The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  POUNDS…STERLING…CURRENCY…KWACHA…LAST DAY…!!!

  As they reached the counter, Mr Mwamba extricated his spectacles and the money for the sprinkler from a worn grey satchel, the sole remnant of his teaching days. Just then, the meaning of the words on the signs flooded Matha’s synapses.

  ‘Ba Tata?’ she gasped.

  ‘What is it?’ her father grumbled, putting his spectacles on. Visiting the Boma always made him irritable.

  ‘It says it’s the last day to trade in the…’

  ‘Oh God!’

  Mr Mwamba, too, had now read the writing on the wall. His face crumpled and he dashed out of the queue towards the exit, his satchel flapping like an elephant’s ear. Matha raced after him. Outside, she saw him clambering into the battered Peugeot he had purchased from a farmer’s widow – midnight blue, edged with orange rust. Matha managed to jump in the passenger side as he turned the key. The vehicle woke with a cough that gave way to a wheezing pant as Mr Mwamba drove back to the farm.

  ‘These people!’ he ranted. ‘They do not give you adequate and fair warning! What is the time? Oh God, almighty saviour, please do not let these people close the bank before I come back…’

  Mr Mwamba did not normally use the Boma bank. Handing his money over to other people had never brought him much luck, so he had invested his earnings in the safest place possible: land. The Mwambas had held on to their farm property for decades, refusing to sell to white settlers, colonial administrators and government developers in turn. Whenever he had cash, Mr Mwamba put that into land too. Literally – he buried it. No need for a bank when you can use the ground for a vault, he always said.

  But today, Mr Mwamba needed a bank. The colonial currency that he had been burying in the earth for the past ten years – the British pound and the Federation pound – were about to become obsolete, replaced by the proud new Zambian kwacha! The sun had risen! One Zambia! One Nation! One Currency! The new government would let the Zambian pound circulate for a few more years and they had stretched out the process of colonial currency extinction to accommodate the rural provinces, but according to the signs in the Boma, today was officially Mr Mwamba’s last chance to trade old money for new.

  The Peugeot lurched to a stop at the farm and Mr Mwamba gangled out without even turning off the engine. He ran to the field behind the house, snatched a spade from Mulenga’s hands, and started digging. Matha’s aunt was on the veranda, twisting water from a rag. Seeing her brother’s unaccountable actions, she cupped her hand to her forehead, then started running towards him, holding the edge of her chitenge, shouting: ‘What are you doing?’

  Matha stayed in the car, watching the drama through the windscreen. The Peugeot panted around her. Outside, she could hear a woodpecker making its hollow, intermittent racket. In the distance, she could see her father bent over in the middle of the fields, which were bursting with green leaves and, now, mounds of red soil from his digging. When Matha’s aunt reached him, he stood up straight and they accosted each other, their shouts as vague as a distant waterfall. Hired hands gathered around to watch. Mulenga wandered over, a puzzled look on his face. High on mbanji, no doubt. A mosquito whined piteously. Matha’s eyes darted around the inside of the car, hunting it, then landed on her father’s old satchel on the floor.

  Now, Matha had loved driving from the moment Ba Nkoloso had taught her during space training. She loved how the mere step of a foot could send a vehicle zooming forward, its weight magically dropping away into speed. So she felt a little giddy as she slid into the driver’s side of the Peugeot, undid the brake, put it in drive and chugged down the dirt road away from the farm. She laughed even as each rut in the road added another bruise to her bum. She was going home! Home was not these old people shouting in a field. Home was Godfrey, his hands gripping a microphone, wailing for love and for country. Stealing the car, driving it off, the money for the sprinkler in the satchel on her lap as her father dug up the rest of his livelihood in the rearview mirror – all of this freedom shook Matha up, filled her with giggles like bubbles in a Coca-Cola.

  * * *

  The bubbles burst when she hit Great North Road. What had she done? The dual carriageway was still mostly dust and gravel, widely known as ‘Hell Run’. Trucks and lorries raced by, terrifyingly close, sending violent sprays of stone against her windows. The Peugeot’s shudder over the rough road was so intense that when she hit the new tarmac at Kapiri Mposhi, the skin on the backs of her thighs began to itch, as if lingering in vibration. She finally pulled over under a pitch-black sky, the headlights barely grazing the darkness. In that eerie glow, she battened down in the back seat, her bomber jacket for a blanket, the satchel clutched to her stomach.

