The Boy Next Door Read online

  “So?”

  “So, he was all, ‘Forgive me, I’m sorry, honey, it will never happen again… ,’ what a load of bullshit.”

  “And…?”

  “I left them to it.”

  “You what?”

  “Lindiwe, she was practically begging me to get lost. He took her to Emergency, and last time I saw, she was getting her arm looked at. And to top it off, she’s preggies.”

  “Oh no, you think she’ll be all right?”

  He shrugs.

  “I’m hammered.”

  I go to him, put my hands on him. I kiss him. And the words come out like a choke, a sob, “I love you”; I say them into his chest, bury them there, and I don’t think he hears, or if he hears, he says nothing but holds me and then there is the shock of his heaving chest. At first I think he’s laughing. “What’s so funny?” I’m about to ask, scold him, and then I realize he’s weeping, holding me so tight as though I’m the only thing that keeps him there… my darling, beautiful Ian.

  2.

  “Ian!”

  I follow him into the bathroom. He looks a mess. His shirt is torn at the sleeve, and there are cuts all the way down his arm.

  “Shit, Lindiwe, it’s bad.”

  He takes off his shirt, takes a look at his arm, runs cold water over it.

  “What’s bad? What’s going on? Here, I’ll get the Betadine.”

  I begin to smooth the Betadine on his arm with cotton wool.

  “Ouch.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s mayhem; the police are kwapuling people downtown. And I reckon I heard gunshots. There’s mahobo police with AKs. Don’t venture anywhere near town. Got chased down an alley when they spotted my camera. You should have seen my fall; lucky for me the goon got distracted. Hope the thing’s not broken.”

  He turns the camera in his hand. “Looks okay, I’m going to take a look at what I’ve got.”

  He starts moving to the shower, where he’s set up a temporary developing room.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Can you believe, it’s about tomatoes and bits of vegetables on tin plates? The city council police were chasing some of the vendors from their spots at the corners, busy kicking trays of tomatoes, stamping on stuff, and some of the vendors got riled up—shit, that’s people’s livelihood right there, and everyone knows that those municipal guys are freeloaders. Anyway, they started beating up one of the guys, then some aleck called in the cops who’ve barged in there like it’s Gaza.”

  “I’m going to get David.”

  “No, leave him, he’s all right. It’s town. I tell you what, Lindiwe, this country slowly but surely is going to explode. Mark my words. South Africa’s on the way up, and we’re on the way down. Bread’s become a luxury, and what do they go and do? Blow a stack of forex on luxury Mercs for ministers; Bob’s so out of touch with his trips and what with that chick of his, he knows shit all. I mean, I hate to say this, but no one starved under Smith, and just the other day, I heard someone cracking a joke, a black chap, that they were going to organize a petition for the return of Rhodesia in double-quick time.”

  On the news the reader talks about minor disturbances, but on the BBC, there are reports of at least ten dead and the wounded being dragged out from their beds at Parirenyatwa Hospital and the Avenues Clinic, bundled into unmarked vehicles. Ian’s contacts tell him of an anti-police demonstration being organized for tomorrow.

  I drive David to school. Everything is quiet in Mount Pleasant. I drive along the university road. Nothing. But as I’m turning left, I see in the mirror a truckload of soldiers turning towards the university’s main entrance. They probably want to seal it off. At home I keep the radio and TV on while I work on the text of the pamphlets for SAFE, an organization that advocates for children’s rights and is currently campaigning for the banning of corporal punishment in schools. The work is funded by the Swedes and the cosignatory of my contract is none other than Stefan, whom I met at Herbert’s house (connections!). It was quite funny when I went up to their offices to find him sitting in the conference room looking very businesslike and serious; that evening at Herbert’s he was completely chilled out on some good quality dagga he’d picked up at Rusape market, and he spent the whole time on the couch trying to undress his wife. He told me that the lawyer who’d been there, too, Benjamin, had died a week later in a mysterious car crash; he had, the previous day, filed some papers against the attorney general implicating senior government officials in the torture of trade union members.

