The Boy Next Door Read online

  Because we’re early, we sit outside, having drinks. I look about and an image of Troutbeck Inn before independence fixes itself on me, just like this one: the white golfers teeing off around the lake, the anglers fishing, the wives nursing children here at the patio, the black waiters carrying trays, weaving in and out of tables, good evening, madam, sir—yes, just like this, except, of course, I wouldn’t be here getting looked over by wives, nannies, and waiters. And I can hear Maphosa all right; his anger still fresh and raw, “Amabhunu” and then right at me, “Sellout.” I look at Ian and see “the White Man,” “the Oppressor,” “the Settler,” “the Colonizer,” for the first time really, and wonder if he would accuse me of being racialistic.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, I’m just going for a walk.”

  “You don’t like it here?”

  “No. I mean, yes, I like it. I’m just going for a short walk.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  We find a signposted trail just over the lake, and we go into the forest. We walk without talking until we reach a clearing and find ourselves at the trout breeding farm. I sit down on a log bench.

  “I know what that was about,” he says. “You shouldn’t care so much what people think.”

  And suddenly my anger is so hot and fierce.

  “You don’t know anything!” I shout. “You’re white, how would you know?”

  “Shit,” he says, “it’s your birthday cele—”

  “Forget my birthday. I don’t care.”

  “We’ve all been fucked up good. Shit man.”

  And the anger evaporates. And he is just Ian again.

  “It’s beautiful out here,” I say.

  “You eat fish?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, correct me, but last time I checked, fish was not a vegetable.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And next you’re going to order chicken.”

  “Yes.”

  “Exactly what kind of vegetarian are you?”

  “I just meant to say that I don’t eat red meat anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “Just…”

  We’re at a table a little bit away from the fireplace. Ian has a choice of views: the fire, other diners. I only have a view of the other diners. I want to swap seats, but I don’t want to cause a scene. I’m trying to find a sentence that will come out naturally: Ian, do you mind changing seats, I want to see the fire (I don’t want to see them). He’ll see through that. And I can’t imagine saying his name in here. As if he were a boyfr—

  “Hello, anyone home?”

  “I just OD’d on red meat.”

  Secrets. I don’t tell him it’s because of that day. The old man in the bush going through the ash, gathering bones.

  “You’re one strange chick. I reckon it’s all the Frenchies you’re hanging around with.”

  “French people eat meat.”

  “And snails and frogs.”

  “Yes, and you guys eat raw dried meat; Ndebeles eat macimbi and flying ants; Shonas, well, I don’t know what their speciality is, but I’m sure it must be pretty interesting, every culture has its—”

  “Yah, yah, now we are the international food fundie. Biltong, one thing; even dried mopani worms, no worries, you can chuck those things in your mouth like popcorn; as for amahlabusi, man, those were the days. Come the rains, I used to joll to the bottle store and join the picannins by the streetlight just opposite. Boy, did we catch those buggers, and boy, did I get bawled out by my old man, hanging with picannins and all that, but yuck man, frogs, those things live on flies, only Frenchies.”

  “You might not be racialistic, but you really are xenophobic.”

  I must have spoken a bit loud: the lady at the corner looks up sharply and whispers something to the man sitting opposite her. He turns round, fixes me with a stare. Ian stares back.

  “Zeno what? Hey, some of us didn’t finish secondary school.”

  “Which reminds me, did you do your O’s?”

  “Nope, got caught up by events.”

  “You’re going back on Monday?”

  “Yah.”

  The children at the table are staring. One of them, a chubby little boy, sticks his tongue out. I smile. He starts pulling his ears, rolling his eyes. The two girls start giggling. The mother looks up at him, slaps the boy on the arm. “Shush,” she says.

  “We’ll check out World’s View tomorrow.”

  “Another one? Don’t tell me, The Very Honorable Mr. Cecil John Rhodes is at it again.”

  The lady at the table on the left of ours chews very slowly, her raised hand with its knife still in the air.

  “Yes, he’s been here too. Liked the place. Built a grand house, which you now know as the Rhodes Inyanga Hotel.”

  “Very interesting, Ian.”

  He looks over my shoulder. I can hear the wheels of the trolley.

  “Dessert time,” he says.

  “Happy birthday, madam,” says the waiter, lifting the cake from the trolley.

  “No,” I say.

  The waiter confused, hesitates.

  “Oh yes,” says Ian, nodding and rubbing his hands.

  The waiter smiles, puts the cake on the table.

  It’s chocolate with one candle.

  “I reckon you chicks are so sensitive about your ages better not give too much away.”

  The waiter lights the candle.

  “Make a wish,” Ian says.

  I close my eyes, blow.

  My single wish lights up the room and is then, gone.

  We don’t go back to the cottage; we check in: a double room with a view of the lake.

  It is the longest kiss.

  The longest, sweetest kiss.

  In the morning I wake up, lift my head from his hand.

  “Where are you going, Lindiwe?”

  He lifts his hand, pulls me back to him.

  “Lindiwe,” he says, “it’s different. This time, it’s different.”

  Secrets. And there it is, here it is, the moment for me to tell him the truth.

