The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  ‘No, no,’ the General smiled. ‘They cannot help you, pretty girl.’

  Jacob tried to catch her brother’s attention but Solo was staring dismally into his glass of vodka. The sky stretched flat and blue above the roofless house. Rays of light skewed down, foreboding as blades. The guards ceased their patrolling to watch. A few feet from the General’s armchair, Christian released his clutch on Pepa’s shirt and spanked her buttocks forward like a reluctant child. Pepa tripped ahead but stopped, eyes downcast.

  ‘Come and say hallo, kapompo.’ The General patted his thigh.

  ‘She has injured me!’ Christian said abruptly. He was staring at his hand, which was stained with red. Pepa’s menstrual blood had leaked into the seat of the skirt he had just spanked.

  ‘She is just on her period, bwana,’ said Jacob, rising to his feet. ‘It is not her fault.’

  Christian sucked in a breath and raised his hand over Pepa. But he was too caught up in the taboo to touch her. He walked off angrily, shouting for a towel. Jacob approached Pepa and pulled off his t-shirt to give to her. She took it but didn’t put it on. She was sobbing.

  ‘Ah you, Jelita. Stop crying. We are happy that you are mature,’ the General laughed. Pepa only sobbed harder. ‘Go and clean yourself up.’

  She raced off, covering her stained behind with Jacob’s shirt, and crouched behind the sofa to put it on.

  ‘And you. Hero,’ the General said, his spectacles blank discs. ‘Do you know what your galifriend’s condition can do? It can cause a miracle! It can heal people who have The Virus.’

  Jacob frowned. Growing up in a women’s hair salon had accustomed him to periods as a fact of existence. Periods didn’t heal anything, though they often seemed to come as a relief.

  ‘…perfect specimen,’ the General was saying. ‘Have you tasted that creamy white skin?’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Jacob demanded. He always felt protective of Pepa when people mocked her for being albino, when they spat on their chests for fear of the hex of her.

  Before the General could answer, a man burst into the clearing, yelling ‘Ba General!’ He skidded to a stop at the edge of the pool, then turned and ran into the house through an invisible wall. ‘We have been spotted,’ he panted. ‘Pa airport.’

  Jacob’s eyes darted to the man’s hand – two gold stripes – and his earlobe – a bead of gold.

  ‘Spotted by who?’ the General stood up. He carried his big belly with authority.

  ‘I do not know if it is police or government or what,’ the man panted. ‘But it is some ka flying thing, videotaping us.’

  Just then, the iPhone flashed on, the black bitten apple in the white screen. Jacob and the General saw it at the same time but the General got there first. He reached down, picked it up and unlocked it.

  ‘What is this?’ He turned it towards Jacob. ‘What have you put on my phone?’

  The GoPro app was still open. A blurry patch on the screen shuddered into focus: a black circle, a white oval around it riddled with red cracks, a wet throat in one corner. It was an eye. Someone had picked up the crashed chopper and turned it over and was staring into the camera in its belly. Jacob looked at the General, unsure how to explain. He reached for the phone and guards on either side stepped forward, but the General raised his hand like Moses and they parted. The General handed the phone to Jacob, who turned and stood beside him so that they could both see the image. Jacob touched the launch button. There was a yelp on the other side of the screen as the chopper stirred to life and rose.

  ‘Oho!’ the General laughed. ‘So that thingie at the airport was yours?’

  The chopper was unsteady, a fly drunk on sugar. Jacob compensated by tapping between keys, yielding a shuddery hover over a black and white pattern – a tiled floor or maybe a duvet.

  ‘You must bring this machine to me, ehn? In exchange for your white ka galifriend?’

  As the chopper rose, the geometric pattern was replaced by a frowning face.

  ‘Who is that?’ The General darted his beard at the screen.

  Jacob hesitated. But something – the look in her eye or the fact that she lived in that house in Northmead, without him – something made Jacob tell the General the truth.

  ‘It’s my mother,’ he said, just as her hand swept through the screen and knocked it black.

