The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  ‘I’m Lila,’ she shouted. Her breath smelled like freshly baked pound cake.

  He bent slightly and spoke in her ear. ‘You’re a thief.’

  She smiled and shrugged her shoulders to the beat. Then she pranced towards the exit, a finger beckoning him to follow. Once they were in the car park out front, she turned to him.

  ‘Smoke?’ she asked, her voice like velvet stroked the wrong direction.

  ‘Nah,’ he said.

  There were four butahs leaning against the outside wall, wearing those new MC Hammer-style sweatpants – tight at the calves, loose at the thighs. She begged a cigarette off one of the guys, who lit it for her. She walked back to Joseph, fully aware of the smokers’ eyes on her ass. Under the street lamp, Joseph saw that her tight black t-shirt had a white blur in the centre – an image of fogged glass with two words finger-scrawled in it: MANIC PIXIES. Under it was a unicorn with a dagger for a horn.

  ‘It’s an Iranian punk band.’

  ‘Ah,’ he raised an eyebrow and glanced away.

  ‘You don’t like?’ She stretched it down and away so she could peer at it. ‘It’s salaula.’

  ‘Salaula? You know that word?’

  ‘Ah-ah, ndine mu Zambia, iwe.’

  He laughed. Her Nyanja wasn’t bad. ‘You were born here?’

  ‘Born and bred, exay.’

  ‘But your parents are what?’

  ‘Guess.’ She spoked her fingers up into her hair – long, purpleblack, shaved on one side.

  ‘I give up,’ he said then tried anyway: ‘Ethiopian?’

  ‘You’re mixed too, ya? Green eyes and that.’

  ‘We say coloured here, but yes. Are you sure you’re from Lusaka?’

  ‘What kind of mutt are you?’ She blew smoke from the side of her mouth like Popeye.

  ‘Muntu-muzungu. I’m not exactly sure what proportion. You?’

  ‘Muzungu-mwenye. Exactly half,’ she said. ‘My mum’s Italian.’

  ‘So basically muzungu,’ he said.

  She stepped back and scanned him. He felt spotty and sickly.

  ‘With a Zambian passport, what’s the frikkin difference, right?’ She smiled and he felt forgiven. She gathered her hair, twisted it into a bun, and pulled two pens from her jeans pocket to pin it up.

  ‘Wait. You were stealing pens in there?’

  ‘Ya,’ she laughed. Her teeth were insanely white, like an actress. ‘You down with OPP?’

  Without warning, she began sprinting towards the Goma Lakes. He ran after her. They raced across the stepping stones like kids and then clambered up a grass hill to sit. The eucalyptus trees drooped in the distance, ministering spirits. It was cool and clear – it was May, the rains were over and the moon was as big and fat and yellow as a sun.

  ‘So, you a fresher?’ he panted. The collegiate slang felt like mush on his tongue.

  ‘Ya, you?’

  ‘Ya,’ he sniffed. ‘But I’m gonna transfer soon. UCT.’

  ‘Shit, men. I wanted to go there too.’ She picked at an intentional rip in her jeans. ‘I didn’t get in either.’

  ‘No, I’ll definitely get in,’ he said and hated himself.

  ‘Why aren’t you already there then?’

  ‘The protests,’ he said. ‘It’s crazy right now. End-times shit.’

  She laughed so hard that it rocked her onto her back. ‘Are you joking?’ she asked the sky. ‘That’s why I wanted to go! They’re frikkin trying to do something! Fight the power and that!’

  ‘How about fight the power cuts?’ He was surprised to hear himself echoing his grandfather. ‘Why make free education a priority when people still don’t have food or electricity or running water?’

  ‘They did it in Chile!’ she exclaimed, sitting up again and crossing her legs. ‘They made it completely free. Uni for everyone, paid for by those corporate oil companies and shit.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to use Chile as the example of democratic progress?’

  ‘Who said anything about democracy, men? Democracy’s bankrupt. People from the West shout “democracy” but they’re vampires, sucking our resources. Bloody capitalist stooges.’

  ‘Stooges?’ he chuckled. ‘You really are Zambian. So what, you give all your money away?’

  ‘I’m Marxist,’ she said with disgust. ‘I’m not stupid.’

