The Boy Next Door (36 page)

I look at David, who’s fallen asleep, his lips puckered open. I try to smooth down the twists of his hair, and I switch off
the Walkman.

“Tell me everything,” I say, watching him breathe. “Don’t keep secrets.”

Daddy is so
thin. I lift his hand; the lightness of it—its lack of weight, substance—shocks me. I look up at my mother busy smoothing
the cover at the foot of the bed. She must feel my eyes on her, but she refuses to meet them.

“Mummy, why is he like this? What happened? Why is he so th…?”

She won’t look up.

“Mummy…”

“It is his stomach. He cannot keep anything in. He must have an operation, but he doesn’t want. He is tired.”

I look down at Daddy. He is asleep, the breath coming out of him so shallow. I take my hand and lay my fingers gently on his
forehead; its coolness, dampness, frightens me.

I will leave behind a blue jersey and a hat, my guilty offerings. I look away to the door, to David who stands there, the
Walkman earphones dangling from his neck.

When we were standing outside the locked gate, he had been so jittery; he’d wanted to climb over it, already his feet were
on the fencing.

“David, no. Come on, get down. Be patient. Look there’s Granny….”

“Gran!” he shouted to the figure marching up to the gate. I was struck with how much stronger she looked. How hard she seemed.

“Gran!”

She didn’t even look at him. She undid the lock, left the chain still hanging around the gate, and marched off again.

David stood there next to me.

“Jeepers Mum, she looks pretty mad,” he said softly.

I knew what he meant, upset, angry, but the literal translation seemed to me spot-on. She
was
mad. Penga. How did such a sweet boy get two nutcases for grandparents?

I was struggling to unwrap the heavy chain. “She’s just getting old. Old people get confused.”

Finally the gate was free of the chain. I pushed it open.

“Maybe it’s my hair.”

We made our way to the house. I was shocked by how desolate it seemed, as if any moment, ghosts might come waltzing through.
There was no sign of dogs, life.

“And you’ve grown so much. She remembers you when you were just so high.”

We were both trying so hard.

I look up once more at her, then down at Daddy, and then I turn away and go to my son, closing the door behind me.

“Come, let’s go and explore.”

We walk through the dark passageway into the kitchen, open the wooden door, and stand outside on the concrete doorstep, the
two of us squeezed together. It is cold in the shade of the loping eaves. I step onto the sparse grass. I don’t look left.
I’m not yet ready for that house. The chicken coop is deserted, feathers caught in the fencing. David walks over to the dog
kennel, peers inside, nothing. He walks towards the boy’s kaya, stands in that place between it and his grandfather’s workshop.

“I don’t think Rosanna’s around,” I say.

He turns, screws up his eyes, scratches his forehead with his middle finger, and bites his lip, looking so much like Ian then.
I wait for him to say whatever is playing in his head, but he makes a little shrug and turns again, the palm of his hand moving
along the rough wall.

I don’t know how much of Rosanna he holds close.

I follow him to the boy’s kaya. There are spiderwebs and deep cracks, crevices, running all along the outer wall. Daddy blamed
the apostolics for their shoddy work, and every year after the rainy season, he would spend a week plastering and filling
in the cracks with cement. Mummy would stand by the kitchen complaining that he was wasting money.

Standing here with my son, I am seized by shame at its shabbiness, how we could have allowed dear Rosanna to live in here.

I don’t know how long Mummy’s been back. What arrangements she’s made with Rosanna. The other times Rosanna’s been expelled
she’s always gone to Uncle Silius to seek refuge, but last time I talked to her, Uncle Silius and his family had been evicted
from their flat in Pelindaba for nonpayment of rent.

I walk around the workshop, and my eyes sweep past the gum tree away to the far corner, where an outbuilding that used to
be partially hidden by rows of maize plants squats.

“Maphosa lived down there,” I say to David, who is crouched on the ground jabbing a stick at an anthill. “He was our gardener.
Let’s go and take a look.”

We walk silently in the dirt. Not a single sound. It’s like walking in a devastated zone. The earth scorched and abandoned.

We stand outside the zinc door, which is just open enough to give a sight of the bleak interior.

