Zebra Crossing

by Meg Vandermerwe

  My hands smell of Omo and my skin is red and irritated. When there is money I must ask George to buy me a pair of rubber gloves. I sip the tea. It is too hot and makes the tip of my tongue tingle. Peter says nothing.

  ‘Where are the others?’ I ask.

  ‘Dublin Bar. Manchester United match.’

  Since George is now getting proper wages, Peter says it is only fair if we split the rent fifty-fifty between us. He says this even though George earns less than David, who is a waiter, and Peter makes good money at the bead shop. Still, George doesn’t argue. I think he feels fortunate that Peter and David have taken us in and helped us find our feet, even if once they were his homeboys who ate sadza cooked by Mama in our house.

  From the mattress I watch Peter count.

  ‘Who is playing against Manchester?’

  But Peter makes no reply. Counting rent money is a serious business. Each month Peter takes charge of collecting and delivering the money to the landlord. It would be easier if we had a bank account, Peter says. Then we could just make a transfer directly into the landlord’s account. But immigrants without ID numbers can’t open bank accounts, so Peter has to go and deliver the money personally.

  When George gave Peter our share, he first took his time counting the notes to make sure he had been given the correct amount. I think Peter likes to feel the money in his hands. He was the same when he was a boy. Some say that he charged the other children to ride his bicycle only because he liked to count the coins afterwards and feel the weight in his pocket. Peter is not a spender. If he could, I think he would count his money every day and look at it in its piles, the way David looks at books and that wooden panel with the African masters.

  ‘What are you saving for?’ George asked him the other night.

  ‘I didn’t come to this country to grow old and die here. When I have saved enough, I plan to go home and start a business that will make me rich.’

  ‘What sort of business is that?’ George asked. His curiosity was aroused.

  ‘Monkey business,’ David piped up, but Peter ignored him.

  ‘You can laugh, brother. Look at you, your nose is always in a book, but where has it got you? When I go home I am going to open a security company. Everyone is worried about their security these days.’

  ‘Well, so long as you are not the one who defends the property.’ David and George both laughed. Even as a boy, Peter was known for not being the bravest.

  ‘Laugh all you like. But when you come to me asking for jobs, I will make you beg.’

  I watch Peter stuff our share of the rent into the envelope. Soon he will go and knock on Jean-Paul’s door. When it comes to the rent, he always addresses Jean-Paul very respectfully, calling him ‘Father’, as if he is scared that Jean-Paul will realise that he pays more as one person than we do as four.

  David is busy with a crossword puzzle, a second-hand dictionary and a pencil at his side. His fingers are long, nimble. His hands, beautiful. There was a book this morning in the window of a bookshop on Long Street: How to Land Mr Right.

  Land rhymes with hand. Hand rhymes with…

  ‘Tortoise! My jeans?’

  I look up from my ironing. George is standing in his underpants with his hands on his hips.

  ‘What is taking so long?’

  Today is 20 November, the day before the World Cup team draw. We have been in Cape Town almost two months.

  ‘A hundred and eighty days until the World Cup starts!’ Peter announced last night.

  ‘Everyone who is anyone is in Cape Town for this very important occasion,’ continues Peter now, reading from the morning paper. World-famous pop stars, famous actresses. Also the South African president. But, most importantly, the paper also says David Beckham is attending.

  ‘The real Beckham?’ I ask. ‘In the flesh?’ The iron spits a cloud of steam as I finish the final seam of George’s jeans.

  ‘No, his ghost… Of course the real Beckham.’

  ‘There is a street called Beckham. Off Kloof Street. Near the Spar. I saw it last week.’

  My brother nods. He is in a better mood today. Only in South Africa can we have such opportunities, he says. Also, George has a date with his new girlfriend. I think she is called Harmony. Is she Zimbabwean like us, or a South African? I do not know. Back in Beitbridge it was the same. Little Sister’s job is to cook and clean, not to stick her nose where it does not belong.