  Stefan didn’t want to talk very much, and later, out on the pavement, he said that they routinely found bugs in the office.

  “We were supposedly debugged this morning,” he said, “so it should be safe. It’s the secretaries.”

  I pick David up early and find other parents doing the same thing. There’s talk at the gates about the city center being up in flames and the riot police running amok. On the local news there’s Mugabe’s latest trip. BBC and SABC have reports of rioting spreading out from the city center. Army trucks are rolling into Chitungwiza and Mbare. Ian hasn’t been back home since he left in the morning. With his camera.

  Ian doesn’t come home for two days. I phone around for news. No one knows anything. An eerie calm descends on the city, helicopters hovering, seeking out would-be trouble-makers.

  Rosanna phones. She says that there is some trouble. Maphosa has moved into Number 18 with his wife. They are living in the main house. They have been joined there by other war veterans.

  Ian’s editor at the Independent phones. Ian has been charged with spying and is in Harare Central. “Don’t worry,” he says. “They won’t dare lay a finger on him.” Too much bad press. He is a journalist. A white journalist.

  Five days later Ian is released. He is interviewed by BBC and Sky TV. “I am a Zimbabwean,” he tells the international viewers, “getting on with my job.” They ask him if he was tortured. He says no. He was treated quite well. No electric shock. No beatings. Just some screaming intelligence officer, ranting and raving about white colonialists and their agents. And then the international press loses interest in the story despite the fact that three other (black) journalists were indeed tortured and one of them is in Avenues Clinic with severe head injuries.

  He’ll have to go to Bulawayo to sort things out, find out what Maphosa and his goons are playing at. If push comes to shove, he’ll call the police in. They’re squatters; they’ll be evicted. The law’s the law.

  He hires a lawyer in Bulawayo who files the necessary papers in court. One eviction notice passes. Then another. And yet another one. The war vets remain put. The police say they have “no transport.” And that’s that.

  I phone Rosanna and she tells me that one of the war vets came to the house and strutted around like he owned it.

  “You should have seen him, Sisi, his bottom was almost touching the sky; he was pointing at this, at that, and when I gave him tea, he was putting the tea bag in his mouth to eat it… and Sisi, they brought a nyanga who killed one of our chickens, and he sprinkled the blood on the inside of that house to drive out the bad spirits. The war vet said that the house is now good and that they can now dwell in it with no issues; he said that since our yard is so big and underutilized he is earmarking stands for resettlement. He said he is going to come back with pegs.”

  “Have you seen Maphosa, Rosanna?”

  “No, no, Sisi, that one is keeping a low profile; when I see him, I will have something to tell him that is for sure; for a relative to behave this way, it is a disgrace.”

  “How is Daddy?”

  She is quiet.

  “He is fine,” she says at last. And then, “But I think he is feeling lonely, that is all.”

  “Slow down, Ian.”

  He stops the car and shouts, “If you don’t like it, get out and walk.”

  “Ian, okay fine, let’s just go.”

  He starts off very fast, and then just after Chegutu, drivers going
to Harare start flashing their lights at us, which is the Universal Zimbo Signal for Speed Trap ahead. So he slows down.

  We drive without talking, just swallowing up the road and Otis Redding filling up the silence in the car until he, too, is quiet.

  Last night I tried to talk him out of going.

  “You don’t know who’s behind them.”

  “It’s your gook relative.”

  “Maphosa? Maphosa’s being used. I don’t think he—”

  “He moved in didn’t he?”

  “Yes but—”

  “They better not have, shit, which other fricking country…”

  One part of me doesn’t understand how he can be so upset about the whole thing. The house is abandoned; he hasn’t been able to sell it. The house has bad memories. “Let them have it,” I want to tell him. “Let them deal with all those spirits.”

  * * *

  He drives right past Number 16 and swings over to next door, the tires kicking gravel, almost hitting one of the gateposts. He gets out of the car, leaves the door wide open. I get out, too. “Stay here,” I say to David. “Don’t move.”

