The Death of Rex Nhongo (4 page)

F
adzai checked the time on her phone. It was almost three. There would be no more customers now. She began to scrape the pots into plastic containers. Gilbert was still talking to a pair of men, a
mudhara
she knew by sight and a younger fellow she didn't. She could see several of her plastics, stacked on the upturned oil drum around which the men liked to congregate. This had been her brother's only job: to collect the plastics. She watched Gilbert say something and the young man seemed to glance her way before laughing heartily.

“Gilbert!” she barked. She recognized her tone. It was the one that Patson always complained about, but she couldn't help herself. “Gilbert!”

He looked at her absentmindedly, but if he had heard the urgency in her voice, he was choosing to ignore it. He turned back to his conversation and clapped the old man on the shoulder. Fadzai carried the pots out to the back and began to wash them at the communal tap.

She scrubbed the saucepans vigorously. She had noticed before that, if she fought with Patson (when he had stayed out all night or returned smelling of perfume) and drove him away with her anger, she tended to clean with uncommon fury. Of course, all this meant was that her husband came back later—probably drunk, certainly oblivious—to a pristine house. She considered her behavior a peculiarly female tendency, both weakness and strength: it had little practical purpose and changed nothing, but nonetheless signified her private triumph that the household continued no matter what.

Fadzai realized that her brother was standing over her. He was smoking a cigarette that he must have begged from one of the men. The noisome stink of it hardly improved her temper.

“Business good?” Gilbert asked.

“No,” she said. “No thanks to you.”

“It was bad no thanks to me? Does that mean I made it better?”

She looked up at him darkly. “I thought you were going to help.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Collect the plastics. At least you can do that!”

He nodded and disappeared to pick up the plates. Fadzai attacked the
sadza
pot again—she could almost have scrubbed a hole in it.

Her brother returned, deposited the plates next to her and flicked his cigarette lazily away. “I don't know what you're angry about,” he said. “You know men don't want their food served by another man.”

Fadzai sniffed. That was probably true. “What were you talking about?”

“I told them you're a good worker and I might even keep you on if you learn to control your temper.” She paused in her cleaning. Her brother laughed. “Don't be so touchy! We were just discussing!”

“What were you discussing?”

“Rex Nhongo. That's all anyone is talking about. Theories of this and that. The old man? He says he knew him from the struggle, but I think he was just talking too much. The other one said it was the wife who killed him. Me? I said, ‘Why will the wife kill him?' I said it was the Cee-tens. I told them about what happened with Patson the other night—the gun and so on.”

Fadzai stood up abruptly. She stared at her brother. “Are you joking? Please tell me you're joking.”

Gilbert returned her stare. He shook his head, unsmiling. “Of course I'm joking,” he said. “Do you think I am an idiot?”

“I know you're not an idiot,” she said. “But you don't think about the consequences of what you do.”

Her brother ran his tongue over his teeth and pushed out his lower lip. She'd struck a nerve. “I have made mistakes,” he said. “What about you? Do you not make mistakes?”

Fadzai was briefly dumbstruck, not by the question but by his admission. She ran a finger under her
doek,
loosening it a little. The cloth felt hot and heavy and was pulling at her hairline. “We all make mistakes,” she said softly. “It's what we do afterwards that's important.” She began to pack the pots and pans into her bag. “Can you help me?”

“Wait. I want to ask you something.”

She straightened up. She raised her eyebrows. Gilbert appeared nervous, shifting from foot to foot.

“I want to stay longer with you,” he announced. “I want to be in town.” He saw she was about to speak and promptly cut her off. “Don't say anything. There is nothing for me at home. What am I going to do there? I'm away from Bessie. It's no good for Stella and it's no good for me. I will stay maybe two more months—that's all. Until I can afford a place of my own.”

“And then?”

“Then I will work until I have money to bring Stella. And maybe Bessie can come and stay and commute to her job. Or maybe she can find a new job. I don't know. But I know it's what I have to do.”

