‘Oh my god, are you okay?’ The girl stroked Thandi’s back. ‘I used to get car sick all the time growing up—’
‘Just hungover,’ Thandi croaked but the girl was already recounting her childhood and how and when and why she had vomited so much back then. The coach heaved and humped along. To stave off her nausea, Thandi fixed her eyes on the girl’s nose, the smattering of freckles like make-up she hadn’t rubbed in. What would happen if those spots grew in number, merged, crowded her skin with melanin? How different this girl’s life would be, the one she was still stitching into a threadbare story with her patchy memories of a small town in California. When the coach finally turned onto the smooth Great North Road, it felt like an exhalation. It gave Thandi an excuse to look out of the window. After a pause, she heard the rustle of the girl opening her stiff copy of Out of Africa.
Thandi closed her eyes and rested her head on the window, her plaits squeaking against the glass. She hated that this girl felt so free to talk to her and touch her. But wasn’t that why Thandi had come to Livingstone? To meet new people? To befriend them in the name of that African mantra: opportunity-opportunity-opportunity? No. She had just wanted to flee Lee’s cowardly eyes, to get out of that damned spot. But then she’d met charming Scholie, and so she’d stayed on, letting him charm her. And now, of course, she was leaving again, this time to get away from Scholie, so that when he pitched up at JollyBoys and said, ‘Hey, man, where’s TandyCandy?’ they’d say, ‘Ah, sorry, man, she’s bounced.’
* * *
When Thandi woke up from her nap, the coach was climbing a road, old car crash sites on the banks marked with white crosses. The sun made the scratches on the window glow and as her gaze receded from that bright cross-hatching, Thandi noticed her reflection: big eyes, small nose, big lips, small chin. She kissed her lips inward to spread her lipstick and saw the American girl’s face behind her, looking not at the world outside the window but at Thandi. Their glances touched in the glass and the girl spoke.
‘Are you feeling any better, you poor thing?’
Thandi felt obliged to turn. She nodded with a close-mouthed smile.
‘I’m telling you, it’s totally car sickness. I don’t know if it’s worse on a bus. This is my first bus ride in Africa, actually. We drove down from Lusaka to see the Falls.’
Thandi breathed. ‘And what did you think of the Victoria Falls?’
‘Oh-my-god. So. Fucking. Beautiful. I’ve seen a lot of waterfalls, like the one up in Impala and this incredible one in Cambodia. But this was, like – the perfect circle rainbow? So amazing. Lemme show you.’ The girl reached down for her bag and her head bounced against the seatback in front of her. ‘Oops,’ she giggled. ‘Good thing it’s so soft,’ she said, stroking the fuzz on the seat.
She was right. The whole coach was furry: the ceiling, the aisle, even the walls were coated with a coarse grey fur flecked with primary colours. An inside-out animal. Thandi’s eye hit a mirror, a large disc above the driver. Rows of heads danced in its reflection and she felt another surge of nausea. The girl had pulled out a sheaf of photos – glossy and unbent – from an envelope and was scrunching closer, bringing the smell of her hair with her. She rifled through the pictures quickly, flashing a montage. Monkeys dangling and reaching for nuts. Livingstone’s bulky, cartoonish statue. Another bloody sunset. A shoeless boy. Arms and oars spoking from rapids. A girl in cargo shorts and a pink shirt floating upside down, arms extended like Christ, a cord scribbling across the sky above her ankles.
‘Is that you?’
The girl turned to Thandi with a solemn look in her eyes.
‘Oh-my-god, bungee jumping? It’s a spiritual experience. I saw death coming straight at me, and then the bungee caught, and honestly, I felt truly alive for the first time in my life.’
She shook her head, moving through photos of the Falls now, all nearly identical – white clusters of chaos against a black-rock backdrop, with that lovely twisting torque that they get during the dry season – until she reached one of her standing on the footbridge.
‘There it is,’ she said with wonder, as if remembering what she had been seeking.
