by Gaile Parkin
Then a man at the side of the road tried to flag down the Hi-Ace, and Benedict joined all the others in shouting, ‘We’re not a bloody taxi!’ and then laughing. Bloody wasn’t a nice word and the Tungarazas weren’t supposed to say it. But still.
After homework that afternoon, while the girls took turns doing each other’s hair in their bedroom, and the younger boys watched cartoons on TV, Benedict lay flat on his stomach on the grass near the flower bed, watching a creature as long as one of Baba’s hands basking in the late-afternoon warmth of one of the steps down to the garage. It was either a lizard or a skink; he wasn’t sure. He observed it carefully, trying to remember all its details so he wouldn’t be confused when he looked it up in the book later.
Lizards could sometimes be a bit flat, but this one had a rather thick body that was striped along its length: dark brown on top, then a lighter brown on its side, then a black stripe just above its white belly. He was trying to decide whether to remember its throat as yellow or orange, when it shot off the step and disappeared amongst the banana trees, frightened by the sudden noise of a vehicle heading up towards the garage.
It was the Ubuntu Funerals van! Eh! For a moment Benedict was unsure what to do. Was he in some kind of trouble? Was somebody at the other house late? Should he go down and greet the people?
Or maybe he should stay exactly where he was, flat on the grass behind the flowers, unmoving and unseen, like Petros.
The van disappeared into the garage, and then the lady and the tall man he had spoken to before emerged and walked towards the other house. The man was carrying something that looked a bit like the box Benedict’s new pair of shoes had come in. Eh, of course! Auntie Rachel and Uncle Enock were having a birthday party for the dairy manager after the milking that evening. The Ubuntu Funerals people were simply coming early for the party and bringing a gift.
Benedict dusted himself down and went inside to look up the lizard. Mama was just finishing off the cake for the party. She had suggested a cake shaped like a silver-grey milking bucket lying on its side with white milk spilling out of it, but Auntie Rachel had said no, that made her think of kicking a bucket, which was a way of saying becoming late, and that wasn’t right for a man who was turning forty, which was old in Swaziland.
Mama had told her about old Mrs Gama who was much older than the dairy manager, and Auntie Rachel had said that the people who were already old before, those people had been able to get older like old Mrs Gama had, but nowadays most people were young on account of the average person not managing to have a thirtieth birthday.
It was a big celebration for the dairy manager because nobody in his family was as old as he was, so the cake had to be happy and not about kicking a bucket. So Mama had made the side view of the underbelly of a cow with a fat pink udder with four teats. On the cake-board she had used her plastic icing syringe to make forty stars of white icing in four rows of ten, looking like drops of milk from each of the teats. Now she was busy fixing a white birthday-candle into each drop of milk.
As Benedict looked for the section on reptiles in the book, he thought about the Ubuntu Funerals van. It wasn’t very nice to bring a funeral van to a party, especially a party for somebody who shouldn’t have a cake about kicking a bucket. He knew from Baba what ubuntu was. It was a word there wasn’t a word for in English or Swahili, it just had to be called ubuntu otherwise you had to use lots of other words instead: words that talked about how human beings were all connected, and about how people needed other people in order to become the best people they could be, and about how working together with other people made people human.
When he discovered that it was a skink, not a lizard, he wondered if skinks had their own kind of ubuntu. Was it important to a skink that it should be the best possible skink that it could be? Did skinks support and help one another? Did they feel connected to all other skinks? Or maybe they felt connected to all of God’s creatures. He was wondering if there was a word for an ubuntu that was about connecting people to all other animals instead of just to other people, when somebody knocked on the open front door and a lady’s voice called, ‘Sawubona?’
‘Karibu!’ called Mama in Swahili, before correcting herself in siSwati. ‘Eh, sorry! Ngena!’
The funeral people stepped into the lounge, the man still holding the box.
‘Hello, Benedict,’ said the lady. ‘Hello children!’ She waved to the boys on the couch in front of the TV, and then went towards the other end of the dining table where Mama was standing up and wiping her hands on a cloth.
