The Boy Next Door (12 page)

He goes in the lounge and sits there with Mummy.

I go in my room, and I think of Rosanna and the baby.

The baby who is my sister.

Half.

“
So you were
born in the boondocks, heh? Kamativi. Me, I’m a city boy through and through. Mater Dei. Jeez, that little bugger was as
ugly as hell. Did you check the nose of that thing, like a blimming hippo.”

“She’s just a baby.”

“Yah, yah. I don’t mean anything. Just commenting. Anyway, babies are funny looking full stop: white, black, yellow, curry
munchers, porcs, the whole lot of them.”

He gets up from the grass and tosses away the stick he’s been hitting the backs of his hands with. He stretches his arms and
yawns. He comes and sits with me on the bench, and we both look out to the fountain that isn’t spewing any water because of
the drought.

When he was on the grass, talking, I could look at him without being shy; it wasn’t staring. While he was talking, I was thinking
that he didn’t look like any white guy I had ever seen in Bulawayo. I was trying to work out if that was because I was getting
to know him. If I didn’t know him, if I saw him in the streets, would I think, Oh, there’s a Rhodie. I was trying to think
what made him different, to me, what I liked about him, trying to list things in my head. But it was hard to make a list because
it seemed that I kept coming to one thing: he’s Ian, the boy from next door, the person I’m beginning to know. It was like
asking myself why I liked Bridgette. I couldn’t really answer that except to say, she’s my friend, we get on well together;
she’s Bridgette.

“I got my rands today. And the fossil at the bank giving me such a hard time about it like it was his dosh I was taking. Hey,
the old man worked for it fair and square.”

I stretch out my leg and he stretches his out, too. He slings his leg over mine.

“Leg wrestling. Jeez, man, you’re weak. And you’ve got Ndebele blood in you. You need to eat more sadza and relish.”

And then he picks up my hand from the bench and puts it on his thigh. I hold my breath. He puts his hand over mine.

“Jeez, you’re a midget.”

I look at all the scars on his hand. He lets me look. And then I take my finger and trace the scars. He lets me do this.

I’ve seen him smack his keys on his hands so hard there was actually blood. I’ve seen him gnawing at them with his teeth and
that really frightened me because it looked like he wanted to get right into his veins.

“She’d take my hands and put fricking polish on the nails,” he said once when I had the courage to say, “Please, don’t.”

“Fricking pink, too.”

And that was all.

He laces his fingers over mine, lifts both our hands so that his elbow rests on his thigh.

“I can’t believe how light you are,” he says, letting go of my hand. “And your wrists…”

“Could you give me a lift?”

“A lift? Now? Where to?”

“When you leave for South Africa. You can drop me in Gwanda.”

“Gwanda! Are you penga? What the hell do you want to do in Gwanda?”

“Can you give me a lift? It’s on the way, or else I’ll just hitchhike.”

“Then hitchhike. I’m not…” He looks at me and shakes his head.

“Please, I… I have a message to give Rosanna’s aunt.”

My face is burning and my mouth is dry. I try to keep looking at him, but I can’t hold his eyes. I look at the mermaids of
the fountain.

“Lindiwe, there’s no ways I’m—jeez, man, I’ve got enough on my plate.”

“Please, I’ll go and come back the same day. I’ll take the bus home. Please.”

I don’t like the sound of my voice.

And then I feel the tip of his finger on my nose. I turn my face to him, dislodge his finger onto my lips. I feel the gentle
pressure of his flesh, and my heart is thumping so hard I am sure he can hear it, feel it.

“I’ll think about it, okay.”

I don’t tell him of Mummy’s shouting and her silences. I don’t tell him of how Daddy is trying so hard not to love his new
daughter or even notice her. I don’t tell him of school; how the girls there are bored with me, how they ignore me completely.
I don’t tell him how much I miss Bridgette, how she’s been sent away. I sit in the car keeping everything inside like I always
do. And the most important thing I don’t tell him is that he is the only one, the only one, who truly knows I exist.

I don’t tell him that it’s not Gwanda where I intend to stop.

There’s an army truck outside the gate. Daddy tells me to go in my room, lock the door.

From the window I can see two soldiers coming out from Maphosa’s room.

Two days later
he picks me up at the Holiday Inn.