Thandi peered at it. The girl looked prettier than she was in real life, standing with her knee cocked and that prismatic halo around her – the rainbow unchecked by a horizon, free to make a full circle. Thandi had hurried through that rainbow herself only a month ago, too nervous about the slippery footbridge to pause until Scholie had put his arms around her and made her look. Thandi wondered for the first time if there was some justice in the choice that he had made at the bonfire. She opened the food warmer again and heaved, but nothing came up.
‘Are you sure you’re not sick?’ the girl asked as she stroked Thandi’s back.
‘I’m fine,’ Thandi said impatiently, spitting into the warmer. ‘I just drank a lot last night.’
‘Oh, I thought you had malaria or something!’ The girl tapped the tip of Thandi’s nose. Her finger smelled of dead cigarettes. ‘I know the feeling. I had a rough night at that bonfire last week.’
‘I know. I was there,’ Thandi said shortly, surprising herself. She had assumed she would play out this farce until they reached Lusaka.
‘Wait, you were?’ The girl burst out laughing. ‘Wait, of course, I thought I recognised—’
For a moment, relief bubbled up through Thandi.
‘You know what?’ The girl scrutinised her, then nodded firmly. ‘I just remembered. Your braids! I loved the red then too! I’ve been wanting to get mine done like that. Do you know—’
‘I didn’t have plaits that night. I came with Scholie?’ Thandi said pointedly. They exchanged a look.
‘Wait. You’re not with Scholie, are you?’ The way the girl said his name was off, the ‘o’ a little too long, the ‘l’ too liquid. Thandi was tempted to lie but she smiled reassuringly.
‘No. Don’t worry. He tried, but.’
‘Oh, okay,’ the girl breathed, relieved. She cocked her head with a knowing smile. ‘He must have been hard to resist. I mean, I was super drunk but that dude was super persuasive.’
Thandi had a flash of memory: two backs hunching to enter a tent. She looked out the window again. The last thing she wanted was a chat with her new mate about Scholie’s persuasive moves – she wasn’t inclined to confess that a rush of air to the eye was the closest she and Scholie had ever got. Outside the coach, the clouds were soft skirts pleated with slanting light. Concrete buildings slid by on Great North Road, iconic pictures advertising their purposes: carpentry, coal, hair-dressing, drink. The side of the road thickened with people: pedestrians, women selling tomatoes stacked in pyramids, men on bicycles warping under firewood.
‘So you heard the stories at the bonfire then?’ The girl’s voice sounded tight.
Thandi turned wearily. ‘Yes. I was there.’
The girl was staring at the seatback in front of her. Her cheeks were pink, but that might have been the setting sun coming in through the window. ‘So you heard mine then. Yeah, that was a pretty shitty night.’ She paused. ‘You know, I was so drunk. And I really thought he was dying.’ Her voice cracked. It was like she was pleading, explaining something to a jury. ‘It was so sad. And I felt like all he wanted was to be touched, you know? Like, held with love. Like, touched in that way.’
Thandi didn’t know what to do with her face. What was this girl saying?
‘He didn’t say anything but I could tell, you know? From his hands and his eyes. I tried to say no, I was whispering so I wouldn’t wake up the boy, but he didn’t get it. He just kept touching my hair and face. And then he put my hand on him. I thought he was dying, you know? And I felt like I could give him this, like – gift. I thought if I touched him the way he wanted me to, he would understand. How sorry I was.’ The girl turned to Thandi. She looked thin and torn. ‘And I was right,’ she said. ‘He did.’
&
nbsp; The girl’s face was so close, Thandi could see the whites of her eyes, the jagged red lines in them. She wondered how old she was, this woman she kept thinking of as ‘the girl’. Thandi had always thought of sex as an exchange – of love or power – or a prize to hold over someone or withhold from them. She had never thought of it as a gift. She didn’t know what to say.
‘I can plait your hair for you if you want,’ she offered finally. She touched the hair wisping at the girl’s temple. ‘Your hair is too thin – it will fall out. But I can try.’
The girl smiled toothily and then they were like schoolgirls. The girl sat with her feet in the aisle and her back to Thandi. Thandi sat sideways with a knee hitched and her back to the window. She pulled out the scrunchie and the hair swept down, static lifting a blonde mist. She smoothed it and parted it. She threaded her fingers in it and rotated her wrists, twisting the rising mayhem into order. She was halfway done when the girl murmured, ‘Just let me know how much you charge.’