  * * *

  That evening in New Kasama, as the sun departed, dragging a ragged train of orange and purple behind it, the General recounted the legend of his empire. Ever since Lusaka City Airport had been given over to the military, he had used his access to bring in goods hidden in the crannies of his cronies’ flesh and luggage. Pills: pharmaceutical, recreational, both. Rough-cut diamonds and cobalt from the Congo. An assortment of consumer goods from Jo’burg and Hong Kong and Dubai, which he sold outside the tariff system. Recently, he had been looking to fry bigger fish, or rather, smaller ones. He wanted to shift his mode of transportation from aeroplanes to drones.

  Drones were everywhere these days but the aircraft laws in most nations had not yet been adjusted to account for them. Drones had been used for reconnaissance during the Arab Spring. The US military was mapping the continent with them to burrow bunkers under the land. A drone airport was being built in Rwanda. The General’s plan to use a fleet of them to secret goods over borders seemed dauntingly pricey, however. He was delighted to learn that you could make your own. He didn’t understand that Jacob had just strapped a camera to a toy helicopter. He instructed Jacob to fetch it and handed over a wad of crisp clean kwacha for transport.

  The money was tempting, but Jacob felt more compelled by the fact that, when the silver-strung driver drove him back to the compound that night so he could carry out his mission, Solo and Pepa stayed behind. The General, casually waving the steak knife he was using to cut his nshima and bream, said he would send the siblings home tomorrow. Christian handed Jacob a fresh t-shirt, then cuffed Solo on the head to bully him to the back of the house to wash the supper plates. The last glimpse Jacob got of Pepa, she was curled up on the sofa, his old t-shirt like a nightgown on her. Had there been drugs in her glass? Her pale cheek pressed to the white leather, her pink lips wet in slumber, she seemed like an animal that has fainted for fear.

  2014

  Jacob walked in on his mother breaking. Not breaking outwards into pieces, but shattering inward, towards the core. She was sitting on the floor of her kitchen, back against the wall, knees pulled to her chest, thighs as spread as her tight skirt would allow. Her chest was clutching, her shoulders jerking. In the ambient glow from the street lamp outside, he could see that tears had melted her make-up, muddying her collar and uncovering dark patches on her cheeks. On the floor were the honey-coloured shards of a broken Mosi bottle – no, five or six bottles. Her knees were rubied with scab.

  Jacob toggled the light switch uselessly. There was no power cut in Northmead tonight. This was an unpaid ZESCO bill. He turned on the iPhone – the General had let him keep it – and scanned the room. No sign of his chopper in here. The light accidentally skimmed over his mother’s face and she opened her eyes. She tried to get up and couldn’t. Her eyes slid shut again.

  Jacob hesitated, then put the phone away and went over to her. He knelt at her side and put his arms around her. She was lighter than he expected, so when he lifted her up, her bloody knee struck his mouth. He carefully wiped his face, then levered her up again as he rose to his feet, one arm supporting her neck, the other wedged under her knees.

  He kicked open a couple of doors before he found a bedroom. As he carried her in, he recalled an image from five years ago: his mother cradling the Indian girl, just like this, and handing her over to Uncle Lee in the middle of the Hi-Fly. That was the day it had burned down. The day he had burned it down. He laid her on the bed, lifted half of the duvet over her, tucked her in. He didn’t know when he had learned how to do t
his – no one had ever done it for him.

  ‘Lee,’ his mother croaked, her eyes stirring open.

  ‘It’s Jacob,’ he said, looking around the bedroom. No chopper in here either.

  ‘Lee,’ she said again, urgently.

  Rage lit his spine from its base to the top of his head. These tears. This drunkenness. This illness that was consuming her body. It was all for Dr Lionel Banda. Again. Her eyes closed and this time her breathing steadied into a sleeping rhythm. Jacob sank to the floor by her bed. He didn’t care, he didn’t want to care. He was just here for his chopper.

  * * *

  Jacob woke the next morning with the chopper in his face. His heart wrenched at the sight of it. It was covered in reddish smears, one blade bent out of shape, the GoPro dangling like a cartoon eyeball. Jacob’s mother, who was holding it over him, was no longer wearing her tight skirt or her wig. She had bathed and was in an orange robe, her damp hair in knots. The lesions on her face and neck were clearer in the daylight. He reached for the toy in her hand.

  ‘So it is yours?’ She pulled it out of reach like a bully.

