* * *
Joseph shuffled through the dark, carrying a bag of lab equipment over his shoulder. He had paid for it – he might as well keep it. It dangled down his back and bumped as he walked unsteadily towards the woodyard. He was high and delirious with fatigue from packing up the lab. He glanced back at the clinic, a last goodbye, and tripped. His bag flew and landed with a soft crunch. He fell slowly and heavily, tumbling down piecemeal, buttocks, then torso, then head.
All of a sudden Jacob was above him, looking down at him. On an impulse, Joseph grabbed at Jacob’s ankle. He lifted it and tripped him and Jacob fell too, cut down. Which came first? Jacob’s nails abrading his cheek? Or the quick punches to his chest? Jacob’s eyes were wide, his teeth gritted. His face floated above as if Joseph had exhaled him: mocking and grinning and drunk. Joseph pressed his fist hard against Jacob’s chest, his other hand around his wrist. Jacob wrapped his fingers around Joseph’s, their hands a clutch of flesh and bone, sweat and skin. Laughter burst from his chest. The moon watched over them, a perfect circle.
* * *
God sat at the base of the mopane tree, looking out. It was night. He would have to tell his grandson sooner or later. But for now he sat and watched Jacob and Joseph wrestle like children, wasted on beer or mbanji or both. The black boy looked silver, the yellow boy gold in the moonlight. RIP Beds & Coffins was otherwise empty but for a few new commissions – a bed, a coffin, a stool – standing like giant chess pieces, mired in curving shadows: a soundless, motionless standoff.
NyiiiiiiinYiiinyiiiiiiinyyyyiiiiiiinyiinyiiiiiiiiNyiiiiiiiinyinyiiiiiiiii. Munyinyi.
We’re still right here, niggling near, nipping and nibbling in. You say we’re vampires – bamunyama – because of our thirst for your blood. But we’re more akin to the walking dead, a stunned dumb nation, a Zombia.
The concept of the zombie was born in the Kongo, then travelled to the New World on slave ships: nzambi (a god) or zumbi (a fetish) – either way, a thing beyond the living. Revived from the dead by a witch, a bokor, the zombie’s a slave with no will. It can be sent to do labour or to murder a neighbour. An unkillable beast, it wanders the earth, doomed to vicarious evil. When a zombie attacks you, bites into your flesh, does it know what it’s doing? Not really.
This is true for us as well. We carry ill but we don’t really mean to. Fevered blood, hot blood, spicy blood, sour. Boiling inside the veins of the ailing, the minute we sip it, we know it. But by then it’s too late: the agent’s inside us and somewhat beyond our control. Viruses and parasites are small canny monsters: they take over our wishes completely. Possessed, blooddrugged, we are the third man, we broker between flesh and disease. Bad faith, bloodlust and anthropophily: such is the way of the mozombie.
Your beastly old tales know it all too well: we are Nature’s great superfluity. ‘What is this creature for?’ you still cry, raising your fist to the heavens. We pollinate little and feed very few, and no predator needs us to live. The name of our species, Anopheles gambiae? It literally means ‘no profit’. A deity slept on the day we sprang forth. We’re an asterisk to Nature, a flaw, a digression, a footnote if ever there was one. We are not just an accident, but issue it too. Extermination trials go wonky. Toxorhynchites, they thought, would devour us, but they released the wrong species and we did not just survive, we thrived!
Joseph himself has learned this the hard way: his vaccine, founded upon a mutation, has foundered on capital’s reef. But all sorts of things can slip through the cracks, especially genetically tweaked ones. Evolution forged the entirety of life using only one tool: the mistake…
Jacob
2009
Jacob lost his mother when her hair salon burned to the ground. After the Indian girl fell from the jacaranda tree, everyone trooped out into Kalingalinga with Uncle Lee as he carried her through the compound to his pickup. They drove off to the hospital, the girl and Ba Sibilla in the front next to Uncle Lee while his coloured son and wife – rollers still in her hair – squatted in the bed of the truck. Those who worked and lived at Hi-Fly Haircuttery & Designs Ltd returned in high spirits – they had saved a life! – only to find it being ravaged by ragged, roaring flames.