  There was an awkward silence. She plucked at the grass between her crossed legs. The music from the student bar thudded and crescendoed like doom approaching. He turned to her but before he could speak, she swung her face at him and kissed him. It was awful. Her tongue was thick and musty, like the slugs he dissected in lab. His penis responded eagerly anyway and he kissed her back. She broke away first and looked across the lake and asked him a question about his parents. He blinked, nonplussed. This girl had no brakes. No steering wheel, either. He furtively adjusted the fly of his khakis and replied politely. When he said his father’s name, she pummelled his arm with her fists.

  ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’ he said, flexing it instinctively.

  ‘I know your dad,’ she nodded, her high-crossed hair bun wobbling.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yessss!’ she seethed. ‘Your dad’s my hero. He saved my life!’

  Something dug into his stomach. ‘He was a doctor,’ he began but she had launched into a story about a compound and a tree and a boy who pushed her, or actually, kind of bounced her—

  ‘Wait. Naila?’

  ‘Ya! Lusaka’s a frikkin village, men,’ she laughed. ‘Wait.’ Her face zoomed into his again. ‘No. You’re joking.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re the coward! You’re the one who ran away like a frikkin weasel!’

  He frowned. ‘I – I ran for help. I’m the one who fetched my father. My father who saved you?’ He stood up and dusted his seat off. ‘Look, I have class in the morning. Good to meet you. Again or whatever.’

  She stood up. Her eyes looked like black pebbles under water. Her lips had a duck-like pout and for a moment, he thought she might kiss him. Instead, she slapped him. Shocked, he put his hand to his cheek. She mouthed ‘ows’, wringing the impact off her hand, then turned and strode back towards the car park. ‘Don’t run off again!’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Coward.’

  He stumbled after her. By the time he reached the car park, she was in the driver’s seat of a blue Mazda, mugging for him through the windscreen. The passenger door was open. The smokers in front of the bar laughed as he got in. Benzes and Beamers still meant something in Lusaka, and the guys drove the cars, not the girls. But Joseph didn’t care, and neither did his penis.

  * * *

  He woke up in her narrow bed in one of the UNZA hostels outside Arcades – her roommate was out of town. Naila was awake, arms crossed over her bare breasts, glaring at him.

  ‘What the hell, men?’ She sucked her teeth. ‘Do you have no manners?’

  ‘What?’ he asked, blinking the blur from his eyes. ‘What time is it?’

  She sucked her teeth and rolled over to check her phone. ‘It’s half five. Looky here, men. No handouts. This is a tit-for-tat economy. Give and take. Emphasis on give.’

  He sat up and scratched his head. Oh, is that what she was on about? Early-morning light cast a coral shade over her messy dorm room.

  ‘Girls don’t come every time,’ he said, picking his khaki trousers off the floor beside the bed and sitting up to pull them on.

  ‘Excuse me?’ She smacked her phone onto the bedside table. ‘What did you say?’

  She was kneeling topless in the sheets like a golden nymph in choppy white waves, her face contorting as she started shouting about gender equality and the right to orgasm and again, about poor manners. ‘Frikkin amateur,’ she concluded. ‘Is this your first time or what?’

  ‘What if it was?’ he sc
owled as he stood up. ‘Now who has no manners?’

  She rolled her eyes. He saw his shirt on the chair and as he strode over to fetch it, he slipped on something. He caught himself by grabbing the edge of a rickety bookshelf and looked down. It was the condom, which he had neglected to knot before tossing on the floor last night. It had spilled its guts and he’d stepped right into them. He lifted his foot with revulsion. This was banana-peel stupid. Naila cracked up. He stepped back to the bed and wiped his foot down the edge of her mattress but she just laughed harder.

  His phone buzzed in his trouser pocket and he pulled it out and sat on the bed, avoiding the streak of semen he’d just left there. It was a new message from the anonymous Doctor, an apology for yesterday’s text: sory rong numba, it said.

  ‘Ugh, I get spam all the time, too,’ Naila commiserated. She was kneeling up behind him on the bed, peering over his shoulder at the screen.

  He nodded absently, tapping a reply: who is this?

  ‘You don’t know your own doctor?’

  ‘This isn’t my phone,’ he said. ‘It’s my dad’s.’

  ‘Oh!’ She tumbled onto her back. ‘You mean my hero, Dr Lionel Banda?’