  I look at the gate and read the cardboard sign hanging from a dirty pink string on the latch:

  HEADQUARTERS OF THE PEOPLE’S

  LIBERATION COOP.

  TRESPASSING WILL BE PROSECUTED.

  Ian reads the sign, too, and snatches it from the gate. He drops it on the ground and kicks it.

  “Ian…”

  He turns around.

  “Just be calm, okay. Don’t provoke them.”

  He looks at me, and I can hear his unspoken question, “Shit, whose side are you on?”

  The rusted gate makes too much noise as Ian pushes it open.

  He takes two, three steps inside when all at once, “Hey, hey, who is, what are you, foosake, this is Private Property, out!”

  They come stumbling out from the caged-in veranda. Ian stands very still and then he lets rip. “This is my Private Property. You are trespassing. You get out.”

  “Ian…”

  He doesn’t hear me, or if he does, he’s past caring about anything I might have to say.

  “I have a title deed for this place. You must get the hell…”

  Two of them start pushing Ian; one of them is holding a mug, home brew spilling out of it.

  “Get your fucking hands off me.”

  “Ian!”

  There are bodies slumped on the veranda and the pungent smell of home brew coming from a steel drum on my left.

  A couple of women have joined the two men. They are real mamas, one of them wearing a T-shirt with Mugabe’s face plastered over her gigantic, braless breasts. They are carrying pots and wooden spoons.

  “The property has been resettled,” says the one with the mug.

  “The white man is no longer wanted in Zimbabwe. African aliberate Zim-ba-bwe. Now foosake.”

  “Ian, please, let’s—”

  “And you, what are you doing here?” says the woman wearing a bush hat. “Are you his prostitute?”

  The other bodies on the veranda are starting to stir.

  “Ian, please—”

  “I see I cannot help you,” Ian says.

  The men and women are confused by this, by Ian’s change of tone, his voice now soft, almost gentle, like a parent who’s done with remonstrations, who’s ready to give up; he has tried his best.

  “Yes, I came here to help, to warn you. You know that a white woman died here?”

  The one with the mug is swaying, this way and that.

  “Yes, we know all that,” says the woman attired in Mugabe, “the nyanga—”

  “Nyanga?” says Ian. “I hope he is the nyanga of a paramount chief. I am telling you the woman who died here had a very powerful medicine. Why do you think I am not living in this house? The woman has very big ma jealous. She loved this house and said that she would never leave it. So I am telling you, be very careful.”

  The two women step back from Ian and start banging on their pots, shuffling their feet, and wailing. One of them begins tearing at the loose plaits of her hair. I watch as the president wobbles up and down the woman’s breasts.

  Ian turns around, and I notice how he fiddles with the pocket of his trousers, and then he spins around, opens his fists, and throws something in the air—ash, pepper, sand—which the wind blows into the faces of the two women who run yelping and crying onto the veranda.

  “We are being bewitched, we are being bewitched, the white man is bewitching us!”

  In the car, Ian keeps banging his hands on the steering wheel. “Bloody fricking kaffirs, goons, munts, gondies… ,” over and over. David and I leave him there, alone in the car; we walk back to next door.

  “Come on, let’s go swimming, David. It’s hot.”

  I fish around in the storeroom and finally find my old school navy blue swimsuit. A little bit of stretching and it will fit. The last time I used it must have been when I was eleven, twelve, at primary school when swimming lessons were compulsory and we had to trek down to North End Swimming Pool every week. Anyway, I have no intentions of getting wet. I’ll leave that to David.

  “Are you coming?” I ask Ian who’s in the lounge sitting in that chair like so many years before.

  “Asch, why not?” He stands up and then he slumps back down again. “Asch, you go.”

  I take Daddy’s Cortina and drive to Haddon and Sly to get a pair of swimming trunks for David.