Ash swarmed around, black and grey and white like television snow. It smelled like a thousand supper fires, a thousand hairdryers. The neighbours were already trying to put it out, shouting commands, flapping blankets, tossing buckets of water. The salon girls scampered here and there, crying out. Jacob stood there helplessly and stared – not at the fire but at his mother, who stood equally fixed before it. Only when Aunty Loveness hugged her from behind did Mummy move, barely – her face trembled like a brushed string.
Only later, when the police told her that the fire had started at the electrical outlet, did she burst to furious life and turn on Jacob.
‘You!’ she spat at him. ‘Always messing about with these wires and gadgets and A-B-C-D! Why can’t you just be playing outside like a normal child?’
But playing outside like a normal child was exactly how the mwenye girl got hurt in the first place, Jacob thought. And it was only because she fell from the tree that they had all abandoned the Hi-Fly.
That night, he and his mother and Aunty Loveness slept outside, warming their bones against the flame-heated earth around the black husk of the salon. The next morning, they stuffed what was left of their possessions into plastic bags – Jacob was distraught to realise his aeroplane belt had charred – and began their exodus from Kalingalinga. He imagined that they would be zamfooting for hours to find housing, but after a short walk across the compound, his mother paused in front of the gate of a small breezeblock cottage and took his hand, gesturing for Aunty Loveness to wait.
‘Odi?’ Mummy called out as they ducked through a curtain at the entrance. It was dark and dank inside, and Jacob heard a faint blurbling sound like a storm drain, though it was not yet rainy season. An older woman, short and dark and round, got up from her squat in front of what looked like a crate of soft drinks. She was wearing a pink jersey and a faded chitenge wrapper with a pattern of binoculars with eyes on the lenses. She stepped towards them and he saw that she was ill – her own eyes were black and shut, her cheeks covered in a chalky rash.
‘Ba Mayo,’ Mummy said coolly.
Jacob looked up at her, then back at the woman. This was his gogo? He had never met her before but he had heard rumours about Matha Mwamba, Kalingalinga’s famous crying woman.
‘This is Jacob,’ Mummy said and nudged him forward. ‘Your grandson.’
Gogo reached out and patted his head searchingly. Mummy was speaking in a stilted Bemba, asking, or rather telling, his gogo to look after him. Mummy turned him to face her. She told him that she and Aunty Loveness already had a place to stay – she named a clinic – then promised that she would come back for him. She rubbed his cheek and made her exit. She did not say goodbye to her mother. She did not turn her head as she went, not even once.
* * *
After a week or so, Jacob went looking for her, but dozens of clinics had sprouted up in Kalingalinga to treat The Virus. It felt like it took as long as its name to find the One Hundred Years Clinic, and when Jacob enquired, a man wearing a white coat and a rubber and metal necklace told him that there was no Sylvia Mwamba living there. Gogo didn’t complain when Jacob returned to her home, stayed on for six weeks, five months, a year, two. She fed him and otherwise left him to his own devices. She didn’t seem bothered by his presence but she didn’t much bother about it either.
Jacob tried to make himself useful. He knocked together a bed and a table out of scraps from a woodyard. He sewed a protective canopy to spread over her tomato garden in the back. He rejigged an old filing cabinet so she could lock away her small moneys and convinced her to spend some of it to fit one wall of her cottage with a glass window, and to replace the old chitenge at the entrance with a wooden door.
His new h
ome seemed empty compared to the hair salon. Gogo only had one seat, a school chair with the desk still attached, graffitied with the love poems of Musonda + Debbie; and one table, covered with a flowery plastic tablecloth, upon which sat a dented pot, a black pan, two cracked plates and a mixed family of cutlery. Several crates of old soft-drink bottles sat under the bed he’d built. He slept on a mat on the floor beside it.
Having long dwelt in two kinds of washing-day loneliness – being alone amongst the salon girls and being alone without them – Jacob now became accustomed to a third kind: spending a lot of time with one very quiet person. Gogo would wobble outside with the dirty linens and slowly lower herself to her knees in front of a plastic tub. She would suds them, beat them on a flat rock, rinse them in the bucket, wring them, then hand them to Jacob to hang on the line.