  Jacob staggered to his feet, his joints cricking from sleeping on the floor. He was seventeen now and he loomed over her in her bare feet. But he was still her son and he tugged his t-shirt down self-consciously.

  She looked him over sceptically. ‘You want a drink?’

  He raised an eyebrow, eyes straying to the chopper in her hand.

  She gave it to him, rolling her eyes. ‘Take it and go, or come and drink. Me, I don’t care,’ she said, then turned and floated out of the room and down the corridor.

  He followed her into the kitchen. In the light of day, it looked emptier than Gogo’s but in a rich-person way: a glass table, matching chairs, a single fern in a porcelain pot. The broken glass from last night had been swept from the floor. In a single motion, Jacob’s mother sat and lifted an open Mosi to her lips. She gestured at the crate under his chair. He pulled out a beer and opened it against the edge of the table. He took a sip. It tasted beerier with his morning breath.

  ‘So you’ve come to ask where I’ve been,’ she said knowingly.

  He shook his head. He fondled the chopper. He looked up and nodded.

  ‘Well,’ she swept the air dramatically. ‘Been all over, darling. Ethiopia, Dubai. I even went to China!’ She gave a stilted laugh. ‘Sylvia Mwamba is a prize commodity. The Lusaka Patient.’

  ‘You went with…’ He paused. ‘With Uncle Lee?’

  At the mention of his name, tears sprang to her eyes. The unpredictable weather of grief – Jacob knew it well from living with Gogo, how abruptly it could whip a rain shower into a storm – but he was startled. He had never seen his mother cry before. There was a knock at the front door. She brusquely wiped her face and got up to open it. Leaving his beer and his chopper on the table, Jacob haplessly trailed her again.

  It was still early, the sun the colour of unripe mango flesh. The woman pouting her lips rudely at the door wore a grey trouser suit, the smell of perfume around her like a swarm. Behind her stood a big man in a brown suit with a short tie, his stomach straining his shirt buttons. And behind him skulked two men in dusty coveralls. The perfumed woman clearly already knew Jacob’s mother. She flung some words directly at her – squatting, bailiffs, thirty days – and stomped off in her heeled boots to a waiting taxi, which promptly drove away. Jacob’s mother put her face into her hands. The big man pushed past her into the house and pointed his workers towards the larger items in the sitting room – the settee, the coffee table.

  Jacob turned to his mother. ‘Mummy,’ he said, and felt the strangeness of the word in his mouth. He tugged her hands from her face. ‘They cannot boot you from your own house.’

  ‘It’s Lee’s house,’ she choked. ‘He’s—’ She collapsed against the door frame as sobs overtook her.

  Jacob backed away. Now he understood. Lionel Banda was dead and his family had come to collect. The workers were shuffling towards the front door, each holding one end of the sofa.

  ‘Stop,’ said Jacob, putting his hand on one worker’s arm. ‘We will move the things out.’

  ‘Too late.’ The big man strolled towards them, sipping Jacob’s beer. ‘She was given a month’s notice.’

  ‘Bwana,’ Jacob pleaded. Then he remembered that he had the money the General had given him for transport. He took it out and pulled out several bills and stretched them towards the big man. The man looked him over, then pocketed the money.

  ‘Go on,’ he winked. ‘Take what you can. I won’t tell.’

  As the workers proceeded to carry the sofa out through the open gate, Jacob darted into the house and started gathering what he could and packing it into the back of Uncle Lee’s pickup truck in the drive. But the bailiffs had four hands and he only had two – his mother’s were busy holding her face as she wept. Neighbours and bystanders soon sniffed out the drama and started taking the things the workers had left in the road. Jacob chased them off but then someone set the pile on fire. Jacob dashed around rescuing valuable items – electronics mostly – trying to avoid the feeling that he always seemed to bring fire into his mother’s life.

  She stood on the side of the road in her orange robe, screaming as the morning traffic honked and crept around the commotion. When all of the things in the road were packed in the pickup or gone or burnt up, Jacob guided her back to the house only for them to find the front door bound with a column of shiny new bolts. The bailiffs had changed the locks. His chopper was still inside. So were the keys to Lee’s pickup, his mother informed him forlornly. Jacob used the dregs of the transport money from the General to pay for a taxi to take them to Kalingalinga. He didn’t know where else to go.

