* * *
That bundle of agitation with its beady eyes needled into Jacob’s mind and stayed there. A few days later, he realised why his helicopter wouldn’t fly. Just as Pepa’s jumper had kept the bat earthbound, he had added too much weight to the helicopter when he had soldered the circuit. The moment it tilted too far, the airlift vacuum created by the spinning blade weakened. The balance of energy and mass was off. Jacob couldn’t make the circuit board lighter now. So he broke a plastic window and pulled out the little pilot, who was bent permanently in a seated position as if taking a shit. Unburdened, the toy buzzed to life, lifted right up and flew.
It flew so easily that Jacob found himself chasing after it. He hadn’t even figured out how to turn it off or how far it could go before the Bluetooth link severed – in the many months of trying to fly it, he had never needed to. His eyes fixed on the hovering chopper, Jacob pushed through Gogo’s gate and ran down the guttered path, swerving around a wheelbarrow and darting down a narrow passage behind a nursery school. He raced diagonally across its yard, where the girls skipping rope stopped their chanting song and gaped up at the wondrous toy, then giggled as he bumped into a guava tree and fell on his bum.
The helicopter swerved towards the metal yard, where Ba Solomon’s crew was busy welding, twisting, pounding and painting iron into playground equipment. Jacob stepped on a merry-go-round, leaving a footprint in the fresh paint, jumped through a swing, tangling its chains, bounced off a juddering slide. Ba Solomon gave a lazy shout, his boys laughing at the slapstick. The helicopter gusted higher, caught in an updrift. As he watched it rise, Jacob’s competing impulses – to fly the thing and land the thing – suddenly both seemed pointless. He just had to let it crash. His hand went limp on the controller as he slowed.
The toy came sloping down, Jacob trudging after it. It had led him to the edge of Alick Nkhata Road, where a blue and white minibus was just pulling onto the dirt bank to pick up passengers. He watched the helicopter swoop down as if on the end of a heaven-hooked string. Just before it crashed into the dust, it nosed into the back of a woman in the bus queue. She turned to stare at the intruder at her feet. She was wearing stiletto heels and a tight chitenge skirt with a pattern of dollars, euros and yen. Her shirt was twisted, her lipstick smudged. Glittery nails curved around her bus fare. She looked up with a frown and blinked.
‘Jacob?’ she gasped dramatically. She shuffled forward in her binding and stilts and fell upon him. Jacob reluctantly accepted the hug. He hadn’t seen Aunty Loveness since the Hi-Fly had burned down three years ago.
‘You’ve grown, haven’t you?’ she smirked. ‘What are you up to? Making trouble?’
‘No, ma,’ he mumbled, picking up his helicopter and hiding it behind his back.
‘Madamu!’ the bus conductor called. ‘Please come up now so we go, eh?’
‘Iwe, shuttup if you want my money,’ she spat, slapping the air with a clutch of kwacha bills. She turned back to Jacob and smiled, her teeth bright as moons in the dark sky of her face.
‘You should go and see your mother, darling,’ she purred meanly. ‘She misses you.’
Jacob swallowed. ‘But Ba Aunty, where is she keeping up?’
‘You haven’t been to the house?’ Aunty Loveness’s laugh tinkled up then fell to a sigh. ‘It is just pa Northmead. Paseli Road.’
Before he could ask for the house number, she had turned, her weave sweeping the air.
‘Right, darling, I’m off. Ciao,’ she said and stepped onto the bus, delicate as a queen in her stilettos. The conductor turned to watch her squeeze into a seat. ‘Key to the grave,’ he muttered. Then he swung the door shut in Jacob’s face and the bus crept into the traffic.
* * *
That warehouse shipment of smartphones had come in to take advantage of the completion of the AFRINET project. Fibre cables now floated in the three seas around the continent like immense electric eels, zapping currents between servers and routers that spewed Wi-Fi into the air until a swarming, flashing stormcloud of it hovered over Africa. Korea and China and Japan had all caught Afrotech fever, flooding the market with cheap mobiles with built-in Wi-Fi ports. In a leapfrog of technology, the majority of Africans, the poor included, had access to the whole wide world through its web.
