The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  She glared at him across the fire. He was lying on his side now, his cheek propped on his fist, three empty Mosi bottles leaning against his thigh, a fourth in his hand. The Nordic tourist called out to him.

  ‘Vhut is so funny over dare?’

  ‘It’s her story.’ Scholie gestured to Thandi with his beer. ‘She should tell it.’

  Anxiety engulfed Thandi’s irritation. Everyone was looking at her. She took a sip of beer and told the story quickly, mocking herself to temper it.

  ‘It happened just now,’ Scholie confirmed with a grin. ‘I’m the one who saved her.’

  ‘Saat. Shuttup, iwe,’ she said, sucking her teeth under a smile.

  Scholie goaded a guide named Mainza into telling another animal story. Mainza’s voice rolled smoothly, his tone mellow with Mosi. His story about a pregnant hyena unfolded at its own pace and grew more and more amusing until everyone was fitting their laughter into his pauses. The stories that followed were the same as always, each trumping the last until the insect in Thandi’s eye had led to Mainza’s hyena, an elephant trampling in Zim, a mauled baby in Kasama, and a drowning in Lake Malawi…This was apparently the cue for the two local girls. They made their exit with a lucky guide, each clinging to one of his arms as they teetered over to his vehicle.

  ‘Wow, that’s deep,’ Scholie was murmuring about the drowning story. He was facing away but Thandi could see from a ripple in his shoulder that his hand was on the American girl and it was moving. The South African couple were snogging again. The conversation seemed destined to fragment. Then the American girl spoke up.

  ‘I had this really intense thing happen a couple of days ago.’

  ‘Ya?’ Scholie said.

  ‘Yeah, on my way to Livingstone. So, we were supposed to leave Lusaka at the crack of dawn, right? But we got totally wasted the night before so we didn’t leave till, like, noon. Then we stopped at the Choma museum – whatever,’ she shook her yellow hair, ‘point being, the sun set at like six and it was pitch-black out and we hadn’t arrived yet. This couple I was backpacking with, Jess and Matt, they were having a fight. So I was like, “Look, I’ll drive.” But then me and Matt, we start fighting. He’s saying I should gun it so we can get to the hostel and I’m like, no, let’s just pull over and sleep. I turn to ask Jess, who’s in the back. And bam!’

  Scholie sat up. ‘Bam, what? You hit an animal?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ the girl said hastily. ‘We swerved off the road into a ditch. We literally felt the tyre blow, like’ – she trapped her curled fingers behind her thumb and flicked them in a spraying motion – ‘poof! So we’re in this ditch, the only light is coming from the headlights. It’s like pitch-black. All we can hear is the seat-belt alarm and crickets. Jess is yelling – like, what the hell is going on? I’m totally shaking. Then we see these eyes glowing in the dark. Jess is like, that is an animal…’

  Thandi frowned. So it was an animal story after all?

  ‘…but it’s this little African kid. He runs up to the car and knocks on my window. He’s got no shoes on and he has that little pot belly, you know, from starving? He doesn’t speak English and he’s super young and I can’t understand what he’s saying but then he goes come, come, he knows that word. So I get out and my legs are like fuckin jelly but I go with him and he takes me to this man lying on the side of the road.’

  Thandi’s head tipped back slightly, like she’d been knocked on the chin.

  ‘And I can see from our headlights, there’s a bike a few feet away, totally mangled—’

  ‘Wait, you hit him?’ Thandi asked.

  ‘No, no!’ the American girl exclaimed, her hands spinning again. ‘It was not us. Like I said, our tyre blew out.’

  Thandi looked around to see if the others were buying this. They were rapt, silent. Maybe it was just the beery drowse but everyone looked like they had stumbled into a private room.

  ‘Some other car hit him earlier.’ The girl looked flushed. ‘Broke his leg. And they just left him there.’

  ‘My Goht!’ said the Nordic tourist next to Thandi.

  ‘Zambians,’ Scholie shook his head. ‘Typical.’

  Thandi stared at him incredulously.