Thandi’s jaw tightened, but her hands kept on twiddling. The girl nestled sideways into the seatback beside her. Outside, the sky blushed then dimmed. The smell of woodsmoke seeped into the coach. By the time they had circled the roundabout under the Findeco House skyscraper, gone over the bridge, and turned into the bus depot, it was night, and the girl was fast asleep. The plaits in her hair were already loosening.
Thandi crept over her and queued up in the aisle behind the other bleary, yawning passengers. Under the orange street lamp outside, family and friends milled around chatting while they waited for the driver to haul their luggage out of the low belly of the coach. Thandi was sniffing her fingers to see if the girl’s hair had left a scent when an older white woman with a cane stepped hesitantly towards the driver. Thandi felt pity rise, and relief. She went over and took the woman’s hand.
‘It’s Thandi,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’
Agnes smiled warmly and pulled her into her arms. ‘We are so glad you’re home, Tendeeway,’ she said, her lips vibrating against Thandi’s ear. ‘We have missed you so much.’
We. Thandi looked over Agnes’s shoulder and saw the pickup across the street, his face framed in the window. Lee didn’t wave or smile. He just looked at her, stern and beseeching and beautiful. His skin was in the shadows but she knew it was brown-brown-brown. Just like hers.
* * *
A year later, Thandi was balanced on stilettos, hovering over a toilet seat, the skirt of her voluminous dress gathered behind her and tilted up so that the wire hoop rested on the cistern. She was releasing a copious volume of liquid from her bladder, legs aching in her squat – a unique paranoia, this mistrust of the backs of other people’s thighs. She could already feel a knot in her forehead, harbinger of the hangover to come. But for now she was happy and tipsy – a four-glasses-in feeling – giddy enough to have brought a bottle of champagne into the toilet stall.
She picked it up and drank as she pissed, relishing the heft in her hand, the silky sting on her tongue, the amusement of concurrently filling up and emptying out. She swallowed the itchy sweetness, lowered the bottle, and then she saw it: a smudge of blood in the crotch of the panties stretched between her calves, a circle of red in the white, like the Japanese flag. She unrolled some toilet paper. She wiped and examined and confirmed. It was her period. On her wedding night. Settling hopelessly onto the dicey seat, Thandi wept. How had she timed things so badly?
After a few minutes, she pulled herself together. She shimmied off the panties – painstakingly chosen from a Victoria’s Secret catalogue and sent from London – and peeked out of the stall to make sure the bathrooms were empty. She hastened to a sink to wash the stain out, scrubbing fiercely at the damn spot, lace threads popping inside her wringing fists. Back in the stall, she hefted her skirt, threaded her stilettos through the holes, and tugged the panties, reluctant with damp, up her thighs again. She didn’t have a pad – she had left her bag in the ballroom – so she wrapped a long stretch of toilet paper around the crotch, where it settled into a papier-mâchéd lump.
Thandi tottered back to the wedding reception in the Ridgeway ballroom and sat next to Lee at the bridal table, shifting her hips to keep the wedge of toilet paper in place. He glanced at her, but kept his back turned as he continued to flirt with her mother. While Thandi had been weeping in the loo, he had castled their positions. She was now sitting next to his father, who had been strutting around all day in his boxy tuxedo and tinted spectacles, trailed by a cloud of cologne and cognac. Drunk enough to forget their mutual dislike, Ronald started telling her about UNZA, where he had been dean of engineering for twenty years. Thandi suppressed her yawns behind smiles as he regaled her with bureaucratic stories about hirings and firings, bursaries and hierarchies. She wished she were sitting with Agnes, who was chatting softly to her aide, Grace.