I am suddenly gripped with dread, but before I can tell David we should leave, he has already pushed the door open wide.

Something scurries on the floor, and I let out a yelp and jump backwards.

“Chill, it’s just a lizard, Mum.”

There is nothing in the room, not even a mattress.

What did I expect to find? Evidence? Of what? The Great Lie?

“He lived in
here?
It’s so small, Mum.”

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go.” I try to shut the door, but the warped zinc springs open. The latch has been long broken and
rusted. “Let’s go and have a sandwich, and then we can go into town for a drive. No, actually, better idea. Let’s go for a
pizza or a chicken at Nando’s, and then we can go and take a look at the museum. You haven’t seen the animal exhibit; it’s
good.”

David eyes me cynically. But he’s also amused as evidenced by his right eyebrow cocked higher and his lips swinging to one
side, his dimple deeper.

I’m frantic with the desire for distractions.

We both stand staring at Daddy’s treasured Ford Cortina. There is rust and dirt, things Daddy would never have tolerated.
I wait for David to make some comment, but when I look at him, I’m shocked by how gentle and sad his face seems to be. What
does he remember?

“Okay, then, let’s get going.”

David opens the front passenger door.

“Back,” I say.

“Mum!”

“Come on, you know the rule.”

“Mum! I’m not a kid.”

“Humor me.”

My beautiful son glares at me and then flings the door shut; the car rattles in protest.

“Dad’s right; sometimes you’re the gestapo.”

“Seat belt.”

Bulawayo, as ever, seems to be stuck deep in another century: the genteel, fading, faded grandeur of the colonial past. Sleepy
Bulawayo with its wide, wide roads that Rhodes had constructed so that horse-drawn wagons could make a complete turn. Ancient
models of cars chugging along, some of them seeming to come from the turn of the century, old, beaten down, driven with infinite
care and pride by their equally antiquated owners. Harare has all the glitz. “Harare is fast,” Bulawayans fresh from their
travels to the Sunshine City gossip. “Too, too fast,” they say, sinking into the welcome torpor of Bulawayo while still feasting
on the hectic rush of life that is Harare. Too fast, as if that city, that foolish, reckless metropolis with its good-for-nothing
Shonas, will one day simply run away with itself, with its good times, get rich vibrations while Bulawayo, good old Bullies,
ever solid, reliable, dependable, boring, dull, will survive for all time. But it is also Bu-la-wayo. The place of killing,
isn’t it? Bloodletting is in its history. The beautiful wide, wide streets are seeped in blood.

“Mum!”

“Yes, what?”

“You’re going as fast as a snail on sleeping gas.”

I readjust the rearview mirror until I can see him.

“This is Bulawayo pace.”

“Yeah, right.”

“That’s right.”

I flash him a smile. He sighs, flings his long legs over the passenger seat.

I press down a bit more on the accelerator.

“Is that better, more Formula One style?”

I watch him for a moment. The earphones are back on. His forehead is pressed against the window. What on earth does he make
of it? The utter wretched barrenness of it. The dry patches of wasteland. The shacks all over that field, where sometimes
I would watch boys kicking their plastic footballs. The land has been reclaimed, and everywhere there are cardboard houses.
And next door to all this, the crumbling houses of the once Whites Only suburbs. What had the whites said as the hordes of
blacks moved in and claimed possession of the well-tended gardens (if they hadn’t been spitefully uprooted by the fleeing
white owners): oh yes, “wait till the munts move in; wait and see what a dump they’ll turn these places into, just wait.”

And how angry it makes me to see how right they’ve turned out to be. Everything is falling apart.

What did Daddy himself say?

“The problem is, we blacks, we move into these big houses with big yards, and we don’t have the money to upkeep them. We want
to be seen to be living like bosses. And then all the relatives descend. It becomes a mess, the whole thing. People living
one on top of the other; it is a recipe for disaster. I’m telling you, very soon we will have cholera outbreaks like in Zambia.”

There’s no longer the
thik, thik
of sprinklers as they water lawns or flower beds—instead, patches of anorexic maize straggling over broken fences.