  But I do know what she looks like. She has beautiful long, braided black hair and skin the colour of coffee with condensed milk in it. I saw her standing with George in the street below while I was washing the windows. I saw her arms around his neck and his around her waist and their bodies pulled tightly together, like the dough of two bread loaves that have run together in the oven. George whistles to himself as he rubs his face with a damp cloth, which he passes back to me in exchange for his jeans.

  My brother pulls his jeans on hurriedly when Jean-Paul enters without so much as knocking first. Peter and David are dressed up, too. David in the trousers I had repaired and a pale blue shirt I had ironed for him that morning. He is sucking the pencil now. He looks handsome enough to be the real Andy Cole.

  Jean-Paul raises an eyebrow at my brother, who frowns. I do not know why, but these two seem to have taken an instant dislike to each other. Jean-Paul ignores my brother and turns to me.

  ‘Why are you still wearing beige?’

  My brother opens his mouth to speak but Jean-Paul puts up his hand to silence him. Miraculously, my brother obeys.

  ‘I only have three dresses, Va Jean-Paul,’ I whisper. I can feel my face turning red with shame.

  Jean-Paul frowns. ‘Well, this is for you.’

  A parcel.

  ‘Hey, she had no right to commission something from you. We cannot afford it!’

  ‘It’s for free.’

  ‘We are not a charity, you know…’

  ‘Oh, come on, George, at least let her open it.’ David coming to my rescue. He closes the book and stands up.

  I squeeze the package to my chest.

  ‘Well, go and try it on, Chipo. I haven’t got all day.’

  In the bathroom I kick off my skirt, whose elastic waistband had long ago grown slack. I cannot remember when I last got new clothes. Not since Mama was alive, that is for sure.

  Very carefully, I pull open the tissue paper. Two skirts. Brand new! One red and one green with a yellow pattern. I put on the red one and look down. It fits perfectly. How do I look? Like the sort of woman who could pull off red? I jump to try to catch my reflection in the mirror above the sink, but it is no use.

  When I come out, they are all looking at me. But I am watching David.

  ‘Very nice, Chipo.’ Without thinking, I throw my arms around Va Jean-Paul’s neck.

  ‘Oh, thank you. They are so beautiful.’ Immediately, I feel Jean-Paul’s body go rigid. He leans heavily on his cane. I let go. But then, very gently, like I had long imagined a father or uncle would do, he pats my back.

  ‘That’s all right, my child,’ he whispers, ‘that’s all right.’

  I would have agreed to work for Jean-Paul without wages, but George would never have allowed it.

  ‘He is strange,’ protested George.

  But when that evening Jean-Paul offered me a hundred rand a week to act as his assistant, saying, ‘I have a bad foot. It is not so easy for me to run errands,’ my brother immediately agreed.

  Within a short time, I learnt that when Jean-Paul is in a good mood, he is full of energy. He can complete as many as two dresses on such days. From deep inside his room, I hear him call, ‘More coffee, Chipo!’

  Jean-Paul will not drink Nescafé coffee, the one that comes in the glass jar with the gold foil that you must break with a spoon. Poisonous chemicals, he says. It must be coffee made from real beans. He sends me down Long Street to buy it from a shop that sells only coffee beans. It is the first time I have gone so far without my brother. I am told to ask for the Rwandan blen
d. It costs an enormous hundred and seventy-five rands for one precious kilo. I carry the silver packet back, past the thin coloured youngsters begging tourists to buy them cigarettes and samoosas.

  When Jean-Paul shows me how to grind the beans using a small electric machine that growls when you press its lid down, I watch carefully until I am certain I know what to do. Afterwards, his room smells of coffee. This he drinks black with one teaspoon of sugar in it.

  ‘In my country, coffee grows in peoples’ back gardens. The landscape is green as far as the eye can see.’

