The Boy Next Door Read online

  And why did they abandon it?

  Zimbabwe, The Great Houses of Stone.

  I look back at the tower again and shake myself awake. These stone buildings were built for the kings, the ruling elite; castles. The povo, as today, had to make do with more humble dwellings; daga, mud and grass, long since eroded away, the temporariness of home.

  David comes running back, tugging at Ian’s hand.

  “You two go up, I’ll wait here.”

  I watch them hurry away, hand in hand.

  I walk to the gift shop, Matombo Curios, to see if they have some Panadol. I buy some aspirins and sit down at the café. I massage my forehead with my fingers, close my eyes. And in the dark, I’m suddenly gripped by a dense feeling of foreboding, sluggish and wet, working its way through my body. I struggle to lift my eyelids, and when I finally free them, there is nothing but heaps of tacky souvenirs in baskets, great zimbabwe stamped everywhere. I go outside into the chilly air. I look up to the Hill Complex, wonder if I should try going up the modern ascent. No, I’ll go over to the reconstructed Karanga village, a gentle walk. Take it easy.

  I watch the supposed Karanga villager pounding maize.

  Then there’s the singsong and some clapping and a couple of tourists taking pictures, an invitation to tour the huts by one of “the village elders.”

  One of the young male villagers smiles at me and I smile back, and then I turn and walk towards the museum. I’ll go in there again, cool down.

  “I went all the way up!” David shouts, sprinting towards me. He falls, breathless, into my lap, dislodging me from the outcrop of rock I’ve been sitting on, waiting. “I did it, Mum!” As I’m hugging him I look up, and there is Ian, with his camera, ready.

  The next day Ian and David go off for a drive in the park to see how much wildlife they can come across; they drop me off at the Great Zimbabwe Hotel, where I read in the gardens and have some tea.

  A shadow falls over me, and when I look up, it’s a huge monkey staring at me with its head cocked towards the plate on the table and a finger digging in its ear, and then in a flash it has grabbed hold of the plate with the scone on it and is rushing up across the garden onto the roof, where it sits, the plate balanced on its haunches, and scoffs down the scone. I look around to see if there has been any witness to this, but no, only me, and a surge of emotion sweeps through me with the thought that I will have a story to tell the boys when they get back from their adventure, an offering.

  When we get back to Harare, there’s an envelope on the floor that the postman slipped through. Ian picks it up, takes a look at it, and hands it to me.

  It’s from Jean.

  That’s all it takes for all the good feeling from the break to dissipate. By even reading the letter, I know that Ian feels a kind of betrayal. I should just chuck it into the dustbin, unopened.

  I don’t know how to tell him, let him know what Jean says, if I should, if he has any right to it.

  Jean is leaving Zimbabwe. He is going to the Ivory Coast.

  Ian shuts himself off. For hours after work he disappears, coming home late at night, the smell of chemicals in his clothes, on his hands; he has been at Ilo’s studio.

  The distance grows between us. I don’t know the words, the gesture that will draw us close again.

  And David seeks solace, once more, in his giraffe.

  9.

  David is in the lounge with his new Bible. It’s full of pictures. Heaven. Hell. Jesus. Even God. I had felt breathless when I saw it in Kingston, then a flutter of panic when I lifted it off the shelf and saw the price. Ian didn’t make any comment when I was wrapping it up, but I could see the annoyance in his eyes; he dutifully signed the card.

  The Bible is splayed open on the floor on exactly the same page I opened it to, Jonah and the whale. David is not even looking at it. I’ve made a mistake. He isn’t the same boy we took away. A train set. A bicycle. A ball. A kite. Anything else would have done.

  But Ian’s got his backup plan. A birthday surprise. I don’t know what it is. Ian is going to show me how a birthday is done.

  We pile in the car and he drives us around the university, where a month ago, I, together with everyone else who wanted to continue their studies, had to sign a piece of paper saying that for the duration of my course, I would respect the governing authorities and refrain from demonstrating against them. We go up along The Chase, past Strathaven Shopping Centre, past Circus Nightclub, and my heart does a dive when I see us go into the grounds of the Old Georgian Sports Ground.

