he answered, a deep, silent pain surfaced and settled in his eyes. ‘We last saw Dumisani on Friday when we left for the conference. These kids, they are not back even today and Dumisani is still supposed to be signing. If his parole officer gets here to find him absent, there’ll be trouble. I’ve never seen a person care less than my boy.’
‘We have the same problem at home.’
‘Where have you heard of a sixteen-year-old gone for the whole weekend? Who knows what evil they are doing? They don’t go to church. They don’t believe in the Saviour. A life without the fear of God is not a good life.’ His eyes shifted to my backpack and he asked, ‘Are you coming from school?’
‘Yes, I’m at Mangosuthu University of Technology.’
‘What course are you studying there?’
‘Tourism.’
‘That’s the way, my boy. There are no shortcuts to a better life. You must have education and faith. Where do you praise?’
‘Catholic.’
‘That’s very good. Keep it like that. You can never go wrong with education in your mind and Jesus in your heart. Leave your number. I’ll get him to call you when he gets back.’
‘I’d greatly appreciate that.’
‘Mama, please get my diary.’
I noticed that Mr Mlaba had the latest cellphone, but he still believed in writing numbers in his diary. I saved his number on my phone while he heaved to get up and buzz me out into a wintry, silvery-orange setting sun.
Simphiwe was still not back in our room. But I told myself that he would be back the next day. Simphiwe never came back later than Tuesday after disappearing over a weekend. He would show up, high out of his mind, and exhausted. He would sleep until Wednesday afternoon. When he woke up, I could recognise parts of his pre-wunga self, before the drug took hold. But by that evening the craving would call him back and he would be gone.
In the few clean hours he had, he used to take out his pencils and draw, or read a magazine. The day he picked up the wunga habit, Simphiwe stopped drawing things from nature. Instead, he drew only self-portraits again and again. The first portrait was detailed and impressive. He had expressed his character on paper. But, as the moments of sobriety became scarce, so his portraits lost their detail.
I sprawled Simphiwe’s art over his unmade bed, and realised that since the drugs started he had never finished a drawing. He began afresh on new paper after only sketching a few details of his face. The portraits started missing ears, then hair, chin, mouth, nose, eyes, until the last drawing was just an outline of his head. He had drawn his own disappearance into drugs.
Ma and I watched TV and talked about the news, the weather, and the good Simphiwe of the past, the Simphiwe who was still a child in our eyes. I consoled Ma, told her he would return and draw beautifully again. The conversation turned to Sango and his perfect life, and then to how expensive my education was, and ended with us grumbling about how the price of cooking oil had rocketed.
On Tuesday I wrote and, frankly, aced the test. Afterwards I sat in the quad and smoked a cigarette that made me dizzy by the third drag. Then, while downing a Red Bull, I saw her, the beautiful Anele, my friend who was steadily stepping away from the friend zone. She waved and walked over.
Tall, spindly, a high jumper in high school, with a face that deserved to be on a magazine cover. While next to her in class, or working on assignments in the library, the pull between us was magnetic. Every time I leaned into Anele, I inhaled strawberries and my insides twisted. I had told her how I felt. She’d smiled and doubted, but slowly she was warming to the idea.
Now she laid her heavenly eyes on me. I felt the warmth of her concern when she rested her hand on my back.
‘Are you okay? You seem down,’ she said.
My worries obviously showed. I told her Simphiwe’s story on a walk around campus.
‘My cousin is also on that wunga,’ she said. ‘You leave nothing within reach of that dude. At the height of his madness he stole a pot while it was cooking Sunday chicken curry and sold it with the curry!’
My enamoured eyes were all over her for the whole fifteen-minute walk. We were already at the door to her room.
Whenever I was with Anele, my burdens disappeared. Even Simphiwe was forgotten in that walk, if only for a while.
‘You must eat something,’ she insisted, when we were in her room. She sliced bread and cheese. I bit into the sandwich she offered me but struggled to swallow.
‘I have to return these books due today. I’ll be back in thirty minutes, and we’ll work on the paper then,’ she said.
I worked on the test paper while she was at the library. This was part of my charm offensive: she’d return to a man with all the answers. I was done in twenty minutes.
I did my best to quell drowsiness. I went out to the garden and smoked a cigarette, paced about the room, snooped, opened her photo album, lay on my back on her bed and paged through her celebrity gossip magazines. The softness of her fragrant bedding won. I napped.
I woke to a soft strawberry warmth in my arms – Anele, up close at last. Outside her window the day had gone, the afternoon shaded by the setting sun. I looked into her eyes and my arms circled tightly around her waist, pulling her even closer. We were both fully clothed, but I was aware of every inch of her. Sparks in our eyes set off a series of time-stopping smooches. I was lost in our kisses. The electricity between us rose to a high voltage.
She stopped.
‘You can answer that, you know,’ she said.
I had not heard my phone ringing. There was a missed call from Sango’s father. I ignored it and got back to kissing, but he was persistent and my phone rang twice more. At this perfect moment to seal the Anele deal, I took a call I had to take.
‘They were beaten by people in Claremont for housebreaking. Blood-curdling mob justice,’ Mr Mlaba said, distressed, when I finally answered. ‘Your brother escaped earlier on in the beating. My son Dumisani … he was beaten badly. He was close to death when the police arrived. A case has been opened against Dumisani and Simphiwe. The police are looking for your brother – perhaps they will find him. We are with Dumisani at Westville Hospital. He’s unconscious but stable. The doctors told me there’s heroin and Jik and rat poison in his blood. This wunga of theirs drives them crazy.’ The phone line was crackly and I struggled to hear.
I did not believe what I thought I heard. I convinced myself that my mind had made up the words he’d just told me; that maybe the bad phone connection somehow distorted his speech. I called him right back and Mr Mlaba told it exactly as he had done a few seconds earlier.
On the taxi ride home I worked out many ways of telling Ma, but when I saw again how uncertainty pained her, I told it as bare and gritty as Mr Mlaba had told me. She called him immediately, and broke down when she heard it first-hand.
As her sobs pierced the walls of our home all through the night, I whispered angry questions and a prayer into the darkness of my bedroom.
Why is Simphiwe this lost? Why did he inhale that first wunga drag? Why did I have to witness my mother breaking down? Why did my father die and leave us? Where are you, little brother? Please, God, keep him out of harm’s way, wherever he is.
We were at the taxi stop earlier than the township’s earliest risers. Ma looked far away into the distance; my thoughts were sombre. As we stood in the cold darkness in silence, I had a feeling of déjà vu – this had happened before. I felt exactly like I did that morning my father slipped into a coma and we had to catch the first taxi of the day – part angry, part sad, and really scared. It had been chilly and dark, just like this.
Claremont Police Station was packed, so we only found seating at the edges of the charge office benches. The service was slow, the long queue served by just one officer. And the young constable