The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  She woke up a few hours later with crust in the corners of her eyes. She dampened her finger with spit to wipe them, thinking of Scholie, the vibration of his breath when that insect had flown in her eye more than a decade ago. Handsome, charming Scholie, Prince of Livingstone, blithely rescuing her, then abandoning her for some white chick…

  Thandi felt a sudden touch of paranoia. Scholie had been a player for real. Wasn’t it risky to spit in someone’s eye like that? Wasn’t it what Lee’s Virus research papers called ‘mucous membrane contact’? How would Dr Lionel Banda have handled that situation? A saline eyedropper? An antibiotic ointment? A pirate’s eyepatch? Thandi realised she was smiling. She knew him so well. A throb of love for her husband – even still, even now – clutched her throat and raised her up and out of bed.

  But when she crept back into the master bedroom, he was gone. It was early morning, the light in the room amber. Thandi disrobed, put on a shower cap, and took a hot shower. She towelled off and massaged cocoa butter into her skin. She put on clean underwear, a skirt suit and high heels. She sat at her dressing table and applied her make-up, priming her face like a canvas, then shaping its beauty with shadow and shine, line and glitter. Last of all, she lifted her wig off its decapitated styrofoam head. Joseph had long ago defaced the bust with a green felt-tip pen, but the Lovely Luxe Locks wig she had bought in Kamwala was exquisite, a shiny copper orb. Thandi crowned herself with it.

  * * *

  ‘Where does your father take you when he picks you up from school?’

  Mummy looked so serious standing in the doorway to his bedroom that Joseph replied immediately. Dad had never expressly told him not to tell Mummy where they went. But as soon as Joseph told her the truth and saw her face go from shocked to sad, he realised both that it was indeed a secret and that he was tired of keeping it.

  ‘He takes you to a hair salon?!’ Mummy asked.

  ‘Mostly,’ he said as the tension released in his breastbone.

  ‘Okay, then. You must show me where it is,’ she said, and his breastbone knotted right up again.

  As the driver manoeuvred the sedan into Kalingalinga after lunch that day, Joseph leaning forward between the front seats to direct him, he wondered why his mother was all made up, like she was going to church or one of Dad’s work functions. And as he slunk into the Hi-Fly and went to sit in his usual corner, he wondered why she was standing in the middle of the room, cradling her handbag like a baby and demanding that the ‘boss’ do her hair. He watched the salon girls scurry around to attend to his mother’s needs as she seated herself regally before the wall of mirrors.

  Joseph wished he had brought a book. He had been so disconcerted by their conversation at home that he had forgotten. In his eleven years of life, this was the first time his mother had ever asked him for something. Bored, he looked over the bits and bobs scattered on the floor around him, lighting on a shallow wire basket that looked like a sun dial, part of a disembowelled electrical fan lying on its back. He found an outlet in the wall behind him and plugged in the faceless half of the fan. When it didn’t start, he spun its blades with his finger. It probably belonged to Jacob, who liked to play with gadgets…There he was now, skulking out from the back room, wearing that stupid aeroplane seat belt around his waist, and hissing at Joseph.

  ‘Futsek, iwe!’

  The woman with skin like carbon paper spoke sharply. Jacob protested, then fell silent.

  ‘Yes, it’s okay, baby,’ Joseph’s mother said. ‘Go on and play.’

  * * *

  The October afternoon was windless, the sun plunging steadily down a cloudless sky. The yard behind the salon was still but for the two boys and their shadows. The clothes line swooped over their heads with its flock of avian pegs. An mbaula sat in its ashes like a mourning thing, a crumple of rubbish beside it. The jacaranda tree was in bloom, its flamboyant crown and train glowing in the lowering light. Jacob carved into its bark with a knife. Joseph sat on one of its roots, using a stick to write and erase words in the fallen blossoms on the ground. After a few minutes, Jacob turned and leaned back against the trunk, arms crossed.

  ‘Who have you come with?’ He nodded at the back door of the salon.

  ‘My mum.’

  ‘Oh-oh? Why has she come?’ Jacob picked at a scab on his elbow. ‘To start a fight?’