  The parking lot is jam packed, and in the end, Ian has to back out and park on the curb. There’s a banner stretched up on the gates. bmx africa challenge.

  There are kids all geared up, padded and helmeted, fathers proudly heaving bikes and coolers from their pickups.

  Clusters of mothers are talking as they make their way to the tracks. There are uniformed maids bringing up the rear with picnic baskets and infants in tow.

  My eyes dart and leap, doing their frantic search—yes, spotted, a couple of black kids, fathers, but I don’t see any women.

  I look down at David who’s staring at two boys. They’re pushing their bikes.

  “Cool!” one of the boys shouts.

  “Let’s go and take a look at the action,” Ian says coming around to us. “This will be good, my boy. If you like it, who knows come Christmas, heh?”

  I walk behind them, smiling like an idiot at the maids I pass who look glumly back at me.

  I look at David’s hand in Ian’s. The shades of father and son.

  My heart is in my mouth when I watch the antics of the riders up and down the humps and troughs of the tracks, the bikes leaping into the air and crashing on the dirt again. A surge of anger at Ian for being so irresponsible. David is not going to do something this dangerous. I won’t let him.

  But then I look over at David, his neck craning in his effort not to miss anything; his eyes wide-open. He gasps; father and son do a high five. Perhaps there are things that Ian knows better than me, things I have to trust him with.

  “I’ll be back in a sec,” Ian says, and he strides off towards the braai area.

  When he’s gone, I hear behind me, “Man, these Affs,” and I feel a dig at my back. I sit stick straight, and then there’s laugher and someone saying, “It’s disgusting.” Another prod at my back. “Siss, man.” Then “yuck.”

  When Ian comes back, he’s looking redder in the face. He’s carrying two Castles and two plates of T-bone steaks, charred rings of boerewor sausages.

  A voice behind him says, “Heh mate, those steaks look good,” and Ian laughs and says, “And they taste even better.”

  He sits down, splashing some Castle on my jeans.

  “What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Lindiwe, you haven’t spoken a word since we got back, what is it?”

  “I told you, nothing. I’ve got an essay to write.”

  I walk past him and sit down by the table.

  “He really had a good time. Yes man, he’s getting that bike. Lindiwe—”

  “What, Ian?” I say, not looking up from the papers I’m riffling through.

  “What is it with you? You blow hot, cold. What’s going on?”

  “Ian, I have an essay to write. It’s already late. Give me room, please!”

  I can hear the quaver in my voice. The place is too small for us. Too few rooms for us to storm away from each other. At any one point there must be only two, three meters separating us, so Ian does the sensible thing; he leaves.

  10.

  “Thanks for doing this, Lindiwe.”

  It’s such a formal thing for him to say.

  We’re driving down to Bulawayo. It’s the Christmas holidays. Everything is so dry and barren it seems it could never once have been saturated with any other color but this woeful grayness.

  I haven’t told my mother we’re coming.

  “They dumped her there,” he told me wh
en he got the notification of her impending evaluation. “They didn’t know what to do with her.”

  She is going to undergo some tests, and if these go well she might be released. She’s now living in a more open wing of the hospital, for patients who are considered low risk.

  I look up at Ian and brush the crook of my finger on his chin, feel the stubble here. He takes the finger, squeezes tight, nibbles at it.

  The thought of our visit fills me with unease; I haven’t slept for two days. On Christmas Eve we’ll go to Ingutsheni, the three of us, and we will meet her. Ian will introduce her to me, me to her.

  I look out the window, at the hacked trees and where the ground has been scorched. I have tried to imagine the kind of trauma being in that fire might have caused; the type of breakdown it might have precipitated. Words and ideas from my studies have leaked out, attaching themselves to the unknown: personality disorder, schizophrenia, psychotic episodes.

