The Boy Next Door

by Irene Sabatini

  “A little detour,” he says.

  He does a U-turn and we drive towards Belmont.

  I think of Uncle Robson who works at the Lobels’ factory down one of these side roads; whenever he comes to visit, he brings us two or three loaves of bread, which have not risen well or are slightly burnt, and some buns.

  We pass the industrial sites (in my head I say out loud all the names of the factories along the road) and finally he stops at a gate.

  He shows the guard some papers and says his name and then I hear, “Sarah Price.”

  I read the sign on the guard post: welcome to ingutsheni mental hospital.

  After checking the papers and names against the information on his clipboard, the guard unlocks the gate.

  Ian parks the car in the visitors’ section.

  “Wait here,” he says. “And keep the doors locked. I won’t be long.”

  I sit in the car and watch him walk up the dirt path, jump up some steps, and wait at the door.

  I watch him disappear inside.

  On the dirt path there is a man mumbling to himself and twisting his hair. Every now and then he throws his hands in the air and clutches at it as if he is trying to catch butterflies or flying ants. Then he goes back to mumbling and twisting his hair. I turn my head and watch the woman sitting on a bench suddenly jump up and stamp her feet on the ground. And then she bends down and starts scratching at it with her fingers. I see attendants in white walking along paths, and over by the walls, there are men, women standing. I am hot in the car. I unwind the window. The air is so still and quiet. One of the attendants looks at me and waves. I wave back. I put the palm of my hand on the metal of the car. It’s burning. I look by the bench again and see the attendant who waved pull the woman from the ground and call out to the men and women by the wall. There are cars and trucks outside, but this place seems to make everything silent, a world in itself.

  “Shit, I hate this,” he says when he comes back. “I’d rather be dead than…”

  And then he’s quiet.

  He drives for a long while, holding the steering wheel so tight as if he wants to snap it in two.

  At a robot he says, “When I’ve made some real dosh I’ll find something better, private. I’ll sort it out.”

  He is talking to himself, making plans, and then he remembers me. “Now you really know Bullies, warts and all, heh.”

  He looks at me and tries to smile. I look out at the robot and watch it turn green.

  For a long time we drive without talking until I say to him, “Do… do white people get put in there, too?”

  He brakes hard and for a while there is just his breathing.

  He opens the door, slams it, and stands outside.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean…”

  He is punching his right palm with his left fist.

  “No problem,” he snaps, looking at the stray dog that has stopped to take a look at us. “Just a question.”

  But he doesn’t answer it and I don’t ask him again.

  25.

  I can’t sleep.

  I go to the kitchen and I take out the Histalax cough mixture. I take the bottle to my room. I put it on my lips. I open my mouth. I drink and drink.

  Geraldine always carried a bottle with her at school when a test was coming. She said it calmed her nerves. She would take swigs of it in the toilets.

  I put the bottle back in the fridge and I go back to my room. I lie on my bed. I see Ian standing. He’s wearing a blue shirt, which brings out his eyes. He’s swaying this way and that. And he is saying something I can’t hear. And then, it’s morning.

  The room smells of chloroform and the frogs are lying on the white sheet waiting. The frog makes me want to cry. He should be out jumping and croaking, but he is here waiting for me to cut him up, to show off his heart and lungs, pin them on a board. I don’t want to do it. But I have to. I pick up the scalpel and I press it on the frog’s stomach. I can’t remember how I’m supposed to start. All the way down, all the way up? I look sideways and see Tracey pushing the blade in; I copy her.

  Afterwards I sit on a bench in the quadrangle. I take out my peanut butter sandwich and feel sick looking at in my hand.

  I think of Bridgette and I try to stop. I try and try not to remember.

  “Eeeeee…!”

  I look up and see a bunch of girls who’ve come back from Chicken Licken, pushing and shoving each other, laughing and shouting, their hands clutching paper bags streaked with oil, full of chicken burgers and chips, knocking against their thighs.