  “I know.”

  That’s all I say.

  I go back to sleep in his arms.

  I wake up in his arms.

  We are late for breakfast so we have sandwiches on the patio. Like yesterday there are the golfers teeing off around the lake; the anglers fishing; the wives, children, nannies here; the waiters weaving in and out of the tables, good morning, sir, madam, looking me over, but today, none of that matters.

  “Lindiwe…”

  “Yes.”

  “You keep tuning out. One minute here, the next gone.”

  “I’m here.”

  “So we’ll stop over at World’s View, then head back to the cottage; should we spend another night here or do you want to go back to Harare?”

  I don’t want to go back. I want to stay. I don’t want to move from this place. I want us to be here, together, forever.

  “Lindiwe…”

  “You have to be in Harare by Monday.”

  “We can leave early Monday morning; I’ll just belt it down to Jo’burg.”

  “That sounds fine.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, more than all right.”

  After a bit of a scramble, Ian pulls me up and finally we’re on a smooth expanse of rock, looking out at a view of the world. Far, far away the mountains shade into purple. I’m embarrassed by my heavy breathing, how unfit I am.

  “Not bad,” he says, turning to me. “Are you okay?”

  “I think I’ve had the exercise of several lifetimes.”

  He smiles and comes to sit down next to me.

  We watch some Japanese tourists busy photographing each other leaning against the observation tower, looking away from the view towards the car park.

  “I’m going to start jogging when I get back or play tennis, squash, anything. The university has courts.”

  “How about netball?”<
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  We look at each other and both smile as the shared thought of our younger selves settles between us.

  “Man, I was confused.”

  “Confused? About what?”

  “You, Lindiwe, you.”

  He bends over and kisses me, his hand warm and strong against my neck.

  And then he points out the different types of sunbirds and warblers darting among the trees, perched on the rocks.

  On our way back to the car, we pass the vendors’ stalls lined up away from the warden’s hut. Ian lifts a stone sculpture. A Zimbabwe Bird. He lifts another one, holds them in the palm of his hand.

  “One for you, one for me.”

  He hands both of them to me and he takes out his wallet, looks inside.

  “Do you have any change, Lindiwe?”

  Without thinking, I say, “Look in my purse.”

  He takes the purse from my backpack that he has slung over his shoulder and it’s only when he opens the purse I remember.

  “Ian, no…”

  But he’s already found it.

  The little picture. He takes it out from the purse, looks at it.

  “What’s this?” he says, but he already knows the answer.

  “Ian, I…”

  “Don’t say anything, just don’t.”

  I get out of the car. I walk all the way back to the observation tower. I climb up the stairs, and standing there, looking out at a view of the world, I know that whatever had begun is finished. Done.

  * * *

  “What’s his name?”

  “David.”

  “David.”

  And that’s all he says.

  We drive all the way back to the cottage. Without a single word.

  He sits at the table, the picture there.

  “Why didn’t you…? Why, Lindiwe? Why?”

  I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know where the answer begins. The room in the lodge? The bus ride home? The missed period? The months out of school?

  “You could have written. On the phone, you could have… Why?”

  Because Mummy loves him like her own. He is her own. He is hers. Only. Because she is his keeper. The Chosen One.

  “David,” he says. Over and over again.

  In the morning he says, “I’m going to see him. We’re going to Bulawayo.”

  Just like that.

  I know that there is nothing for me to say, nothing I can say. We will go to Bulawayo.

  We will do as he says. We will see the boy, his son.

  3.

  He drives as if he is possessed. He is possessed, by the Holy Son. I want to prepare him. I want to warn him. I want to tell him the power Mummy holds. But he has powers of his own. Nothing will stop him. I see this. And as he drives, I see him all those years ago.

  “He’s not bad looking for a Rhodie,” Bridgette said that time at the Grasshut. “He doesn’t have that look of theirs.”

  And I think of Mummy with the boy, hand in hand, waiting, for us, her lips pursed, her hand squeezing his; the boy looking up at her, loving her.

  I look at Ian, and anger’s silent litany starts: What right do you have to accuse me of anything? To judge me? You weren’t there. I was the one who had to put up with everything. Who do you think you are? You don’t have any idea what it was like, all those years by myself.

  I came back from Gwanda to Mummy’s terror. She waited for me to enter the house, and then, within its walls, she dragged me by the hair, slapped me over and over again. But that wasn’t enough. She spat at me. She went out and took a belt from Daddy’s closet and beat me. I lay on the floor and let her. And when finally she was done, she told me to get up, get out of her sight, that from now on she did not have a daughter.

  I think of those nine months, the look on Mummy’s face as my stomach grew. She tried to convince Daddy to send me off somewhere. I wasn’t allowed to go into town, anywhere out of the property, and even then, when she had her Manyano group over, I was to stay in my room.

  I think of those years when I had to go to Speciss College with all the other failures to do my O and A levels because none of the schools would take on a girl who had been pregnant, the bad influence she might have on others, the contagion she might spread. The girls I would bump into from school, who would look at me up and down, pass comments to each other, words like cheap, slut, baby dumper tossed from one lip-glossed mouth to another. How I had shut myself off; hours in my room studying, draining bottle after bottle of Histalax to quell my attacks of anxiety, loneliness.