Jacob connected the iPhone he’d nabbed from the warehouse to AFRINET and searched online for Audis and Benzes; Solo watched Nollywood clips on YouTube. The boys had been swapping it back and forth for weeks before Pepa noticed. She was furious. Christian, as they had started calling the soldier with his dangling cross, had been satisfied with their warehouse heist. He had even rewarded them with a carton of Pall Malls, which Ba Godfrey had promptly resold. But if he found out that they had stolen from him, who knew what he would do to them?
‘Are you not the one who opened the box?’ Jacob accused Pepa.
‘Just to see!’ she protested. ‘We could not do the job with that nasty thing flying at our heads! But I told you we must leave it there. Not start thieving-thieving.’
Jacob defended himself. It had been an impulse theft, the way Pepa herself had once snatched glasses off the sunburnt noses of foreigners.
‘Solo, did you not say your sister took mbasela?’
Solo was too busy scrounging around Ba Godfrey’s mat for bits of marijuana to reply.
‘He pays us to steal for him!’ said Pepa. ‘Not from him!’
‘Isn’t he stealing from the bwana who owns the warehouse? How can he deny us the same?’
‘Waona manje,’ she said sullenly. ‘That man has a gun.’
Solo sidled up and put his arm around his sister, the iPhone in his hand. The browser was open to a picture of a South African model, Refilwe Modiselle. Pepa’s eyes widened: Modiselle was an albino too. Soon enough Pepa was snatching the iPhone out of the boys’ hands every day, shouting ‘Bags I!’ and hunkering down to open her book-marked fashion blogs. And when Christian asked them to do another warehouse job, and then another, with nary a word about a missing iPhone, she decided he must have missed or forgiven it.
Over the next two years of working for Christian, the Kalingalinga squad skimmed a little off the top of all of their heists. They alternated who got first choice of mbasela. Pepa selected a sky-blue dress from a shipment of clothes. Solo took a neon boomerang from a crate of electronic toys. The siblings were surprised that Jacob let Solo choose that time – didn’t Engineer want this-here remote-controlled car, or that-there robo-dog? No. Jacob saved his pick for a shipment of sports equipment. Aha! A bicycle! Pepa winked at Solo. But no, what Jacob wanted was a small white box labelled GoPro.
* * *
Jacob downloaded the GoPro app on the iPhone, then popped a battery in the eyeball camera and suctioned it to the bottom of his helicopter, right between the skids. He had to chip away six panels, the pilot’s chair and the steering wheel to make up for the camera’s weight, and the chopper still wobbled when it went up. But Jacob had become an expert at flying it and it was unexpectedly easy to navigate via the iPhone, which streamed the images recorded by the GoPro.
Jacob saw its flight unfurl from his seat on the stoop of No. 74. It was like watching a film of the compound taken from above. The dwellers of Kalingalinga went about their business, little black heads trailed by their shadows. The motley roofs of their homes resembled the chitenge patch-quilts people sold at Sunday Market at Arcades.
On a whim, Jacob sent the helicopter across the road to the Lusaka City Airport to meet its gigantic relatives, the parked aeroplanes with their drooping noses. It zipped between two barbed electric wires and over a rolling heap of oil drums. He saw the warehouse in a corner of the screen and instinctively veered towards it. He approached from behind, clucking at what a poor job he and Solo had done of concealing their digging under its back wall, then navigated around to the front. Four men were loading boxes inside. They wore green army uniforms an
d black belts sagging with guns. Soldiers. Rich ones – gold glinted from their necks and wrists and fingers and earlobes.
As he neared, one man whipped around and gazed right into the eye of the camera. Shit. Jacob started back and reversed. An eddy of action broke onto the screen – men yelling and waving gold-spined fists – then receded into a blur as Jacob lifted the chopper’s nose up into the air and banked sharply left. Shitshitshit. He zoomed off, his heart pounding, and in a fever of acceleration, he overshot the compound. He caught a glimpse of Gogo’s roof and himself on the stoop – a cross-legged splotch – and looked up just in time to see the helicopter fly overhead, the camera like a black moon in its white belly.