“There are a lot of dreamers here who would like to think other­wise,” Fadzai said, “but the city is hard.” She returned to packing the bag, but she knew that her brother was right: there was nothing in Mubayira for someone like him. He would become a wastrel. But to have him stay, to take responsibility for a grown man with no job? It would be OK if it was for just two months, but who could possibly give such a guarantee? It was a risk, especially considering the state of her relationship with Patson.

She suspected she already knew how her husband would react. He would listen in silence, his expression unflickering, then he would sniff, stand up and say, “I don't think it's a good idea.” And he would go out and stay out and not answer his phone, expecting her to have resolved the situation upon his return.

If that was Patson's attitude, she had to admit it was largely her own fault. Her husband had always liked her brother until the fiasco of Gilbert's marriage to Bessie. Then Fadzai had been so angry and had bad-mouthed Gilbert so consistently that Patson's opinion of his brother-in-law had plummeted. Of course Fadzai had subsequently softened, but not before she'd poisoned her husband's mind, so much so that even this week's visit had prompted Patson to shake his head and remark, “He is good for nothing. You said so yourself.”

“Fadzai?” Gilbert was insistent. “What do you think?”

“I will talk to Patson. I can't make the decision alone.”

He smiled. “I'm sure it will be fine. He is my big brother. We get along famously. You know I have my license now? I can drive for Patson sometimes. We can keep the car on the road twenty-four hours and earn more money. I will work hard, I promise you. I can help at the kitchen. Like today.”

“Like today? And what help have you been today?”

“I have been thinking,” he said. “It's what I do best. I have an idea.”

Gilbert told her his idea while they stowed the pots in the stall, locked up and walked to the ET rank. He told her the problem was competition. She automatically scoffed—did he think she didn't know that? But her brother just waited patiently for the objections to finish before continuing. She should, he announced, buy a loose-leaf notebook or two, sign her name on every page and give a sheet to every customer. She would sign it again any time they returned for a meal, and after they had received, say, five signatures, their next plate would be free.

Fadzai, ever skeptical, ran through the logistics in her head—the possibility of forgeries, guys sharing the piece of paper and so on. But there was nothing too problematic. She told Gilbert she would think about it, even though she knew it was a good idea.

“And you'll talk to Patson?” he asked.

“I'll talk to him,” she said.

A
pril looked at herself in the mirror. She washed her hands and splashed her face. Even in the embassy, the water smelt bad. She said aloud, “This wasn't what I signed up for.” She had lately read a self-help book that required her to speak her emotions to her reflection. She wasn't sure it self-helped. She wasn't sure what she was referring to—job? Marriage? Motherhood? Probably all three. She looked pale and unwell and a lot older than thirty. She thought about Jerry. She looked in the mirror and she said, “Fuck you, Jerry.” Doing so had no impact on her emotional state. Instead, she became preoccupied by her teeth: their pale yellow color, that small brown mark at the top of one canine that had appeared some time ago and now seemed to be a permanent fixture, and the recession of her gums that gave her mouth a somewhat equine look. She took a small pot of day cream from her handbag and began to apply it liberally to what an online skin-care diagnosis had described as her “problem areas.” April never wore makeup to work. She wondered if she should start.

At their wedding reception, April and Jerry had both given speeches. This break from tradition was partly because April's father had drunk himself to death when she was sixteen years old and partly because she felt it was right and proper for her to have her say. She had spoken first and mentioned meeting Jerry “at Cambridge.” When it came to Jerry's turn, he made reference to this and pointed out that, while they had indeed met “in” Cambridge, he hadn't been “at” the university. April was, he said, quite the brightest person he'd ever met and that was one of the things he loved about her most. He said he was the “eye candy” in their relationship and everybody had laughed. April had laughed, too, but she also felt a slight, but pointed, irritation, the source of which she couldn't identify. Was it the mild, mocking suggestion that she might have fabricated something from embarrassment at his relative lack of education? Was it that his self-deprecation seemed to derive from some kind of compulsion to be perceived as lovable? Or was it simply that his speech, delivered off the cuff, got a lot more laughs than hers, which she'd spent days writing and practicing?

