The Boy Next Door Page 30

“Can we go next door?”

  I almost drop the kettle.

  “Next door?”

  “It’s Dad’s, isn’t it? We can explore.”

  I know he’s making fun of me for yesterday with that exaggerated “explore.”

  “No, I don’t…”

  “Come on, Mum, it’s major, major boring here.”

  “Let me think about it, okay? Remember we have the museum today.”

  “Get a hold of the major excitement on my face, Mum.”

  * * *

  I try to phone at nine o’clock and then at nine twenty and then nine thirty-one. Nothing.

  “Come on,” I say to David who has been standing behind me. “Let’s get a move on. We’ll have a brunch over at Wimpy’s and then we’ll go to the museum.”

  I sound like a stuck record about this museum.

  Mummy comes out of the bedroom wearing a threadbare nightie, which reveals the outlines of her heavy, sagging breasts. I’m embarrassed for her.

  “How is Daddy?” I ask her.

  She walks past me into the kitchen, and I listen to the water running.

  I put my hand on the door handle, press slowly down, inch the door open. It’s dark. It smells musty and medicinal. I listen (for what?), to hear Daddy’s breathing?

  I gently close the door.

  “Remember to take the extra set of keys with you. I’m going to Manyano this afternoon,” Mummy says coming out of the kitchen with two cups of tea, one black with lemon, the other very milky.

  “What about…” but she’s already elbowed the handle down and disappeared into the darkness.

  Surely, she can’t leave my father on his own? There must be someone who comes, but why would I need the keys? What if there’s a fire, or he needs something, how can she—?

  “Mum, let’s go. I’m starving.”

  The phone rings.

  I wait for Mummy to pick it up.

  After the fourth ring, I do.

  “Hello.”

  “Howzit.”

  “Ian! We’ve been trying to phone you all yesterday and this morning. Where’ve you been? Oh, hold on, Ian, David wants to speak to you.”

  I hand the phone over to my son, and he gives me his “could I please have some privacy?” look, so I disappear into the lounge.

  After about five minutes, David comes in.

  “Mum, Dad said he had to go. He’ll phone later.”

  We have two plates of very thick pancakes with cream and syrup. David wolfs his down as though he hasn’t eaten for days and days. And then two tall glasses of chocolate milk. And then he burps, which earns him a look from me.

  “Excuse me, mademoiselle,” he says pulling on his earphones.

  I look out of the window.

  Opposite the road is Woolworths, owned by ZANU-PF. All along its pavement are beggars and cripples and a couple of women selling bits and pieces: chipped enamel cups, some thread, pieces of faded material, scrawny-looking tomatoes, some sweets. How it has changed from my schooldays when the pavements were uncluttered.

  Just outside Wimpys, right by the stairs, we had to jump over a blind man and his infant son, and even from here, I can hear the rattle of his tin cup on the stairs. In last night’s news, there was something about the homeless settlement in Killarney, just outside Bulawayo, being trashed by the army. Street children have been rounded up in the city center and dumped in various detention centers.

  Already, there’s a queue for a consignment of sugar that is rumored to be on its way that stretches from upstairs in the supermarket at Woolworths, around the counters downstairs, to a side entrance and out onto the pavement.

  There is a discarded newspaper on the table. The front page is occupied with a car hijacking in Morningside and an old white man at the Edith Duly Nursing Home found dead, beaten, his TV taken. Even in Bulawayo crime is on the rise.

  The Legal Aid offices downtown were ransacked two days ago and several homeless people who had taken shelter there were beaten. Like in the rest of the country, inflation, corruption, lawlessness, are all taking their toll here.

  David looks up, removes his earphones, and takes a look around and then his eyes settle on me.

  “Mum, can I be brutally honest?”

  “Yes, of course, what?”

  “You’re the bomb.” And he makes those funny hand movements that must come from the music videos he watches.

  And then the earphones are back on again.

  My son doesn’t seem that impressed by the carnage on display in the Animal Section.