There was a warning sound and he looked back down at the phone. A low-battery window was covering the view. Sucking his teeth, he tapped the x in the corner to close it. The helicopter was still moving rapidly. Jacob recognised the green expanse of the UNZA grounds, the Goma Lakes set into them like giant mirrors. Arcades came into view with its white canopy like a cresting wave in the middle of the car park. Then the building-buttoned maze of Showgrounds. The Manda Hill parking structure, grey and immense as ancient ruins. The green metal pedestrian bridge where Great East Road met Addis Ababa Drive, infested with Airtel and Digit-All ads.
Just after the Northmead shopping centre, Jacob made a right. Paseli Road. He didn’t know the exact house number but it didn’t matter – a boxy white frame came into view and he swerved towards it as if magnetised. It was Uncle Lee’s old pickup, parked in the drive in front of a reddish L-shape – a roof – with a green lawn filling out the rectangle. Jacob descended and sent the chopper around the house, angling the one-eyed belly of the beast up to a window but he could see nothing through the curtains. His mother had always preferred privacy to light. Annoyed, he reversed from the window too quickly, ricocheted off the edge of the house and tumbled into the grass.
Jacob stared at the picture on the screen: sharp green blades jutting through thin white skids. He jabbed the launch button but the chopper shuddered uselessly against the ground. Shit. The low-battery window appeared again. He tapped it closed. A chongololo began slinking upward from the grass, probing a skid with its antennae, then creeping up it. What if he sent the chopper forward and up at the same time? He pressed both buttons at once, but this just sent the blades sputtering like an overturned plough. The knubby centipede was now curled around the skid – the vibration had triggered its spiral clutch. Shit. With this new burden, the chopper was once again too heavy to launch. A little white circle began to whir over the screen. Shitshitshit. Jacob stood up from Gogo’s stoop in Kalingalinga, staring helplessly at the iPhone as it went black.
* * *
He ran to RIP Beds & Coffins to get the phone charger, which Pepa insisted on keeping there at all times. He found her alone, sitting under the mopane with a resting frown, rifling through an issue of Mademoiselle. With a sinking feeling, he noticed the telltale bulge under her tight blue skirt – she had stuffed something in her panties to absorb her menstrual blood. That bulge usually appeared along with the cloudy mood that dulled her silver eyes to grey.
‘Pepa? I need the…’ he began cautiously but he was interrupted by a shout.
Solo raced into the woodyard and stopped in front of them, panting and pointing behind him. Pepa stood with a sigh as the red dust storm approached. Christian’s SUV rumbled towards them and crunched to a halt. Used to this by now, they stepped back, coughing. But this time, Christian did not come out to berate and instruct them. Instead, the tinted passenger window purred down and a gun nosed out from the darkness within. Pepa gripped Jacob’s arm. Their stolen mbasela had been discovered.
With a curt clunk, the back door swung open. Solo, Pepa and Jacob looked at each other, then piled wearily into the SUV. Christian glanced at them in the rearview mirror, but said nothing, his gun resting in his lap like a subdued pet. The driver beside him wore civilian clothes and so many silver chains that he seemed caught in a net. Christian gave a slight nod, and the driver reversed the vehicle and sped out of the compound.
The three teenagers sat quietly in the back of the shadowy machine, with its cold air and metallic smell and glinting lights. Jacob heard Pepa’s bare thighs unstick from the leather seat whenever she shifted. Christian was tapping his palm with a finger. Solo’s eyes widened and he nudged Jacob, who peered between the seats. Christian’s palm was lit bright blue – he’d had a Digit-All Bead implanted in his finger. The boys had read about the prototypes online but they had never seen one in person before. Christian glanced at the rearview again and they trained their eyes on the tinted windows.
They drove from Kalingalinga towards Kabulonga, from the compound to the suburbs, moving up in the world. Stone walls rolled by, their smooth facades hiding private schools and fancy motels and apamwamba homes. Even the walls seemed to have their own gardens here – their barbed-wire or broken-glass crowns festooned with bougainvillea, strips of green grass stretching from their feet. Past Crossroads, near Leopards Hill Cemetery, jagged heaps of slate began to appear on the side of the road, stacked vertically like jagged grey flames.
