The Boy Next Door Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2009 by Irene Sabatini

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-07207-6

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  PART ONE: 1980s

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  PART TWO: Early 1990s

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  PART THREE: Mid-1990s

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  PART FOUR: Late 1990s

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  This book is dedicated to

  Fabio, who never believed otherwise;

  Griffin and Riordan, treasures

  and my parents, who set me on my way.

  PART ONE

  1980s

  1.

  Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight.

  A week later the police came. I was reading Sue Barton, Senior Nurse on the veranda, and I was at the part when Dr. Bill Barry proposes to Sue Barton. Daddy was busy tinkering with the Cortina under the jacaranda tree. Mummy was in the bedroom trying on her new Manyano outfit for the graduation ceremony that was going to take place at church, which would turn fifteen young women into fully fledged members of the congregation. Rosanna was helping her.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Bishop,” I heard. “Sorry to disturb. We have come about next door.”

  The chief constable wiped his forehead with a tissue. “This heat is destroying us,” he said, and from the veranda, I could see a wet dark patch on his shirt, which made it cling to his back.

  It was midday and there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. Even though it was the end of January not one drop of rain had fallen in Bulawayo.

  “This problem of no transport. Only walking these days for us. Ten kilometers and I am not so young anymore, not like these calves.” He pointed at the other two policemen who were standing near the Cortina at attention.

  Daddy said something about bulls, which made the chief constable laugh while the calves remained very rigid and serious.

  Most of the brand-new police cars donated by Britain were in scrap yards; the police force had been statistically shown to have the most dangerous drivers in Zimbabwe. In fact, the chief constable, who had only recently been promoted after his white superior had tendered his resignation, had been responsible for a recent smashup against an electricity pole; Daddy hinted that he was most likely driving without a valid license.

  “Are you finding petrol?” the chief constable asked, eyeing the two policemen who sprung forwards. It looked like he had jerked them into motion with string.

  “A little only,” Daddy replied as he gently put down the bonnet. “Enough to go to the office and back.”

  I knew that he was exaggerating; he didn’t want the chief constable to feel free to ask him for transport.

  The chief constable took out his tissue again and patted his forehead. “The South Africans are making it very difficult, Mr. Bishop.”

  The day’s headline in The Chronicle was about the RENAMO rebels in Mozambique who were funded by South Africa. They had sabotaged a big section of the pipeline, which brought oil to Zimbabwe. South Africa was trying to destabilize our newly independent country.

  “Let’s hope we can secure the Beira pipeline from further attacks,” Daddy said while wiping his hands on his orange overalls.

  Daddy and the chief constable looked at the Cortina as if they were expecting some response from it. The Cortina was gleaming proudly in the heat.

  The chief constable coughed and cleared his throat. “Well, Mr. Bishop. This is a very sad business we have come about. We…”

  Roxy, our Jack Russell terrier who had been sleeping in his kennel, came running out at full speed. He leapt and landed on a police foot and began vigorously licking the boot. The policeman hopped and skipped and wagged his foot, but he couldn’t shake Roxy off. Daddy finally managed to pull him away while trying hard not to laugh.

  “We are looking for evidence,” the chief constable started again, once Roxy was safely in Daddy’s arms. “We have thoroughly investigated the McKenzie property, and now we are checking all the neighboring land. We would like to take a look by the perimeters.”

  Daddy took them to the back of the house where the two juniors cupped their hands under the tap at the end of the vegetable patch and drank as though they had not seen water for a very long time. The chief constable looked at them and shook his head. He drank slowly from the glass that I had brought out to him. Then they all walked along the fence that separated our limestone pink Spanish Colonial from the McKenzie’s whitewashed Cape Dutch.

  Their black boots kept getting sucked in and stuck in the mud as they trudged about looking for the evidence, because Maphosa had just watered the vegetables even though Daddy was constantly telling him that watering at the hottest time of the day was a treacherous waste of a precious natural resource and that even the borehole could run out of water.

  After one walk through, the evidence was still missing. The chief constable said, that was quite all right; they had obtained a confession.

  He took out his notepad, like Columbo, and he asked Daddy if he had heard or seen anything strange at the neighbors on that night or before. Daddy quickly said no, not at all. And then he invited the chief constable, who was one of his best customers, for some tea.

  Daddy worked for the Telecommunications branch of the post office, making sure that the phone system worked throughout Bulawayo and the rest of Matabeleland. Sometimes he got calls in the
middle of the night, and he had to take off to the exchange to fix something. But he was also good with other things like radios and TVs. He had passed the City and Guilds of London Institute exam in electrical repairs. He did up the boy’s kaya with electricity so that Rosanna, who lives in that small room, is much better off than the real maids and gardeners who have to stay in them: they have to use candlesticks and paraffin stoves and sometimes, they don’t even have proper toilet facilities.

