When Hoopoes Go to Heaven (12 page)

Benedict thought about his duck, hoping she was okay and being left alone by any merman that might be in the river. It was too early for her to come to sleep at the dam – if she even
wanted to – so he decided to go back home for some tea.

As he left his old shoes outside the back door, he realised that the house was very quiet. Good. But the kitchen made him sad, on account of there being no smell of cake just out of the oven, no
sight of Mama’s icing syringe drying along with mixing bowls on the draining board, and no sieve full of weevils from the flour waiting for him to take them outside for the birds.

In the lounge, Mama lay asleep on one of the couches. Scattered on the floor around her were a number of crumpled tissues.

Eh!
Had Mama been crying? Tears stung the back of his own eyes.

Tiptoeing closer, he saw an open magazine on the coffee table. Without making a sound, he scooped it up and moved away with it to the dining table. Mama had been looking at the story about a
very special wedding where they used to live on account of Baba’s last job, and the beautiful cake that Mama had baked for it. Looking at the photographs had made Mama sad, and Benedict knew
that she was sad because her business was so slow now.

Feeling bad, he closed the magazine and put it with Mama’s two other magazines on top of the bookshelf, next to the basket where Baba kept the keys to the red Microbus and the Corolla from
his work. He slipped it underneath the other two magazines, hoping that Mama might forget. On top of it was the magazine with pictures of road signs that Mama had used for getting ready to learn
how to drive, and on top of that was the magazine that a friend had sent her from Ghana in West Africa. Was it safe for that to be on top, or was there anything in it that could make her sad?

He moved with it to the dining table, and sat down to flip through it. It had stories about artists and craftspeople in Ghana, with lots of photographs. One of the stories was about a group of
ladies who were printing designs on cloth that other ladies could use to make dresses. It looked a bit like the kind of cloth for the dresses at the special wedding in Mama’s other magazine.
Eh!
This magazine could upset her, too.

He was about to close it when another story caught his attention. It had photographs of people making the most beautiful caskets. The story said that if a person was a car salesman before he
became late, he could have a casket that was carved into the shape of a Mercedes Benz. And if he was a musician, he could be buried in a casket that looked like a guitar. Or a fisherman could have
a casket shaped like a fish. All the caskets were painted so that the Mercedes, the guitar and the fish looked real.

They were even more special than the beautiful one that Jabulani had made for Benedict’s hoopoe.

Jabulani would love them!

Eh!

Benedict opened his mouth and breathed in quickly.

Maybe caskets like these were the edge for Ubuntu Funerals that he had asked for in his prayer at the hoopoe’s grave. In that same prayer, he had asked for customers for Mama’s
business. Maybe if Mama showed these caskets to Jabulani and Zodwa, they would be so grateful for the edge that they’d send each and every one of their customers to Mama for cakes.

Eh!

He went to the couch with the magazine and shook Mama’s shoulder.

‘Mama!’ he whispered excitedly. ‘Mama! I’ve found an edge!’

S
ITTING ON THE COLD EDGE OF THE STEP OUTSIDE
her room, Mavis pulled her blanket more tightly around her, tucking her knees
closer to her body and rocking gently while she waited for Madam’s drops to do their work inside her body. Whatever it was that had wrenched her from her sleep tonight had left her sweaty and
shaky and needing air.

As usual, the buildings on the hillside lay in darkness. But Mavis knew that if she were to walk round to the other side of the main house, the side where Madam and Doctor’s bedroom opened
onto the garden, she might see a tiny red light glowing at the window of the downstairs bedroom that was for visitors.

Visitors weren’t allowed to smoke inside the house. Madam said it wasn’t healthy around the children and Doctor said it was a bad example. Mavis knew from jobs she’d had before
that cigarettes made a smell and a mess. Tiny flecks of ash fell everywhere, and an ashtray was a very unpleasant thing to clean. And,
eish
, the smell on the clothes as her hands had washed
them!

Mavis tutted loudly on the edge of the step, sure that Lungi – fast asleep on the other side of the door – would not hear her. Sure, too, that in the morning she would find herself
cleaning the dark smudge off a dishcloth that smelled of smoke.
Gogo
Levine had not been staying long, but already she had a routine. During the chaos of the children’s breakfast at
the big table in the kitchen that seemed almost as big as the whole house at one of Mavis’s old jobs,
Gogo
Levine would quietly take Mavis’s dishcloth – damp from washing
the morning teacups – and go to her room, where she would wipe from the outside windowsill any mess from stubbing out her cigarettes at the open window in the night. Then she would put the
cloth back next to the sink as if she thought that Mavis was a bad cleaner who wouldn’t see the dirt on it or smell that it wasn’t clean.

But Mavis would never say anything to Madam. What would that be for?
Gogo
Levine was Madam’s mother.

Madam had too much luck, she was able to be a mother meanwhile she had delivered no child. Mavis would never be a mother herself, and she would never meet a man like Doctor who wouldn’t
mind. Doctor had been out in the world, he had schooled in South Africa, he didn’t mind that Madam wasn’t a Swazi and she couldn’t deliver. Mavis would certainly never meet a man
as rich as Doctor.
Eish
, he had too many cows!

But her mind was going to dangerous places. If she thought about cows she might think about Petros, and if she thought about Petros just after she had thought about never being a mother, then
she would have to think about how Petros was so like her own boy would have been, and that would be too hard.

Rising from the step, she pulled her blanket around her. The little gaps in each crocheted square made it not the best blanket for wrapping up in against the cold night air, but her mother had
made it for her, and that was what made it warm. This year there would be a good sum of money to take home to her mother: the Cobra floor-polish tin under her bed was filling up nice-nice.