  Nineteen-year-old Ian, coming out of jail, his first visit to his mother, what, who did he see behind those walls? His mother’s reality must have shifted so that where she was, where she found herself, became the norm: what kind of adaptations had her mind made to survive?

  That was an essay topic last year: does madness really exist or is it just a reasonable response to a set of events?

  I look back at David. He’s grown. I look down at his feet, at the new Bata tackies we got on Saturday (when I said “tackies,” the young shop assistant looked at me with her Big City Girl attitude. “Oh, you mean sneakers,” she said). I see his bare feet on that morning months and months ago when we lifted his sleeping body out from his grandmother’s grasp.

  “They need to see that she has some kind of support system,” Ian told me.

  A support system, I thought. We can barely support ourselves.

  We haven’t talked about how we’ll manage.

  We are staying at, ironies of ironies, the Grey’s Inn, former all-exclusive Rhodie Hangout. It is two blocks from The Selborne and caters for the budget traveler. We are refugees in our own town. Looking up at its colonial facade, I think of my schoolgirl self sitting in the car while Ian stood behind a fence trying to connect with an old school friend in Khumalo, arranging to meet here to check out the new contingent of expat chicks.

  While Ian sleeps, I go with David into town, his hand in mine, still a surprise.

  We go into Woolworths.

  “You can have a sweet, David. Any one you like.”

  I watch him take in the assortment of delights, hazards. The fudge and licorice sticks, the cool cigarettes with their white peppermint stalks and red tips, snug in their packet; Rita would “smoke” them during lunchtimes even though they were forbidden at school, blowing elaborate circles in the air with her exhaled “smoke.” I look at the jelly babies, red, white, yellow, orange, and feel the sticky mess of them in my fist.

  I look over the counters at the gift packages of men’s aftershave and ladies’ perfumes: Impulse spray, Shield deodorant for men. I would save months and months ahead for my parents’ gifts. I think of the day after Christmas when I saw Mummy giving my present away to Rosanna. She wanted the perfumes that came from Europe, that were sold only in Edgars.

  “Maybe some chocolate?” I ask him. “Those peanut clusters are delicious.”

  We stand there together until finally we take the escalator and go upstairs to the supermarket to see if there are any toys there.

  I stand upstairs and memory gushes at me: Daddy maneuvering the trolley, the wad of dollars in his shirt pocket, Mummy holding the list, slowly crossing out the found items. I walk up and down the aisles, lifting the familiar objects as if they were artifacts. The same things as in Harare, but here in this place, they seem to resonate with meaning.

  There’s a selection of balls in one corner, and I notice David eyeing them.

  I’ve bought him a football for Christmas, and it’s in the suitcase with the other gifts. Back in Harare there’s the bicycle waiting for him; Ian got it on account from Manica Cycles. But I want him to have something now. I want him to have a memory of this moment, me and him together.

  “You can choose a ball, David, since you didn’t have any sweets.”

  I almost add “please.”

  He picks up a red plastic ball, throws it carefully up in the air. And then he puts it down again. He takes hold of my hand. And we take the stairs downstairs.

  When we get back to the hotel, Ian’s not in the room. I wonder if he has gone to the pub or if he’s driven off somewhere. We wait until it gets dark, and then we eat the chicken sandwiches I brought with us and we both fall asleep watching TV.

  We drive through the gates bearing gifts: a sweater in baby blue four-ply wool, a pair of yellow socks, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a bar of soap. This time I do not stay in the car waiting for Ian to get back. I step out of the car. David and I find a bench to sit on while Ian goes up the stairs.

  “She’s sleeping,” he says, when he comes back alone.

  We sit on the bench, the three of us. I close my eyes and imagine music playing through the air here, something with strings and maybe a flute, something so soft and fragile if you breathed too hard it would shatter.

  “I’ll go and check again,” Ian says, and I notice that this time he takes the gifts with him.

  I look down at David and find the giraffe in his hand; he’s gnawing at the giraffe’s head.

