The Boy Next Door (39 page)

I look at Ian again and imagine his body cramped in a filthy cell, faces bent over him, fingers clenched, unclenched.

I put my hand gently on his thigh and I leave it there until he finds it, and we drive the rest of the way back to Harare
like this.

The day before
Daddy’s birthday, I decide, on an impulse, that I’ll go down to Bulawayo, surprise him. I think of taking him out in his
wheelchair, maybe even going to the park, just the two of us; him feeling the sun on his face, breathing in the scent of grass.
Or we can sit on the veranda. The image of him lying on the bed, his hand so thin, his breathing shallow in that musty, dark
room, spurs me on. I want to do something for him.

“I wish I could drive you, Lindiwe, but there’s mahobo work here and…”

“It’s fine, Ian. I’ll take the bus. I just need to see him. I
want
him to see me. I didn’t talk to him last time. I feel as if I’ve let him down.”

“Lindiwe, they’re our parents; we’re the kids, remember.”

And hearing him connect my father to his mother like that is like a miracle, the wonder of our story: how far back we go,
how far we’ve come.

“How is she, Ian?”

“I think she actually likes the joint; doesn’t say much, but her face seems relaxed, and yesterday, when I was up there, she
was wandering in the vegetable garden with a wily looking old-timer, male.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever told him I love him, Ian, not once.”

*    *    *

When everyone has gone, I phone Bulawayo.

When Mummy hears my voice, she cuts in, “Your father passed away. Two weeks ago. He was sleeping. I’m selling the house. I’m
going to Botswana. Come and get your things.”

I stand there breathing, the receiver tight in my hands.

A memory sears itself: Daddy and I walking along a zebra crossing; the feel of his hand too tight on mine and the sound of
the road trembling underneath me and him, airlifting me up, up away from the monster truck that had no interest in yielding
to me. He stood on the pavement, then bent down to me and wiped down my dress with his shaking hands as if I had fallen in
some dirt. We walked again hand in hand along the pavements of Bulawayo.

“Mummy, what? I, when…?” The wretched tumble of my meaningless words.

But she has already left.

I put the receiver down. I squeeze my eyes very tightly and I try and think of him, my father, but when I seem to have him
in focus, the image peters away.

There is only the weight and fury of Mummy’s revenge. Her words biting, merciless.

She buried him alone, without the people who cared for him.

All those years he contributed to their funeral policy: the tall white man coming every end of the month for his check, how
Rosanna, and Mummy even, wouldn’t go anywhere near him, and how they rubbed some foul-smelling ointment on everything he had
touched. Maphosa called him nothing but a robber, a crook, another settler.

I go into the lounge and look at Danielle, who is lying on the couch, earphones clamped on.

In the afternoons I’ve come upon her sitting outside by the gazebo, writing the lyrics of the songs down in a blue notebook.
It’s Bob Marley; hip-hop, of course; but also some of Ian’s tapes, jazz, the blues, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, Louis
Armstrong, all the greats that Ian once surprised me with. I’ve tried to ask him where, how he discovered that kind of black
American music, but it’s always the same nonanswer he gives me: “What? Even racialists know good vibrations; don’t be so racialistic,
Lindiwe. You should check out even the hard-core farmers when Mapfumo, or even better, Mtukudzi comes on and…” I know it touches
something very deep, tender, and raw in him. I’ve spied him listening to it when he thinks he is alone, and there is so much
gentleness and anguish in his face, in him, then. For moments, while the music plays in his head, he lets go. And I try to
think if he even sees the irony of it: he, the son of oppressors, finding release in the music of the children of slaves.

Once when I picked up the Walkman and put it on, I was shocked by the tragic sound of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” and
I wondered if Danielle understood the meaning of the song, of the strange fruit of black men swinging from trees in the American
South.

I’ve seen her leafing through some of Ian’s books, old books he has found in markets in Mbare and Johannesburg which are full
of black-and-white pictures of the old-time greats playing in clubs and bars. Now and then I’ve caught her humming and sometimes
even singing snippets of songs, and as soon as she sees me she gives me a shy, nervous giggle.

“You have a very sweet voice,” I told her once.