I changed from my school uniform in the toilets at Haddon and Sly.

“Nice earrings,” he says.

I put my hands on my ears.

“You’re a hard case,” he says. “A fricking hard case.”

But he’s smiling.

I want to tell him so many things. How Prince Charles shook my hand outside the City Hall when he came for independence. How
proud Mummy was and how Daddy scolded her for taking me there into the crowds where anything could have happened, like getting
squashed to death by overexcited would-be Zimbabweans. How I looked and looked at my hands afterward to see if they were any
different because Mummy said I had shaken “the hands of a prince.” Or how, last year, I got stuck at the Eisteddfod public
speaking competition, and I stood on the stage in front of hundreds of people, including Mummy and Daddy, also Uncle and Aunty
Wesley, my mouth opening and closing, opening, hoping that words from the air all around would somehow enter and give me once
again the power of speech; how I could hear every single noise in the hall, every whisper, giggle, cough, except what I was
desperately looking for, my words, until finally the Master of Ceremonies led me away, and just as I got behind the curtain,
the words came, “In Praise of Silence,” my speech. How Mummy and Daddy greeted me with silence, and Uncle Wesley, who had
just come from Canada where he had done a doctorate in aeronautics and who Daddy respected very much, made Daddy take us all
to Eskimo Hut, the Kings of Ice Cream, where Uncle Wesley bought me a double ice cream cone and Aunty Wesley said that in
Canada she had seen grown men shaking in front of podiums and she had heard someone say that the best approach to public speaking
was to think of your audience with no clothes on. Aunty Wesley was like that. She said some Very Interesting things. Or how
I had four full scrapbooks of Lady Diana, now Princess Diana, and how I had written her a letter telling her all about them.
How I thought Björn Borg was a great tennis player and maybe he (Ian) would laugh and say, “Jeez, man, you’ve got one heavy
crush on him” (which was true) or…

I want so much to impress him. I want to give him something.

“Mummy doesn’t know, but Daddy killed someone during the war.”

It comes out of me so forcefully that I am out of breath.

“Shit. A gook? A terr?”

“No. There was an ambush. He started shooting. It was a baby on a woman’s back.”

“Cross fire, shit. Shit. That’s really heavy shit. How do you know?”

“He told me.”

“Just like that.”

“It was the time I was sick with malaria. He thought I was sleeping. He was praying, I think, asking for forgiveness. It was
a big mess; his unit ran into an undercover operation. Next thing they were under fire. He told me once that the war was full
of secrets. Full of bad times but good times also.”

“Yah, one thing the old man said was, once you got in the bush and the grass and sky were shitting bullets, every man found
God and then, shit, lost him in double quick time once he was safe again with his mates and downing lagers and telling mahobo
tall stories about kills. Worked like a charm, he said, every fricking time.”

I sit in the car next to Ian thinking of the pocket money I saved up, which is rolled in a sock at the bottom of my schoolbag,
how much rands it can buy.

I sit in the car next to Ian, thinking of the note I’ve left behind for Mummy, Daddy, or Rosanna to find. I think of what
I’ve left behind. I try to think of what there is to come. Of how everything can be different, new.

“So, did he kiss you?”

“Who?”

“The youth group chappie.”

“No.”

“I knew it. You tshayad him good, didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t interested.”

“What, he was ugly?”

“He was white.”

“No shit. An expat?”

“No. A Rho… A Zimbabwean.”

“Now, that’s a first. You know, I reckon my old man killed mahobo gooks.”

“What are you going to do down south?”

“Who the fricking hell knows. The rands will tide me over for a bit, and then I reckon it’s mind over matter, got a couple
of connections there. You still haven’t told me what you want to do in Gwanda. Fuck all there. Jeez, check how dry it is.
That Swedish chick says that no drought relief is being allowed in dissident areas. She reckons people are dying like fricking
flies. Bob, shit, he’s hard-core. Shit,
now
what? A fricking roadblock.”

I look out of the window.

“Jeez, did you see how that gondie looked at you. I thought he was going to drag you into the bush and do God knows what,
what the Swedish chick hinted at—it’s like fricking World War Three; me, I’m sticking straight on the tarmac, no fricking
adventures, you hear me.”

“So, I’m your sister.”