When they were dry, she would press them with the coal-filled iron, more to eliminate putzi fly eggs than wrinkles. They would fold together, doing that odd mirror dance – their arms stretching wide and coming together as they drew close, then apart, then close again – until the sheets were all bundled up in themselves. Just like his gogo. Though she sometimes made a low hum that he recognised as his name, her quiet, weeping presence made Jacob feel lonelier than ever, as if her solitude were contagious.
* * *
One Tuesday two years after he’d moved in, Matha’s grandson came into the house, closed the door, and told her that there was a dead man in the garden. It was rainy season. The smell of mud and the smell of concrete walls hugged in the air like long lost relatives. The tin roof clattered. The air was skittish with sheltering insects. Matha sat on a stool, head tilted so her tears ran off her face. She was shelling groundnuts, discarding the squeaky husks on the floor, preparing to make a special dish of chibwabwa ne’ntwilo for her grandson. She would roast the groundnuts and pound them; the pumpkin leaves were already boiling in a pot on the mbaula. Jacob came in and said, ‘There’s a man in the garden holding a piece of paper that says he is dead.’
Matha frowned and smacked his head for lying. Then she paused. She stood up and went over to her new window to look outside, but she couldn’t see properly through the heavy rain. She patted the windowsill to find her matchbox of razor blades, opened the little drawer, pulled one out, and plucked its tip to check its sharpness. Then she swiftly ran the blade lengthways between her right eyelids. She heard Jacob gasp and rush over, but by the time he reached her, she had already done the other side, slicing through the tangle of lashes that usually kept her half-blind. She nipped a final knot and blinked wide. She stared out of the window until she was sure.
She went over to the bed Jacob had built for her and dragged a crate out from under it. She pulled out three soft-drink bottles – a Coke bottle shaped like a bishop chess piece, a Fanta bottle engraved with ridges that you could play like a guiro, and a Sprite bottle indented with fingerprints as if a baby had handled the green glass before it hardened. The bottles were full – not with bubbly black, orange or silver – but with a clear, still liquid. She picked up all three, reconsidered, and took just two. She walked to the door of No. 74 and opened it.
A man moved towards her through the downpour. Drops bounced off his body and crossed the falling rain, their clash shaping an aura. He stepped under the slim shelter formed by the jutting tin roof. His hair was long and matted in greying dreadlocks. A slip of paper hung from his slack fingers. Matha saw the scar on his neck. She reached across the threshold and handed him a bottle. He took it with a nod. They clinked and drank. He spat.
‘Heysh, woman! But it’s salty!’
Matha raised an eyebrow and drank again.
‘May I have a beer instead?’ asked Godfrey Mwango.
* * *
A few days later, the rain still clamouring on the roof of No. 74, Jacob found the dead man on the stoop, barefoot and muttering in a low steady current. His dreadlocks hung like different kinds of seedpods, some thin, some thick. He wore a tattered maroon suit with flared trousers and wide lapels. It had once been velvet but large mangy patches had worn away. Jacob joined him. Ba Godfrey handed him a Mosi – he didn’t seem to notice or care that Jacob was fourteen.
‘…radical! The Godfather of Soul! In Zambia! James Brown…’
Jacob took a swig of beer – it tasted bitter and round like impwa – and tried to follow the meandering account of the concert. He latched on again when Ba Godfrey mentioned his gogo.
‘…Lusaka to see Matha because I heard she was back from Kasama but then the lorry I jumped on in Choma broke down so I walked with the driver to a village somewhere there to find materials to fix the lorry. I have some mechanical knowledge from the Doctor, he taught us about revolution but also about these electronical things, I know how to fix an engine…’
But when Ba Godfrey reached the nearest village, he had ended up drinking three or four cartons of shakeshake with the locals – this was unwise, he admitted – then he had made a bet and lost and had to work to pay it off and a white preacher had baptised him with cooking oil and put the host on his tongue – but it was a beetle, he vomited it up – and he had joined a church and played the guitar like KK but the white hanky turned black after KK lost the election—
Jacob knew about Kenneth Kaunda and his white handkerchief, but KK had stopped being president in 1991, six years before Jacob was born. Ba Godfrey was still going.