Around New Kasama, the SUV turned onto a dirt road then, after a few minutes, swung into a stone driveway splotched with red ants’ nests. The silver-strung driver parked and leaned back as if settling in. Christian got out and walked off, waving his gun over his shoulder to beckon them. The three of them tumbled out and followed him on a path through lush hedges springing with purple and white flowers – a shocking abundance in the midst of dry season. Jacob had just decided that Christian was taking them into the bush to murder them when they came out into a fenced-off clearing.
Before them was a rectangular swimming pool, its inside painted the colour of shadow, a scatter of leaves poxing its surface. On the other side of it was half of a mansion. Concrete columns stood in the three corners, and there was a flight of steps in the fourth, but there were no walls or ceiling yet. Wave-shaped roof tiles were stacked along the edge of the garden. Though unfinished, the house was furnished, with armchairs and sofas and tables and even a bed. With no walls to hang from, the decor was spread out on the ground: ‘African’ paintings of bare-breasted women with pots on their heads, raffia-trimmed wall hangings, mirrors in gilt frames. Uniformed men prowled around, stepping cautiously around the strewn interior design. Le Grand Kallé muttered from speakers as tall as the men.
Christian walked into the open-air half-building, stepping politely through an empty door frame. They followed. A low voice issued a command and Christian stepped aside to disclose an older man sitting in a leather chair with wooden arms carved into pouncing lions. He was blueblack, bearded, bespectacled, his big belly taut under his army shirt. He gestured for them to sit on a white leather sofa across from him. They huddled together, Pepa’s arms crossed over her breasts. Christian stood beside them, handgun at his side. The man, the big bwana, petted the lions’ heads and smiled broadly.
‘It is now a party!’ he said.
They stared.
‘Greet!’ Christian ordered.
Solo shot to his feet and stepped towards the man in the chair to shake hands, but Christian grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him down onto the sofa. ‘From here!’
‘Hallo, sah?’ Solo said shakily.
‘Muli bwanji, Ba General!’ Christian corrected.
They all intoned the greeting. The General adjusted his spectacles but did not reply. He flicked his fingers over his shoulder to call one of his men, who leaned in for a whispered instruction. The minion sauntered off and came back with a tray bearing glasses of a clear liquid, which he served to the three quivering guests. The vodka went from knife cold to searing in Jacob’s throat. Pepa gulped it down, thinking it was water, and started coughing. Solo sipped cautiously, then eagerly.
‘So,’ the General smiled. ‘I hear you have been robbing me, ehn?’
The thr
ee of them glanced at each other, Pepa shaking her head subtly in an ‘I told you so’ way. This must be the bwana whose warehouse Christian was stealing from. Christian had clearly brought them here to take the blame for the missing loot.
‘Toys, gadgetry,’ said the General. ‘Whatwhat, other things. Clothez, camera, iPhoney.’
Jacob sat up, pulled the dead iPhone from his pocket and stretched it towards the General. Christian grabbed it from Jacob’s hand and ferried it to his boss.
The General pressed the silver button on the edge of the phone. ‘What kinds of things are compound children doing with my phones?’ He sucked his teeth. ‘Why is it not coming on?’
‘The battery is finished, bwana,’ said Jacob.
The General called for a charger. A guard brought a black square covered with gleaming panels. Jacob stared with professional curiosity as the guard plugged the phone into it and placed it in a spot of sunlight by the sofa. A solar-powered charger.
The General thrust his beard upward. ‘You! Come here.’
All three of them touched their chests: Me? Christian hoisted Pepa to her feet.
‘But I am the one who took!’ Jacob said.
The General waved his hand dismissively. Christian slammed the butt of his gun down on Jacob’s shoulder to shut him up, then grabbed Pepa again and began dragging her to the General. She looked over her shoulder, her pale cheeks blotchy, her eyes pleading.
The Old Drift Page 54