  North End Swimming Pool has been closed for ages because the local council has run out of funds to keep it up; the strict water rationing put in place by the city because of the drought means that fresh water can’t be pumped into the pool, so we have to go to Borrow Street Swimming Pool in town where the water is recycled back into the pool.

  * * *

  This is the first time I’ve come here; the girls in the senior school swimming team would train here. When I was at primary school, it was Whites Only.

  David struggles a bit with the ancient turnstile but finally manages to get through.

  And then, as it happens ever so often, after pushing myself through the turnstile, I step into Rhodesia: an enclave of immaculate nostalgia.

  Oh, time stand still and it does.

  Heads turn. Eyes dart up and down. Thoughts sharpened, mulled over, whispered into glossed lips.

  School gave me enough practice.

  “David, do you want to change with me?”

  “No.”

  I point him towards the children’s changing room, and I stand there watching my growing son rush off, on his own.

  I choose a cubicle with a red door and squeeze myself into the very unbecoming swimsuit that smells so musty, and I’m overwhelmed by a sudden heady rush of the torture of school swim days, where the only way to get out of them was to feign severe period pains. I must look ridiculous. I should have bought a new one, too. But I never swim. Still, it’s embarrassing to be wearing this tatty thing. I wrap my Zimbabwean flag towel (why, oh why, did I bring this threadbare relic here, Daddy’s purchase to mark Zimbabwe’s Independence Day).

  “You took sooooo long, Mum!” complains David who’s been running up and down the pathway, poking his head under doors, looking for me.

  We pass two girls on the veranda flicking through magazines who both stop, give me the once-over.

  Come on, I can do this.

  David jumps and splashes in the water. I marvel at how athletic he has become. He won a gold medal for the breaststroke at the school’s intersports this year.

  I give him twenty dollars, and he goes off to buy chips and cream sodas at the kiosk.

  I’m lying on the grass, my towel wrapped over my breasts like a chitenga, when a shadow falls on me.

  “So you’re not even jumping in, what a wuss.”

  Ian sits down next to me, and I glimpse the girls on the veranda shooting us looks and chattering away.

  “I almost drowned once at school.”

  “Really?”
>
  “Yes, and I almost drowned another student, my rescuer. I was swimming in the shallow end and drifted off to the deep end; when I tried to put my feet down, panic station.”

  “And your PE teacher?”

  “She had to jump in, fully clothed, wasn’t at all amused.”

  He puts his hands behind his head. He takes a look around.

  “Best pool in Bullies. Makes North End look like a fricking pond. I reckon it’s Olympic size, this one. Used to come here for interschools. Some lighties would have towel fights and jeez, man, the warden would throw a major kadenze, threatening to chuck everyone out of the pool and ban the whole lot of us.”

  “Dad!”

  “So, my boy, this is what you do when I’m not around, heh, cream sodas, chips, man…”

  I watch the girls on the veranda transfixed. Ian looks up at them.

  “You forget this place when you’re up in Harare; a village, everyone into everyone’s business.”

  “Watch, Dad, watch. Check this dive, from the top one.”

  And he’s already running off.

  “David, I don’t think…!”

  “Leave him, Lindiwe.”

  “Do you think he should wear sunscreen?”

  “Sunscreen! Man, that was for moffs.”

  “Ian!”

  “What? No one put that stuff on when I was a kid; come to think of it, sometimes we’d really get fried and then we’d just slather on margarine. Boy, did that hurt.”

  David climbs up the stairs of the high diving board. He gives us a wave when he reaches the top.

  “I wish he wouldn’t. I could never do that.”

  “To tell you the truth Lindiwe, me neither; I’m shit scared of heights.”

  David, our son, knees tucked up to his chest, whoops and jumps fearlessly into the water.

  He shakes the water off his body and goes up again.

  “The old man was a heck of a swimmer. Told some stories about swimming across rivers underwater to ambush the terrs. Watched him once here swimming a whole length underwater. Hardcore.”

  “What are you going to do, about the house?”