  She smiled, sprawled out in her green panties embroidered with – was that…? It was. It was the Zambian flag. She had a chitenge pattern tattooed on her tricep, too. A true patriot.

  ‘Dr Lionel Banda is dead,’ he said and something small and hard began to buzz in his throat, like a dung beetle was trapped there. He had never had to say those words out loud before.

  ‘Stop lying.’

  He just looked at her.

  ‘Oh,’ she said softly, her eyebrows knitting. ‘Sorry, men.’

  ‘I’m trying—’ He stopped and cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been trying to figure out what he was working on before he died. He was doing some pretty important research. On The Virus.’

  ‘Oh, wow.’ She unconsciously covered her breasts with a forearm. ‘Like, a cure?’

  ‘Maybe. A vaccine, more likely. I’m still trying to find his lab log.’

  ‘You don’t have his…files? His experiments or whatever?’

  ‘All I have is this.’ He held up the phone. ‘I found some articles he sent to himself, but—’ The phone buzzed in his hand and he looked down. ‘This Doctor guy keeps texting—’ He broke off and laughed at the message. He turned the phone so she could read it: WHO IS THIS?!

  ‘Shame,’ she laughed. ‘Probably thinks he’s getting texts from a graveyard.’

  She rolled off the bed onto her feet and stretched her arms overhead. She had small breasts but her ass stretched that Zambian flag taut. She wrapped a chitenge around her torso.

  ‘Try Memos,’ she said and flounced out of the room to the loo.

  Of course. Joseph had only ever looked at the email and messaging apps on the phone. He tapped the microphone icon now and found a dated list of files, the most recent from the day before his father had died. He touched his finger to the screen. Dad’s voice rose into the room, buffeted by wind:

  ‘…question then is whether to modify the genome of the host or the genome of the vector, which—’

  Joseph pressed pause, his whole body sprung with goosebumps.

  Naila came back in and started tossing through the mess on her floor, murmuring, ‘Now where are my frikkin keys?’

  As she drove the Mazda along the empty roads towards campus, Joseph went through all the apps on the phone, one by one. In Notes, amongst to-do lists and logs riddled with question marks and exclamation points, he finally found what he was looking for. The name mostly showed up as Dr M, but once in a while it was spelled out. Musadabwe. The bedraggled doctor he had met at Dad’s funeral. Joseph sent a text explaining who he was and asking if they might meet again.

  * * *

  The notes on the iPhone app took some deciphering. The logs were dated but coded in a cryptic shorthand, with test subjects labelled by number. Joseph had just cracked the key and was typing out the list of names – Chileshe K., Loveness J., Sylvia M. – on his laptop in the dining room when Gran walked in.

  ‘Darling.’ Her voice was thin as a string. ‘Could you find something for me?’

  She was in her usual outfit – a faded collegiate sweatshirt and a wrap chitenge skirt from Sunday market. She had worn it every day since the funeral, except for the days that Ba Grace insisted she take it off to be washed. Gran’s eyelids were shadowed with purple and she seemed ruffled, her freckles shifting in her skin as she fidgeted.

  ‘Are you too busy?’ she said. ‘With your schoolwork? How is—’

  ‘No, no. I’m working on my own project,’ he said. ‘What is it you’re looking for?’

  ‘There is a—’ She stopped herself. ‘You know? I’ve been thinking. Since that conversation we had about the protests? “Rhodes Must Burn” and so on.’

  ‘Fall,’ he said.

  ‘What? Oh dear. Yes, “Rhodes Must Fall”.’ She paced in a circle, picking at her cuticles. They looked raw. ‘In any case, it has me thinking about these campus protests that went on at UNZA in the seventies, when – actually I was pregnant with your father at the time and I was in this group, The Reds, and we had a—’ She stopped to catch her breath. She was panting slightly.

  He stood up and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, it’s just, I’ve lost something terribly important to me. A tape. Well – a book.’

  ‘A book on tape?’

  ‘No, it’s – I was hoping you could find it for me? It ought to be in my bedside drawer but…’

  Joseph guided her down the corridor, though she could navigate by herself – his hand on her arm was just for comfort. In the master bedroom, he could smell traces of her body, a maundering mauve odour. She stood by the door and waited while he rifled through the leavings in the bedside drawer: a crusty earplug, old and new fifty-ngwee coins, a plastic chequebook cover, a Scooby Doo sticker, a box of Lion matches, a rusty pin that said MIND THE GAP.