April and Jerry had met in Cambridge two days after she had completed her final viva for an MPhil in Development Economics and two months after her affair with Professor St. John Vaughan had ended badly, when April had opened her door to find Mrs. Vaughan standing on the step. She was holding her infant daughter in her arms and declared April the “latest in a long line of stupid, clever cunts.” Moments later, St. John had pulled up in the family Volvo and coaxed and cajoled his wife into the car, saying things like “Not here,” “Let's talk about it at home,” and “Jesus, Mary, I'm sorry, OK?”

April had watched Mrs. Vaughan get into the passenger side and St. John buckle his daughter into the child seat behind. Then, as he opened the driver's door, he had looked at April and lifted his right hand to his ear—I'll call you. As the Vaughans pulled away, April had realized that she hadn't actually spoken a word from the moment she opened the door. St. John never called and she was largely thankful.

April completed her time at Cambridge by working, crying and self-medicating with a combination of alcohol and speed. It worked well enough.

April and Jerry had met at an end-of-year party in student digs on Trumpington Street. The first moment she saw him, she knew he had nothing to do with the university. He was wearing a T-shirt, jeans and Converse, and his hair was cropped to the same length as his beard. But it wasn't his appearance that gave the game away so much as the self-evident lack of artifice behind it. He laughed openly and often, and as she watched him in conversation with her friends and acquaintances, he appeared genuinely to be listening to what they said.

Later, when she was one bottle of rosé and a gram to the good, she spotted him dancing in the living room. Again, everything about him spoke of a life outside the university. While the anthropology students danced wildly, indulging some shamanic ceremony of ritual abandon, Jerry moved in a rhythmical but conservative white-boy shuffle—the mark of someone who had been in environments (nightclubs, for example) with people who actually knew how to dance. Fueled by booze and amphet­amines, April shimmied towards him and they shuffled together, she shielding any embarrassment by occasionally mimicking the more outrageous moves of her peers. At one point, he caught her round the waist and asked her what she did. She told him she'd just finished her master's, that she had a job to go to at Oxfam. He raised his eyebrows as if he'd misheard, then shouted in her ear, “You don't look like a student.” He told her he was a nurse. “Just qualified,” he shouted.

“That makes two of us,” she shouted back.

They left together and went back to hers. She was more fucked than she'd realized and threw up on the way. She told him he should go home and she'd be fine, but he wouldn't hear of it. He sat her up in bed and she watched the room spin while he made coffee. They talked into the small hours, a conversation neither of them remembered.

She woke up early to find him sleeping next to her. They were both still fully dressed. Her throat was parched and she was too hot. She drank a glass of water, brushed her teeth and stripped to her underwear. She felt unbearably lonely and pushed herself against him until he woke up. They had sex. Afterwards, he made more coffee and they sat up in bed, sharing their way through his last three cigarettes.

She said, “You don't want to get involved with me. I'm a fuck-up.”

“Do you want a second opinion?” he asked. “You know I'm a qualified medical professional, right?”

She told him all about Professor St. John Vaughan, his most celebrated papers, his pioneering work and horrific experiences in Darfur. Jerry listened and nodded and said, “Sounds like an impressive guy.” Then, “But you knew he was married, right?”

“Yeah,” April said. “I knew.”

“So why did you keep doing it?”

“I don't know. I didn't think about it,” April said. Then, “The sex. It was just…it just felt like ascension.”

Jerry snorted with laughter and pulled on his cigarette. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “If you ever get another boyfriend, don't tell him that!”

April laughed, too, and took the cigarette. “No,” she said.

As it turned out she never did get another boyfriend.