  She woke at dawn, cold and hungry and disconcerted by the sight of the windscreen. She had been staring through it with such concentration the day before, she hadn’t noticed it becoming almost opaque – streaked with mud, scratched with pebbles, blotted with bird droppings and the ashes of butterfly wings. She got out of the car and peed behind a tree. She cleaned her teeth with a stick, ate the four bananas she had bought at the petrol station in Kasama, and wiped off the windscreen with a leaf. When she got back in the Peugeot, it wouldn’t start. She had left the headlights on the whole night and the battery was dead.

  She managed to hitch a ride in a van packed with passengers, the air thick with their breath and sweat and palpable judgment about the tight stretch of her dress over her stomach. The sun was setting when they reached Lusaka. As she disembarked, Matha pressed a crumpled Federation pound from the satchel into the driver’s hand. When he complained, she realised that she too had missed the currency deadline. She stuffed the bills in the pockets of her bomber jacket and bartered for her ride with the satchel itself – good, strong leather even if it was old.

  She zamfooted to the shebeen in Kalingalinga to find Godfrey, shivering at the thought of seeing him, and hoping he had the connections to go back for the Peugeot and trade this outdated cash. They would need money and transport if they were going to navigate this baby situation. But she bounced at the shebeen. And she bounced at the old shed behind it where the Just Rockets practised. No Godfrey. No lazy smile, no sleepy eyes, no kiss to her belly. She stood there staring at the bare shed, the stake in the ground bereft of even its cornhusk practice mic.

  Matha made her way slowly through Kalingalinga. Where would she sleep for the night? Then she remembered that an older cousin of hers lived here now, having been ostracised from the Mwamba family for a crime no one remembered any more. Matha asked around the compound until she found it – a five-foot-square cubical shack shaped by wood and metal sidings, a chitenge hanging over a gap in the facade. She knocked on the metal siding and a woman of about twenty-five poked her scowling face around the curtain.

  Matha hadn’t seen Grace in years. She had grown into a tall, sullen woman, with a frown so deep it looked like a scar. Matha reminded her of who she was and launched into an explanation: about Godfrey, and the baby, and why Kasama was no good for her, and why there was a Peugeot on the side of Great North Road awaiting jump leads, and how the Just Rockets’ practice shed had been empty, and how she just needed a place to sleep for the night because she would surely locate the father of her child tomorrow. Grace stood with her arms crossed, an old Kaunda chitenge wrapped around her waist, listening in silence to this saga, her eyes lingering over the bulges in Matha’s pockets. When Matha was finished, Grace nodded and beckoned her inside. She gave Matha the leftovers from supper, laid out a sleeping mat for her, then lay down on her own and curled away like a provoked chongololo.

  * * *

  Matha woke to an empty shack. She felt ruffled – or rather, rifled. The obsolete bills she’d stuffed in her jacket pockets were scattered around her mat, several of them crumpled in little balls. Grace had apparently discovered the useless stash. Matha got up, washed at the communal taps, and began the hunt for her love
r. The same round of places, the same dearth of Godfrey. Nothing. Zee. No sign of him, she complained that night as she wolfed down the remainders of Grace’s supper. Grace hitched an eyebrow and picked up her sewing.

  The following week, Matha managed to locate Godfrey’s Just Rockets bandmates, who had started a new band called Dynamite Rock without him. Reuben told her not to worry. Godfrey had probably just gone to see his family in the Copperbelt. But Godfrey was not back the next week, nor the week after that. Matha gave up on retrieving the Peugeot. It had surely been stolen or stripped by now, she told Grace as she wiped down the patapatas she’d borrowed from her cousin. Grace shrugged and resumed her sewing.

  Matha mailed a letter to the Ndola Boma looking for him. No reply, she complained two weeks later to Grace as she beat the dust out of her sleeping mat. Grace sucked her teeth and bit through a thread. Matha stayed up all night drafting a missing-person notice to print in the Times of Zambia.

