Shamiso headed for the radio. Perhaps a little music would lift her spirits. As she fumbled with the tuner, wondering why the radio was unresponsive, her eye picked up the notice that had been in the mailbox earlier. Of course, load-shedding!
The silence was too much. Frustration bit at her. This was the place that her father had loved, but it was impossible for her to love it in the same way. She felt as though she was trapped in a nightmare she couldn’t leave, as though someone had pulled the rug from beneath her and stolen her life in the process.
20
Horror loomed in the hallway and clung to the walls of the hospital. The place reeked of medicine, pain and disease. The intensity of the atmosphere made Tanyaradzwa uneasy. She sat on the chair, her foot nervously tapping on the floor. There was not a lot to distract her. Once in a while some uniformed person would walk past, but that was it.
Tanyaradzwa saw her mother’s lips move as she spoke to one of the nurses at the reception. She nodded a lot as the nurse spoke. Tanyaradzwa sighed. The hospital was not accepting individual health insurance anymore. It had become a financial risk. Right beside them, another nurse was speaking to a bald old man who seemed well acquainted with fatigue. Tanyaradzwa could hear the nurse explaining that the old man would need to pay for his treatment in cash. At least they had known about this; her oncologist had warned them in advance. She watched the old man walk out of the hospital.
Tanyaradzwa blinked slowly. Cancer was exhausting everyone.
As her eyes followed the old man, she caught a glimpse of her father pacing up and down just outside the hospital entrance, one hand holding his phone to his ear and the other swimming around in the air. He had been at it for the past twenty minutes or so. There had been a lot of brow-brushing and head-scratching. He needed a large sum of money from the bank, not only for bills relating to her treatment, but for his business as well. It had been announced just that morning that citizens would only be allowed to withdraw a maximum of a few thousand Zim dollars. This had created panic. She looked at his folded face, brushed with lines of stress. He was trying to get money: money he knew he had in the bank.
“Tanyaradzwa Pfumojena! Tanyaradzwa Pfumojena.”
She turned and looked at her mother, who nodded, then signaled at her father. He pointed to the phone and continued pacing. Tanyaradzwa followed the nurse down the hallway. The farther they went, the more vile the medicinal taste became.
The nurse indicated for her to sit down. “Tanyaradzwa Pfumojena,” she said, reading from her clipboard.
She smiled, which only made Tanyaradzwa more uneasy. She watched as the nurse drew a long syringe from the tray. The noise of the plastic ripping was elaborate. Her heart sped up. She had been through all this before, but it was something she would never get used to.
Her eyes stayed fixed on the nurse’s arm as she connected the little plastic portal of the drip bag to the end of the syringe. Tanyaradzwa swallowed again. The nurse’s cold, gloved hand rubbed her arm and tapped it for a vein.
“Breathe . . .” she instructed and smiled that alarming smile. “You’ve done this before, no?”
Tanyaradzwa nodded.
“Don’t worry, it’ll only take a minute.” The nurse rubbed some sterilizing ointment on her arm.
Tanyaradzwa held her breath, eyes on the syringe and heart thudding rapidly.
She flinched at the bite of the needle.
PART THREE
Six weeks after that
21
Life had begun to settle into a new kind of rhythm. Tinotenda sat on the teacher’s table in front of the class like he always did, reading the paper. Like any other Tuesday, the students half listened as he read aloud, their faces dark and closed off. But unlike any other Tuesday, Mr. Mpofu wasn’t present. He had not delivered the paper. So there was no speech about keeping them updated on the goings-on of the country. Today, because of the strike, not a single teacher had showed up, although Tinotenda claimed to have seen a bunch of them in the staffroom, probably only there to ensure that the students were not completely abandoned.
Shamiso wondered about Mr. Mpofu. Murmurings floated around that a fight had broken out at the local bar close to the school, where most of the teachers retired for a drink after work. The story was that Mr. Mpofu’s political views had instigated a brawl and he had been crushed like a wild berry underfoot. Shamiso had no idea if the rumors were true.
She stared at the oak tree outside. She could hear Tinotenda reading on. Election results had now been released, nearly a month late. The paper announced a possible rerun of the election, which had unleashed chaos. People everywhere, even in the class, were on edge, exchanging different views.
Shamiso glanced at her wristwatch, wondering if Mr. Mpofu would still show. He was never late, regardless of the strike. In fact, he was one of the few teachers that made it to class at all. She had heard the others joking about a time he had had the flu and had wheezed and coughed his way through the whole lesson; not that the students had remotely appreciated that.
She peeked at her watch again, realizing the seconds were crawling by. Tinotenda was now narrating a made-up version of what had happened at the bar. From the way he told the story, it sounded like he had been there, having sneaked out of the hostels at night. Shamiso rolled her eyes. He did not exactly own up to it, but his story had too many inconsistencies. She guessed he had been at the scene on other occasions and was now trying to imagine what had happened that day.
Tanyaradzwa seemed to be the only other person in the class whose mind was drifting elsewhere.
Shamiso bent her head into her book. She could feel the weight of Tanyaradzwa’s eyes on her, but she scribbled some answers as though she hadn’t noticed.