  Before Joseph could respond, a girl stepped out into the yard. She looked Indian, her skin a little lighter than Joseph’s. She was about the same age as the boys but thin and gawky in her light blue school uniform.

  ‘Howzit?’ she said. ‘I’m Naila.’

  Joseph shrugged and drew lines in the dirt. Jacob yawned and overturned an old yellow bucket to sit on.

  ‘O-kaay.’ She looked around, then sat down on a root next to Joseph’s. She played with her hair for a while, plaiting it loosely, then unplaiting it. After a while, she got up with a sigh, dusted the seat of her uniform, and began to climb the jacaranda tree.

  ‘The branches will break,’ Joseph warned, dropping his stick and standing up.

  ‘No, it is strong,’ Jacob called. ‘I have climbed this one before.’

  The girl’s Mary Janes were skidding on the trunk. She sat on the ground and started to pull them off.

  ‘Don’t!’ Joseph yelped. ‘You’ll catch tetanus!’

  ‘Ah-ah, what is wrong with no shoes?’ Jacob scoffed. He himself was barefoot. ‘Some of us do not have rich daddies to buy Bata. Take them off! It will make the climbing better, believe you me.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s not educated. Where do you go to school?’

  ‘Namununga.’ Naila’s shoes now off, the edges of her skirt tucked into her panties, she placed her foot against the trunk like a warrior.

  ‘I’m at Rhodes Park,’ Joseph said with a measure of pride.

  ‘What can school be teaching you about climbing?’ asked Jacob. ‘You are a softie, you.’

  ‘And what would you know about the laws of physics?’

  ‘Physico what?’ Jacob frowned, then smiled with delight. ‘Look!’

  He pointed at Naila, who had started to climb again. The boys watched her rise. Her dress was like the sky, a pale flat blue. Her limbs were like the tree’s, bent and beige, a little scaly. You could see fear only in her toes, which curled to grip the bark. She moved slowly but surely and soon disappeared up into the foliage.

  * * *

  Jacob knew well what a good climbing tree the jacaranda behind the salon was. Its bark was just rough enough, and its branches started low, forking with curving angles that did not require great leaps of effort or faith. Inspired, he took off his aeroplane belt, tossed it on the ground, and followed the mwenye girl up. He heard her panting above him and he felt the soft kisses of the blossoms against his skin and he sensed the tension in his legs and arms as he balanced himself in the familiar stages – here, now there, now here – of his zigzag up the tree. Halfway up, he looked down between his straddled legs and saw Joseph’s face frowning up at him. The apamwamba boy was still on the ground, of course, with his hang-em-high jeans and fly green trainers.

  Uncle Lee had always been nice to Jacob. He brought him the occasional treat or toy, and he made his mother laugh, softened her. But his son? This skinny, ugly, banana-coloured boy, reading all the time, and acting like a goody two shoes, as if there were rules about tree climbing – Jacob hated him. Staring down at that smug yellow face, Jacob felt a crackle in his throat, and without even thinking about it, he spat. The glob landed squarely between Joseph’s eyebrows. The coloured boy clutched his face, shouting in horror. Chuckling, Jacob scurried up the tree, pushing off its branches, ducking its shaggy purple locks, reaching away from the boy gagging and cursing below.

  The girl came into view, facing away. She was sitting with one bum cheek on a limb, her other leg swinging. She was peering down intently, trying to make out w
hat Joseph was shouting about. Her hair fell forward, revealing the damp back of her neck, the curls distinct as cuts.

  ‘Bwanji?’ Jacob shuffled himself along the limb towards her to sit.

  ‘Bwino.’ She turned with a grin. Her eyes widened. She was pitching forward. Jacob gasped and reached out for her, his hand sweeping through the air as if swatting a mosquito.

  * * *

  Joseph heard the boughs snapping before he saw the girl plunging towards him through the canopy. She caught at a branch, which broke, then another, which didn’t, and for a breathless moment, she swung, safe as a monkey. Then she slipped. The silence as she fell through the air was terrible. The sound when she landed was worse. Joseph stepped towards her, his throat still sore from ranting, his brow sticky with spit. Naila was on her side among the jacaranda blossoms, her eyes closed, her hair splayed up and behind her in the shape of a splash. If it weren’t for the moans pulsing from her lips like water from a hose, she might have been asleep in a purple bower.