  When my father used to bring me here, I would be filled with expectation and dread as I waited behind him at the Admission’s desk, sneaking looks into the narrow stone passageway, dimly lit, where, on both sides, glass cases were filled with animals in the wild, tearing apart other animals. There was blood and intestines, the lion’s fur matted with red, the poor once-elegant impala shredded, and I would feel through my trembling hands and legs that those predators might just be able to break through the glass and get me, too.

  And then there was me and Ian, standing here, too, a long time ago.

  But here is my son, already out the other side in the cavernous hall, where in the middle is a huge Styrofoam whale looking utterly displaced and worse for wear.

  “You didn’t enjoy it, the animals?”

  “Mum, they’re stuffed.”

  “Well, in case you haven’t noticed this is a museum; next time I’ll take you to Hwange.”

  I’m tempted to add “duh.” I sound crosser and more annoyed than I feel. What’s wrong with me?

  We go up the long spiral of stairs.

  A stop at the reptiles, and these do make a better impression.

  The cobra. The black mamba, also known as the three-steps snake, one bite and one, two, three steps, you’re dead. Then over across to the Hall of Man, the big mural on the wall showing the Ascent of Man from his apelike ancestors to his supposedly more intelligent and refined present-day incarnation. A few steps and we are in the Hall of Chiefs, and this one seems to capture David’s imagination, earphones now dangling from his neck, neck craning to see artifacts from the battlefields in Matabeleland and Mashonaland, the business of how men go about killing each other. The meticulous display of weaponry: guns, axes, spears, shields; horns to sound out an impending attack; a bullet that got imbedded within a Bible in a soldier’s chest pocket (and there is the very Bible), a soldier’s life saved by the holy word. And look, there is how a country was bought and sold: the Great Indaba, Lobengula, sitting on top of a kopje and Rhodes and his men exchanging a few guns and gold for a simple X on a piece of parchment.

  Out again, and as we walk out, I turn to see the bench that Ian sat on, looking out of the window, how he turned around and saw me. I watch David walk along that same bench and jump gracefully off it.

  Into the butterflies and birds. How sad these casements have always made me feel: small, delicate creatures trapped forever, some of the wings of the butterflies rubbed away by not-so-delicate fingers and time.

  And just like that, an image of Bridgette lying so still inside a wooden box holds me.

  Into the spooky tunnel showing the mining of minerals, and David, on cue, makes ghostlike noises, ooooo, ooooo, and I, too, respond, on cue, shuuu. And then we’re down the stairs again, outside. I blink in the bright sunshine.

  “Let’s go for a stroll in the park. We can get something to drink at the bar by the train rides.”

  Centenary Park.

  Ah, the pleasures of Saturday afternoons, strolling up the long thoroughfare, bumping into other families, coming and going. The thrill of treats awaiting. On special occasions, perhaps a birthday, the train rides, perhaps even two, on the miniature steam train run by the Rotary Club of Bulawayo; the conductor walking along the open carriages, punching tickets and making jokes about picannins; the train starting, steam shooting up in a straight column; the pulse and pace of my heart quickening; Daddy curling up, shoulders bent in the seat
next to me, his head scraping the wooden roof; ducking under the long, long narrow tunnel, where if you’re brave enough you can touch the walls with your outstretched hands; up some bridges; oh, look, a pond of ducks; watch your outstretched hands on the thickets and then back again to the waiting platform.

  The frantic scramble onto the huge models of an airplane and a tank, children shooting and calling, vroom, vroom, pa pa pa pa.

  The run up to the playground, a haven of swings and slides, look, look what I can do. Look! And the swings that can go so high that the sky seems to be about to crash on you, and coming off, legs shaking.

  “That’s where I got this,” I say to David, turning my head and tapping a finger to the scar above my right eyebrow.

  “On that?” he says, eyeing the slide.

  “Yes. I was seven, maybe eight. It looked so high, scary. The big kids would go down whooping. I was with Thandi, one of Uncle Jacob’s kids. She had gone down a few times already. She was the same age as me and they lived in some flats in Luveve Township, which I thought was very exotic.”