  ‘It’s a book. Quite small. Red,’ Gran urged. ‘Perhaps the tape fell out…’

  A small red book. Like the one Dad had been reading the day after he arrived back home? The one he’d taken golfing with him and had in his pocket when he collapsed? The one that had come home from the hospital in a plastic bag that was now stashed at the bottom of Joseph’s closet?

  ‘I think I know where it is,’ he said and sat Gran down on her bed.

  He went to his bedroom closet and dug out the bag, then the book. He opened it. MAO-TSE TUNG. He turned past the title page and frontispiece and saw now that the rest of the book had been hollowed out and an old cassette tape was squeezed inside. He tugged it out and turned it over – it was labelled LIONEL. Just then, his phone buzzed. A text from Musadabwe: hi jo! meet @ clinic tmrw. kalingalinga. nxt 2 rip kapenta.

  Joseph put his phone away, then took the book and the tape to Gran’s room and placed them in her hands. She nearly swooned with relief, running her hands over the book, opening it and expertly slotting the tape back into its choppy cave.

  ‘This is all very mysterious, Gran.’

  ‘Oh dear, I suppose it is,’ she smiled. For the first time since the funeral, she seemed happy.

  ‘What’s on that tape? And why’s it got Dad’s name on it?’

  ‘It’s actually his namesake. It’s a recording of these meetings that a lecturer named Lionel Heath used to run on campus.’

  ‘What were they about?’

  ‘Well.’ She tilted her head. ‘It’s—’ She shook her head. ‘It’s hard to explain. I suppose I listen to the tape more for – the sound. The voices. The feeling. Of that moment in time.’

  ‘What feeling?’

  ‘Why don’t I play it for you?’

  * * *

  Kalingalinga had become a little city by now, concrete b
locks with flat colourful faces, windows criss-crossed with white grids. There were signs everywhere – BE ON TIME TRADING, OBAMA SALON, NITE DANCING CLUB – and misspelt lists of services: cooka, barba, filta, panting. Items for sale lined Alick Nkhata Road: thatch coops and kennels, wooden tables and chairs, bricks stacked in Tetris-like heaps. Joseph parked Grandpa’s car and got out and asked a Digit-All Time seller for directions. From Musadabwe’s text, he had assumed the clinic was next to one of those fish stands loaded with ponging heaps of silver minnows, flies buzzing over sizzling flesh strung with latticed bones. But as the sign came into view – RIP BEDS & COFFINS LTD – he realised that kapenta was just the doctor’s efficient if idiosyncratic spelling of the word carpenter.

  There were two actual carpenters in the yard, both coated with white dust, a roiling sea of curled shavings at their feet. The older man wore goggles and gloves and was bent over a sawhorse, delicately applying a spinning blade to a log. The younger man sat on a turned-over oil drum, legs swinging, feet gonging, as he fiddled with a black box with a single phallic antenna. Nailed to the tree next to him was a kifwebe mask, a spine running down from its crown to form the bridge of its nose. Below it was a plastic version – the top half of a chigubu jug, its handle for a nose, its spout for a pout.

  Next door was a blue building with a white base, like a schoolgirl in bobby socks. A satellite dish sat on its corrugated roof like a jaunty cap. The facade said ONE HUNDRED YEARS CLINIC and below that, in smaller letters, DR PATRICK MUSADABWE, and below that in even smaller letters: BA. BSC. DPHIL. MD. PHD. Lowest and smallest of all was a set of Chinese characters like squashed insects. The door was ajar so Joseph came in, gently knocking the frame.

  He found himself in a corridor that ran the length of the building to the back door. To the left was a door labelled in white paint: EXAMINATIONING ROOM. Across from it, to the right was a modest waiting room, inside which a teenager in a grey school uniform sat behind a desk, desultorily thumbing his phone. There were three folding chairs against the wall, one occupied by a dark-skinned, big-boned woman wearing a white blouse, a pinstriped skirt with a side slit, and espadrilles. She looked up from her phone as he came in. She seemed familiar, not her face but her scent.