The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  ‘Thank you,’ said Joseph. ‘Did you work at his clinic?’

  ‘Ah, no, I’m just a fellow student with your father from UTH days. A velly-good man.’

  Joseph thought his father had gone to med school in Zimbabwe, not at UTH. He felt a tug on his hand and looked down. Farai raised his Fanta bottle, which looked oversized in his little hands and still needed opening.

  ‘Give,’ said Musadabwe.

  Farai handed it over shyly. Musadabwe opened it with his teeth and handed it back. Farai broke his beaming smile to sip from it, then marched out of the kitchen.

  ‘Your father?’ Musadabwe turned back to Joseph. ‘Was a blirriant man. A mind stretcha!’

  Joseph nodded and fondled his own unopened Fanta.

  ‘His resatch was just—’ Musadabwe pursed fingers and lips and kissed them together. ‘He was on the blink of blaking through to some other side. Groundblaking, I swear to Goad.’

  ‘His vaccine research?’

  ‘Yes! He was going to heal us. The Virus is getting worse with these viro multiplications…’

  Two Chinese men in lab coats strolled in, speaking in serious voices. Musadabwe fell abruptly silent and turned away from Joseph, opening the fridge as if to contemplate its insides. Joseph excused himself to the man’s back and went to look for Farai.

  He found him outside the closed door to the sitting room. Farai wrapped his hand around Joseph’s thumb as they both pressed their ears to the wood. Behind the door, the keening of the women accrued volume and insistence until one voice broke into a seething wail. The other voices climbed to meet it in staggered succession, as if up a ladder with missing steps. It had never occurred to Joseph that sadness could have such fury to it. The two feelings seemed so different, two bells of disparate size and swing. Now they chimed together and the hair on his neck rose up.

  * * *

  Three days later, the family held a funeral service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. It was cloudy outside and the modern stained-glass windows – skew panes of lemon and menthol and cherry – looked like dusty coughdrops. The family sat in the frontmost pew, Grandpa and Joseph in suits, Ba Grace, Gran and Aunt Carol in chitenge outfits. Salina, who had arrived only yesterday, wore an Ethiopian garment, a rococo braid of orange and green winding down it, and a headwrap as tall as a bishop’s hood. Thandi wore a black retro-1990s suit, the sort of thing that was so fashionable in London that it was old-fashioned in Lusaka. Farai, with a child’s impunity, wore overalls.

  The extended family, the village of Grandpa Ronald’s relatives, filled the pews behind them, the women wearing matching chitenge wrappers over their church dresses. Meeting them all had been nightmarish for Joseph in a hall-of-mirrors way, the prominence of certain traits – high cheekbones, trapezoidal noses – making it especially difficult to distinguish between the aunties. Scattered in the audience were about thirty doctors of various ethnicity, their white coats making them look like paper dolls among rag dolls. At one point in the service, they all rose on cue and began reciting in unison:

  I swear to consider dear to me, as his parents, him who taught me this art; to live in common with him and if necessary, to share his goods with him; to look upon his children as his own brothers, to teach them this art. He will prescribe regimens for the good of his patients according to his ability and his judgment and never do harm to anyone. He will not give a lethal drug to anyone if he is asked, nor will he advise such a plan; and similarly he will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion. But he will preserve the purity of his life and his arts. He will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; he will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art. In every house where he come he will enter only for the good of his patients, keeping himself far from all intentional ill-doing and especially from the pleasures of love with women or with men, be they free or slaves. All that may come to his knowledge in the exercise of his profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, he will keep secret and will never reveal. If he keep this oath faithfully, may he enjoy his life and practise his art, respected by all men and in all times; but if he swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be his lot.

  Joseph followed along in the programme. The Hippocratic Oath. The contortions of translation made the xeroxed pamphlet seem almost archaic. Was this who Dr Lionel Banda was? Never doing harm? Keeping himself from the pleasures of love? Joseph kept turning back to the colour photo of his father on the front, an old one with full cheeks and shiny teeth and turmeric skin, a fallen eyelash on his cheekbone like a parenthesis. Joseph felt a prick in his chest. Dad was dead.