  Joseph crouched down and saw her cheek ballooning before his eyes, a slow hydraulic rise. Blood trickled from her nostril and curdled the dust. She cracked an eyelid. That was when he leapt back. When he saw the blood flooding her eye – that was when he ran. He bolted into the salon through the back door, pushed the curtain aside, raced past the women inside, yanked the front door open – slamming it against the wall in his haste – and fled into the compound.

  Joseph didn’t hear his trainers pounding, his breath snagging on the spikes of his sobs. He didn’t hear the pedestrians shouting as he bounced off them or the cars honking when he darted into the road. Only one sound could penetrate the panic suffocating him. His name. When it came, he stopped and turned and everything surged at him. It was as if he had pulled a plug. A river of colour and movement and smells and noise – life itself – washed over him: Kalingalinga with its brightly coloured signs and chitenge-patterned people, and in its midst, in the distance, a broad-shouldered man in a long white coat striding towards him.

  Joseph put his hands on his knees to catch his breath and blinked down at his dirty trainers. Where had he been running? Was the girl dead? He stood up straight just as his father reached him, put his big hand on his bony shoulder, and asked: ‘Joseph, where is your mother?’

  * * *

  Thandi was sitting in a plastic seat, her head ensconced in the rattling inferno of an old hairdryer. Her relaxed hair had been rinsed and wrapped around big plastic curlers, which vibrated in the blast of hot air aimed at her skull. She was vibrating too, with the adrenaline of looking Lee’s mistress in the face, of boldly subjecting herself to the other woman’s hands and the chemicals she had slathered on her scalp. But Sylvia had not pulled too hard as she combed. She had not left the lye in too long so that the hair would fall out in clumps later. Sylvia had been calm and deft and professional. Relax, her fingers had said. Relax, the cool rinse had murmured.

  Sylvia and her girls were now clustered around a veiled woman who had just come in and sent a little girl outside to play with the boys – their boys. The scratches in the dryer shield made it hard to see them, as did the sweat rolling from her temples into her eyes, but it looked to Thandi as if the salon girls were unwrapping a mummy, the customer’s shawls unscrolling and wafting to the floor. Thandi’s vision began to water.

  She gave up, slumping in the chair and closing her eyes. She suddenly felt exhausted. Asking her son about his father had been excruciating enough. Joseph was the only one who knew where Lee went when he was not at work. But still. The shame she had felt, stooping to bully her boy with questions, forcing him to betray his father – and the rage, too, at Joseph’s sullen complicity, his disloyalty – something in her relationship with her son had…SLAM!

  Thandi opened her eyes and caught the back of someone running out through the front door. She couldn’t discern more from within the buzzing cocoon of the dryer. The salon girls didn’t seem bothered – they had already turned back to the new customer with scissors in their hands. Sylvia ignored it, too, going about her business, chatting with her partner – was her name Loveness? – who was counting cash at the counter. Standing beside her pretty dark-skinned friend, Sylvia looked washed out. Thandi judged her for bleaching her skin with Ambi but she had to admit that Sylvia was otherwise lovely, with high cheekbones and big eyes and a natural waist. Her impassive beauty had thrown Thandi off.

  She had wanted to shame Sylvia simply by coming here with the unspoken truth etched all over her face: I know. I know all about you. But now that the thrill of confrontation was over, now that the salon had turned indifferently to the next customer, Thandi felt that she had just exposed herself to more humiliation. The hairdryer was like a machine of self-mortification. The noisy swarm of heat around her head was her own fear, her own anger made external, a ring of hell, accompanied by the smell of sulphur and…

  Smoke? Thandi’s eyes sprang open. Swirling clouds of it were flooding the room. Coughing, she tried to pry the helmet off her head but it was locked in place. She slithered down in her seat until she could manoeuvre herself out from under it, accidentally knocking hair curlers loose in the process, sending them spiralling down. She jumped up and scanned the room. It was empty of people but filled with the racket of the dryer and a chaos of smoke.

