The Boy Next Door Read online

  The giraffe is pressed so tight against his chest that I’m sure it will leave marks on his skin.

  At last I say, “Maybe you want to watch a cartoon.”

  “Ma says TV is the work of Satan.”

  Ian lets out a whistle and mutters, “Penga.”

  I open all the bedside drawers and I can’t find the slim volume of the New Testament. It has to be here. There must be a copy. There’s always one in hotel rooms. Somewhere. Ian stands there watching me.

  “Lindiwe, relax,” I hear. “We’ll get it tomorrow. You can tell him a story from the Bible.”

  “I…”

  And suddenly I’m just tired. I slump down on the bed. I listen for a sound coming from the bath.

  “He’s so quiet in there.”

  “He’s okay, Lindiwe.”

  “We should telephone Bulawayo. We have to let her know that we’re, that he’s safe. She must be worried sick. Whatever she’s done she loves him.”

  “Phone her then. Don’t tell her where we are.”

  I wish I could speak to Daddy. I dial the Bulawayo number and listen to the phone in the passageway ring on and on. I put my phone down.

  “She’s not answering.”

  I try again. This time, as I’m putting the phone down I hear, “Hello.”

  But it’s not Mummy. It’s a voice that comes from a far place, such a long time ago I can’t believe it.

  “Hello,” the voice says again.

  “Hello,” I say, “who is this?”

  “This is Rosanna,” the voice says.

  Rosanna!

  “Hello, hello. Hello, Rosanna, it’s me, Lindiwe. How are you? I would like to speak to Mummy please.”

  “Sisi! Hold on. I am fine, thank you, Sisi.”

  Rosanna, I keep saying to myself, Rosanna, how can she be…? What is she doing…?

  “Hello, Sisi Lindiwe, Mama is resting; she is lying down.”

  I can tell Rosanna is trying to find the right words. Mummy doesn’t want to speak to me.

  “It’s okay, Rosanna. Just tell her that we are all fine.”

  “Yes, Sisi. Okay, bye-bye.”

  It is only after I put the phone down that I think I should have asked about her daughter, my sister, half.

  “Rosanna’s there,” I say to Ian.

  * * *

  “Are you ready to come out?” I ask the boy.

  He takes the giraffe from his perch on the bath’s ledge and cradles him.

  “Would you like me to bath you or maybe you want Ia—your father?”

  His small body rocks in the bath, and I try to catch what he is murmuring.

  Of course.

  “The Lord is my shepherd, I…”

  I pick up the small hand towel, rub soap on it.

  “It’s better if you stand…. David?”

  I wait for him.

  He stands still in the water.

  How small and skinny he seems.

  “Good,” I say and take his free right arm which feels so weightless to me, and begin to scrub as gently as I can. He keeps at The Lord Is My Shepherd, all the way through the scrubbing of his body, and it is only when I’m done and look up at his face that I see the tears.

  “David, what’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  My questions seem to release something because the silent crying becomes heart-rending sobs, and I watch stunned as his fragile little chest heaves in and out, the tender bones of his ribs threatening to snap any moment because of the pressure of his anguish.

  “David, David.”

  I hear the panic, desperation, in my voice and hate myself for it. What is he doing here? What are we doing to him?

  “Hey, what’s wrong, little man?”

  I step back from the bath, leave the boy to his father. I listen out in the lounge, and soon the sobbing subsides and I can hear Ian’s voice, “Jeez man, you’ve got a good pair of lungs on you, that’s for sure.”

  I sit down on the couch and wait.

  Ian comes through carrying the boy, who is wrapped up in a white towel, in his arms.

  “Should we order some sandwiches or go to the restaurant?” I ask Ian.

  “Just order some sandwiches and chips. This fellow’s finished for today.”

  “Off to bed,” says Ian and off they go, the two of them, in the small room with the single bed.

  I can hear Ian’s voice, rising and falling as he tells the story of Jonah and the whale.

