by Malla Nunn
Minutes pass. She hangs up and strides across the pockmarked road with her high heels clicking and her hips swinging to a tune that only she can hear. A loose curl bounces against her flushed right cheek, the way it always does after she’s talked to him on the telephone. I can’t tell if winding a strand of hair around her index finger is a nervous habit or a soothing motion. She throws her arms wide and hugs me tight. Air escapes my lungs with a hard whoosh.
“He’s coming,” she whispers into my ear.
“When?” I want dates and times. In one way or another, he is always on his way. He tells us he’ll be in Mkuze, only five hours’ drive from us. Or he has a meeting coming up in Golela, and it’s a quick hop across the border from South Africa to us. Next, he’s visiting Kruger Park with the other children and he might drop by for a few hours. Maybe he’ll show up. Maybe he’ll come this weekend . . .
“Saturday.” Mother is giddy with joy. “He wants to see you before you leave for boarding school. And he wants to see Rian. You know how he worries about Rian’s asthma. Missing school. He cares about us, my girl, but you know how things are.”
Yes, I know “how things are.” I am an expert in the unwritten rules that govern our family and the boundaries that can’t be crossed or even mentioned out loud. I was born knowing. Mother reminds me of “how things are,” on a regular basis so I’ll remember that certain things in life can’t be changed.
“Come.” Mother grabs my arm, and we retrace our footsteps back in the direction of home. The vacant land around us rustles with sounds: secretive porcupines digging up roots, the soft pads of a house cat hunting small creatures through the bush, and a nightjar’s escalating song. Mother hums “Oh Happy Day” under her breath. She used to sing in the church choir, and she has a lovely voice even now.
Car headlights swing off Center Path, and two bright beams illuminate the craggy length of Live Long Street. We automatically jump off the road and into the tall grass that grows thick along the edge. A truck speeds past, and we tuck our faces into the crooks of our arms to avoid being choked by dust. The white Ford pickup truck with a dented front fender belongs to Fergus Meadows, who lives in the house opposite ours and inherited his father’s lumberyard five years ago.
A stone pings my leg, and I see that I’m cut. I wipe the blood away with white powdered fingers and step back onto the street. This is where Mother usually says, Hooligan! His father would die twice if he knew how spoiled that boy has turned out. He saw us walking in the dark. Don’t you think he didn’t. Two females. Alone. Yet he doesn’t even slow down. Imagine!
But tonight is different. Instead of criticizing Fergus Meadows’s manners, she flicks dust from her skirt and tucks her arm through mine. She hums and smiles at the half-moon in the sky. The neighborhood gossip and the sly glances thrown at her in the aisles of the new hypermarket on Louw Street can’t touch her. She is bulletproof. She is armored by a simple fact:
He is coming.
* * *
• • •
I lie awake to the rasp of my little brother’s asthmatic breath in the next room and the hard scrap of steel wool on the kitchen stovetop. Mother is cleaning in preparation for the visit. A maid comes every day except Sunday, but you can’t trust them, Mother says. They don’t know how to treat nice things. They are careless, and you have to watch they don’t break the fine china cups or leave streak marks on the windows.
It’s better to do the important things yourself, she says. That way you know they are done right. His arrival is the number one most important thing. The house has to be perfect when he walks through the door on Saturday, so Mother takes care of the details. She cleans the stove, washes the floors, and dusts the porcelain angels on the sideboard next to the settee. Tomorrow, on Friday, she will choose our outfits for his visit: a pretty dress with strappy sandals for me, and a pair of khaki shorts and a collared shirt for Rian. We will be clean and neat, to match the house.
The oven door opens, and the scratch, scratch, scratch of the steel-wool pad continues. To my knowledge, he has never once looked inside the oven or opened the cupboards. Maybe this visit he will, so Mother has to make ready.
I roll over and blink at the windup clock on my bedside table. It is twelve minutes to midnight.
Rian coughs and Mother cleans, and I think of the moths suspended above the phone booth, their delicate wings beating the air until dawn.