  Late the next morning, she woke up with an itch on her nose. She batted it off, thinking it was a mosquito, but there it was again. She blinked her eyes open to the sight of a brown blur. She swivelled her head back like a chicken and the blur clarified into a rough weave. It was a sack. Several sacks, in fact, stitched together, hanging from the ceiling. Matha sat up and poked at it. It swayed. Over the last month, Grace had sewn a wall of old unga sacks, dividing the shack in half, making their banishment complete even unto each other.

  * * *

  Matha finally quashed her pride and went to see Ba Nkoloso at the African Liberation Centre. He was in his office, at his desk, typing a memo.

  ‘Miss Mwamba!’ he announced without looking up.

  ‘Shani, Ba Nkoloso,’ she said, cupping her hands and curtsying. ‘You are busy?’

  ‘Yes.’ He squinted at the typewriter. ‘Our neighbouring nations have not achieved independence, so we are vigilantly pursuing…’ He looked up. ‘I thought you went back to Kasama.’

  ‘I am here now. I am looking for Godfrey.’

  ‘Oh, my star astronaut?’ said Ba Nkoloso, rifling roughly through some papers. ‘The only chap in this nation fit for moonwalking? The star of the Just Rockets?’

  ‘Yes, that one of it,’ she giggled. ‘He seems to be missing. It is a bit worrisome.’

  ‘Worrisome!’ Ba Nkoloso slapped the papers against his desk. ‘If I was you, Miss Matha Mwamba, I would be more worrisomed about what he left behind!’ He pointed at her stomach.

  Matha glanced down, putting her hand protectively over it. Smarting from her family’s rejection; living in poverty with a frowning cousin who despised her; not just bearing, but actively resisting Godfrey’s absence – his persistence in not coming home to her – had already strung threads of hurt in Matha’s throat. Ba Nkoloso’s words strummed across them, making them vibrate. She swallowed.

  ‘When the baby comes,’ she ventured, ‘maybe I can join your work here?’

  ‘You? Here?’ he laughed bitterly. ‘This is revolutionary business, Matha. Serious business. Not for girls who cannot keep their…’ He broke off.

  Matha looked at this man she had known her whole life, this small man who had always had such power, such force in his booming perorations. She felt like she was hearing his real voice for the very first time. She divined the store of disappointment inside it, like a cave hidden by a waterfall.

  ‘Do you know what they said when you started to grow that baby in your stomach?’

  The threads in her throat thrummed.

  ‘They said that I was the one who put it there,’ he said softly, angrily.

  A tear rolled down her cheek. Ba Nkoloso shook his head. ‘The Academy could never survive that.’

  Matha turned and stalked out of his office, dashing the tear from her face, but it was useless. Tear after tear slid down her cheeks as she trudged back to Kalingalinga, a dribble that gurgled into a stream, then gushed into a great heaving flood as soon as she was inside the divided ramshackle cube that was now her only home.

  * * *

  In the beginning, Matha Mwamba sobbed on her back, eyes clenched, breath skipping like a record. When the fit ceased, she turned on her side, facing the old chitenge over the doorway – a pattern of birds in a thicket. As she lay there, tears collected in the cove between her eye and her nose. She blinked and the pool brimmed over and plopped in one big droplet onto the new chitenge she’d folded into a pillow. The droplet sat for a moment on the waxed threads, a clear sphere catching the sunlight that flashed inside whenever the curtain lifted from the door. Matha briefly forgot herself, forgot why she was even crying, as she gazed at that little globe of light. Then it collapsed to a stain like a shadow of itself. She blinked again. The next tear that fell was long and continuous. It grew the stain until her whole pillow was wet shadow.

  For days, Matha cried. She lowed and keened and fell silent and wept. For days on end, she watched, through the warped lens of salt water, the dawning and setting of the curtain over the door, the pattern of thicketed birds dissolving as night fell and emerging line by line when the sun rose. Her eyes and nose grew swollen. Her cheeks were hot and taut, webbed with dry salt. The threads in her throat were an utter tangle. She relinquished herself to gravity, the cradle of its heavy arms.