  * * *

  The General had not kept his promise to send Solo and Pepa home. As the days went on, Jacob realised that the General was holding them hostage until Jacob brought him the chopper. He couldn’t call the police – just more men with guns – and the chopper was locked up in the Northmead house. Handling his mother’s business had left his pockets too dry to purchase a taxi ride to New Kasama to explain things to the General. She had taken over his sleeping mat at Gogo’s, so Jacob stayed at the woodyard with Ba Godfrey, waiting for his friends to come home.

  Nearly a week passed before the hulking black SUV arrived with its halo of red dust. A back door clicked and swung open. Jacob and his grandfather approached the vehicle. In the back seat, where pale Pepa and sooty Solo were supposed to be, was a black and white box, labelled with a pointy-lettered word. Jacob made to climb in beside it, but the driver turned and glared, motioning for him to take the box out. Jacob lifted it onto the ground – it was surprisingly light – and shut the door. The SUV rumbled away.

  Jacob knelt down to open the box, sounding out the letters on it in his head. Pandom?

  ‘Is it a gift?’ he asked his grandfather.

  ‘It is a ghost!’ Ba Godfrey laughed.

  ‘No,’ said Jacob as he tugged away the styrofoam packing. ‘It is a drone.’

  He recognised it from the Internet – the latest model from a Chinese company called DJI.

  ‘What’s this?’ Ba Godfrey reached into the box and pulled out an envelope. It was thick with fresh kwacha bills. ‘Two thousand, three thousand,’ he counted. ‘Ah, but this is not much.’

  ‘No, bashikulu,’ said Jacob. ‘You have forgotten that they changed the currency.’

  The kwacha had been redenominated last year, from multiples of a thousand to multiples of one. K3,000 was no longer equivalent to less than $1. It was equivalent to nearly $500.

  ‘Oh!’ Ba Godfrey’s eyes grew wide. ‘Iwe, what did you do for this money?’

  But the real question was: what would Jacob do for it? He was staring at the drone on the ground. It was a bribe and a temptation and a command all at once.

  * * *

  Syl
via woke up on the floor of her mother’s house. It was afternoon. The sunlight in the room was brazen and casual, pouring in through the new glass window and the cracks around the new wooden door. She watched the dust drift and flash in its rays. Turning onto her side, she pulled her knees to her chest, examining the wounds from the broken glass. The scabs had a comforting smell, like warm ngwee. Time passed. Even when the sun had snuck away, leaving the air to cool and the shadows to gather, Sylvia stayed curled up on the floor, not waiting, but not not-waiting, either.

  When her mother came home a few hours later, her feet knocked right into Sylvia’s legs. Sylvia yawned and stretched and said hello, her voice crackling with sleep. Matha sniffed and made a pot of tea. They sat across from each other at the wooden table – also new – and sipped tea from tin cups in a silence strung with unspoken words. Evening arrived: woodsmoke and cooking oil, homegoing footsteps, people talking and eating. Then the children went to bed and the bars woke up and night arrived: twinkling light and tinkling glass, bass tremors, people laughing and drinking. A juicy, drunken laugh splashed in through the window from a shebeen.

  Matha sucked her teeth and Sylvia looked up. Since when? And so what if she had spent her life in that kind of place, enjoying the company of a man or two? At least she hadn’t been stuck inside a room, crying over one. Her head shook no; Matha’s head shook no. Their heads were like flowers swaying in the rain, like there would be no end to the back and forth. Finally, Sylvia stood and cleared their cups, taking them out to the tap in the yard – another upgrade to No. 74.

  She squatted and washed up, the colliding tin cups making an open-mouthed echo, the gritty spray needling the cuts on her knees. Her thoughts struggled to float free but a string held them, kept them fluttering. Where can I go? Where can I go? Where can I go? It had been years since Sylvia had worked the profession, years since another man’s mouth had clenched over her with pleasure. She was too sick now, anyway. Who would trust a face like hers, with its dark, rough patches? Many of her former clients had The Virus too, but they could afford the ARVs to pretend otherwise. She still didn’t know who had given it to her, which anonymous man had carried death instead of life in his amabolo, banking the wrong currency in his money bags. Her precious mutations had only delayed the inevitable. The Virus had several subtypes and more than two ways to enter the body.