* * *
• • •
Sixteen is four years too old to be sitting on his knee, but when he collapses on the lounge chair, all rumpled and sweaty from driving tar roads and gravel paths and narrow dirt lanes to get to us, I do just that. I take his right knee and Rian takes his left, and we simultaneously plant kisses on opposite cheeks: a ritual that goes back to before my memory begins. Bristles prick my lips, and I think that he is tired, that he is older than when he delivered our Christmas presents five days before Christmas Day. He wanted to spend the holidays with us, Mother says, but you know how things are.
“Look at you,” he says to Rian, who is pale and exhausted from last night’s asthma attack. “You’ll be bigger than me soon.”
That’s possible. Rian is thirteen and sprouting fast while our father gets smaller each year, the black strands of his hair now overrun with gray. What he lacks in muscle and youth, he makes up for with brains, Mother says. He is an engineer. He builds the dams that hold the water that feeds the cornfields and fills the bathtubs of the people who live in town who’ve forgotten how to wash in rivers.
“And you.” He pinches my cheek. “You are even more beautiful than the last time I was here. I’ll have to buy myself a shotgun to keep the boys away.”
The idea of him armed with anything but a pen and a contour map makes me laugh. He loves reading books, drinking scotch, and cutting wood-block puzzles with Rian in the lean-to behind the kitchen. And what good will a gun do when he’s not here to take shots at those limber night-boys who might, one day, creep over my windowsill? He lives in faraway Johannesburg with the other children, who I imagine are red-haired and clever, with skin as white as smoke. Family friends stop them on the street corner and marvel at the resemblance. “Goodness,” they say. “You certainly take after your father. It’s uncanny.”
The others naturally take top billing. They are classified “European,” and Europeans are the kings and queens of everything. We are not European. Our skin has color. Our hair has curl, but not the steel-wool kink that’s hard to get a comb through, and praise Jesus, Mother says, for that small mercy. Our green eyes shine too bright in our brown faces, as if to confirm the combination of white and black blood that flows through our veins.
When he is here, he loves to tell us the story of how they met. Him on a work trip to the land title office in Mbabane, and her, slotting ancient charts into the right pigeonholes in the map room. Mother in a blue polka-dot dress, making order of the chaos. She smiled at him. A smile like an arrow to my heart, he says. Beautiful and shocking, all at once. And how he knew in a flash that, no matter what, Mother would be a part of his life. And so she is. Not the whole part, he forgets to add, but a small, bright piece of his life that’s hidden away in Swaziland. We are an add-on to Father’s regular life. We are the secret well that he drinks from when no one else is looking.
Mother sits cross-legged on the flowered carpet and beams to see us perched on his lap. She’d dip the scene in amber to preserve it if she could. We are together for one day and one night, and that will have to be sufficient until the next time.
“Are you thirsty?” she asks.
“Ja . . . I’m parched. The drive took longer than I thought, and Swazi roads . . .” He shakes his head as if remembering the high mountain passes and dangerous hairpin turns. “The minute you cross the border, it’s like going back fifty years. Cows and people everywhere, and more potholes than tar.”
“Go get a beer from the ic
ebox, Adele.” Mother tucks a strand of freshly ironed hair behind her ear and pulls a tragic face. “Daddy has to wash the Swazi dust from his throat.”
Father smiles at her comical expression, the way it distorts her features without touching her natural beauty. Whoever picks combinations of skin color, eye color, and body shape got Mother just right. She is mixed-race, like us, with golden-brown skin, flashing green eyes, and pleasing curves.
I go to the kitchen to get the beer. The maid is in the backyard, hanging up my blue-checkered school uniform and the knee-high white socks that go with it. Keeping white socks white in the blooming dust and the red earth of Keziah Christian Academy is almost impossible. I plunge my hand into the icebox, and the shock of the cold bottle against my palm shifts my thoughts from the dying days of the school break. Bowls of stiff porridge and stale toast will come around soon enough.