And now, to top it off, the smell of sewage entering through my open window.

“What a pong.”

“It’s the river,” I say closing the window.

Daddy was always complaining to the city council about all the illegal dumping that was going on upriver at Trenton. If you
caught the bus at certain times, you would have to share it with a goat or a pig from one of the squatter camps there that
was beginning its long, miserable journey to the lands.

Main Street.

“Look, David, there’s where Grandpa used to work.”

The Main Street Post Office building, I’m relieved to see, is still there, sturdy and reliable with its thick red stone and
straight lines despite all the internal havoc and machinations of its occupants: the never ending strikes, the go-slows, pay
and labor disputes, firings, rehirings, court cases, pending court cases, tribunals, and the decline of all the services rendered
by the Post and Telecommunications Corporation.

“I remember it,” he says, craning his head out of the window. “Grandpa used to take me to his work. The machines were gigantic,
and there were pictures of naked ladies on the walls.”

That must have been the main telephone exchange down at the basement of the building. How many times had Mummy allowed Daddy
to take him there? He had taken me, too, sometimes straight from school when he got called out on a fault, and I had seen
those pictures, Miss January, Miss June… which some of the younger guys had tacked onto the walls. The older pin ups were
from
Scope
magazine, the newer ones, with black girls with clothes on, from
Drum
. There is a pang of sorrow when I think of David with my father. I can see them walking down those stone steps in the gloom,
Daddy steadying David on the uneven stairs, David reaching for his Granddad’s hand.

“So, pizza or chicken?”

“Pizza.”

“Right then, pizza it is.”

Pizza Palace is still in existence. Shabbier than I last remembered it. The blackened-out glass front, which has always made
the place look like an illegal nightclub, seedy and downmarket, is covered in dust, and I spy several flies in the casement.
I’m already having misgivings but I’m also very hungry.

It’s gloomy inside. I can’t remember if, once upon a time, this was an atmospheric gloominess; at the moment it feels more
like an economic strategy; hard times have befallen the once grand Pizza Palace.

Laughter rings out from the table to the left of the door. Some teenagers. Their pose and laughter sweeps me back into Grasshut
(Grasshut!) with Bridgette.

David glances at the table and feigns lack of interest at the two girls there, who are staring at him virtually openmouthed.
I think schoolgirl Bridgette would have called it, drooling.

We get a table right in front of the door so that at least we have some light. David looks at me with what I take to be a
new interest.
So this is what Mum thinks is a nice restaurant. Interesting.
His head is bobbing and only now I notice the music. Rap. The waitress comes. She looks very bored and tired and also irritated
with us for giving her work to do.

“Yes?” she says, scratching her weave with her finger.

“Two pizzas,” I say. “Can we see the menus?”

She digs her finger out of her weave, points to the table next to us, and waits for us to grab the grimy menus and look through
them.

“One Margherita with lots of olives,” says David.

“O-leaves,” says the waitress, yawning. “We don’t have o-leaves.”

David bops his head as if he is agreeing with her.

“I’ll have a Margherita, too. And can we have some bottled water?”

She looks at me as though I’m crazy. A black woman asking for bottled water, in Bulawayo, well…

“Thank you,” I say.

She shuffles off.

David’s taking a look around, his eyes flitting over the two girls, who appear not to have changed posture at all.

The door opens and a well-dressed young couple walks in. They swivel their eyes over the joint. The woman whispers something
to the man, and they both turn back, straight right out of the hole. This is not a place to be seen (caught dead in). Not
even in Bulawayo.

After what seems like forever, the pizzas finally arrive. David looks down and then up at me with his “Is this a pizza? Are
you joking?” expression.

He’s right to ask.

The bread, dough, whatever, is awash in a Day-Glo yellow substance that I presume to be cheese. Islands of uncooked tomatoes
are stranded in it. Rings of onions charred around the border.

“Pizza, Bulawayo style. We can go to Nando’s.”

David sighs and gingerly picks up one end and bites into it, the cheese slopping down his chin onto the plate, taking a forlorn
tomato with it.

“The taste’s not too bad,” he claims.

I could hug him for such fortitude.