  The feeling was short-lived. By the time the speeches commemorating Dr Banda’s professional triumphs had gone on for an hour, Joseph had stopped listening. He felt bored and hungry – he hadn’t eaten breakfast. When he stood up for yet another hymn, static burst in a loud hush behind his eyes. He felt light and heavy at once, as if gravity had reversed…

  He woke to too many hands and eyes on his body – doctors trying to outdo each other in caring for the dead man’s son. Ba Grace was at his feet, shouting instructions at random. His mother was at his head, Farai in her arms. She looked more annoyed than concerned.

  ‘Y’alright, luv?’ Her accent sounded oddly British. It was the first she had looked at him today, or since she had arrived, really. He nodded and sat up. Everyone clapped, which felt wrong somehow. As the crowd of people around him dispersed, Ba Grace helped him to his feet, admonishing: ‘You must have tea in the morning so your stomach does not eat itself!’

  ‘God is punishing you,’ Grandpa Ronald whispered sardonically as he passed.

  He meant for being an atheist. It was true that for the past many Sundays, while Grandpa and Ba Grace had gone off to church, Joseph had stayed home to read to Gran – the Guardian mostly, book reviews and editorials. This was more out of sloth than a firmly held position. But now, in the cathedral, Joseph felt so dizzy that he wondered if Grandpa was right. He sat on a bench against a side wall, his ears hot and blocked. Foodlessness foolishness feint faint fatigue.

  The mourners began filing past the open casket. Joseph saw Salina go by, stoical and alone, casting barely a glance at the corpse. He joined the line behind Gran and his mother, Farai still in her arms. When they got to the casket, Mum buried her head into Gran’s chest and pulled Farai’s head into hers, making three nested curls of their bodies as they moved past. Gran couldn’t see; Mum didn’t look. Joseph stepped up to the casket. He was almost surprised to find his father there. Dad looked small in his fancy box, unworthy of all this spectacle, his face rubbery and shrunken, a pretender’s mask.

  * * *

  A week later, Joseph went with his mother and grandmother to the Barclays at Woodlands to sort out the burdensome inheritance. Salina had left. Most of the relatives had vanished, too, as soon as they learned that the deceased’s distributable possessions were in Addis Ababa. At the bank, they found a long queue, so Mum asked for the manager, a woman she knew from Zambia Airways.

  ‘Thandiwe!’ said a plump woman in a tight business suit. ‘Gosh, it’s been ages.’

  ‘Brenda, how are you?’

  A flurry of air-kissing in a cloud of clashing perfumes.

  ‘You’ve stayed so thin!’ Brenda said admiringly.

  Mum smiled wanly and introduced Joseph and Gran.

  ‘Lovely to meet you.’ Brenda’s eyes lingered over Gran’s white stick and closed eyes. ‘So howzit, Thandi? I heard you moved to London, lucky fish! How’s your handsome doctor of a husband?’

  Mum cast her eyes down.

  ‘Oh, my deeya. What has happened?’ Brenda guided Mum and Gran into a booth.

  Joseph sat by himself on a bench in the lobby, which stunk of midday torpor. Officious tellers ticktocked by in high heels while customers, mostly glum men in
cheap suits, shuffled the queue along. Twenty minutes later, Gran and Mum reappeared with a stack of files.

  It was lunchtime so they shifted to the Chicken Inn next door, Joseph guiding Gran by her upper arm, all loose jelly in thin skin, her freckles like tiny green eyes in the fluorescent light. She picked at a plate of chips while Joseph tore through half a chicken, his stomach slowly turning on itself until he was staring at the stripped bones in disgust. Mum ignored her plate of wings as she sorted through the papers she’d spread out over the table. An ancient printer had spewed them out – perforated side strips, faded ink – and spots of grease appeared on them, darkening as they seeped in, lightening as they dried.

  ‘It’s…it’s,’ Mum sputtered, shaking her head.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Gran said softly. ‘He has left quite a mess for you, Tendeeway, hasn’t he?’