Most of the times it feels more as if I’m a mother, an aunt, not a sister.

And seeing her now, her eyes closed, her lips moving silently, I don’t know where to begin.

She opens her eyes, sees me, and pulls the earphones away.

She starts to get up, and I say, “No, it’s okay, Danielle, I…”

And I know, from looking at her face, that my voice sounds odd, broken, so I go to her and take her hand, hold it gently in
mine, and then I hug her and there is a single thought in my head: did my, our father ever hold her, know her?

I go in the bedroom and begin to pack, then stop, the clothes limp and horrid in my hands. I lie on the bed, wait for Ian,
David, my hands crossed over my heart. I reach out a hand, spread it over Ian’s side, seeking comfort, touch.

I put my fist in my mouth, bite at it, bury the sounds coming from me into my flesh, my body heaving.

I look at my watch and the numbers slide and fall. I wipe my eyes and the numbers glisten: eight thirty. The house is quiet,
as though like me it’s absorbing the news, holding its breath.

David’s still not home. He’s supposed to be in by seven on school nights.

I ask Danielle if she has seen him. I phone Charles’s place. I go next door, to the boy’s kaya, to ask Robinson. I go into
David’s room and stand there among his things looking for something. Anything. How neat he is for a teenage boy. His bed made
up with army corners just like Ian showed him when he was nine, ten. His jeans hanging over the chair. His army jacket slung
over them. His tennis racket and hockey stick in the corner. Bob Marley on the wall.

I get down on my knees, check under the bed, as if he might be there playing hide-and-seek.

I sit on his bed, trying to quiet the racing of my heart. I turn over his pillow.

“I’m going to the gardens,” Ian says when he gets home.

It’s nine thirty, and I’ve made five other phone calls.

“I’m coming with you.”

“No, Lindiwe.”

“I’m coming.”

“Did you get the torches?” Ian asks as I’m getting into the car.

I jump out, dash back inside the house, frantically open kitchen drawers, tears streaming down my face, until I find them
at last in the corner behind the toaster.

I tell Danielle to lock the door.

I get in the car, and we drive to the Botanical Gardens.

“Don’t worry yourself,” Ian says. “He’s just being a boy, no sense of time. He’s grounded for a month for this stunt.”

There is no other car in the parking lot.

We walk along the narrow path, past the gazebo used for lectures and seminars, into the open expanse of savanna territory,
my eyes straining for any glimpse of the boy and his bicycle, my boy and his bicycle, in the eerie dark.

We walk quietly, quickly, Ian far ahead of me; I almost have to run to keep up.

We walk along the edge of the pond, and I know that Ian is doing the same thing as me, looking
in
there, searching the dark depths for our boy, the beams of the torch swooping over the water…

“David! David!” I call out, my heart jumping, racing.

“David!”

Ian turns to me.

“Don’t panic,” he says, but there is something in his voice, something subdued and held closely, fluttering.

We walk into the rain forest, Ian pulling me along; then out into the wide-open space again.

And then I see it, the torchlight settling on its metallic surface, propped up against a boulder.

A bicycle.

Ian reaches it first. It’s David’s.

I’m about to shout his name when Ian tugs my hand hard. “Shhhh.”

We are at the park’s boundary.

On the other side of the fence, the army camp.

We are still, hearing the murmur of voices, singing, chanting.

“Shit.”

We walk along the fence’s boundary, trying to find a way through, but in the dark, our torches off, it’s impossible. Ian falls
into a ditch, and I think of our boy lying there, heart racing.

We find our way back to the car park, Ian wheeling the bike, and we drive silently home, and inside I feel as though I’ve
abandoned David, my boy, my son, that I’ve let him terribly, terribly down.

I’m opening the front door when I hear the phone ring. I run inside. I pick up the receiver.

“Hello, hello,” I say into the quiet.

There is a gasp, a whisper of some word, and knowledge snaps in my head, painful.

“Hello, hello, Sarah…”

And it’s as if we’re both shocked by what I’ve just done, said, for there is such a stillness between us, and yet so dense
and physical it is that we could be in the same room, looking at each other for the first time really.