  And always the boy kept from me, bound tight in Mummy’s godly arms.

  She didn’t want me in the house before five o’clock. I left at seven thirty with daddy to go to college. When I came home, I would get busy with the cooking, the cleaning, and ironing. Mummy and the boy would eat in the lounge, the door closed; Daddy in the workshop over whatever it was he was fixing, and me in the kitchen, standing up. I missed Rosanna who had been thrown out when the boy was only three months.

  Mummy took him everywhere.

  I look out of the window, watch the Bata factory in Gweru recede, and I know that in two hours we will be in Bulawayo. Last week, after Pay Out, I went into town to try and find something for him. There are two pairs of Bubblegummers, one red, the other yellow, in the drawer in my room on campus, lying neatly in their boxes waiting for his tender spongy feet. I agonized over them in the Bata store on First Street. Which one? What size? What color? What type? I couldn’t decide if I should just post them to Bulawayo, send them with someone, or wait until April, a whole three months away.

  And will Mummy let him wear them at all? Will she throw them away once I’m gone?

  Ian turns the radio dial on, then off, then on again. I watch him chew the inside of his cheek, scratch behind his ear. These things give me comfort. He is nervous.

  The last time I was home, Christmas, he wriggled out of my arms and called me “aunty.” Mummy, always standing near, watching with her hands crossed said, “What do you expect? You are always away.” And I saw her pleasure when he called her “ma.” It’s just short for “grandma,” I told myself, but I knew it wasn’t so. And Daddy there, locked in his room, alone.

  But I had managed to take him with me just once. I lied to him and said that we were going to meet Grandma in church (Mummy had been called before sunrise to a Manyano member’s house to commiserate over her husband’s sudden death), and then I drove into town to take him to see Father Christmas in his cave at Haddon and Sly with Jean who had come with me from Harare and was staying at The Selborne. Jean brought a Lucky Dip full of plastic soldiers and toffee, which Father Christmas was supposed to hand over to David. Father Christmas sat in his throne and beckoned to David. “Come, my boy, I see you’ve been a good boy. Come and get your gift.” David’s eyes had opened wide and then he’d started shaking, tears rolling from his face. He called out for Mummy, his chest heaving, and he’d banged his little fists against me.

  He wouldn’t let me touch him during the rest of my stay.

  WELCOME TO BULAWAYO.

  * * *

  I think of how she won’t let him go to school. Excuses after excuses:

  “Those children are dirty and rough in Baines. It’s just blacks now. They hit him. He’s too sensitive to go there. Anyway, I’m teaching him. He already knows his alphabet and his two times table.”

  We pass all those familiar places. Alton Heights. South Grove. The graveyard. The garage that is now a deserted shell, the bus stop, and then we turn and, we have arrived.

  And there she is, Mummy, waiting for us. God has warned her, prepared her for our onslaught. There she stands by the gate, her white Manyano cap starched to a peak pointing heavenward. There she stands in her red blouse, black skirt, and black lace-up shoes, God tucked under her arm.

  Ian looks at me. He sighs. He gets out of the car leaving his door open.

  “Hello, Mrs. Bishop.”

  Mummy holds on to the gate, looks past him, to m
e.

  “You remember me, Mrs. Bishop. I’m Ian, Ian McKenzie, from next door.”

  Of course she remembers him, knows him, has lived with parts of him for all these years.

  “I have… we… Lindiwe is here with me. We’ve come to visit, to see my… my son. I’ve just found out, Mrs. Bishop. I…”

  She has already turned away, is walking back into the house. I watch Ian watch her. I watch him lift the latch of the gate, follow.

  I get out of the car, call out to him, “Ian, Ian, wait, wait.”

  He waits.

  “Let me go first, okay. I’ll talk to her. Wait here for a moment.”

  He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t move. So I rush past him, into the house.

  It is quiet and dark in the passageway. And then I hear the murmur of voices.

  Mummy’s: “the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want.”

  His: “he leads me not into temptation.”

  And I wait there in the dark until they are done.

  “Amen. Amen.”

  Mummy is getting off her knees, settling herself into the couch. He is standing, looking up at me.

  “David,” I say.

  He looks up at his grandmother who tells him nothing, something.

  “Mummy, he’s come to see his son.”

  “He cannot enter this house. I will call the police.”

  “Mummy, he has to see his son. If you want, I can take him out. Come, David.”

  Mummy jumps out from the couch, shrieking. “No! No!”

  She snatches the boy.

  “No!”

  “Mrs. Bishop, he is my son. I have a right…”

  I step out of the doorway and Ian stands there, looking, watching, waiting.

  A tableau. A terrible tableau. I can’t bear it. I leave them. I go to Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom. I knock. I open the door and find him there lying, curled up on the bed.

  “Daddy.”

  “Daddy.”

  And his eyes flicker open, then close.

  I sit on the bed, take out his thin, shrivelled hand. I sit there with him in the quiet.