  When they got back home, they found Grandpa in the sitting room. He was still in his pyjamas, peering and jabbing at his new smartphone, a bulky plastic bag on the table before him.

  ‘You’re back!’ he said with relief and scooched his glasses up his nose. ‘The hospital sent someone with his things. I didn’t know if they would be relevant. For the will.’

  Grandpa seemed somewhat offended that his son hadn’t named him executor. Gran sent Ba Grace to make some tea, then sat across from him. Mum went to check on Farai. Joseph knelt in front of the coffee table and looked through the things inside the plastic bag. He took out his father’s crumpled golf clothes, the green shirt and the plaid trousers still spattered with mud. The little red book that his father had been reading the other day fell onto the table with a thud. Joseph put it aside and pulled out his father’s wallet and iPhone, which was dead. He went to the wall outlet and plugged the phone in to charge.

  The wallet was crammed with money in several currencies, an origami wedge of receipts, and four driver’s licences from different countries. Joseph almost expected different names, too, but no, they were all for Dr Lionel Banda. His National Registration card was at the back, laminated corners sneering around a picture of a startlingly attractive young man. Joseph felt a stab of envy – he had inherited all of his father’s bad traits and none of the compensatory ones – acne without the rugged scars, height without the muscles, yellow skin without the golden glow.

  Over rooibos tea and Eet-Sum-Mor biscuits, his grandparents were discussing what they had learned about their son from the bank. There was a tangle of different accounts that each received regular transfers from his bank in Addis Ababa. There were other, shadier dealings in the bank statements, too: money going to commissioners, coming from drug companies, online purchases from URLs twisted around the words ‘pharma’ and ‘Rx’. And there were six accounts receiving monthly infusions of cash from his main account in Addis, all vastly different sums. One account was receiving nearly four times as much as the others.

  ‘Business partners?’ asked Gran hopefully.

  ‘Women,’ Grandpa shook his head.

  Gran seemed upset, but Joseph didn’t understand why she was surprised. Even as a boy, he had picked up on the whiff of sexual drama his father carried with him when he had fetched him from school and toted him around Lusaka on his little ‘visits’. Joseph remembered it well – those long, dull afternoons sitting in some woman’s flat or hair salon or office, his eyes glued to his book as he waited for his father to finish. He wondered whether any of Dad’s women had been in that mourning room at the home funeral, if the one who had wailed so furiously was one of his widows.

  Gran ought to have known how her son was. Did she actually think he had contracted The Virus, passed it on to a wife and a son, divorced, remarried, and then stopped fucking around? Did she not realise that sex was what had killed him? The charging iPhone blurbled to life and lit the wall around the socket. Joseph walked over to it, his body brimming with an unspoken ‘I told you so’, that satisfaction that lays over disappointment like the play of iridescence on the surface of an oil slick.

  * * *

  The last thing Mum had to do before flying back to England was to visit the three houses she now owned in Lusaka. This time they left Gran behind and brought Farai – he had been grumpy that morning and Mum suspected Ba Grace had fed him something with groundnuts in it. The real estate agent they had hired sat in the back seat. She had apparently once been a model and her red skirt suit and plexiglass stilettos and heavy perfume seemed to confirm this. Joseph didn’t have his licence yet but he drove, wanting to impress his mother.

  The first house was very nearby, on Senanga Road. No one was home, not even the servants. They had to peek through the gap in the locked gate to see it. The glances Joseph caught – white bricks, a red-dust driveway, a boulder in the garden painted as a chessboard – stirred something in his memory, but his mother said this wasn’t possible. They had moved out of this house just after Joseph was born. He must have been remembering it from photos.

  They drove on to Munali to examine the second house, a bungalow with drooping eaves and a well-coiffed garden. Joseph and Farai sat on the warm boot of the car, the metal flexing around them with popping sounds. Only the cleaner was home this time. The estate agent and Mum stood talking at the threshold. The cleaner, in a faded tunic and bare feet, was nodding at the ground, waiting for them to finish their conversation so she could go back to work. His mother would have forgotten this – she had been abroad too long – and the estate agent didn’t care.