  I push the giraffe’s head away from his mouth.

  Where are all the inmates? Do days like this, days of celebration, make them edgy? Are they given more medication than normal to blot out memory, desire, longing?

  As if in answer, a shriek pierces through the silence and David stiffens next to me. At this moment it seems such a foolhardy thing to have brought him here.

  Ian returns alone. The gifts are gone.

  We spend Christmas in the hotel. We eat the buffet lunch. I don’t say anything about Ian’s drinking, the Castles cluttering up our table.

  Later I go to see my father. Like Ian, bearing gifts.

  Mummy is sitting outside by the veranda with Aunty Gertrude.

  It is a shock to see Aunty Gertrude there. They watch me in silence as I go inside the house. I go into the bedroom. All the curtains are drawn, and in the darkness I can hear Daddy’s raspy breathing.

  The room smells, and for a moment I think of Ian’s mother, if she might not be in a room such as this, not in size or shape perhaps, but in how it feels.

  I go to the windows and gently draw back a curtain, enough for a shaft of light to fall over the left side of the bed, Daddy’s side.

  I go around the bed, and standing there, I remember that day when one moment Daddy was sitting on his favorite chair in the lounge having his tea, and the next, the cup falling from his hand, the tea spilling onto his lap, onto his slippers, and Daddy’s head slumped forwards. And I remember that, while I called the ambulance, Mummy went to the bedroom and I could hear her prayers. Later while we waited for the ambulance, she made phone calls to her Manyano friends, and I thought then how girlish she sounded as she related the calamity that had befallen her.

  I lay down my gifts at my father’s feet. A scarf and a hat.

  I go to the back of the house to the workshop. I find a dog, barely a puppy. I think of Roxy who the vet put to sleep because of the pain he was suffering from a tumor in his neck, and I remember my father’s grief at the loss of him; when I came back from school, he told me that he had no choice but to agree with the doctor.

  The dog is lying on the mat in front of the door, and when she sees me, she whimpers. I lift her off the mat; she is little more than bones. I go to where the vegetable garden used to be and run the tap. I watch her lap at the running water. I look out at the house next door.

  There is no sign of Tess, the cocker spaniel who Daddy got (just before his stroke) and who I’m sure is the mother of the puppy in my arms. She must finally have got herself pregnant, because when she was in heat, she
would always manage one escape from the yard, biting right through her leash when she was tied to the gum tree.

  Carrying the puppy, I go and see if Rosanna is around. I knock gently at her door. When I push it open, there is a faint smell of perfume but that must be my wishful thinking.

  I stand by the veranda trying to find words. Mummy and Aunty Gertrude don’t even look at me.

  On the drive back to Harare, David sings just under his breath Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” the track that Ian’s been playing at home. He knows the words, I think. He knows them. I look at Ian who smiles at me. We were right not to bring him to my mother. It’s a gift to have him singing this; The Lord Is My Shepherd spirited away.

  The dog sits quietly on his lap.

  11.

  “Bridgette!”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Bridgette!”

  “Lins!”

  It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting in the hairdresser’s chair when she walks in. I don’t see her straightaway because I’m reading Femina magazine and my head is bent low because Bea is putting the straightening lotion right at the back. Then I hear, “Hello, I’d like to have my braids undone.” I look up, almost knocking the brush from Bea’s hand.

  “My God, Bridgette, what are you doing here?” I ask her as she drags a chair and sits next to me.

  “I’ve just come back from London. And you, Little Miss Thing?”

  “University.”

  “Of course.”

  Her “of course” takes me right back to my fifteen-year-old self. How irritating I must have been then and how generous of her to be my friend.

  Bridgette reschedules her appointment so that as soon as I’m finished we go upstairs to the Book Café. We order coffees and pancakes.

  “So,” I say, “fill me in, all the juicy details, please.”

  “I’m dabbling in import, export. Hair products to start with. I’m thinking of setting up some salons.”