  But Jean-Paul’s mood is as changeable as Cape Town’s weather. It can transform to overcast faster than it takes the rain clouds to sneak over Table Mountain. Sometimes when I knock on his door in the morning he sends me away. He is seeing no one, he says. Helping no one. His voice, from behind the locked door, sounds like he is hissing at me from under his blanket. Sometimes he continues with this puzzling mood for two days. Regardless, he always pays me my one hundred ZARs on Fridays. Extra if I work Saturdays. Other days the door is open, the curtains are back and he sends me down to Adderley Street to buy pink roses or sunflowers or the last of the season’s daffodils from the old Malay flower seller whose skin is the colour of cinnamon. She sits on a crate under a blue beach umbrella and eats packets of cheese Nik-Naks.

  The first customer he sent me to on the day of the World Cup draw was a family on the first floor. Ugandans. The husband opened the door. He was wearing steel-rimmed glasses like a schoolteacher, and took the parcel without a word. Their flat smelt of cooked bananas.

  Meanwhile, outside, Long Street was totally jammed. Thousands had turned out to enjoy the free festivities. A parade of beauty queens from the four corners of the globe. The crowd pressing as close to the stage as it could. Everyone wanted to have a closer look. But not me. Let them have the stage all to themselves while I rely on my imagination to carry me above it all and turn sounds into faces. I felt happy. Maybe George is right, I told myself, lying on our mattress looking up at a great crack in the ceiling plaster later that evening. The others were out, enjoying the celebrations, but I didn’t mind. Maybe we have come to the right place just in time. In time for the World Cup, sure. But also for Jean-Paul. For David. Promised Land rhymes with helping hand. I am Jean-Paul’s helping hand. And David is mine.

  Eight

  ‘Do you ever think about home?’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  David looks up from his book, but his eyes show his mind is elsewhere, and he stares straight through me.

  ‘I think about home sometimes,’ I continue. ‘You know, it is what’s familiar. But I do prefer—’

  ‘Sorry, Chipo, I am reading. Can we talk about this later?’

  ‘Oh. No problem.’

  I stand up. There is not much for me to do. I have already done the washing and hung it out to dry. Peter and George are on day shift. Jean-Paul’s door is closed; he does not want his assistant today. So I go to the window. Down below, the city is busy as usual. Everyone moving, trying to earn their rand.

  During the day, Long Street has a different face from the night. It reminds me of the men who would come to Mama’s tavern. All respectable at first, but as afternoon turned to evening and evening to night, and the Seven Days brew hit the spot, their shirts would come loose from their trousers, their mouths would hang open and they would start their bedroom talk.

  ‘Bedroom talk’ is what Mama called chatter that is best left to the privacy of the bedroom. The sort a man should reserve for his wife and then only when no one else is in earshot. A few litres of Seven Days, though, and it all comes out. Long-seething gripes. Sugary sex talk. Maybe that’s why Mama herself never drank. It was only ever cool drinks for her – Coca-Cola, or sometimes a can of green Creme Soda, or, if it was cold, a mug of tea with two teaspoons of sugar dissolved in it that I brought to her from the house. Seven Days makes a man’s tongue too loose, Mama said.

  ‘Their secrets creep from their cupboards. If you ever want to see a man’s true nature, Chipo, give him a litre of Seven Days and pay attention to what raises its head.’

  Mama was right. I saw it often enough. At first, the man would become playful, like a monkey. He is the jester. Wants to win a laugh from everyone. But then two, three litres later, he is an adder. Ready to strike whoever comes too close.

  Once, a man on our street was bitten by an adder. It got him in his house. They carried him out by his arms and legs. He was purple, his lips and eyelids swollen. He was dead before anything could be done. People were saying his wife had gone to the nganga to arrange that. That he was a husband who drank too much and beat his wife and children when drunk.

  Mama poured salt around our doorway. Salt, she said, makes a snake’s skin dry out, so they won’t slither inside.

  ‘You know what snakes love to eat?’ George asked when Mama was out of earshot. ‘Albinos.’

  ‘Ha, I have heard that they like small boys. Especially those that like to play soccer!’

  George and I made a good game of betting who would be bitten by the snake next. But no one else was bitten.