  They headed to Northmead to see the last house, Joseph carefully dodging potholes so as not to wake Farai napping in his mother’s lap. They drove past the shopping centre, and just as they turned onto Paseli Road, the estate agent reached a sheet of paper forward between the front seats. Joseph glanced at it as she scraped a curved pink fingernail down a column of numbers.

  ‘You see?’ she said to Mum. Pairs of zeroes, each pinioned with a full stop: 0.0, a column of eyes. The car crunched into a pothole. Farai bumped his head against the window, woke up and started crying.

  ‘Shit-sorry,’ Joseph said and looked back at the road.

  ‘That’s where the payments should be,’ the estate agent was saying. She had nearly wedged her torso between the front seats. Despite her perfume, Joseph could smell the Marmite on her breath. Farai was still whimpering.

  ‘Almost there,’ said Mum, hugging him close. She shrugged at the estate agent. ‘We’ll just boot them out.’

  ‘Hm,’ the woman frowned. ‘Yes, but—’ She leaned forward to say something.

  But then they had arrived and she had to communicate in the pauses between Joseph honking the horn and the gardener opening the gate and the car creeping into the flagstone drive, where a white pickup truck was already parked – Joseph did a double take, it was Dad’s old Peugeot! – but Mum didn’t notice because once they were out of the car, Farai refused to walk on his own and she was picking him up and the estate agent was just repeating herself about the payments when the front door opened and a woman stepped out of the house.

  She was in her forties maybe, wearing a shiny orange robe with no bra underneath, her nipples beading the satin, her uncovered hair in shrubby clumps. She was beautiful, nevertheless.

  ‘Oh!’ said Mum.

  The woman knelt heavily onto the stone driveway – Joseph and the estate agent both instinctively reached towards her – and clasped her hands together. She began mumbling through tears, as if praying to Farai, who stared down at her with wide eyes from his perch in Mum’s arms. Mum spun and stalked back to the car, her face frozen in an odd little smile, sudden tears leaving runnels in her make-up. Joseph touched her arm as she passed but her flinch held the quick of anger.

  He turned back to the estate agent, who was already shouting questions, her manicured fingers pursed like she was aiming at a dart-board. When the weeping woman didn’t reply, the estate agent clipped past Joseph to join his mother and brother in the back seat of the car. Helplessly,
Joseph watched her shut the door. Through the open window, he heard her begin to explain that this woman was an illegal tenant, she had not been paying…The estate agent turned and closed the window, the sunbright glass rolling smoothly up over the contempt on her face.

  This time, when he turned back to the woman, he recognised her. It was one of Dad’s mistresses, a hairdresser named Sylvia – God, he had called her Aunty Sylvia back then, hadn’t he? The last time he had seen her was at her salon, the day Mum had questioned him about Dad’s whereabouts and they had gone to Kalingalinga and the Indian girl had fallen from the tree. Dad had clearly continued his relationship with Sylvia after that if she was living in his house, rent-free. It came to Joseph again, the phone call he had overheard between his father and his grandmother about where Dad would stay when he came home to die. One of your properties? Gran had asked. Dad had wanted to come here. To this house. To her.

  Sylvia’s crying had taken on more momentum now, her sobs as rhythmic as a pulsing vein. There were two parallel purple marks on her neck – burns perhaps. It was disquieting to see her sealed off in her grief yet crying so publicly. She knelt there in a spotlight of sunshine, her face tilted up to the fresh blue sky, the folds of her robe shaking around her, her mouth stretched wide and her throat vibrating with the wretched urgency of a baby bird.

  * * *

  Joseph saw the fire on his way to take his IGCSEs. Grandpa was driving, Joseph in the back with his textbooks spread out over the seat. He wasn’t studying so much as calming himself, whispering words like one of his Aunt Carol’s Buddhist mantras. He barely noticed the burning smell and the frustrated honks of the cars until Grandpa slowed to a stop. Joseph looked up.