read. She smiles wanly and takes my hand.
“It’s going to rain.” Her voice slips back down her throat.
I will the electricity to come on soon. Mama has had several such episodes, where one minute she is fine and the next she is suddenly very ill. It happens whenever there is a shortage of medication at the clinic. I squeeze her hand and read to her, the same words over and over, hissing them in undertones, softening the consonants. Eventually, she falls asleep. Her face, thin lines of make-up etched into her skin, has a peaceful look, caught as it is in the dusty, textured afternoon light. For a moment I fear that she may be slipping away, my mama, so peaceful is her countenance. I feel for a pulse. With each beat, my heart strengthens.
I make a fire in the back yard. The logs are wet and take some nursing before allowing a weak fire. All around, whispers of smoke puff into the sky. I busy myself in Mama’s kitchen, banging through her pots and pans stashed beneath the sink. I make tomato soup, with no spices, because that is how Mama likes it these days, and whip up a pot of soft sadza. Mama refuses to eat. Instead she languishes on a bottle of Castle Lager.
That night, before I sleep, I hold her hand and say, “I need you to fight for me.”
She cackles. “What do you care? After I am gone you can have this whole house to yourself. You don’t love me.”
“If believing that makes you feel better, then okay.”
“You don’t want a prostitute for a mother, remember?”
“No, I don’t. But you are one, and you are my mother. What can I do?”
“You can disown me the way that girl of yours disowned Holly.”
“But you know why she did that.”
“You never disown your mother, you hear? Never.”
“Holly has been a terrible mother to Nomsa.”
“Oh? So now you believe the rubbish she feeds you too? For years that girl has been going around the township talking nonsense about her own mother. Her own mother. That is just shameful.”
“Holly is a shameful mother. I am lucky to be a boy. If I were a girl and you were bringing all these men into the house, what do you think would happen?”
“That’s just lies. Those men never did anything to Nomsa. Holly would never allow it.”
“How do you know? You weren’t there.”
“So, if Holly is a bad mother then you are also saying I am a bad mother. Since Holly and I are the same.”
“You and Holly can never be the same.”
“When I die, you will shame my name.”
“You are not dying, Mama.”
“Yes I am. I have been having these frightening dreams about death. I don’t want to die. What will I say to Jesus at the pearly gates?”
“Tell him how you went to church.”
“I don’t want to die. I’m not ready to die. I still want to enjoy my life.”
“I thought you had enjoyed your life.”
“Nobody loves me any more. The men who once loved me now love younger women.”
“Those men never loved you, Mama.”
“Yes they did.”
“No, they didn’t.”
“Yes they did!”
Mama begins to cry.
“I don’t want to die. I’m afraid to die. I’m too young to die.”
“Stop it.”
She will not stop crying. I leave her and lie down in the sitting room. Her pitiful crying has been going on for weeks now. I can’t stand her when she’s like this.
Life in the Township
Holly was the first friend Mama made when she arrived in the township. They used to get together every weekend. Sometimes it was at our house. Mostly it was at Holly’s house, painted a lustrous pink, which stood out among the dull brick township houses. Holly’s was one of the bigger-sized township houses. It had two bedrooms, a kitchen that had enough space for a table and a set of four chairs, and a living room with a gloomy interior. Her toilet was not housed outside in a narrow structure in the back yard, like many others were, but was inside the house. Holly spent a lot of money, though at first she was never clear about what she did for a living. She was always buying new things; when we first visited her house she was in the middle of building a separate bathroom.
“A nice white tub?” Mama asked, inspecting the pale-pink tiles being laid on the walls.
“Pink,” Holly replied. “White is too common. I’m thinking pink, with gold taps. And a cistern to match.”
Mama and Holly soon became fast friends.
Holly’s prized possession was a heavy red photo album, which she loved to show off to Mama. They would sit in the living room and gossip like old ladies, sipping Tanganda tea and eating shortbread biscuits.
Holly turned the pages of the album with glittering eyes. “Heh, look, I used to be very foxy! Look, here – my aunt, my father’s younger brother’s wife’s sister, she’d come to the village with a hot comb. We didn’t know what a hot comb was, and all the girls were afraid to use it to straighten their hair, in case it burned it. But me, I was the first to volunteer – look – I had long hair!”
The only thing about Holly that stood out in her pictures was her breasts. They stood to attention, arching from her skinny frame, so that she looked like a naive rural girl dumbfounded by the curse of puberty.
“Beautiful!” Mama would exclaim. “Hmm, you were beautiful!”
“Ah, sisi, you are being too kind, you were also a little firelight – remember that picture you showed me with that mdala holding on to the door of his truck?” They giggled. Holly slapped Mama’s thigh. “But what were you thinking with that old man, hanging on the door like that? Ah sisi, you were a bhari! Remember how stupid you looked? Like it was your first time inside a car. Kikikiki!”
“I was a hot bhari, Holly, heh! The boys used to leave the cows and stalk me all the way down to the stream. There was this other boy who was at a mission school nearby who always said one day he would be prime minister of an independent Rhodesia and that I would be his Queen Elizabeth. He used to woo me with this fancy English and all this Shakespeare love sonnet business I couldn’t understand, and all I did was giggle. What was his name again? Oh, yes! Typewriter Nyoni. Heh! You know, I have never laughed so hard. Typewriter! During those days people used to give their children funny names: Gunpowder Mpofu, Radio Mlilo, even Michael Jackson Ndiweni! And I remember that poor boy couldn’t even dance!”
When she tired of listening to their stories, Nomsa would nudge me and together we ran outside to play huru-huru-r with the other children. Nomsa and I were the kind of kids other mothers discouraged their children from playing with in case they picked up the fleas we got from our mothers. So we spent a lot of time together. Often, we stole fifty cents from her mama’s money box and ran off to Ntengwa’s bottle store to buy a 300 ml bottle of Coca-Cola. We hid behind the anthill that reached up to the sky like a pyramid, disrupting the sagging fence that ran along the divide between Holly’s house and the one behind. There, I turned the Coca-Cola bottle upside down and shook it hard, like the men at MaG’s did before they opened their calabashes. When I opened the top with my teeth, frothy, coffee-coloured bubbles spurted forth, showering our squealing little faces. We drank some of the Coke, panting with delight as the cold, Cokey fizz ran down our parched throats. Sometimes I even poured some of it on my hair and rubbed hard, until cute little half-curls began to sprout.
“Now you look like a mukaradhi,” a gushing little Nomsa squealed.
“Nah, I want to be white, coloureds