  Last year, with the help of some apostolics, he built his own workshop between the boy’s kaya and the chicken pen using asbestos roof sheeting and bricks that were made by the apostolics in their yard.

  The chief constable dismissed his juniors with instructions that they should type out a report, ready for him when he got back to the station.

  He stood with Daddy by the fence. “Our white people are losing direction, left, right, and center, Mr. Bishop. Independence has confused them.”

  Mummy, Daddy, Rosanna, and I had watched the independence ceremony on TV over two years ago now. Prince Charles looked rather sad when they gave him the British flag; his mouth was set very firmly as if to make sure that he would not cry and disgrace the queen. All the previous week The Herald had had a list of white Zimbabwean beauties who would make a perfect bride for him.

  Mr. Robert Gabriel Mugabe took his oath, his hand firmly on the Bible… and so help me God… and Zimbabwe was born.

  Daddy and the chief constable washed their hands under the tap.

  “He was smelling heavily of smoke, Mr. Bishop, shaking nonstop, you could think he was suffering from heavy-duty malaria. We have never had any problems from that place before. It seems the boy has only just come from South Africa for his father’s funeral.”

  They went to sit under the gum tree. I started making the tea in the kitchen, leaving the window wide open. They were sitting only a couple of meters away and the chief constable had a loud voice.

  “It was very bad, very bad over there,” he went on, settling into his chair with a very loud “humph.” “The youngster, only seventeen, came to the station, gave himself up. And you are quite sure you have never seen this boy before?”

  I bit my lip and held tightly to my breath, but I didn’t hear Daddy’s reply because the kettle started whistling.

  I brought the tray outside, and the chief constable closed his notebook and put it on the table beside the tray.

  They were quiet until I was back inside.

  “We found the remains at the back of the house by the boy’s kaya. Eighty or so percent of the body burnt, just bone left in some parts.”

  I saw Daddy turn, and I quickly bent my head by the kitchen sink and pretended to be busy washing the dishes.

  “But, madoda, this is a strange case. There is another woman also; the young man brought her first to the hospital before he came to us.”

  He started scratching his arm and then reached out for a slice of bread that I had spread with butter and strawberry jam.

  “It is not at all sure she will survive,” the chief constable went on, shaking his head while he chewed with his mouth open. “And we do not know the precise identity of this woman. We are not sure of her age, if she is even local. We have contacted Beitbridge Border Police for the entry documents to see if we can learn anything; the car he was driving has South African number plates.”

  He was eyeing the second slice, and Daddy told him to please help himself. “He will not talk about her, nothing. Tsh, he will have enough time to think about all this in the stocks.”

  The chief constable scratched his head and drank some more tea. Some spilled on the saucer, and he poured this back in the cup.

  I stood there in the kitchen the chief constable’s words creeping inside me.

  “Lindiwe…”

  The glass dropped from my hands.

  “Rosanna, you gave me a fright,” I scolded, bending down to pick up the pieces.

  She was standing by the door, holding an empty perfume bottle. She must have been in the main bedroom all this time.

  “Daydreamers will miss the Lord’s Banquet,” she sang roughly to the tune of The Lord Is My Shepherd, with her eyes closed. She put the bottle on the table and took the broom from the corner.

  I couldn’t even smile at her impersonation of Mummy. The chief constable’s words had suddenly made what had happened next door real. Until now I had been reading about the events in The Chronicle like everyone else in Bulawayo, trying to pretend that I didn’t know more. I could feel Mrs. McKenzie here, her eyes following me, watching. I was sure her presence would soon bring in the chief constable, who would open his notebook and demand my statement.

  “It’s good that she has gone to her meeting with Mrs. Ncube. What’s wrong, Sisi? Your hand is shaking; you will cut yourself. Leave this, I’ll finish.”

  I liked the way Rosanna called me Sisi; it irritated Mummy. When we were living in Thorngrove, one of Mummy’s brothers brought her from Kamativi and said that she was the daughter of so-and-so in the village who had just died. Could Mummy please look after her? Mummy had no choice but to help.

  “What would have possessed that boy to do such a thing?” Mummy asked when we were having supper in the lounge.

  “South Africa,” said Daddy. “Pure and simple. They pick up fast ways over there. Drugs. Mandrax and even worse.”

  “But,” said Mummy, “to do something like that…?”