The man nodded a greeting at Benedict, whose eyes were big with surprise.
‘And you must be Benedict’s mother.’ The lady extended her hand and Mama shook it, looking confused. ‘I’m Zodwa Shabangu, and this is my colleague Jabulani Ndwandwe.’
Mama shook his hand, too. ‘I’m happy to meet you. Are you... Are you Benedict’s teachers?’
‘No, no, we’re the people from Ubuntu Funerals,’ said Zodwa, handing Mama a business card. ‘I’m the director. Mrs Patel told us where to find you.’
Mama looked at the card. Benedict could tell that she was very confused, but it was all happening too quickly for him to explain.
‘Eh!’ Mama looked up from the card, fear spreading suddenly across her face. The beautiful brown of her skin began to turn grey, and when her voice came, it was a whisper. ‘Is my husband late?’
Her body seemed to sink, and Jabulani rushed forward to hold her up, putting the box on the table. Zodwa pulled out a chair, and they helped her to sit.
‘Mama, no!’ cried Benedict.
‘Nobody is late, my dear.’ Zodwa’s voice was kind but firm. ‘Everybody is fine.’
‘Sisi, we’ve just come to see Benedict,’ Jabulani said softly, kneeling beside Mama’s chair and stroking her arm.
Mama breathed out loudly. She looked up at Benedict.
‘I’m sorry, Mama,’ he said, feeling tears beginning to prick in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What is it that you’ve done?’ she asked him.
Zodwa put an arm around Benedict. ‘No, no, he’s done nothing wrong. Didn’t he tell you about meeting us last week?’
‘He told me nothing.’ Mama’s eyes were accusing; his own flooded with tears.
Mama told Moses and Daniel to turn off the TV and sent them to play outside, then she sent Benedict to wake Titi up from her afternoon nap and have her make tea for everybody. When he had done that, he went into the bedroom and curled up on his bed, covering his head with his pillow so that if his brothers came in they wouldn’t see that he was crying. His tears were about upsetting Mama, but the fact that they had come meant that he had let himself down, too.
Mama had told him that if somebody had tears inside, those tears needed to be cried out, and it didn’t matter if the somebody who cried them out was a boy, a girl, a man or a lady; anybody was allowed to be sad. But Baba had told him that he was supposed to be strong on account of being the eldest boy.
It didn’t matter that he was still young, or that he sometimes felt that he was still small. It didn’t matter that Grace and Faith were older than him. They were girls. He was the eldest boy, and the eldest boy had responsibilities. He was supposed to take care of his sisters, he was supposed to be a good example to his younger brothers, and he was supposed to look after the whole entire family if Baba ever became late.
Under the pillow, he sniffed loudly.
Eh! Say the funeral people had come to say that Baba was late! Imagine! And here he was in the bedroom, weeping like a baby! Eh!
He sat up and wiped his eyes with the edge of his T-shirt, taking a few deep breaths to calm himself. Then he went into the bathroom to splash water on his face, recognising as he did so that his tears had been selfish. Mama had thought that Baba was late! Eh! What a fright she must have had!
And it was all his fault.
In the lounge, Jabulani was tucking in to a large slice of chocolate cake iced in the same pink that Mama had used for t
he udder, while Zodwa was looking through the album of photographs of Mama’s cakes and sipping from a mug of tea made the Tanzanian way with boiled milk and plenty of sugar and cardamom.
‘I’m sorry, Mama.’
Mama opened her arms wide, and he went to her on the couch, squashing up against her large, soft body and burying his face in the clean, cocoa-butter smell of her neck. He stayed there only a few seconds, knowing that he was a bit too big now for her to feel comfortable with him on her lap. Slipping down next to her on the couch, her right arm still holding him, he apologised again.
She pulled him closer and planted a kiss on his forehead.
‘We’re sorry too, nè?’ Zodwa leaned forward, putting her mug of tea down on the coffee table and patting his leg. ‘Eish! We felt so bad!’
‘Sorry, nè?’ said Jabulani.
‘Your mother’s right, though. A cup tea and a slice of cake can make everything better. Have you had?’