  I want to ask David if he ever saw a man bitten by a snake. But I don’t.

  Christmas sounds like Getting Down to Business. It was always a special festival in our house. Mama would send George and I to buy a chicken from the market. She would slaughter and we would pluck. Chicken, cabbage salad and rice. That was our Christmas feast each year.

  ‘Don’t walk next to me. You look like a leper.’

  George was referring to the sun cream that Mama had smeared all over me. My brother had recently heard the story of Christ healing the lepers, with their snowy skin. Now he had taken to calling me a leper at every opportunity.

  I stood a few metres away as George made the purchase in the bustling market. Even though it was him and not me who they interacted with, the market women still dropped the coins into his hand without touching him.

  ‘Come on, burden.’

  Now, David has burdens of his own. With Christmas just two weeks away, this morning I watch him pack a parcel for home. Carefully he arranges the gifts in neat piles on his bed. Four white school shirts. Short-sleeved. Four packets of HB school pencils. Two scientific calculators. Two school rucksacks with front zip pockets. David examines the long list of school supplies that his sister in Harare emailed him on behalf of her two sons. The parcel will have to leave this morning or, by the latest, next Monday if there is to be any hope of it arriving in time for the start of the new school year.

  Five minutes. He arrived just five minutes before Peter and so carries all the burdens and responsibilities of the eldest. But what is five minutes? I want to ask him. Why should you shoulder such responsibilities while Peter saves his money for who knows what? David never complains, but he sighs as he ticks off the items on the list with a pencil. As well as school supplies, the parcel contains items for the rest of his family: sanitary pads and tampons, perfume as a gift for Margaret, some arthritis medication for his mother and a book about African birds for his father. David was working extra hours at the restaurant to earn the money to cover all the costs. He rubs his eyes and sighs again, louder than the first time, as he ticks the final items off his list.

  ‘Thank God, that’s all of it.’

  People who like to study birds are called ‘ornithologists’, David tells me one afternoon. Ornithology sounds like apology. Which is what David’s family should give him for placing such responsibilities on his shoulders. Somehow he must still find the money to pay for the malayitsha to deliver his precious parcel personally to his family in Harare.

  I suppose George and I were fortunate not to have such obligations. Our close family had made it clear, time and time again, that we were an embarrassment. What, an albino for a child and a husband who abandoned the family for a tuck-shop owner in Harare? They shook their heads at gatherings and muttered under their breath when we saw them in the street or at the market. Though this sense of shame had not stoppe
d them from knocking on our mother’s door when times were still good for her and our tavern was flourishing. Could she lend them a little something until payday? Or could she make a contribution to such-and-such a funeral? Aunt Esther’s eldest daughter was getting married and the family needed help to finance the event. How about a contribution? Our mother always obliged, even though as George grew older he grew more and more resentful.

  ‘Why do you help them when they have done nothing for us?’ he would reproach her.

  Mama would quote from the Bible: ‘A generous man will prosper; he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed.’

  ‘But Mama…’

  ‘Real Christian charity, George, is to give without expecting something in return.’

  Mama’s words proved prophetic. When she grew ill, the family melted away, like water into parched sand. In our community, the feeling was that when someone was struck down by her disease, a disease that no one dared even to name, it was a sign of promiscuity. So when the begging calls and even SMSes started to come through to George and me in Cape Town during those first three months, George took great delight in refusing or deleting them.

  But David was different. I could never imagine him abandoning his family, no matter what. He and his older sister Margaret were always particularly close. As I watch David tie string around his bag and knot it once, twice, I think of Margaret. A churchgoer. Quiet. Head girl in her year. When was the last time I saw Margaret or her parents?

  Mama wasn’t a regular churchgoer. But almost everyone else in our neighbourhood was, including Mama’s five brothers and sisters and their families.

  ‘Why don’t we go to church like the other children at school?’ I asked Mama once when I was seven.

  ‘Because Jesus Christ is everywhere. Not just in a building on Sundays. And you don’t need a pastor to talk to Him.’