  I must doze off because the next thing I’m on the couch with a plaid blanket over me.

  “Hey there,” I hear.

  I sit up and see Ian with the TV remote in his hand.

  “What are you watching?”

  “A documentary on Mandela,” he says, rubbing his eyes.

  I don’t ask him when he’ll go back, how long he’ll stay, what this means, us, here.

  “I’m going to have a bath.”

  “Lindiwe,” he says, reaching out for my hand as I walk past him, “don’t worry yourself penga; everything will sort itself out, promise.”

  I try to hold on to his words. To believe.

  5.

  Sitting at a table at the Alliance Française, I write a letter to Jean. I do the one thing Marie warned me not to.

  I think of the one trip we made to Bulawayo together, during the Christmas break. We drank beers on his balcony, watching Bulawayo ambling along in its leisurely way. Jean said that he could never get over all the colonial architecture of the city. “Look at this place,” he said, pointing at the arches and all the teak furnishings. “It’s like a movie set. What do the English call them? Period pieces.”

  He had wanted for me to stay. “I can’t,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “Not I can’t,” he said. “I won’t.”

  And I had laughed and told him how good his English was, all thanks to me, and I went away.

  I was afraid of how much he wanted of me, of who he thought I was.

  I’m not good enough for you.

  I put the letter in the envelope, seal my words in.

  I get up and start walking.

  I make myself think of Ian and the boy. Of the cottage Ian has just rented in Avondale.

  I walk slowly.

  I cross the road and watch the learners maneuver the cars between the drums in the grass field. Further on I watch the trainee security guards practice their drills. I walk on and on, all the way up Herbert Chitepo Avenue, all the way up Leopold Takawira Street, past Parirenyatwa Hospital, where Jean says what is happening there is criminal, the AIDS patients dying all along the corridors and the nurses and doctors who won’t treat anyone suspected of having the disease.

  On and on I go, under the shade of the jacarandas lining either side of the road.

  I step into Avondale post office and buy the stamps I need. I lick them and put them on the white envelope. I stand outside and look at the red postbox, which waits patiently.

  Someone says “excuse me,” and I watch an elderly white lady put her letter through the slit.

  And then I do it, put my letter in, let go.

  I stand still for a moment, watching the tremor in my hand.

  I walk through the parking lot up to the Italian Bakery, and before they see me, I see them. David and Ian and a young woman, white, a Rhodie. Ian has his head back laughing and the woman is slapping his arm. The boy sees me first, then Ian, then her. I pass one, two, three tables.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hey, Lindiwe. Just bumped into Heather here, the sister of a mate of mine I used to joll with in Bullies.”

  And he has become, just like that, a Rhodie again. Heather gives me a weak smile.

  “Hello,” she says. “I have to go now. Nice seeing you, Ian.”

  “Yah,” Ian says, getting up. “It was good to chew over old times, catch up on what’s what.”

  I watch Heather walk away and I sit down.

  “She’s pretty,” I say.

  Ian shrugs. I look at the boy, the
giraffe on the table looking at him.

  And then I look at the boy’s father who is looking at me.

  “I’ll get my stuff from campus. Can you help me transport it?”

  “No worries.”

  6.

  “Ilo Peretti, Lindiwe. You have to see the place. It’s magic, straight from the pavements of downtown Harare into another era. The guy’s got prints all the way back to the thirties man, all up on the walls—Egypt, Morocco, Ethiopia. I stepped in there and man… his back room, boxes and boxes of negatives, who knows what he’s got stashed there. When he saw I was interested he said I could go down there, go through the stuff, take whatever I want.”

  It’s good to see him so excited.

  “What’s he doing down there? Shouldn’t he be somewhere more upmarket, Newlands, Sam Levy’s?”