The reception moved in slow motion, chewing up the cake, draining the liquor bottles, swallowing time. Thandi stared out at the laughing, chatting, eating, drinking, blinking wedding guests. All dressed up and laid out before her, they seemed like strangers, passengers on a flight. Only when a child waved, or a man raised his beer bottle, or a woman clinked a fork against a glass to make Lee kiss her – which he did with dead eyes and great gusto – did Thandi remember that these were her friends, her family, her people, that she had chosen them to be here with her. All she wanted was to be at home in bed, curled in a ball, alone and quietly bleeding.
2006
Thandi’s wedding-night mishap ought to have made her more adaptable. Instead, as time passed, she grew obsessed with always being prepared. Her life became a matrix of schedules – hers and Lee’s and their son’s. Her dainty handbag transformed into an African mother’s handbag: a repository of unexpected need. Over the years, that leather sack accumulated tissues, nappies, dental floss, condoms, panties, a bra, a clip-on tie, tampons, sugar packets, ketchup packets, lozenges, mints, sweets, toothpicks, an interesting toy, an interesting book, bottles of perfume and of rubbing alcohol, plasters, scissors, and a sachet of sharp and tiny tools – paperclips, safety pins, tacks and staples. As a stewardess, anticipating needs was how Thandi had served people. Now it became how she loved them.
Her son’s mere existence spurred a rage of solicitude in her. Marrying Lee had felt like a concatenation of compromises, with him and with herself. But Joseph was separate from all that, a beautiful accident – her blood pressure had skyrocketed during her pregnancy, and it had been a high-risk birth, an emergency C-section at eight months. The baby was underweight and prone to infection, colicky and mucousy. She stared for hours at his little face, a synopsis of his parents’ storied ones – Lee’s gold undertone, Thandi’s green eyes. Only she could provide what her boy needed. She fed him often, monitored his growth like a nutritionist. She held him tight enough to crush his bones.
By the time he was eight, Joseph had learned that he could get her attention by moving ever so slowly, a milquetoast torpor designed to torture her. He spent most of his time in his room, which he kept meticulously tidy. Thandi would stand in the threshold, her hands cupped in front of her.
‘Need anything, baby?’
Joseph, sprawled out on the bed, wouldn’t even look up from whatever languorous task was at hand – thumbing the pages of a book or the buttons of some toy.
‘Anything at all? Hungry?’ Thandi would reverse her cupped hands, turning them over as if she held an hourglass with grains of patience retracing their path.
After an unbearably long pause, Joseph would raise his head, mouth slack, and shake it. Left. Right. Left. Thandi would turn and walk off so he wouldn’t see her hands jerking open, the hourglass shattering, her patience running out.
‘He’s not that slow, Thunder,’ Lee would say when she complained, chucking her under the chin. ‘You’re just too fast.’
Easy for him to say. Lee spent all his time at work or abroad at conferences or out with his friends
. She couldn’t really complain. After he had moved back to Lusaka from Harare and finished his medical residency at UTH, he had set up his own lucrative medical practice. They had moved into a large house in Thorn Park, with a freshly watered garden and two cars. They had a maid and a cook and a gardener and a driver, which Lee seemed to think was enough adult company for his wife. He would waltz in just in time for a meal or a bit of telly, then head straight to bed, belittling her impatience in passing.
‘Mrs On-your-mark-get-set. You’re just too ready,’ he’d chide and then leave her alone once again.
* * *
Thandi was ready. Every night, she lay beside her husband in bed, White Linen perfume seeping from her neck and tickling her nose. For a long time, she had been too preoccupied with caring for her son to mind that Lee had stopped having sex with her. Now that Joseph was almost self-sufficient when it came to food, clothing and shelter, she was ready to make another baby, a new needy being. But in the meantime, her co-creator had slipped away. Their marriage had ceased to be conjugal; his body did not conjugate hers; there was no grammar between them.
This sometimes happens in a marriage, and with age, but Thandi was not done with sex. She was thirty-one, brimming with desire, haunted nightly with visions of men – rough men, hung men, sweet men, creative men – annoyingly, all slight revisions of her man. Lee had not been her first but he had been her best. He had set her sexual compass. How humiliating to lie on her back every night, nipples brushing her nightie with each breath, aching for him, while he lay on his side, snoring with a stringy whistle, his palms clasped and wedged between his knees.
The Old Drift Page 42