“Quick thinking, heh, half sister. Thought he was going to drag me into the bush when I came out with that, almost did a double
take myself. Shit. You check those gondies in the cattle truck? Where the hell are they taking them? You see the look in their
eyes and the smell, shit. Fear. That Swedish chick says that they’ve made camps. Balange, Balangwe, something like that; over
at Matopos is where the main indaba is. Bob has it in real good for you Ndebeles. Shit man, gondies versus gondies, had to
happen.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“What?”

“Gondie.”

“Gondie, now don’t you start that racialistic shit. Gondie, Aff, helluva lot better than kaffir, munt, muntu, toey in my book.
You can call me honky, no worries.”

“Boer. Bhunu.”

“Now, that’s a bit far.”

“Gondie. What does it mean?”

“Shit, I don’t know, just another way of saying Aff. Anyway, in forms and shit what racial group do you tick?”

“Colored.”

“Colored. Yah, well, different strokes. Me, African. No two ways about it. Pure and Simple. Born and bred.”

I think of Maphosa. What he would say to this African here.

“Boy, did I hate that Clem Tholet song, ‘Rhodesians Never Die.’ Don’t even get me started on that one. The old man would tune
that stuff, what was the other one, yah, ‘It’s a Long Way to Mukumbura,’ and the whole house would be like a fricking Rhodie
sport’s club come Saturday evening…. You should check how all teary he’d get listening to Troopie’s Request on the radio.
Come six o’clock, he was downing scotch. ‘My boy,’ he’d say. ‘Come, come here, my boy, just listen to her, Sally Donaldson,
you have no idea how much comfort that voice gave us troops out there in the bush, no idea.’ I even found a picture of her
from
Look and Listen
in his bedside drawer, would you believe.”

“My father also liked her. He said that she even played requests from African soldiers.”

“Give me ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica’ any day. Yebo mama, God bless Africa. One thing you can say for sure is gondies—what? okay,
okay—Affs can sing. Now I think of it, I bet that chick’s been with a gondie; they’re all into gondies. Third World groupies.
You check them walking in town, hand in hand. Not being racialistic or anything, but it just doesn’t look right. You can tell
even the blacks want to tshaya the gondie. And then you get all the goffle kids.”

I think of the white girls at school, how they pulled faces when they had to learn “Nkosi Sikelel” from Mrs. Moyo and how
they copy her accent and wave their hands over their noses when she passes them. How they inch their bodies away from her
when she walks around the class.

“So, what’s she going to call the little bugger, heh?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“And no blimming sign of the father and so, what’s new. Are you sure your war vet hasn’t been… Anyway, better a mother; one
thing for sure, no lightie needs a
step
mother. Once she caught me with a
Scope.
You know that South African magazine with chicks? Boy, did she throw a major kadenze. Wasn’t she pretty enough, all this
shit, and when the old man gets home, she gets him to give me a right good hiding, and afterwards she’s all ‘come luvvie,
show me where it hurts.’ Jeez, man, it’s fricking hot. Best years of my life, I reckon, must have been zero to seven. Remember
fuck all but
she
wasn’t around. Plain downhill after that.”

I try and remember Mrs. McKenzie, what she looked like. She’s been dead for two years now, and she’s only someone in people’s
heads, stories. She only comes alive then.

“She got rid of Mavis, the girl who was looking after me, and she told me mahobo lies about my mother, how I’d been abandoned
and all that shit. When I got down south and found her, boy, did the truth come out; how he used to beat her, showed me the
scars from the knives, and anyway, he chased her out, made her leave without me. I shouldn’t have let her come back with me.
Shit.”

He suddenly claps his thigh.

“Man, too much gloom and doom.”

“What school did you go to?” I ask him.

“Baines, primary, Gifford, secondary, one term only, though.”

“Baines, Baines, have no brains.”

“Yah, they’re still blasting that one? First year there was a real bust-up at the interschools’ sports day. The Baden Powell
kids start blasting that from the stands, some senior boys donnared them good, and then all the fossils get involved. Shit,
they had to call the police—two of the boys in hospital, broken noses, ribs, the works. They were tshayad, that’s for sure,
no brains but hobo brawn! Every time I drive past that school now, its looking like a real dump, the grass is growing up to
here. Funny to see black lighties running around there. Where did you go, primary?”