  David starts fiddling with the Walkman.

  “Anyway, I finally worked up the courage to go on it. I can almost feel myself going up those steps, biting my lips, wanting to cry; the other kids, bigger kids, pushing and prodding behind me, move, go, move. So I’m finally right at the top, my legs have managed to carry me up those, what, twenty steps, and when I look down, Mummy and Daddy seem so small. I squeeze my eyes shut, my heart is racing. I’m holding on for dear life to the sides. I can barely hear Mummy, Daddy, Uncle Jacob, maybe even Thandi calling out encouragement. And then, suddenly, I’m off. One of the bigger kids behind me must have given me a shove. I open my eyes, big mistake. The sky seems to be falling. I will never stop. I’ll keep going, going… and so, to make myself stop, I swerve to the right just as I get to the bottom, and I hit a bit of the metal edge that’s jutting out. Lots of blood. I had to have stitches.”

  David looks at the rusty slide again with a newfound respect, and then the earphones are back on.

  I don’t tell him how Daddy had to blame someone as usual. My mother. Or that there were specific times when black children were allowed in the playground.

  Centenary Park.

  What a grand affair it used to be. And now look at it.

  The Christmas lights, famous throughout Africa. And then Harare stole them for First Street. The fountain where before independence, rowdy whites would jump in and splash about while the few brave blacks, garden boys and garden girls from the surrounding suburbs, Burnside, Khumalo, Morningside, Ascot, on their one day off, watched from the road. And now, the smell of feces from the receptacle, its sides stained yellow.

  And here we are at the aviary. For a moment, I watch Ian grab hold of the fence with his bruised hands. It was the first time he told me about Khami Prison.

  There are no birds anymore. I would like to think that they have finally been set free, but it’s more likely that those tame birds have all been eaten. In fact, throughout the park, I notice patches of charred grass and sticks.

  Behind the aviary there used to be a wild park full of impala, ostriches, and a giraffe. The impala and ostriches must have long become “inyama” and as for the giraffe, who knows. One ostrich would come right up to the fence and jab its beak at it. Daddy said an angry ostrich could easily kill a man.

  The Horticultural Society of Bulawayo planned and tended the gardens, and there were intricate beds of flowers, which fascinated Mummy, and she would try to remember the arrangements so that she could do a bit of the same at home.

  “The whites, they really know how to beautify,” she would say bending down to examine a particular flower.

  The colors! Purples, oranges, reds, all of them so vivid and startling. Hydrangeas, sweet peas, roses, chrysanthemums, flame lilies… Daddy would be standing impatiently behind her muttering about how expensive seeds were and “unnecessary expenditures.” Sometimes he would tug on a seedling, even though it was forbidden to take any plant life from the park and if you were caught the fine was a hundred Rhodesian dollars and maybe even time in jail.

  The flowers are long gone; trodden ghosts of beds and dirt remain. Benches missing planks (firewood again).

  We walk back to the museum car park.

  “Do you feel like an ice cream, David?”

  I have to ask him again, shouting through his music.

  “Yes,” he shouts back without taking off his earphones.

  So we drive to Eskimo Hut next to the Trade Fair Grounds where they have the best soft ice creams in Bulawayo.

  As usual there are carloads of youngsters and families. And vendors milling around selling Ndebele jewelry and some replica pots and carvings from Khami Ruins.

  For a moment I think I must be wrong. I must.

  We see each other at the same time.

  She looks up from talking to a man with a black rucksack.

  I’m handing David his cone.

  Her face breaks out into a wide smile. “Sisi!” she calls out.

  “Rosanna!”

  And then I see her. My sister. Danielle. (How small she is. How much David towers over her.)

  The man with the rucksack gives Rosanna some money; he clumsily folds the lace tablecloth and shoves it into his rucksack.

  We meet each other halfway. “Sisi!” “Rosanna!”

  For a moment we cannot say anything but hold each other’s hands. And then we move to a patch of grass and we sit on the bench there.