Mama sent him into the kitchen, where Titi was scrubbing the milk saucepan in the sink.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked him, leaving the saucepan and drying her hands on a cloth.
He knew she had seen his tears when he had woken her. He said he was fine, but she hugged him anyway, and then she insisted that he have the cup of tea that was waiting for her on the draining board with a saucer on top of it to keep it warm.
‘Don’t keep them waiting,’ she whispered, cutting him a thick slice of cake. ‘They have something for you.’
‘For me?’ Benedict remembered the small box. ‘Eh!’
But when he went back into the lounge with his tea and cake, the box wasn’t where it had been on the dining table, and it wasn’t on the coffee table or either of the couches. He ate and drank quietly while the grown-ups talked.
‘My husband Ubuntu,’ Zodwa was saying between mouthfuls of cake, ‘he’s the one who started the business. Then when Ubuntu himself was late in an accident, eish, I don’t know how it is in your country, my dear, but here a woman can’t inherit a business, she’s a child in the eyes of the law. Some things may be beginning to change now, slow-slow, but at the time of Ubuntu’s accident there was no way.’
‘I’ve heard of such things.’
‘The business went to his younger brother. Thanks God he’s an academic, doesn’t want to be dealing with the late. So he lets me do what I want with the business and he takes a percentage.’
‘That is very good,’ said Mama, finishing her cake before the others. Benedict knew that her slice had been smaller on account of her watching her hips.
‘It’s a good business to be in,’ said Jabulani. ‘Second only to security.’
Benedict knew about the security business: Sifiso’s father worked in it. Every morning, Sifiso’s father dropped him at school in the Buffalo Soldiers van after he’d been out early collecting Buffalo Soldiers from their night shifts and dropping others off for day shift. He had started as a guard protecting people’s homes at night, and then he had got a promotion to supervisor, which made Sifiso’s mother happier because she didn’t have to worry about him getting shot any more. Getting shot was something that Benedict didn’t like to think about, so he hadn’t told Sifiso that his own first baba had got shot even without being a security guard; he had simply been somebody coming home and finding robbers in his house.
‘Eish, but it’s competitive! People are trying to start up their own funeral businesses all the time.’
‘A younger business can be less professional,’ said Mama.
‘Mm.’ Zodwa had just taken a sip of tea. She swallowed. ‘Up to so far, we’ve survived by being experienced professionals. But we need to find a way to differentiate ourselves in the market. We need an edge.’
‘What’s a nedge?’ asked Benedict.
‘Edge, nè? Edge,’ said Zodwa. ‘It’s what makes you stand out as different so that customers come to your business rather than the business next door. Sometimes its called your unique selling point.’
‘Eh! Now you are talking like my husband!’
‘He’s also done a certificate in business management?’
‘He’s done so many things! He’s a consultant here at the Ministry for Trade and Industry. His job is to find ways to increase Swazi exports throughout the world, more especially to research ways of encouraging other African countries to prefer Swazi goods rather than importing things from afar.’ Mama flapped her hands around in the air. ‘Something complicated like that. I’m not an educated somebody myself.’
Benedict finished his tea, and as soon as he put his mug down on the coffee table next to his empty plate, Jabulani leaned towards him and spoke softly while Mama and Zodwa talked.
‘I have something for you.’
‘Eh!’
‘Your mother made me put it outside. Come.’
Benedict followed him out through the front door and round to the veranda, where the box sat on top of the stack of plastic chairs against the wall that they never used for sitting on out there on account of Mama not wanting to be in the garden because of snakes.
Jabulani gave the box to Benedict, and he took it carefully. It was made of a light-coloured wood, and worked into its lid was a beautiful carving of a hoopoe. Breathing in sharply, he looked up at Jabulani.
‘Is it...?’
‘Yes. It’s your King Solomon’s queen. I made the casket myself.’
‘Eh! It’s so beautiful!’ Benedict turned it round in his hands, examining it from every angle. ‘Does it open?’