  I see Sophia turn around, see me. I see her whisper something to Brenda, give her a high five. I see her walk over, throwing her head back, laughing at something one of her friends has called out. And here she is now, hands on hips, chewing gum, ready to have some more fun.

  “Everyone’s saying your friend killed her baby, shame.”

  She blows a big bubble and pops it. She takes the gum out of her mouth, stretches it out and rolls it into a ball again, puts it back in her mouth.

  I think of how she got a week’s detention because Miss Turner caught her reading Lace in class. The blockbuster was on her lap, her exercise book on top of it.

  Ever since the book became hot news, Sophia and her gang have been calling other girls “bitches.”

  I think of Bridgette and me right at the last table in Grasshut, Bridgette reading the juiciest bits to me using a small torch because it was so dark, sucking her chocolate milk shake in between.

  “Stop, I don’t want to hear anymore; shush, you’re too loud.”

  Some of the words made me feel funny.

  “Lins, don’t be so squeamish. You can learn lots from her.”

  Her was the film siren Lili, who was looking for her mother who had abandoned her a as a baby.

  She would skip over the boring bits and go to the parts where something juicy was happening.

  “Lins, look how you can give yourself pleasure without a man.”

  “No, Bridgette, stop!” And we would end up giggling, the two of us.

  I look up at Sophia and my head is sore with Bridgette.

  “She thought she was so smart. They’ll put her in jail, you know. Maybe even you. If you confess…”

  “Oh, shut up,” I say, getting up.

  She stands there with her mouth wide open.

  I hope she chokes on her bubble gum and dies.

  There is a bomb alert at Woolworths. Someone has left a suitcase in one of the aisles. So I cross the road to OK’s and get a bunch of Cadbury’s Flakes. The Fawcett’s security guard looks at me and I walk right past him, right out the door, and I do not turn my head once to check if his eyes are still glued on me.

  I sit on my bed and break the chocolate into tiny, tiny pieces. I lick my hands and stick them in the chocolate, and then I start licking it off my hands. I do this until there is no more.

  I go into the bathroom. I lock the door. I look at my face in the mirror. I watch myself put my finger in my mouth; I push my finger as far back as it will go. I hold my hands on the sink and watch it fill with chocolate.

  I go out of the house, over to the back.

  Rosanna is lying on the mat, making a strange noise.

  “The baby is coming,” she gasps. “The ambulance. Call the ambulance, Sisi.”

  I stand there and then I run back into the house. I cannot think of the phone number. I cannot think of where the phone book is. And then I remember Daddy has all the emergency numbers on the wall above the phone. I dial seven, one, seven, one, seven. The phone rings and rings. No one answers. It rings and rings. I put it down and dial again. It rings and rings. No one answers. I run out of the house. Rosanna is moaning and crying. I run out over to Number 18 shouting, “The baby, the baby, Rosanna!”

  Ian walks out of the boy’s kaya. He’s rubbing his eyes as if he’s been asleep. He’s wearing a blue shirt, the buttons done up wrong.

  “What the…”

  “It’s
Rosanna, the baby’s coming, I don’t know…”

  “So call the fricking ambulance.”

  “I tried; no one’s answering.”

  “Jeez man.”

  He jumps over the fence and stands outside the door.

  “Jeez man, she’s in a bad way. We’ll put her in the car. Take her to the hospital. Try the ambulance again.”

  I go back to the house, try, but still no answer.

  Ian tries to lift Rosanna, but she starts to scream. “No, no, oh, oh…”

  “The baby’s head, it’s fricking huge.”

  I look and I see it. The baby coming out.

  “Put your hands under, Lindiwe. You don’t want the little bugger to get concussed or something.”

  Rosanna is pushing and pushing and then, just like that, all of the baby is out, in my hands.

  The baby is wet and slimy and crying.

  “Put him against her stomach, so he gets some heat or something. Does she have a blanket?”

  I put a blanket over the baby.

  “I’ll go and get an ambulance,” he says.

  I stay behind.

  Rosanna is shivering.

  I look down at the baby.

  Someone comes into the room.