I shake off my bad feelings about returning to school. He is here and sulking is forbidden. When he is here, we are happy. When he is here, we are grateful and well-behaved so he’ll have a good reason to come back and visit us again. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, Mother says, and don’t believe what people tell you, miss. Misery might love company, but misery has to learn to shut up and take care of itself.
I pop the cap from the beer with a metal opener, and white foam rims the lip. I step into the lounge room, and I remember to smile.
2
And the First Shall Be Last
We are late. Of all the times and places to be late, the Manzini bus station is the worst. Men drag goats through the maze of buses while women hold live chickens with their feet tied together. The women push through the crowd while the chickens flap and squawk. Children and women sell roasted corn, boiled peanuts, and bags of deep-fried fat cakes to passengers about to board the smoky buses, from pans they carry awkwardly in their arms. Passengers also buy pineapples, mangoes, and bananas from woven baskets carried on sellers’ heads. Pickup trucks reverse out of narrow spaces, with their horns blaring, their worn tires flattened by the weight of the passengers packed shoulder to shoulder in their open beds.
Dust is everywhere. The purple heads of the bougainvillea strangle the chain-link fence outside of B&B Farm Supplies: you need it. we got it. Red dirt weighs the flowers down. A million motes suspended in the air catch the early-morning sun.
Animals bleat, children cry, and bus-ticket sellers call out their destinations in singsong voices. “Quick, quick time to Johannesburg. No stopping. Best seat for you, Mama.” “Smooth ride to Durban by Hlatikulu, Golela, and Jozini. Brothers, sisters . . . all welcome.”
We hurry through the dust and noise to the far end of the bus ranks. My heart lurches against my ribs. We are too late. All the good spots are already taken. If Delia, my best school friend, hasn’t saved a place for me, I will be forced to the middle of the bus, where the lower-class students sit dressed in hand-me-down clothing, or, worse still, I’ll have to make the long walk to the very back of the bus, where the poor and smelly students group together like livestock. I walk faster, and the corner of my suitcase bumps against my knees.
“There.” Rian points to a decrepit bus with a faded blue wave painted on the side.
All the buses have names. There’s Thunder Road, True Love, Lightning Fast, and finally, the Ocean Current, which drops students off at Keziah Christian Academy at the beginning of the school term and picks them up again on the first day of the holidays. It’s a public bus, but today the exclusively mixed-race students of the academy will take up most of the spaces. Black people with common sense wait to catch the next bus heading south to the sleepy part of Swaziland. They know that mixed-race children only stand up for white people.
On paper, we are all citizens of the British protectorate of Swaziland, but really, we are one people divided into three separate groups: white people, mixed-race people, and native Swazis. Each group has their own social clubs and schools, their own traditions and rules. Crossover between the groups happens, but it’s rare and endlessly talked about on the street corners and inside Bella’s Beauty Salon for All Types.
My sweaty palms grip the handle of my suitcase, and my shoulders ache from hauling its dead weight from the crossroads where Father dropped us off on his way back to Johannesburg.
“See? The bus is still here.” Mother’s breath comes fast. She is annoyed that I rushed us to get here. “All that fuss over nothing, Adele. We have plenty of time.”
I give my suitcase to a skinny black man, who throws it onto the roof of the Ocean Current, where another skinny black man, barefoot and shining with sweat, adds my case to a mountain of luggage already piled there. Faces peer out of the dusty windows. I look frantically from the front row to the back. I cannot see a vacant window seat.
“Here.” Mother gives me a small cardboard box of impago, food packed especially for long road trips and enough to tide me over on the eighty-eight-mile journey ahead. Inside will be boiled eggs, strips of air-dried beef, thick slices of buttered bread, and maybe an orange. Whatever the cupboard had to give.
I say, “Sorry for the rush.”
