ‘Um, well, I grew up in Harare. My dad works for the national electric company—’