  It’s Mummy.

  She looks up at Rosanna, then down at the baby.

  “It’s just a girl,” she says and goes away.

  The ambulance arrives. They take Rosanna and the baby away.

  I look for Ian, but he is gone.

  I go in the kitchen and Mummy is there. She is humming. The Lord Is My Shepherd.

  “Lindiwe, my child.”

  “Yes, mummy.”

  I wait for a bit and then I say, “I have to go and study.”

  “You are a good child. Don’t study too hard.”

  I wait for Daddy by the gate.

  When he comes home, I tell him about Rosanna and the baby.

  He goes in the lounge and sits there with Mummy.

  I go in my room, and I think of Rosanna and the baby.

  The baby who is my sister.

  Half.

  26.

  “So you were born in the boondocks, heh? Kamativi. Me, I’m a city boy through and through. Mater Dei. Jeez, that little bugger was as ugly as hell. Did you check the nose of that thing, like a blimming hippo.”

  “She’s just a baby.”

  “Yah, yah. I don’t mean anything. Just commenting. Anyway, babies are funny looking full stop: white, black, yellow, curry munchers, porcs, the whole lot of them.”

  He gets up from the grass and tosses away the stick he’s been hitting the backs of his hands with. He stretches his arms and yawns. He comes and sits with me on the bench, and we both look out to the fountain that isn’t spewing any water because of the drought.

  When he was on the grass, talking, I could look at him without being shy; it wasn’t staring. While he was talking, I was thinking that he didn’t look like any white guy I had ever seen in Bulawayo. I was trying to work out if that was because I was getting to know him. If I didn’t know him, if I saw him in the streets, would I think, Oh, there’s a Rhodie. I was trying to think what made him different, to me, what I liked about him, trying to list things in my head. But it was hard to make a list because it seemed that I kept coming to one thing: he’s Ian, the boy from next door, the person I’m beginning to know. It was like asking myself why I liked Bridgette. I couldn’t really answer that except to say, she’s my friend, we get on well together; she’s Bridgette.

  “I got my rands today. And the fossil at the bank giving me such a hard time about it like it was his dosh I was taking. Hey, the old man worked for it fair and square.”

  I stretch out my leg and he stretches his out, too. He slings his leg over mine.

  “Leg wrestling. Jeez, man, you’re weak. And you’ve got Ndebele blood in you. You need to eat more sadza and relish.”

  And then he picks up my hand from the bench and puts it on his thigh. I hold my breath. He puts his hand over mine.

  “Jeez, you’re a midget.”

  I look at all the scars on his hand. He lets me look. And then I take my finger and trace the scars. He lets me do this.

  I’ve seen him smack his keys on his hands so hard there was actually blood. I’ve seen him gnawing at them with his teeth and that really frightened me because it looked like he wanted to get right into his veins.

  “She’d take my hands and put fricking polish on the nails,” he said once when I had the courage to say, “Please, don’t.”

  “Fricking pink, too.”

  And that was all.

  He laces his fingers over mine, lifts both our hands so that his elbow rests on his thigh.

  “I can’t believe how light you are,” he says, letting go of my hand. “And your wrists…”

  “Could you give me a lift?”

  “A lift? Now? Where to?”

  “When you leave for South Africa. You can drop me in Gwanda.”

  “Gwanda! Are you penga? What the hell do you want to do in Gwanda?”

  “Can you give me a lift? It’s on the way, or else I’ll just hitchhike.”

  “Then hitchhike. I’m not…” He looks at me and shakes his head.

  “Please, I… I have a message to give Rosanna’s aunt.”

  My face is burning and my mouth is dry. I try to keep looking at him, but I can’t hold his eyes. I look at the mermaids of the fountain.

  “Lindiwe, there’s no ways I’m—jeez, man, I’ve got enough on my plate.”

  “Please, I’ll go and come back the same day. I’ll take the bus home. Please.”

  I don’t like the sound of my voice.