  ‘So the kid is holding money in my face,’ the American girl continued, ‘like waving it around, like that’s gonna help. There’s no ambulance, we’re nowhere near a phone – do you guys even have payphones out here?’ She shook her head. ‘Anyway, so this guy is out here alone in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, bleeding out on the ground. I tied my t-shirt above his knee…’

  ‘You should have made a splint,’ Thandi muttered. She had received extensive first-aid training to become a stewardess. Scholie flapped his hand to shut her up.

  ‘…kid is staring at me,’ the girl was saying, ‘because I’m in my bra. He’s in fuckin shock, and I’m in fuckin shock, and his dad’s bleeding out, and it’s just a clusterfuck. Matt and Jess come over with a flashlight and, first thing, Matt takes off his t-shirt and gives it to me to cover up. I’m like, dude, someone’s dying and this is your priority? With the flashlight, we can tell this guy’s in bad shape. There’s all this blood and a hole in his cheek where you can see through to the teeth. Matt says the guy’s drunk on the local drink, um, it smells like rotting fruit?’

  ‘Chibuku,’ Scholie murmured.

  ‘Yeah,’ the girl blinked, ‘he’s totally wasted on that stuff, definitely too drunk to stand up or walk. So we decide I should stay with him because Jess is too scared to stay alone and Matt doesn’t want to go for help alone. There’s this construction site, half a brick house type thing, so we use a tent to make a gurney and carry him in there. Matt and Jess start walking to a town we passed a half hour back. And I stay behind and wait with the man and the kid and some beer to keep me company.’

  ‘Now, that’s bloody brave,’ one of the British girls slurred.

  The American girl described how the rest of the night went. How the boy fell asleep. How she cradled the man’s head on her lap, and the blood soaked through her jeans, drying there. How she got a bit drunk and lost the feeling in her thighs. How the sun was already rising when the ambulance finally came. Thandi could see it all. The boy curled in the corner like a snail’s shell, the waxy dawn sky, the man’s blood blackening. She even knew how the story would end: a patched tyre, a race to the nearest hospital, a triumphant recovery. Perhaps there would be a quasi-adoption of the boy: sponsored schooling, intermittent donations, his pot belly diminishing as his fortunes grew. But the American girl trailed off before all that.

  ‘The guy was fine in the end,’ she said. ‘But it was super intense. He had, like, a hole in his face. Not bungee-jump intense but, you know,’ the girl laughed.

  After a beat, her audience did too. Except for Thandi. Didn’t it seem a little convenient that this girl had not caused the accident and had magically saved its victim?

  ‘To life!’ The American girl stood, raising a beer with a whoop. ‘Let’s fuckin dance!’

  Someone pulled out a radio and soon an Ace of Base song was yelping out of it and everyone was up and dancing, as if on command. Thandi alone stayed seated by the bonfire, watching Scholie rock his hips in front of the American girl. Sex had arrived, with all of its tender collusion. The wind picked up, raising copper in the embers. The canvas tents applauded.

  * * *

  There had always been other girls around Scholie. That was why Thandi was so reticent. After finding Lee’s callous inventory in his bachelor pad, she wasn’t about to fall for another philanderer. But it was hard to resist Scholie – his dark, rich skin, his plump lips, even his slippy-slidey accent. He and Thandi had spent many nights partying after her shifts at JollyBoys, drinking at the hotel bars or dancing at the one nightclub in town, which had a full wall of mirrors. Thandi would back up against him and wind her hips as they stared in the glass, admirin
g themselves and each other under the roving blue lights. They never took it any further. Thandi knew that after he dropped her back at JollyBoys late at night, he often went out again and found another girl to take to bed.

  But the bonfire at the bushcamp was the first time Scholie actually left Thandi to find her own ride home. She supposed it was his way of saying he would no longer besiege her dam wall. At dawn, just before he slipped into a tent with the American girl, he looked at Thandi and shrugged, his eyelid twitching at her. Teasing her? Mocking her? Hungover and sulking at her own passivity, Thandi climbed into Mainza’s Land Rover. She almost wept with dismay when the troop of British girls from the bonfire clambered in after her. Just a quick drive, Mainza promised. These girls wanted a tour of the game park.