She felt calmer now, but she had woken up sweaty, and it wouldn’t be nice to go back to her bed without first having a wash. The door to their bathroom creaked a little, but it never woke
Lungi.
Eish
, she envied Lungi her sleep! The room on the other side of the bathroom was used for storing things, so Mavis didn’t need to worry about waking a gardener or any other
worker sleeping in there. She was glad that the bathroom was for her and Lungi only. She wouldn’t want to share it with a man who might not keep it clean – though Lungi wouldn’t
have minded if Samson lived in. On the days when Samson came to work, if Madam was out, Lungi sometimes asked Mavis to make sure that none of the children came near the outside room.

Lungi was already a widow, though she was young, just twenty-six. Mavis was five years older, but she looked younger because she was small next to Lungi. When Lungi had lost her husband an uncle
of his had wanted to take her, but Lungi’s family had pretended that she was sick, and when that didn’t work they gave back the cows that his family had paid for her. They didn’t
have to give back the
lobola
, it wasn’t like Lungi hadn’t been able to conceive – she had just never had the chance because her husband was always away at his job in the
mine in South Africa, and then he was late when part of the mine fell down on him. Anyway, the uncle accepted the cows in Lungi’s place, and now Lungi was free.

The neon light in the bathroom was so bright after the darkness, Mavis had to close her eyes for a few seconds. When she opened them, she saw that one side of her shoulder-length relaxed hair
was standing straight up, pushed there by lying on her side as she slept. She was always asleep before Lungi in the first part of the night and it was always Lungi who woke her in the morning. But
most nights something else woke her in between. It had been happening for years – almost seventeen years – and she had had plenty of time to grow used to it. It really didn’t
matter at all, especially now that she had found a way to use her time awake to earn some extra money to support her mother. She would get back to her crocheting as soon as she had washed.

The bathroom had hot and cold water, but only one at a time. That made a shower a very difficult thing to have, so neither Mavis nor Lungi used it. Instead, a big, red plastic tub lived on the
floor of the shower, and with the plastic curtain drawn so that the water didn’t splash, they would fill it with first one and then the other, like a bath. Mavis was just small enough to sit
right inside the tub, but it was much easier to wash standing up in it. Tonight, though, she would have just a small wash at the basin.

The main house had the same problem of not having hot and cold at the same time. Doctor said it was to do with the geysers and the water-tanks from the dam, and there was nothing to do to fix
it, so when they had added the new upstairs for the children’s bedrooms, they didn’t waste money putting a shower in the upstairs bathroom. Mavis was glad of that: nobody ever used the
downstairs shower, but the small tiles in the floor of it took a long time to clean nice-nice. The one-at-a-time water wasn’t a problem, they must just always put cold before hot in the baths
so a child could never climb in to a bath of water so hot it could hurt them.

It was the same at the
kwerekwere
house. Titi told her that sometimes an insect or something would come into the bath with the cold water and then the girls would be afraid. Probably
there weren’t insects in their own country; the eldest boy certainly looked at them like he had never seen them before. Mavis had once watched him in the garden from an upstairs window,
squatting down and staring for a very long time at something that was crawling in the grass.

Patting herself dry with her towel, she thought about how different that boy was, for his age. He was like Vusi, serious and wanting to learn. He always came to the house with questions that
needed answering, meanwhile his brothers came to play with Fortune and his sisters came to play with Innocence. Titi said he liked to read books and to be quiet by himself outside. Petros also
liked to be by himself outside.

Eish!

Now she was thinking about him again.

Sighing deeply, she pulled her nightgown back on over her head, wrapped her blanket around her again, and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. Maybe she should stop trying to keep him out
of her head. Maybe she should just let him walk around in there and then maybe he would go out of it again.

Petros was a good boy. He was mature, responsible, already earning his own money. He didn’t need anybody. But in the late afternoons when she heard the cows beginning to make their way
down past the house towards the milking shed, if she didn’t have a child clinging to her or one in the bath or a mess to tidy or clean, and if nobody was watching, she would take some
leftover food from the fridge – something nice that he might not cook for himself – and she would go out to meet him on his way home with the cows. He would take the food and thank her
politely, then he would chat for just a minute or two, always watching the cows, always making sure that his dog didn’t jump at her.

Such a good boy!

She always felt disappointed when the cows came past with somebody else instead of Petros. Then she would pretend to be picking some vegetables in Madam’s garden, and she would act like
the supermarket bag with Petros’s food in it was for the cabbage or the carrots or the onions that she was choosing. The food was for Petros, she didn’t want to give it to anybody
else.

When she had talked to him recently he had coughed and coughed, and after he had continued on his way with the cows, Mavis had seen that his spit on the ground was red with blood. She had told
Madam, and Madam had taken him to a doctor for some pills, so he was going to be better soon. But just to make sure, Mavis had taken the small jar of Vicks from the house and given it to Petros to
rub on his chest. Here, he had asked her, patting his chest with one hand as he took the jar with the other. Yes, there, she had told him, longing to rub it there for him, longing for him to be her
own boy so that she could do that for him. But her hand had made a circle in the air instead, and he had thanked her politely and continued down the hill with his dog and the cows.

She had watched him go, knowing he had no mother to go to, no family anywhere, and hoping that he would turn and come back up the hill to her, holding out the jar and saying to her, here, show
me, please, take care of me. But he hadn’t turned, not even to wave, and on Saturday she had bought a new jar of Vicks at the supermarket, putting it in the cupboard before anybody had
noticed that the other one was gone.