‘…minibus stopped at Mazabuka but I found a bicycle. Then it broke but Ba Nkoloso taught us how to put the chain back on and ratchet it tight so I was riding fine but then a Land Rover hit me and I broke my leg and there was a hole just here…’ Ba Godfrey pointed to a deep scar, a ravine in his cheek.
A long night had followed – there was a muzungu woman and an Arab man who had vanished in a burst of kwacha and a boy who had brought him water and then the muzungu woman had returned but her hair had gone from black to yellow, from night to day. She had cradled his head in her lap and kept him alive until the weeyo-weeyo bus came. Blinding white lights, the smell of inswa and Dettol, a fire, playing nsolo with a monkey that bit his thigh and snatched a beer out of his hand, a long dark plain lit by a single paraffin lamp…
Jacob frowned, unsure if it was Ba Godfrey or the Mosi that had him buzzing with confusion. ‘Who is Ba Nkoloso?’ he asked.
Ba Godfrey’s head swayed with the interruption, his lips trembling as he turned to Jacob.
‘Ba Nkoloso?! A revolutionary! He said Zambia would go to the moon!’
Jacob’s spirits sank. Bashikulu had wandered off the path again.
‘Your gogo has not told you about Ba Nkoloso?’
‘Gogo does not talk much,’ said Jacob, wiping beer bubbles from his upper lip.
‘Hm, yes,’ Ba Godfrey laughed. ‘She can be quiet, that Matha. But she is a fiery girl!’
Jacob looked at him. How strange to imagine that this muddy old man – skin riddled as dirt, wormy grey hairs in his dreads, that slug-like scar on his neck – had known Gogo as a girl.
‘Ba Nkoloso taught us about history, politics, technology. And Matha – she even has math in her name! She was the smartest space cadet—’
‘Wait, Gogo was…a space cadet?’
‘Yesss!’ said Ba Godfrey. ‘That is what I’m telling you! Listen.’
And on he went, opening two more Mosis for them along the way. This space story was bizarre but it was more coherent and detailed – oil drums rolling down a hill with cadets inside, the headquarters in Chunga Valley, the Cyclops I shuttle – and it could withstand questions, unlike his other stories, which crumbled at the touch like Jacob’s clothes after the fire at the salon. By the time Gogo returned from the market, slouching under a Union Jack umbrella, Jacob almost didn’t recognise her. So taken was he with the vision of ‘Matha Mwamba, Star Afronaut’ that his grandfather had painted – a young woman decked out in a bomber jacket, arms akimbo, a sparkle in her eye – that
it had displaced the swampy, lumpy Gogo moving slowly towards them.
Jacob slid his empty beer bottle behind him and got up to help her carry her bags of unsold vegetables. Ba Godfrey nodded at her as she passed inside but stayed on the stoop, sipping at his Mosi, his feet half-sunk in mud. Inside, Jacob sat at the table and watched Gogo stash vegetables and a rotten wad of kwacha in the filing cabinet. Did she like selling vegetables? Did she miss being a space cadet? Gogo switched on the electric kettle he’d found for her in the dump and made them each a cup of tea. She sat with him and they sipped. Only then did Jacob ask her his most pressing question.
‘You had twelve cats, Gogo?’
Her head tipped up with surprise. It was the first time Jacob had ever seen his grandmother’s smile. She was missing some teeth but it was beautiful.
* * *
Jacob was too young for a real job and too old to go back to school. His mother had never tried to get him a formal education, not that he wanted one – who would want to be a student with an itchy uniform and a ringwormy head, confined to a hot classroom all day, listening to the drone of a teacher who had barely passed Form II herself? Plus school was a dead end once you hit the dread wall of grade seven exams. Your best bet was to hustle – scrape some profit by hawking goods to those Zambians with better luck or richer relatives. You could grow those goods (vegetables, fruits, puppies). You could buy them on the black market (watches, hats, puppies). Or you could scavenge for them.
The Old Drift Page 51