  Thandi leaned her head against a cold metal pole in the back, three itchy blankets over her, as the British girls – shockingly spry after all that drinking – oohed and aahed and leapt up to take pictures of impala until they eventually realised that impala were as common here as deer in England. Thandi had almost managed to fall asleep in the jouncing vehicle when Mainza swung it into a small grove and parked.

  The British girls thudded out, pulling up the waists of their boot-cut jeans to avoid wetting their hems in the dewy grass. Thandi stayed in the Land Rover, watching them follow Mainza over the grass. When he reached a cluster of grey rocks, he stopped, turned to them and opened his hands like a preacher.

  ‘This is the Old Drift cemetery,’ he said. ‘The very first European settlers to this place came here in the 1890s. But they say this place was cursed and most of them died. From what?’ He pointed at a girl slapping at her neck. ‘From the same reason you’re smacking yourself!’

  ‘Mosquitoes?’

  ‘Malaria, you twat,’ her friend said.

  ‘Yes!’ Mainza said, pretending to be impressed. ‘But in those days, they called it black fever.’

  ‘OoOOoo,’ another girl tittered. ‘Is that like jungle fever?’

  ‘That ka American movie?’ Mainza pretended to be scandalised. Then he smirked and leaned towards them to murmur confidentially: ‘I wish!’

  The British girls giggled and glanced back at Thandi in the Land Rover. She avoided their eyes. She knew they were thinking of Scholie and the American girl at the bonfire. They had all seen him and Thandi arrive together. Mainza saved her by resuming his speech.

  ‘Take a look around. Not all the headstones are marked, but you might even find one of your ancestors.’ He swept his arm wide and stepped to one side as if welcoming them into the graves.

  Thandi was completely exhausted by the time Mainza finally dropped her at JollyBoys. There was no time to sleep – she had only half an hour before her shift. She showered, climbed into her skirt suit as if into a torture apparatus, and took up her station behind the front desk. The clock said 6.04 a.m. The hostel guests who had booked a morning drive were already in the lobby, rustling around a table with an electric kettle, a basket of teabags, a jug of milk and a plate of biscuits. Thandi stared at the Italian woman with dark brown hair. Her husband, a big Indian man with a moustache, was handing her a cup of tea with a cloying solicitude.

  The couple had checked in two nights ago, for their honeymoon. They had arrived at night without a reservation, flustered from a long drive. The man had carefully counted out cash for the room. Their mismatch – in age and in race and in accent – seemed worse now, wrong somehow, as wrong as Scholie’s dark hand on that girl’s pale back as they’d rocked their hips in tandem. Thandi snatched up the reception phone receiver. She bit her lip – she couldn’t remember her sister’s number in London or her parents’ in Harare. Instead, she dialled the one number in Lusaka that she knew by heart.

  * * *

  A week later, Thandi was sitting on the kerb, waiting to board the Mazhandu coach to Lusaka. The coach was expensive but she knew she couldn’t withstand a minibus today, not with this hangover. The going-away party the JollyBoys staff had thrown her the night before had left her wrecked. She sipped on ice water, wishing she hadn’t had her hair plaited with extensions yesterday. A tender, stinging force field now cradled her scalp – too much discomfort for a six-hour journey.

  A group of tourists showed up at the coach stop around the same time as her. There was a group of guys who had stayed at JollyBoys: Thandi remembered their unplaceable accents. She smiled weakly and waved but they just looked at her vaguely. Now that they had checked out, they wouldn’t bother with her – the young woman who spoke uncluttered English to them as she handed them keys and printed their bill. A girl sat with them, squatting on her bag, knees tenting her long batik skirt.

  Thandi stared at the girl, an itch in her mind. She didn’t seem attached to any of the men but she was enjoying their lazy morning revelry: coffee in flasks and vitumbua and morning-after stories. Then the girl gave a deep, raspy laugh that dredged up a memory from Thandi’s mind: the night at the bonfire. In the daylight, the American girl looked nondescript. She could have been any girl from any time during the months that Thandi had spent in Livingstone. But she wasn’t. She was that girl from that night and Thandi swiftly hated her.

