giving each value.
She sat next to her daughter, away from the two men. The Magistrate went to the kitchen and brought her supper – or was it breakfast? He watched as she took a small portion of sadza, rolled it gently in the palm of her hand and dipped it in the stew. Her lips parted. He watched her chew, admiring the soft line of her jaw, the tenderness of her face. He observed the fleeting bulge on her long neck as she swallowed, then she turned to him with a smile.
“Baba Chenai, murume mukuru anobika mbodza so. I’ll have to get a takeaway to eat at work.” She rose, kissed Chenai on the forehead, and left the room. The Magistrate realised that those were the only words she’d said to him all week.
The bedroom was a misty blue from the morning light. The Magistrate yawned as he stretched his back. He checked the time on the radio clock. He was only vaguely aware that it was a weekday. Days rolled by in purposeless succession. He rose, felt the cool floor under his feet and shuffled to the toilet. His face was wrinkled from too much sleep, eyes puffy and red. He washed his face, shaved and combed his moustache. A face he seemed only vaguely to remember stared back at him from the mirror. He took his medication with water straight from the tap.
“Dad, hurry.” Chenai pounded on the door. “I cannae hold it in, Dad.”
“Good morning to you too,” he said. She pushed past him. “I feel so loved.”
“I love you, Dad,” she replied mechanically from behind the closed door.
The Magistrate returned to the bedroom and began making the bed. First, he smoothed the bottom sheet. Mai Chenai loved to complain if it wasn’t straight when she came in. This was their routine. He would make the bed for her in the morning and in the evening he would find it perfectly made as if it hadn’t been slept in, as if they were trying to erase each other’s presence. They were becoming strangers who, except for the subtle scent of sleep that clung to the sheets and hid in the pillows, never shared a bed. On Mai Chenai’s days off the Magistrate watched television until the early hours and slept on the couch downstairs. If he used the small, third bedroom, Chenai would know something was wrong, though he wondered if she hadn’t already noticed.
“Dad, we’ve run out of sugar, again,” Chenai called from downstairs.
“Tell your mum later.”
What could he say? That he’d get it? He hardly had a penny to his name. When the gas beeped, or, God forbid, the electric ran out, he had to wait for Mai Chenai to sort it out. It was not meant to be like this. The shame sat somewhere in his gut, looping round his intestines, a dull ache that was with him every minute of every day. In the time of his father, whom he’d never known, a man’s role was clearly defined. He was the provider. Nothing else was required of him. He had no duty towards his kids, save for the occasional moral correction – by the belt. The Magistrate imagined the past a simpler time, free from the overwhelming complexity of modern life.
He left the house and walked down the road, past the robots and the light early-morning traffic. He went past the police station into the residential area. Through one window he saw a family sat at the breakfast table. Further along, a commuter anxiously watched an AA man in a fluorescent jacket fiddle with his engine. The morning air was cool and fresh. The Magistrate filled his lungs as he walked slowly down the road, round the bend, then along the fence through which he could see his daughter’s school. He could not remember when he had begun taking these morning walks. They had become a timeless, comforting ritual.
He found he could clear his mind when walking. It was as though the act of perambulation was complemented by a mental wandering, so he could be in two, or more, places at the same time. His physical being tied to geography and the rules of physics, his mental side free to wander far and wide, to traverse through the past, present and future, free from limits, except the scope of his own imagination.
He turned into Duddingston Village, walking along the pavement beside a narrow cobblestoned road. The cars parked on the side of the road meant only a single lane was free for traffic to pass through. To his left was the old stone wall, a little taller than a man. Quaint Georgian cottages stood to his right. The houses in Craigmillar were modern, brightly coloured yellow, blue or lime green. They did not possess the weathered, timeworn look of the village. They did not have its charm or the same sense of being rooted in the city, eternal, indelible. He walked past the Kirk, built of the same grey stone as the cottages and the wall, the past stealing its way into the present.
He crossed the road and walked onto the gravel and grass that led to the loch. A woman with a shawl wrapped round her shoulders was feeding the ducks and swans with bread. They swarmed round her, quacking and scurrying about. The water was a broken mirror of undulating waves lapping the shore. The conifers and heathers caught the morning rays as dew melted off their leaves. The woman’s face was serene. She gave the Magistrate a light nod. They often met here, sharing the space, never once speaking as though voices would have shattered the morning’s peace.
On the horizon, the sun was an icy orb hidden behind a thin veil of wispy white clouds. The Magistrate looked straight at it for a few seconds, its power lost in the stratosphere. With a bit of glue and feathers, he could touch it. He’d never have dared look the Bindura sun straight in the face like that. It came to him that each place had its own little sun, different from anywhere else. In Edinburgh the sun was this cold disc, distant, vague, powerless. For much of the year it was hidden behind grey clouds and, when it did come out in its brilliance, it felt awkward, alien. Here the North Wind reigned. In Bindura, the sun was all-powerful and magnificent. The air shimmered there, tar melted and buckled. People walked with beads of sweat rolling down their backs. Yet, even in this small town, there were two suns. In the low density suburbs the sun was wondrous, a joyful gift of warmth and light, but one had only to cross Chipindura Road from the east or Chipadze Road from the north into the high density suburbs to find the sun fierce and angry. There it assailed the residents, wilted the few patches of grass, stripped everything bare, revealing brown, cracked earth. If the sun infused life’s essence into the low density suburbs, in the townships it drained this very same essence away.
When he thought about home, the Magistrate often looked to Arthur’s Seat. He left the loch, tracking back up the road. The gorse gripping the sides of the hill was the bright yellow of the Bindura sun. The plants were strong, aggressive, making a niche on the bare sides of the hill. There was a hill in Bindura too, right in the middle of the town. It was made of granite that had formed deep in the bowels of the earth, patiently waiting until wind and rain had, slowly, over many millennia, stripped the soil off and left the hill high above everything else. Arthur’s Seat was a volcanic creation. Magma had pushed violently up from the belly of the earth, sculpting itself by sheer will.
Funny, the Magistrate thought, how old geography lessons hidden in the grey lesions of the mind crawled back to the surface after so long. He thought of the hours spent cramming useless information about the limestone regions of England. Stalagmites and stalactites. Igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks. The rock cycle. Weathering. Different types of rain formation – the latter, he supposed, was always useful in Scotland. Crammed notes forced in by the master’s cane came flooding back. What was Chenai learning? Computers? Media Studies? Things were much more straightforward back then.
The traffic grew heavier. He could hear the drone of engines creeping along the road. He descended the slope to the other face of the hill. A man on a bicycle was holding up the traffic and a long tailback formed behind him. The white dome of Dynamic Earth appeared behind the foliage. No wonder I’ve been thinking about geography, he thought. He put his hands in his pockets to keep warm.
The Magistrate’s daily circumambulation of Arthur’s Seat meant that he would not see Mai Chenai. Morning encounters when she was tired from the night shift were best avoided. High above, on Radical Road, early walkers scaled