  “The guy’s got quite a story. He was part of the whole Mussolini thing in Eritrea. You know, in the thirties when they Italianized the place? Anyway, he went absent without leave and went jolling all over the continent, got hold of a camera and just went about taking pictures. Worked his way down here, late forties. Some of them are real beauties. Got some shots of the construction of Kariba, some of the Tongas, by the way. Man, to think he’s stuck there over by Rezende, in one of those shops opposite the post office; you can lose all track of time looking at what is on the walls. He’s got one picture up, and I’m not lying, you could swear he’d taken a shot of Lawrence of Arabia, and then some really soft ones of this girl and you know it’s someone he had big feelings for. He’s been around for ages on the street. The man’s an institution. He has a flat up-stairs.”

  I hate to break into his good news, especially because of the hard time he’s been having trying to find photographic work. How he has had to start doing work as a mechanic, his name on a part-time roster at an employment agency. The way he’s been humiliated at job interviews, made to wait for a whole morning sometimes to see the young, black, upwardly mobile, politically well-connected entrepreneurs who’re moving into white-held businesses. After one of these interviews at a car showroom, he came back and smashed his hand on the wall, spraining his wrist; his would-be boss had, after keeping him hanging around for two hours, casually flung his legs on the teak desk and asked him to please polish his shoes in the toilets.

  “The guy actually takes off his shoes, crocodile, and hands the things to me, and then the laughing when I took off. Lindiwe, I was ready to turn right back and hit the git. Shit, wait till they run the businesses to the ground. Then we’ll see what’s what. Man, they’re driving around with the latest import Mercs with all the trimmings, and they’re just out of their fricking twenties.”

  I was pressing ice on his hand.

  “Asch, the goffle lady at the agency warned me, showed me the drawer stashed with unemployed whities. She said two, three years ago they had no whites in their books, everything was through the network, not that I would have been networked even then.”

  “So, it’s okay to discriminate as long as it works for you?”

  “Lindiwe…”

  He’s refused Heather’s husband’s offer to go and work for him.

  “No ways man, he’s a friend now. I’m not that desperate.”

  And now for him to have stumbled on this treasure.

  “Ian—”

  “And can you believe, to top it off, after we’ve been talking all morning, the guy gives me a set of keys, any time I want to come in and do my own stuff, says it’s good to have someone take an interest, now the only thing people are interested in is instant color…”

  “You should take me there. He must be old.”

  “Yipp, easily late eighties but as sprightly as hell; he’s still running a studio, can you believe, taking the pictures himself and one guy helping with the developing. Only in Zimbabwe.”

  “Ian, the school phoned.”

  He’s turning the old camera in his hands, another find.

  “Ian—”

  “Yes, the school phoned and…?”

  “They want David to take some tests, they—”

  “What tests?”

  “I’m not sure, she didn’t go into details. She’s set up a meeting for us this afternoon.”

  “They need to leave him alone. He’ll come out of his shell in his own good time. He’s not stupid.”

  “Ian, they just want to help him.”

  “You’re the fundie, Lindiwe, but I don’t want them to start tuning that he has to be in a fricking special class. He’s gone through a lot. They should hold their horses.”

  I know he’s right; this is my forte, testing and assigning scores to thought, behavior, emotions; I know all about labeling, but I’m worried about David. Maybe it’s guilt. It’s been a month and the only thing he seems attached to, to have any confidence in, is the damn giraffe. A sudden thought crosses my mind—perhaps we can get a puppy, something alive and warm for him.

  “We can hear what she has to say, Ian.”

  “Who’s she?”

  I take a deep breath. “The government psychologist.”

  “Christ Lindiwe, he’s not getting ambushed. He’s already making strides with us, he’s starting to trust, when I was that age…”

  And then he stops.

  I go to the meeting alone and find myself steadily getting angry at the tone of the professional. How she seems to have already made up her mind, given the drawings that have been forwarded to her by the teacher. I refuse to sign the concession form. She gives me a stern look, shakes her head, and says that he shows all the symptoms of emotional abuse, and unfortunately, there are no clear-cut laws to protect children from this or else she would… I’m shaking by the time I leave her office.