“He’s with me,” she says at last.

*    *    *

We find him sitting on the cot bed, his face turned to the wall. Ian’s mother sits on a chair in a corner of the room, David’s
camera on her lap.

“David,” I say gently. “David.”

I put my hand on him and his body pulls away.

All along his legs are scratches, some of them turning into welts, a nasty one along the inside of his right leg, blood congealing.
There are blackjacks in his socks, and there is an image of him so clear in my head of him crouching, running through bushes,
catching his breath in his hands.

There he is cutting through the gardens in the dark, stumbling out of its perimeters into Alexandria Park, zigzagging though
the roads, and by luck, by luck he doesn’t wander into Gunhill suburb, where Mengistu the former bloody dictator of Ethiopia
has been given asylum, living in a luxury villa, protected by the Zimbabwean army, until finally my boy finds the highway
and he is running all the way up, up Borrowdale Road, the place where his legs carry him to, his feet pounding the earth,
his breathing ragged, choked up with fear, the camera beating against his chest.

I look up to Ian.

“Ian…”

I want him to make whatever is wrong right.

“David,” he says.

Our son is shaking, and when I touch his forehead, it’s damp.

“David, David.” That’s all I seem able to say.

“He keeps going on about pictures,” she says.

Ian lifts the camera from his mother’s lap.

David suddenly shoots up from the bed and then goes limp; Ian is there to keep him from falling. My boy, my son, is crying
in his father’s arms.

“What… what is it, Ian?”

“He’s seen something,” he says quietly. “Something’s happened.”

And then seeing him standing there, holding his son with the camera in his hand,
his
camera, the camera that has witnessed so much that is brutal and unforgiving, so much killing and slaughter, I know too well
what he is saying. I understand. Our son is traumatized. He has been a witness.

We take him home.

I take off his clothes.

The shock of his warm body in my arms.

“Let’s run you a bath,” I say. As though he were five, six again.

I go to the bathroom, run the water.

When I come back, he’s asleep.

I put him under the sheets and draw up a chair, watch him in his sleep.

“Mum,” he says. “Mum.”

“Yes, David, I’m here.”

“I saw them.”

“Who, David?”

“I saw them.”

And that’s all he says.

Ian won’t show me the pictures.

But I find them.

It’s the camp out at the Botanical Gardens. He stumbled onto their little playground.

It’s the thought of him, my David, my boy, my son, seeing the heavily booted foot on an old man’s head; a trail of boys, their
pants down, defecating on their elders; a blood-splattered face… more and more… fragments of reality, real life in a democratic
nation… which takes the breath out of me, makes me tremble with rage.

*    *    *

David won’t speak. He is camouflaged once again in the silence of his Walkman. A film of resolute defiance over his eyes.

“We have to leave,” Ian says. “This stuff is explosive. We get this in some British papers, heck, even South African, and
there’s mahobo explaining to do.”

Awe and bewilderment, slivers of pride, all spilling out of Ian: his son, his boy, has done this; the audacity of it; a chip
off the old bloke, that’s for sure.

“You’re in good books with the ruling party these days, Ian. Remember: you’re their advertising genius.”

I watch hime take in my words.

“I haven’t
done
anything for them, Lindiwe. I told them I had AIDS. Shit, you should have seen how spooked they got. I reckon all of Bob’s
portraits are being burnt as we speak. Haven’t seen one up.”

I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Whether to be angry with Ian.

“Quick thinking,” he says, tapping his head.

“And where are we supposed to go exactly? We can destroy the pictures, Ian. No one will ever know.”

“David will know.”

“Oh, please, Ian, don’t, just don’t.”

“Don’t what? I’m just saying that he saw what he saw. We can’t change that. He took those pictures, Lindiwe.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean? He’s a child, Ian, in case you’ve forgotten. We have to protect him.”

“Lindiwe, we have to use those pictures—”

“We? Who’s ‘we’? It’s you, Ian. You. Fame and glory. Award-winning stuff on the back of your…”

It happens so quickly; the look of pain, shock, rage, disgust.

“Don’t you
ever
accuse me of, damn it, Lindiwe, he’s my son. How can you—?”