Tanyaradzwa shook her head and turned toward the front again.
She fanned her shirt, opened her top button and loosened her tie. The heat was overwhelming. It was strange how everyone else seemed to be coping with it. She lowered her head onto the desk and, as she did so, a pool of saliva collected in her mouth. She swallowed faster in a bid to keep up. Before she could register what was going on, her morning porridge had made it to the floor, and her mouth tasted vile and bitter. Not much stayed with her after that.
Shamiso’s reflexes kicked in and she pushed her chair back and made her way to where Tanyaradzwa was lying on the floor.
A little crowd circled around her, but most of the class stayed at their desks, staring.
Shamiso called out to Tanyaradzwa, but it seemed the girl’s body had given up. Without thinking, she gasped to Paida and two other girls to help lift Tanyaradzwa and started leading the way to the school clinic.
As they went out the door, Shamiso glanced back at the class.
They were whispering among themselves, faces lit up with disgust.
22
Shamiso found herself in the middle of whatever was happening to Tanyaradzwa. She sat on a wooden bench outside the school clinic, wondering how she had gotten to this place. In that brief moment back in the classroom, a kindness, like insanity, had gripped her and she had sprung into action. Now she had been sentenced to the clinic bench for the whole afternoon. Paida and her two friends stood a small distance away.
The school van had not been fueled, of course, because of the scarcity of petrol. And because Tanyaradzwa seemed to be coming around, the school nurse had asked the girls if they would accompany her to the hostel on foot.
Shamiso felt trapped. She could hear Paida tell the other girls how her father had treated the family to a holiday in Zanzibar for her brother’s eighteenth birthday, accompanied by the gift of a whole farm afterward.
“I mean, what will he do with a whole farm? My brother wasn’t so pleased with it. He just wanted the latest Xbox.”
Shamiso scratched her neck. An afternoon with Paida was the price she had to pay for compassion.
Paida and her
friends indulged in giggles and whispers, evidently enjoying their excuse not to be in class. Shamiso turned to see if there was any movement from the nurse’s office.
Shamiso approached the other girls. “Do you know how long this is going to take?”
They stopped and looked at her.
“Dude, you smell of smoke.” Paida laughed as she drew away.
Shamiso stepped back as her heart began to pound. The other girls wrinkled their noses and continued their conversation.
She strolled slowly to the newspaper stand by the door before surreptitiously sniffing at her cardigan. She knew where the smoke had come from. She rubbed the itch creeping up her right arm.
The girls’ chatter pricked at her as she reached the stand. Then cold paralysis struck. She stared in horror at the paper on the metal rack. She reached out for it, both hands shivering. Her father’s picture filled half the page. Her heart froze, stuck mid-beat. Holding her breath, she unfolded the paper and read the bottom half. The lump in her throat tightened.
“Maybe Tanyaradzwa’s pregnant,” she heard Paida say, and all three erupted into gasps and giggles.
“It’s always the quiet ones that do such things, honestly,” one of the girls agreed.
Shamiso struggled to breathe. Her ears were saturated with the noise and laughter that escaped Paida’s mouth. The same sound that had escaped the girl’s lips the day she spread those lies about her father. The lies that kept being spread around and around and around. They were everywhere!
“She has been sick a lot actually,” Paida went on, drawing closer to her friends.
Shamiso shut her eyes. Reality spiraled out of her grasp, gaining momentum and sucking her into its vortex. She had nothing to hold on to. The pressure of it all fizzed within her. She needed everything to stop: the noise, the laughter, the lies.
“Shut up!” she hissed from the stand. The three girls stared at her in amazement. Her breath gained pace, galloping to relieve her thirsty lungs.
Paida raised one eyebrow, folded her arms and took a step back. “We weren’t talking to you.”
Shamiso stared at her, heart still pounding. Anger took hold of her, pushing her body toward Paida and raising her hand.
A sharp pain cut through her palm and she heard a piercing shriek from Paida. Her hands trembled and her mind whirled. All those things the paper had said about her father! She knew they weren’t true. Her father had never held a single pint in his life. He couldn’t have caused his own death!
23
Tanyaradzwa liked to think of her body as a mysterious bag of codes and tunes that had to be kept in balance. She knew that if ignored it could spike into tantrums that would cause a perfect disaster.
She swirled the gulp of water she had taken. It had been in her mouth long enough to warm up. She looked at the capsules in her hand, wishing they would just go away, then tilted her head back and dropped them into her open mouth. Her throat held them there, their bitter sting slipping downward. Little aches nudged at her back. She had been lying here for too long.
A soft breeze whistled through the window. Tanyaradzwa pulled herself up and out of her bed. The fresh air was so tempting. She stepped outside and felt the breeze dance around her, cooling her feverish body. She made her way to the laundry room, a short distance from her hostel. The light still shone through the open door.
She could hear a little trickle pouring from the tap into one of the washing basins. The council had cut off the water again earlier. Someone must have forgotten to close the tap after checking if the water was back on. She walked into the laundry room to turn it off and, as she did so, spotted someone sitting on the stairs leading out of the room.
She stopped.
“Shamiso?”