  As if from a great distance, she could hear her cousin coming in and out of their home. A couple of days into the weeping, Grace’s bustling sounds abruptly stopped. Between sobs, Matha heard an audible sucking of teeth. A minute later, a ripple moved along the rough unga curtain dividing their lives, and a tin plate of cooked samp appeared underneath it. Matha took it up and ate it eagerly – she was pregnant after all – salting the meal with her tears. With food came scraps and with scraps came insects, the cockroaches and flies and fleas and ants. They conquered the crusty remnants on the plate, and the pot she had been squatting over as a bedpan, and her damp and tender skin.

  On the third day, she pulled herself together enough to throw out the soured remains and stinking waste, and to sweep the insects away. Then off she plodded through Kalingalinga, tears pittering from the overhang of her chin, seeping into the neck of her dress. In Zambia, crying is private and communal: women come together behind walls to wail. Matha’s public, personal grief seemed odd, rude even. Women stared and clucked. Men avoided her path. Schoolboys laughed at her. Matha spat in their direction and kept weeping as she made the hour-long trek to the hostels near Evelyn Hone.

  * * *

  As soon as Cookie opened the door, Matha collapsed onto her knees.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Cookie asked as she crouched beside her sister. Matha’s belly was as big as a village pumpkin now but she had lost weight. There was a sandy scrim on her cheeks, which were usually as dark and shiny as the backs of beetles.

  ‘Godfrey’s gone,’ Matha croaked.

  Cookie rolled her eyes. ‘Well, thank your lucky stars for that,’ she said as she dragged Matha back onto her feet, led her to the kitchen and plopped her in a chair. Cookie set about making them some tea.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ Matha hiccupped, glancing around.

  ‘Protests,’ Cookie waved dismissively. ‘The Eves have caught politics like the flu. The canteen served chicken feet and the girls want to know where the rest of the chickens went. As if government is now hoarding breasts and livers.’

  Matha nodded blankly.

  ‘Where have you posted up?’ Cookie asked.

  ‘With Grace. In Kalingalinga.’

  ‘You’re living with Dis-Grace!?’ Cookie’s laugh died in her throat. ‘Okay, okay, sorree.’ She sat down across from her sister and willed herself to ask. ‘So what happened now?’

  Matha let out a sob. ‘I can’t find Godfrey,’ she began, ‘and with the baby on the way…’

  Cookie listened and offered occasional reassurances cribbed from Mills & Boon, about love triumphant, dreams and passion, visions and hope.
She didn’t believe any of it, of course. As Matha went on with her sob story, Cookie tried not to yawn, her eyes tracing patterns in the fastfading stains of the tears falling onto her sister’s dress: triangles and diamonds and stars. It’s always hard to imagine another person’s pain, especially a pain as abstract as heartache.

  ‘…why did you tell them?’

  ‘Hmm-what?’ Cookie blinked up from her mesmeric pattern-making. Matha’s face was covered in a sheen of tears that glinted under the new fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen.

  ‘Why did you tell the aunties that I was pregnant?’

  ‘Ah-ah, but I didn’t,’ Cookie lied without hesitation.

  ‘But—’ said Matha. The sobs ratcheted up again. Cookie sighed but did not offer to take her sister in. While Matha was away in Kasama, Cookie had made some calculations. She would graduate soon, and Mr Mwape was on the verge of leaving his wife, she could just sense it. He would never marry Cookie if she was carrying the baggage of an unwed sister and her unborn child. The prospect of Cookie’s ‘patron’ stopping by to see her, only to find a shorter, darker, prettier version of her, with a belly out to here? No. As far as Cookie was concerned, Matha had squandered all her gifts – her intelligence, her beauty, her sunny disposition – while Cookie had churned out profits from the scraps. She would not give them up for mere heartbreak.

  ‘…if you hadn’t told the aunties,’ Matha was blurbling, ‘they wouldn’t have sent me away to Kasama and then Godfrey—’

  ‘Godfrey what?’ Cookie scoffed. ‘He left you, Matha.’ She sipped her tea and lied again. ‘Everyone knows that while you were in Kasama, he was hopping from bed to bed.’

  * * *