  I decide to walk all the way down to the school to pick David up from his art club.

  At the school gate I watch him walk slowly down the steps, the giraffe peeking out from his backpack. I watch a boy try to push the giraffe deeper inside the backpack. David turns around and the boy steps to one side. The giraffe is in David’s hand now. I take the backpack from him and we walk silently side by side. I take his hand, and we cross the road and catch an Emergency Taxi home, him sitting on my lap, squashed in between five, six people in the aged Peugeot 504. I twine my hands around him and the giraffe.

  “How was school today?” I ask him when we are in the cottage, and he is sitting by the table, having a cheese sandwich, a glass of milk.

  He looks up, shrugs.

  “Hey, guys,” Ian shouts cheerily when he comes in. “Hey, little man,” he says, ruffling David’s hair. “Ready for the trip? We’ll have to take care of your mother here, make sure she doesn’t get hassled by monkeys.”

  For the Easter holidays, which are just over two weeks away, Ian is organizing a whole Camping in Great Zimbabwe Experience somewhere by Lake Mutirikwi. Perhaps that’s what David needs, the three of us together, relaxed, our first holiday.

  David looks at me his mouth full of bread and cheese, a milk mustache on his lips.

  When finally he swallows and has wiped his mustache with the sleeve of his T-shirt, he says, “Yes, Dad,” and Ian and I look at each other across the top of his little head, and Ian can’t resist mouthing, “See, I told you so.”

  7.

  I’m on campus in the lecture hall when the trouble starts. Students have been gathering at the vice-chancellor’s and administration offices demanding a top-up to their Pay Out. It’s been due for a month. I come out of the hall to find a mob chanting and the vehicles in the car park getting stoned, and there are windows already broken in the administration block. Students are running around with branches and bricks. Some are rocking the vice-chancellor’s car. I know it’s only a matter of time before the riot police get called in.

  “Looks like you’re going to be in for a long holiday,” Ian says when I get home.

  The university has been closed indefinitely.

  During the impromptu closure, I work four afternoons a week at the advertising age
ncy, and on one of my lunch breaks, I find Ilo’s studio squashed in between a shoe repair stall and a tailor, several meters inside a narrow passageway. If I wasn’t looking for it, I would have missed it. I open the door and I see what Ian means. The old black and whites on the walls, some on matte, some on gloss, giving the whole place an old glamorous movie-like feel. I turn around and I go to one wall which is covered with different studio images of one woman. What did Ian call them? Soft. I lift my hand and I’m startled by a discreet cough behind me, and when I turn, there is a man in a white dustcoat. He’s just a bit taller than me and there are sprigs of hair on his mottled bald head. He rubs his glasses with his sleeve and puts them back on. He looks at me, then he gently takes my hand, pats it.

  “So you are the one,” he says.

  He takes me to the back room and there, hanging on a string from one end of the wall to another, are images of me.

  And I see that Ian’s been experimenting with lighting and texture. With stillness and movement. With the whole and parts of the whole.

  I stand there taking it all in.

  “Un uomo innamorato.”

  And I understand.

  When I come back from helping with a shoot at a housing site for a building society’s advertising campaign, after having lugged film equipment over rubble, getting my new skirt covered in red dirt, thus fulfilling my job title of production assistant, also known as General Dogsbody, I come back to the office to find Ian sitting on my desk and Leeann, the receptionist, in an apparent state of rapture.

  “Jeez man, Lindiwe, you look like you’ve been out and about in a war zone.”

  I look past Ian at Leeann who is all shiny, pink and scrubbed and has her eyes latched onto Ian’s head.

  “I came to take you out for lunch.”

  There’s a sigh from behind Ian and he turns around.

  I think of saying a Leeann kind of thing, “Oh, luv, I have to go into the ladies room and freshen up.”

  Leeann smiles at him, and I’m delighted to see that despite her continual tweaking and touching ups, there is a smudge of red on one of her pearly whites.