  The moment the driver had loaded the suitcases and opened the coach doors, Thandi boarded. She plonked herself in an aisle seat and her kiondo on the window seat. She was flabbergasted when the American girl pitched up in the aisle next to her and blithely asked if she could sit there. Thandi looked around. The coach was already nearly full.

  ‘Ya, no, I guess it’s available,’ Thandi said sullenly. She slid over into the window seat, lifting her kiondo onto her lap. The girl smiled and slung her rucksack on the floor in front of her seat, her shoulder wrung red where its strap had bitten the skin. She sat down, her foot propped on it, her other leg bent under her like a half-collapsed chair. Thandi looked at the girl’s shoe on her rucksack, each wearing its layer of grime patiently, in the way of martyred objects. The girl combed her fingers through her hair, filling the air with a candysweat smell as she pulled it into a ponytail that looked heavy in its lightness. Thandi reached in her bag for her bottle of ice water. Just looking at that hair the colour of unripe maize made her feel thirsty.

  The coach driver strolled down the aisle, counting heads. The girl pulled a paperback from her rucksack – Out of Africa, of all things – and fanned herself with it but the pages released only a weak sugary must. She puffed her lips at Thandi to commiserate. She didn’t seem to recognise her. Thandi nodded and sipped at her water bottle, the plastic crackling unhappily as the vacuum released. The chill crept down her throat, delicate and sharp, but as soon as the water hit her stomach, nausea rose like a demon. She swallowed and shut her eyes to fight it but it was slippery and coiling. She needed to eat something. She pulled her food warmer out of her kiondo and notched it open, hoping the shortbread biscuits the JollyBoys cook had baked for her this morning hadn’t yet cooled. The girl looked over.

  ‘Would you like one?’ Thandi held out the container reluctantly.

  ‘A cookie? Hell yes!’ the girl said, taking one with her closebitten fingers. What was her name again? All Thandi could remember was that it had a cat-like snap and purr to it. Scholie would know, of course. But Thandi would never see Scholie again. And she would never ask him. Even if she did see him. Which she wouldn’t. The girl bit into the biscuit and grinned.

  ‘It’s just like the ones on safari!’ she said. There was a galaxy of crumbs over her lips.

  ‘And what did you see on your safari?’ Thandi asked with the exact rhythm and tone that she had been using at the front desk at JollyBoys for the past six months.

  ‘Eland, rhino. Hippo. Monkeys, of course…’

  The girl responded at length, crunching through Thandi’s biscuits along the way. This was how all the tourists had spoken after a game drive, naming the animals one by one like children. Her forearms on the desk, Thandi had nodded and smiled, watching their wi
nd-brightened eyes dim a bit more with each animal. Sometimes the wonders of the world are better left unsaid.

  The coach gave a hitch and its bowels began to grumble. Thandi’s bowels responded in kind. The air conditioning gushed down with the smell of scrubbed dust. Something was crawling up her throat. Saliva brimmed in her gullet. Biscuits or no, Thandi was going to be sick at some point on this coach ride. The girl had finished her nursery-room incantation.

  Thandi swallowed. ‘And how was your guide?’

  ‘Ah. Mazing. I met him at this bonfire and he took me for a morning drive the next day, just us.’

  ‘And did he teach you anything interesting?’

  ‘Well, he told me about, um, the musting? You know how the bulls – the male elephants – go into heat? It kind of made me think of my period, you know – how it runs down their leg?’ She grinned. ‘He told me a joke about periods, too. Okay, so: what’s an elephant’s tampon?’

  Thandi raised an eyebrow.

  ‘A sheep!’

  Thandi sneered with distaste. The girl rocked into her grandfather laugh. When she had sorted through it, thoroughly explored every cranny of her amusement, she put her hand on Thandi’s shoulder.

  ‘Come on, it’s hilarious.’

  Thandi glanced at the girl’s hand on her skin just as the coach descended into a giant pothole in the road. The vomit rose, and Thandi turned away, her long plaits strumming the back of the seats in front of them. She had no choice – she opened the food warmer in her lap and puked over the remainder of the biscuits. Barely anything came up: a grainy mush, water, and something putrid yellow, the colour of a warning. Thandi wiped her mouth, closed the lid on the mess, and turned it to lock it.