  We watch David and Danielle look at each other, and the thought strikes me, they are cousins; no, no, that’s not right, if she’s my sister then, oh, my God, she’s David’s aunt. David’s her nephew!

  “You are looking so fine, Sisi. Harare is too, too sweet for you.” She giggles into the palm of her hand.

  “But you, too, you are looking good, Rosanna.”

  Rosanna laughs.

  We both know that I am lying. She is much thinner and the chitenga cloth hangs limply on her.

  “I am keeping busy, that is all. Surviving.”

  I notice the swollen blackened area below her left eye, and she raises her hand to hide it.

  “Where are you staying, Rosanna?”

  “I was staying for some months in Killarney, but the army came and destroyed everything. Now I am here.”

  “Here” I know is the streets.

  She puts a hand on my knee, lowers her voice.

  “Sisi, I must tell you this. Maphosa is busy terrorizing people. He is the number one war vet in these parts. His gang killed that white farmer over at Nyathi. He is looking for your white man. He must not come to Bulawayo.”

  I look up from her hand back to the children. David has given Danielle the ice cream. The tip of her tongue darts in and out as she licks the cold. David stands there with his hands in his pockets, trying to look so much like the man of the world. So much like his father.

  “He is saying Number Eighteen is Headquarters and Interrogation Centre. He is saying that the fighters are going to truly liberate Zimbabwe now. He is going to the Indians in Lobengula and getting money; otherwise they beat the Indians and take from the shops anyways.”

  She lets out a long sigh. “People are changing, Sisi.”

  Someone calls her name, one of the vendors. “I have a customer, Sisi. I must be going.”

  I sit for a while watching Rosanna negotiate with the elderly white lady who is holding a doily in her frail fingers. Rosanna takes the doily, carefully folds it, and gives it back to the lady. The lady digs in her purse and gives Rosanna some coins. Rosanna stands there, looking down at the coins in her open palm, and then ties them up in a handkerchief, tucks the bundle in her chest.

  Ashamed of myself, I give Rosanna all the money that I have despite her protests. I ask her if she still has my Harare number. She says yes. If you need anything, I tell her, just call. “Thank you, Sisi,” she says. I know that this is not right. I should take her back to the house. Have it out w
ith Mummy. But I am a coward. So I leave them there. Rosanna and my sister.

  * * *

  When we get back, I try to phone Ian again. Nothing.

  This time I startle awake. I draw the curtains to one side. As though I’ve expected this all along, the glow of orange in the dark does not surprise me. I turn to Ian, but he is not there. I feel the smoke and heat in my mouth, eyes. I get up from the bed. I walk out of the room, the house, and stand outside in the dark, watching the house next door burn, and then there is a figure running towards me lit up, whirling and twirling in the night—

  I jolt up and find Ian standing at the foot of the bed.

  “Hello stranger,” he says.

  7.

  David and Danielle are sitting, whispering at the back.

  I keep seeing Rosanna’s face when she stood by the car and raised her hand to wave good-bye to her daughter.

  “You must be a good girl,” she told Danielle. “Don’t bring shame to me. You are now with your little mother.”

  Ian had stayed behind the wheel, nothing said between him and Rosanna.

  “Yes, Mama,” Danielle replied and sat down quietly, her hands folded on her lap.

  David had his earphones on and was looking out his window.

  “She will be fine,” I said to Rosanna. “Don’t worry.”

  She had phoned early in the morning.

  “Please, Sisi, take my Danielle with you. It is only till I find a place to live. It is not good for a girl to be living in the streets. The government will take her. Also, there are some gangs from South Africa who are coming after young girls. Please, Sisi.”

  It’s only when David and Danielle are both sleeping, their heads lolling on the backseat that Ian opens his mouth.

  “Now don’t get all worked up about it, but I had a visit from the spooks.”

  “What?”

  “The spooks. CIO.”

  “Ian!”

  “I told you, don’t get all worked up about it; they just took me over to headquarters, for a discussion.”

  “A discussion?”

  “Yes man, listen to this one. Someone’s got hold of a negative and is busy adding horns and a pitchfork to Bob’s portrait.”