  I was looking at where Daddy was sitting, thinking that not too long ago that boy had sat in the exact same place, cradling a car radio on his lap, like a cat, waiting for Daddy to take a look at it.

  Daddy caught me staring at him and said, “In life, anything can happen.”

  2.

  He had rung the bell at the gate. Maphosa went to see who it was, and then he called Rosanna. Rosanna let him in because he was a white boy. He’d just brought his radio from South Africa, and the thing was already playing up. “Those South Africans,” I heard him say. “They’re a bunch of crooks, right skellums, not like us honest blokes down here, lights off.” He sat on Daddy’s chair. I was sitting across the room from him, doing my homework on the dining-room table. Rosanna went to make his tea.

  “Hey, lightie,” I heard, “what you’re doing?”

  I’m not a lightie I wanted to tell him. I’m not tiny. And, I’m not a boy. But his voice didn’t sound as though he meant to be mean to me.

  “Homework,” I answered in my best European voice.

  “Homework,” he said, leaning forward to put the radio on the table. I thought of how annoyed Mummy would be to find it there, possibly scratching the wood. It only needed to be moved a bit to go on top of the linen doily, but I couldn’t do it.

  “Talking about skellums, you should have seen what we guys got up to, how we mucked about, did fuck all at school.”

  Fuck all echoed inside me.

  I couldn’t believe that this white youth was sitting on my father’s chair, his white tackies planted on the brown carpet. I tried to concentrate on my math problem, but the numbers would not stay still.

  His hair was cut in the same style as Craig Davies’s, the youth leader at church: very short at the sides with a little tail at the back and the front looking like the bristles of a brush. When he reclined his head on Mummy’s lace sofa back, it made me think of a porcupine.

  Craig had announced on Friday that he was heeding God’s call and going to Pretoria to spread His word. Daddy said it was funny how, of late, God was targeting whites and being very specific in his relocation directions. I had overheard Craig tell one of the church deacons that there were way too many Affs now, the atmosphere had all changed….

  For a long time we were the only nonwhite members of the church. On our very first Sunday at church, Mummy, Daddy, and I had the whole row to ourselves and no one sat behind or in front of us. An old white lady gave Mummy a dirty look when their elbows brushed.

  “Mind my language. So homework, heh?”

  Rosanna brou
ght him the tea and a plate of Marie biscuits. She looked at me as though I had done something wrong.

  He gulped down the tea and munched on the biscuit. He seemed very hungry.

  “You look like a boffin,” he said. “What number you come in class, heh?”

  I didn’t want to tell him. Somehow I was embarrassed by it.

  “Come on, cough up. Don’t be shy.”

  “Number one,” I said in my best European voice.

  “Number one, heh.”

  He slapped his thigh and some tea spilt on the carpet.

  “I told you so. I can spot a boffin from a mile away. Me, I was right off the scale, the other end of it.”

  He coughed and choked on his biscuits and tea. He went red in his face, and I could see the schoolboy in him.

  “I tell you what,” he said. “Since you’re so smart, I’ll give you a problem to solve. It’s something that’s bothering me a lot.”

  But before he could tell me the problem, Daddy came home and took a look at the car radio. They moved out to the workshop and I finished my homework. For days I thought about the problem, his problem that was bothering him so much. I wondered if it had had anything to do with Mrs. McKenzie and this made me feel guilty as if I could have done something to save her life.

  Because, three days later, Mrs. McKenzie was dead.

  3.

  The Friday after the chief constable’s visit I went to the public library. I didn’t go down straight to the Sue Barton series or to the Nancy Drew shelf like I usually did; I went upstairs to the medical section. The librarian gave me a funny look but didn’t say anything. She was busy chatting with a farmer, telling him all about the mobile library.

  I wanted to find out how long you would have to burn to become just bone. I wanted to know if Mrs. McKenzie had burnt all night while I had been sleeping. I tried to think what I had been dreaming of. I wanted to know if something had happened in my dreams that should have made me wake up, draw back the curtain and see… what? Would I have seen her? Heard her? Smelt her? I tried to remember when was the last time I had seen her alive, but I couldn’t see it, that exact moment. Sometimes I would think I had spoken to her or she had said something to me, but when I thought harder, I couldn’t see the two of us anywhere like that. Mrs. McKenzie didn’t like me. Even though I was a girl and too old, she still thought that I was one of those kids who ran down the road ringing bells and scooting off. She would send old Mphiri, her gardener, after them. He couldn’t match their long skinny legs, and Maphosa would get angry and start his muttering: That old man should be back home, but what is he doing? Look at him—boy this, boy that—with their broken Mukhiwa Ndebele. Bastards, amabhunu.