Shamiso turned to face Tanyaradzwa. Her hand moved out of sight.
“What are you doing out here?” Tanyaradzwa asked in surprise.
Shamiso turned her back to Tanyaradzwa and pulled the sleeves of her pajamas over her palms.
“What does it look like?” She brought the cigarette to her mouth. Tanyaradzwa stared for a second, then sat down beside her. Shamiso searched Tanyaradzwa’s face for judgment. It wasn’t there.
“What are you doing here?” Shamiso asked.
“Air,” Tanyaradzwa replied.
They sat there for a moment, uncertainty hovering between them.
“I heard you slapped Paida?”
Shamiso looked away. A small smile escaped her lips. “More like my palm slipped onto her face.”
The girls laughed awkwardly, stretching the silence while each tried to work out how the conversation might continue.
“If you did it for me, you should be careful. It’s actually starting to look like you might be growing a heart there,” Tanyaradzwa advised in her soft voice.
Shamiso smiled.
Silence settled once more.
“I’m not pregnant.”
“I know.”
Tanyaradzwa hesitated. “It’s . . . cancer.”
Shamiso kept her gaze firmly in the distance and pulled in another drag of smoke as if she hadn’t heard. The silence stayed with them for a minute longer. Tanyaradzwa’s eyes rested on Shamiso, waiting for the pity that usually came. Shamiso turned to her. Her eyes were quiet. They offered an incredible relief. In that moment, Tanyaradzwa did not feel like the girl with a deadly disease.
“Are you going to die?”
Tanyaradzwa kept her gaze on Shamiso. Her right hand reached for her neck and pressed lightly against the little mass inside her. She did not know how to feel about the question.
“Well, aren’t we all?” she replied.
Shamiso looked at her and smiled.
“You probably need this more than me then?” She extended the lit cigarette to Tanyaradzwa.
Tanyaradzwa burst into peals of laughter. Her laugh lingered, ringing out for longer than it was supposed to; almost as if there was a broken car nearby whose keys had jammed and now simply refused to restart.
24
Students moved more quietly, sticking to their little groups as they headed back to the classrooms for evening prep after another long day. The teachers stood their ground and continued with the strike. Shamiso walked alone, wondering what purpose school served while the teachers were still on strike. But the principal had made it clear that students were expected to go about “business as usual.”
It didn’t feel much like business as usual. On a normal day, the students would already have been seated, waiting for the second siren to sound. Yet, Paida and her friends chattered away behind her, relaxed in spite of the time, and the girls in front of her were having a heated conversation, the volume rising as they explained things to each other in competing voices.
Shamiso continued along the jacaranda avenue to the classrooms and felt a slight tap on her shoulder. She turned to see Tanyaradzwa walking beside her, holding her books to her chest.
“Hey!” Tanyaradzwa called.
Shamiso frowned. “Your voice . . . ?”
“I think I’m getting a cold, that’s all,” Tanyaradzwa explained, before coughing into her elbow.
Shamiso shuffled in silence alongside her, unsure of what to say.
“You want some?” Tanyaradzwa asked eventually.
Shamiso looked at the pack of maputi in Tanyaradzwa’s hand and smiled. She had hated the salty taste of it at first, but it had grown on her. She reached her hand into the back of her satchel, produced a packet of her own and waved it playfully in Tanyaradzwa’s face. The girls burst into cackles of laughter, leaving Tanyaradzwa coughing.
In her merriment, Shamiso didn’t realize that the yellow envelope, the one with her father’s writing on it, had been pulled out in the process. It dangled on the bridge of the satchel’s pocket, contemplating freefall.
The siren sounded noisily, herald
ing the start of prep; everyone ought to have already been seated by now. The students around them started running.
“Go on, run,” Tanyaradzwa advised in her voice of broken whispers. The two girls could see Mr. Mpofu walking toward them, one hand in his pocket and the other carrying a small travel bag. He had a slight limp, and his lip had a bruise as if he had been fighting. The girls looked at each other, Tanyaradzwa more nervously than Shamiso.
“Pfumojena . . . Muloy . . .” he called as he got closer, his free hand now softly stroking his beard as though it were a pampered royal cat.
Shamiso stepped up her pace. Tanyaradzwa tried to increase hers. Paida and her friends ran behind them. The yellow envelope fell.
“Did you . . . happen to . . . hear the siren?” he asked, now standing by the main gate.
Shamiso rolled her eyes. While her attention was on the teacher, Paida snatched up the envelope and hid it among her books, excitement hopping through her veins at the thought of having something that belonged to Shamiso.
“Sir, I am not feeling well so I was unable to . . .” Tanyaradzwa began to explain. Mr. Mpofu raised his hand in the air, halting her monologue. All the while, his eyes were on Shamiso.
“Muloy . . . are you . . . unwell too?”
Shamiso shook her head.
He glanced behind her.
“Paida, shouldn’t you know better?”
Paida remained silent.
“Then I believe detention tomorrow might help your hearing next time the siren sounds.” The girls began to plead but stopped, reading the stern look on his face. He moved out of the way, allowing them to continue to prep. They carried on, scared to look back in case they turned to salt.
Hope Is Our Only Wing Page 5