‘No, I glued it shut. She broke into pieces when I pulled her off the van’s grille, so I went for closed casket. Sorry, nè? I kept her in a plastic bag in the fridge till I’d finished making it.’
Benedict didn’t know what to say. Nobody had ever done anything like this for him before. There was so much work in the carving!
‘Shall we bury her now, or do you want to invite your friends and family?’
Benedict thought about it. Giveness and Sifiso wouldn’t understand, and nobody in his family would be interested in a funeral for a bird. Baba might even shake his head and look at him with disappointment. Uncle Enock, maybe. But Uncle Enock might say something about the hoopoe flapping its wings in Bird Heaven now, and Benedict didn’t want to think about himself maybe one day ending up in a separate Heaven without any beautiful birds to look at.
‘Let’s do it now,’ he said, glad to have Jabulani with him.
They chose to bury the bird under the lucky-bean tree at the side of the house on account of the hoopoe being lucky to be buried in such a beautiful casket, and on account of a lucky-bean tree also being called a sacred coral tree. Somewhere sacred was a proper place for a queen. And when the tree’s flowers came they would be red, which was the colour of royalty in Swaziland. It was also a good place for the burial because queens wore jewellery, and lucky-bean seeds were often threaded together to make necklaces. Jabulani said the bark of the tree was good for treating aching joints, which the hoopoe might be experiencing, being all in pieces. And the tree was next to the hedge of yesterday, today and tomorrow bushes that would help the bird to be remembered for eternity.
Taking turns with the small spade Benedict kept outside the back door for his chore of clearing any kinyezi the monkeys did on the grass, they worked together to dig a hole, place the casket in it, and pat the soil into a small mound on top.
Then Jabulani stood to the side as Benedict knelt, crossing himself and saying a silent prayer. He asked God to bless the hoopoe and to look after her in Heaven even though she had given King Solomon some bad advice about not respecting ladies, and to bless Jabulani for making such a beautiful casket. And then he asked God to do everything He could to help an edge to come to Ubuntu Funerals.
Mama didn’t need an edge for her business, she already had one: she was confidential. A customer could tell Mama anything they wanted, and Mama would never tell. But Mama’s business needed customers, and while he was on his knees, Benedict took the opportunity to as
k God for some of those.
He stood and brushed the soil from his knees. ‘Thank you, Jabulani.’
‘Not to mention.’
‘The casket is so beautiful I almost didn’t want to bury it.’
‘I liked making that! Eish, it was a nice change from the ones we make every day!’
They made their way past the family’s washing lines and round the back of the house, past the window of the bathroom that belonged to Mama and Baba’s bedroom, and past the window of the bathroom for Titi and the children. Outside the kitchen, next to the gas tank for Mama’s special oven that they had brought with them on the trailer behind the red Microbus, was the outside sink made of concrete where Titi did their washing. There they washed the soil off their hands, and Titi gave them a towel to use, handing it to them carefully because her hands smelled of the onions she was chopping.
‘Jabulani!’ Zodwa’s voice came from inside the house.
They went in through the kitchen, finding Zodwa standing at the dining table with her purse, counting out some emalangeni notes which Mama took, folded, and tucked through her neckline into her underwear.
‘It’ll be ready next week Friday, as we’ve agreed,’ said Mama, patting the Cake Order Form that lay on the table.
‘Good. I’m so pleased I was able to give you some business after we scared you so badly. Come, Jabulani, ours is not to linger, nè?’
As he watched Mama walking with them down the steps to the garage, Benedict held the Cake Order Form to his chest.
Eh! God could answer a prayer quickly sometimes.
FIVE
ON SATURDAY MORNING, BABA TOOK BENEDICT AND his brothers and sisters to the public library in Mbabane. Mama and Titi never went there; Baba usually dropped them at the supermarket at either The Plaza or The Mall so that they could do the family’s shopping for the week. Baba didn’t mind if Mama shopped at the supermarket, on account of prices there being the same for everybody, but if they were going to a market where you could argue for a lower price, Baba wanted to do that himself because Mama was too kind. Mama said she was being fair to the seller, but Baba said she was being unfair to his budget.