The real reason I have rushed us to the bus station is my secret. Mother grew up in a shack with dirt floors, and the poor girl that she was still haunts her: the two pairs of underwear made from old flour sacks that chafed her skin, a broken comb with six uneven teeth to do the combing, and the daily walk from a mud hut to Keziah Academy in shoes with more holes than leather. She never caught the Ocean Current to school, so she has no idea how the seating on the bus works. If she knew, she’d smack me for playing a part in keeping the rich students and the poor students apart, so I’m not about to tell her.
“Be good.” She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and blinks back tears. “Mind your teachers and keep up your marks.”
“I will.” I let her hug me in front of the crowded bus. Snickers come from the open windows. Hugging is for babies. I love the feeling of being held close, but I keep my face blank. Showing my emotions will get me teased by the bully boys for weeks.
I pull out of Mother’s embrace and go to ruffle Rian’s hair. He steps back and offers me his hand instead. Already man of the house. Rian’s independence annoys me, because showing him affection in public is actually allowed. Everyone knows that Rian is sick. The last time he had a major asthma attack was smack in the middle of second term last year. May 12. I remember the date. Mr. Vincent, the white American principal of Keziah Academy, drove the dirt road from school to the Norwegian hospital in Mahamba with the high beams on and the accelerator pressed to the floor. Steep mountain passes fell away into darkness, and stones pinged the underside of the car. Death rode with us. We heard it shortening Rian’s breath, willing him to surrender. To stop breathing.
Mrs. Vincent sang the Halls of the Holy hymn book from the first page to the last while I clutched my brother’s hand and prayed—not for show, the way I do in chapel, but for real. Please, God. Don’t take him. Take another boy. Take one of the mean ones. Take Richard B, Gordon Number Three, or Matthew with the lazy eye. Please. They deserve to suffer.
The doctor at the Norwegian hospital said that Rian had severe asthma—up until then, we’d called what he had “the struggles”—and he needed a mother’s care and a clinic nearby. Our house is three miles from Christ the Redeemer Hospital, where the Catholic sisters inject the sick with needles and pull rotten teeth out with pliers.
Now Rian stays home and gets his lessons via the mail. In any case, he’s too delicate to survive the bullies who control the boys’ dormitory, and I am secretly relieved that he has stopped coming to Keziah. Although I tell him I miss him at school, things are easier now that I don’t have to defend him from Richard B, Gordon Number Three, or Matthew with the lazy eye.
“Be a good boy for Mummy,” I say. “See that she doesn’t get too lonely, and make sure to read all the books that Daddy brought you from Johannesburg.”
>
“Of course!” Rian is offended by my advice, which is, after all, just me repeating words I’ve heard grown-ups say to children.
The ticket seller leans out of the bus with one hand clinging to the top of the chrome lip above the door. He whistles to get our attention. “Ocean Current to Durban, leaving now, now, now!”
I tuck the box of impago under my arm, throw Mother and Rian a last look, and climb aboard. I am sick with nerves, because I know what I will find when I reach the top of the stairs: rows of occupied seats stretching all the way to the poor children at the back of the bus. Unless Delia has saved me a place, I am doomed to four hours in rough company. I buy a ticket with the money that Mother gave me and pocket the change. It’s enough for me to buy one item a week from the school store.
I step into the aisle and check the first two rows. Both are taken by black teachers from the Cross of Nazareth, a native school fifteen miles from the academy. Mr. Vincent, our American principal, has told us to be polite to the black teachers and to show them respect. We do as we’re told, not because we believe that natives are equal to us—they are not—but because we’re afraid of being punished for our rudeness.
From row three on, mixed-race students in every shade, from eggshell white to burned charcoal, stare up at me. They are waiting for something, but I can’t tell what. I start walking and see Delia in the fifth row. There’s an empty seat beside her. She’s saved a place for me. Praise be. I hurry toward her, ready to shimmy past her knees to claim the window seat.
I grab the metal handle on the chair back and blink in disbelief when a cinnamon-brown girl with glossy braids dressed with Vaseline pulls a bag of peppermint chews from the box at her feet and sits up in the seat that’s meant for me. I don’t know her, but her mint-green dress is brand-new, and the heart-shaped locket around her neck is sparkling silver.
