the sports channels like you. I don’t even pay my TV licence.”
The Magistrate shook his head at the honest skinflint who so openly admitted leeching on him.
“Dad, if this guy cannae be bovvered to learn proper English, why did he write a novel?” Chenai slapped Harare North back on the table. The Magistrate didn’t have an answer. He’d seen the book in Waterstone’s in Cameron Toll, whilst perusing legal texts, and had bought it on a whim. He couldn’t get into it either. It appeared to have been written to deliberately turn the English language inside out. He wondered how the book had ever got published. He wasn’t one for fiction anyway. A serious man concerned himself with facts, newspapers, journals, textbooks and the occasional biography, especially if the subject was an influential figure in law or politics.
A sharp whistle sounded from the kitchen as the kettle boiled.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” the Magistrate asked Alfonso.
“Oh no, I’m drinking my beer.” Why, then, did you switch the kettle on, the Magistrate felt like asking, irritated. The referee’s whistle blew and the crowd roared. Alfonso kept pointing out the obvious, yelling, “Did you see that?” like an excited teenager whenever there was a near miss, and always queried offside decisions, even against slow-motion camera replays with computer generated lines showing the positioning of the defence against the straying attacker.
How could a man be so capable of challenging incontrovertible evidence put right in front of his eyes, the Magistrate wondered. The referees could be forgiven, they made decisions in real time against a fast-flowing game, but Alfonso refuted the replays from multiple angles. Worse still, from time to time he would look at the Magistrate, with his little eyes, seeking affirmation. He’d seen this in his courtroom. The defendant, usually a thief, overwhelmed by the evidence against him, still refused to plead guilty, only to catch a heavier term because of his specious mindset. The defendant would square his shoulders, look into the distance beyond the Magistrate with the self-righteous air of a martyr, occasionally shaking his head reproachfully at the irresistible testimony; and when the judgment was returned against him, he, with a shocked air, would turn to the gallery as if appealing to the public against some grave injustice.
“I’ll be in the kitchen, cooking.” The Magistrate excused himself.
“But the game’s still on,” Alfonso said. “Tell the girl to do it.”
“I go to school. Mum goes to work. Dad disnae do anything. That’s why he has to do the housework.” Chenai gave Alfonso a wicked stare.
Just as the Magistrate rose to leave, a goal was scored. Liverpool was down. He went to the kitchen without waiting for the replay. Alfonso’s voice followed him. “Did you see that, did you see that?”
It was strange that of all the things the Magistrate missed, his golfing buddies, his family, the sunshine, wide-open spaces, it was the maid he missed most of all. That quiet woman in her starched uniform, humming as she worked in the background, almost invisible to them. Mai Chenai had never been satisfied with her. The food was never cooked well enough. The house was never clean enough. The maid had a thankless job but she never grumbled. Looking back he’d never given it a moment’s thought. The house was a woman’s domain. Now he found himself questioning the conditions under which the maid had worked for him. The first time this had occurred was when he was bent over, brush in hand, cleaning the toilet bowl. In his entire life, he’d never imagined himself carrying out such a humiliating task. The maid, though, never complained. She did the laundry, walked Chenai to school, worked all day, and only got one day off in seven (a day off which could be revoked on a whim). Why did I never question this before – an injustice in my own house, yet there I was dispensing justice every day while I kept a virtual slave in my own house? How could this have seemed normal?
He sliced the greens. The can opener was broken so he had to use a knife to open the tinned tomatoes. He had bought hupfu from the Zimbabwean shop in Gorgie that sold exotic meats, Mazoe and little portions of heaven that reminded him of home. Thank goodness for hupfu. He put all these ingredients on the faux granite countertop and studied them as if they were the roots of some complex legal conundrum.
Cooking was a complicated business. Sometimes he watched the wrinkled chef on TV, shouting and swearing, all the while making the preparations look effortless. How could the simple maid have done this with such ease? Worse, the Magistrate somehow had to extract taste out of bland British ingredients. He prepared the sadza. Ravakukwata, the boiling mix, leapt out of the pot, stinging his arms. It looked like a white volcano, active and dangerous. Rising steam filled the room, painting itself a thin film on the window. He worked on the beef, which he mixed with veg in the wok, adding a light mix of spices, stirring, smelling the rich aroma as it wafted around the kitchen.
“Zviri kunhuwirira,” Alfonso called out from the living room.
He heard the sound of footsteps on laminated flooring upstairs. His wife was up. He imagined her reaching down and picking up her gown from the floor. After all these years, she still slept naked. The thought made him smile. He opened the sadza pot, added more hupfu, and stirred. The trick lay in squashing any lumps against the side of the pot. Heaven forbid he should end up with mbodza. He added more hupfu until it thickened and became sadza gobvu. Nhete was not for connoisseurs like him. He let the mixture simmer, listening to the hiss of escaping steam. One should never rush sadza. At this stage, the TV chef would call for a commercial break.
He could hear the faint splash of bath water upstairs. He arranged four plates and prepared to dish up his meal. The wrinkly chef was tough on presentation. Half the taste lies in the presentation, in how enticing the food looks. In the cartoon, something else he’d never have dreamt of watching back in the day, the rat wins the critic over by giving him ratatouille, a little taste of home. The Magistrate had become the anthropomorphic rat conjuring a minor miracle with each portion he put on the plate. The sadza lay on the top half of the plate, plain white and a sharp contrast to the red, green and brown of the stew and veg. Soup ran along the plate, meeting the base of the sadza.
“Goooaaal,” shouted Alfonso. “Two – nil! Your team’s as good as finished. It’s over, I’m telling you. The fat lady is singing.”
The Magistrate picked up two plates and returned to the living room. Alfonso clapped his hands. Chenai took hers with a quick, “Cheers, Dad.” He collected his own plate and joined them.
“You’re a fantastic cook, Magistrate,” said Alfonso.
“We should call you Jamie,” Chenai said.
“I think it’s all due to your profession. This is my theory, you were supposed to weigh facts, sieve out the kernels of truth through the rubble of falsehood. What better training is there for cooking? None. They call these ‘transferable skills’.” Alfonso smiled importantly. He loved postulating his little theories and, at the drop of a hat, would expound the improbable and claim it was biblical truth. The Magistrate felt torn between accepting the compliment and pointing out its ridiculousness. He reserved judgment.
The sound of stairs creaking and sighing as one foot followed the other preceded Mai Chenai, who walked into the room graceful, in spite of her blue tunic.
“Aika, Alfonso, you are here.” Her familiar tone bothered the Magistrate. Back home he would have been Babamudiki or VaPfukuto at the very least. This western business of calling people by their first names riled him. He reasoned it was the consequence of an individualistic culture, as though everyone had simply sprung up from nowhere. Some utopian ideal of equality – calling Her Majesty, Liz! The Shona way, the right way, stressed the nature of the relationship. The individual was the product of a community and