  She quickly traced it to a socket in the wall where the hairdryer and a broken electric fan were plugged in. The two cords were steaming and sparking. She grabbed a hand towel, wrapped it around her hand, and yanked at both: the dryer cord came out and it sputtered to a stop but the fan cord ripped out from the machine instead of the wall. Still plugged into the outlet, the torn end of the cord sizzled over the floor like a serpent with a lightning tongue. She leapt away from it and stepped into something soft – a pile of white hair on the floor. She stared down at it in a daze. It was as if the tangled skeins of smoke in the room had frozen in place.

  Just then she heard a commotion – or rather two. One came from behind the curtain at the back of the salon, the other from its entrance. The curtain parted and Sylvia staggered in with a little Indian girl in her arms, trailed by her son, her workers and the girl’s quailing gogo, the customer from before, who now had a shorn head. At the same time, the front door swung open and Lee and Joseph came rushing in. As if choreographed, the two calamities on either side of the salon crashed at its smoky centre.

  Thandi watched Sylvia transfer the injured girl, bleeding and shaking, into Lee’s strong, capable arms. Thandi saw that Sylvia and Lee did not greet each other – they did not need the hello, the entrance into a conversation, because it was always ongoing. She sensed the ease of their bodies, their muscles moving in tandem, their skin brushing. Overcome, Thandi looked down. She saw the white hair at her feet and the softly sparking cord of the fan. She saw the shapes and how they fit together. With a grunt, she kicked the serpent with its fiery head into that fortuitous kindling.

  ‘Thunder.’ Lee turned to her.

  She stepped forward to help, her body blocking his view of what she had done. As she wiped the girl’s bleeding cheek and fashioned a sling from a rag; as she and the others followed Lee out into the compound, carrying the girl to his pickup truck, Kalingalinga bystanders attaching themselves to the host in their wake; as she and her husband navigated this emergency as deftly as they had the one 30,000 feet up when they first met fifteen years ago, Thandi felt at peace. She had been brave. She had done exactly what she needed to do.

  Lee the brave, the bold, the bright. Brinksman of love and of science. His ultimate aim is laudable, true: to free mankind of The Virus. But to do it that way, to play chromosomes, is to tinker with Nature’s design. Foolish Pandora! Wilful Prometheus! Shirk primal laws at your peril! This is one topic to give us our due: we know far more virology than you do. Malaria, dengue, fevers yellow and black, West Nile, and the newcomer, Zika. Illness we know, in our blood and our spit. Parasites, viruses, wormy nematodes: you
name it, we surely deliver.

  Mala aria’s the worst, she uses us both – that rank double agent – to make and remake her own kind. Hippocrates knew her, and Shakespeare, too, though he didn’t know whence she came. Hear Caliban’s curse: All the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him by inch-meal a disease! But bad air’s the wrong name – she doesn’t waft from the swamp, she’s carried by all of the swamp-dwellers.

  Our proboscis, a needle that punctures the skin, is the devious, dark double carriageway. When we snack on your blood, we exchange a few fluids, and the parasite cells catch a ride. They go down to your liver, and stay there a spell, and grow exponential in number. Sometimes they rise to the top of the head and breach the wall of your mind. Either way, your warm body allows them to hibernate and this is when fever besets you.

  Oh Her Highness, Queen Mal, she’s an imperious imp and she’s taken a fancy to travel. We’re her gnatty waggoneers, trundling along, driving a swift team of atomies. Once in your veins, they gallop right through you, blistering your sweet lips with plague. But you humans have made it far worse, you know, by travelling so much yourselves.

  Though a fidgety itch we occasionally give, this itch to run is your own. As exploration expanded and freedom went faddish, you took the pathogens with you. You carried us, too, as tiny stowaways in aeroplanes, in tyres, in soil. We got loaded on boats, shipped across seas, with a baggage of bad blood beneath us. Wherever we landed, we spread our thin wings, then we spread our Queen Mal’s malcontents.

  In this same global way, Lee’s scientific play will scatter the hazard haphazardly. Though he did not tamper with bad air as such, bad blood is much harder to banish…