  And then I feel the tip of his finger on my nose. I turn my face to him, dislodge his finger onto my lips. I feel the gentle pressure of his flesh, and my heart is thumping so hard I am sure he can hear it, feel it.

  “I’ll think about it, okay.”

  I don’t tell him of Mummy’s shouting and her silences. I don’t tell him of how Daddy is trying so hard not to love his new daughter or even notice her. I don’t tell him of school; how the girls there are bored with me, how they ignore me completely. I don’t tell him how much I miss Bridgette, how she’s been sent away. I sit in the car keeping everything inside like I always do. And the most important thing I don’t tell him is that he is the only one, the only one, who truly knows I exist.

  I don’t tell him that it’s not Gwanda where I intend to stop.

  There’s an army truck outside the gate. Daddy tells me to go in my room, lock the door.

  From the window I can see two soldiers coming out from Maphosa’s room.

  27.

  Two days later he picks me up at the Holiday Inn.

  I changed from my school uniform in the toilets at Haddon and Sly.

  “Nice earrings,” he says.

  I put my hands on my ears.

  “You’re a hard case,” he says. “A fricking hard case.”

  But he’s smiling.

  I want to tell him so many things. How Prince Charles shook my hand outside the City Hall when he came for independence. How proud Mummy was and how Daddy scolded her for taking me there into the crowds where anything could have happened, like getting squashed to death by overexcited would-be Zimbabweans. How I looked and looked at my hands afterward to see if they were any different because Mummy said I had shaken “the hands of a prince.” Or how, last year, I got stuck at the Eisteddfod public speaking competition, and I stood on the stage in front of hundreds of people, including Mummy and Daddy, also Uncle and Aunty Wesley, my mouth opening and closing, opening, hoping that words from the air all around would somehow enter and give me once again the power of speech; how I could hear every single noise in the hall, every whisper, giggle, cough, except what I was desperately looking for, my words, until finally the Master of Ceremonies led me away, and just as I got behind the curtain, the words came, “In Praise of Silence,” my speech. How Mummy and Daddy greeted me with silence,
and Uncle Wesley, who had just come from Canada where he had done a doctorate in aeronautics and who Daddy respected very much, made Daddy take us all to Eskimo Hut, the Kings of Ice Cream, where Uncle Wesley bought me a double ice cream cone and Aunty Wesley said that in Canada she had seen grown men shaking in front of podiums and she had heard someone say that the best approach to public speaking was to think of your audience with no clothes on. Aunty Wesley was like that. She said some Very Interesting things. Or how I had four full scrapbooks of Lady Diana, now Princess Diana, and how I had written her a letter telling her all about them. How I thought Björn Borg was a great tennis player and maybe he (Ian) would laugh and say, “Jeez, man, you’ve got one heavy crush on him” (which was true) or…

  I want so much to impress him. I want to give him something.

  “Mummy doesn’t know, but Daddy killed someone during the war.”

  It comes out of me so forcefully that I am out of breath.

  “Shit. A gook? A terr?”

  “No. There was an ambush. He started shooting. It was a baby on a woman’s back.”

  “Cross fire, shit. Shit. That’s really heavy shit. How do you know?”

  “He told me.”

  “Just like that.”

  “It was the time I was sick with malaria. He thought I was sleeping. He was praying, I think, asking for forgiveness. It was a big mess; his unit ran into an undercover operation. Next thing they were under fire. He told me once that the war was full of secrets. Full of bad times but good times also.”

  “Yah, one thing the old man said was, once you got in the bush and the grass and sky were shitting bullets, every man found God and then, shit, lost him in double quick time once he was safe again with his mates and downing lagers and telling mahobo tall stories about kills. Worked like a charm, he said, every fricking time.”

  I sit in the car next to Ian thinking of the pocket money I saved up, which is rolled in a sock at the bottom of my schoolbag, how much rands it can buy.

  I sit in the car next to Ian, thinking of the note I’ve left behind for Mummy, Daddy, or Rosanna to find. I think of what I’ve left behind. I try to think of what there is to come. Of how everything can be different, new.