come get us,’ the girl whispers.
Zandile jolts awake. Her cellphone shows it is 4:12 am. She knows she will not be able to sleep again. Might as well get up and get to work.
Searching for Simphiwe
The knock on our kitchen door did not scream of urgency, but I suspected it had something to do with my brother, Simphiwe. I shared a room with him: my fifteen-year-old, troublemaker of a brother. In a descent too fast – only three months – he went from being a child of great promise to an out-and-out lost one. I curse the day he started smoking wunga. That poison turned him into a neighbourhood thief.
I fought for his honour when the very first allegations of him stealing clothes from washing lines surfaced, only to find he really was the thief. I slapped him when he stole and sold my cellphone. I lost control, and decked him, when he pinched cash from Ma’s purse. Then I had to recoup our household appliances from the wunga merchant – all sold to him by Simphiwe.
‘Khulekani, someone’s here for you,’ Ma called out.
I didn’t answer. I had just noticed that next to my flip-flops, the box with my new sneakers was empty. I imagined the foul things, in dirty places, that Simphiwe was stepping on with my new sneakers; saw visions of him high after he sold them for a wunga hit.
Before he became a wunga boy, we shared some of my older T-shirts. When Ma forced us to go to church, I let him choose from my smarter clothes. But Simphiwe stopped loving himself after he inhaled that first drag of wunga. His side of the room became untidy, his bed never made.
‘Simphiwe needs a klap,’ I said to the mirror, before finally responding to my mother’s call.
I walked out to see scrawny Boy Boy, another wunga slave, waiting outside the front door.
‘I was just checking on Simphiwe,’ he told me. ‘I heard he was in a fight at the wunga spot. Is he here?’ Boy Boy couldn’t look me straight in the eye. He scratched the back of his head, arms and shoulders – tell-tale signs that he yearned for a wunga hit.
‘You know I don’t entertain his nonsense. It has nothing to do with me. It’s his life, not mine. He is not here.’
I was going to close the door, but he went on.
‘I thought, as his older brother, you should know about the fight,’ he said, his scratching growing vigorous.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked.
‘I need a hit. Do you have R5, Khulekani? Please, I want to buy bread.’
‘You just told me you need a hit, Boy Boy.’
He got my drift, understood he was not going to get a cent out of me. I fumed at Simphiwe’s latest stunt, my vanished sneakers, and the dead gaze in Boy Boy’s eyes. It all added to the hangover I already had. I wanted to complain to Ma but when I opened the door to her bedroom, I found she had gone back to sleep. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was still only six in the morning.
I drank water and napped the hangover off, waking up to a silhouette at my door an hour later. It was Ma.
‘You know I’ve never dreamed of your father since he passed, but I just saw him now in my dreams. He told me Simphiwe is in trouble.’
‘Simphiwe does this every weekend. He’ll be back. Besides, Ma, I have tests this week. I need to study.’ During the week I crashed with friends on campus since Simphiwe’s antics were not good for my studying, but over weekends I had to come back home to Ma and the troublemaker. Luckily I was still on course to finish my Tourism diploma on time.
‘Shut up and listen to me.’ Pools of tears filled Ma’s eyes and she went on: ‘Your father said Simphiwe is in trouble and you must look for him. And that is exactly what you are going to do.’
‘Okay, okay, Ma!’ I was alarmed by what Ma had said, and how she said it – her voice stern, before she broke down in tears. I left the house to show her I was going to do as she asked, so that she could calm down. I was worried about the state she was in, but not about Simphiwe. He had been going AWOL over weekends regularly, so to me it really was just more of the same.
The change in my little brother’s life had happened at high speed. It was painful to witness: the lies, the stealing, the shame he brought to the family. My dad, especially, must be turning in his grave.
I tore open a new airtime voucher and thought angrily of my sneakers – brand new and two sizes too big for Simphiwe. It took me a long time to make enough money to buy them, working as a busboy in a restaurant after my classes at Tech.
Cold bottled water from the shop on the corner lifted the weight from a heavy night of partying. Blocking thoughts of Simphiwe, I decided to rather call Anele, this beauty in my class, to hear how her studying was going. If anyone could motivate me to hit the books hard this weekend, it would be her.
While punching in the voucher PIN, I made out the scrawny frame of Boy Boy with another wunga addict on the outskirts of my peripheral vision. They walked, lost. When they saw me and approached, I recognised the need for a fix in their eyes.
‘Have you seen Simphiwe yet?’
‘No.’
‘Eish!’ Boy Boy whined and clutched the back of his head.
‘What’s wrong, Boy Boy?’
‘I haven’t had a hit today. Help me out; the pain in my belly is unbearable. I can feel my intestines twist into knots. The back of my head is cold, my whole body itches. Please, Khulekani, I’m only short by R5. I beg you, please, my brother. I am good for it. We have this roof-painting job, but we can’t function without the hit. I’ll pay you back this afternoon.’
‘I would, Boy Boy, but you are not helping me with Simphiwe. I bet you know where he is, but you are covering for him.’
‘No such thing. He has not been smoking with us for a week. Look for him at the wunga merchant,’ Boy Boy said, scratching harder, almost peeling the brown off his skin.
‘What’s his name? Skhumbuzo?’
‘Not Skhumbuzo. Bheka, in the shacks. That’s where Simphiwe smokes now, where I heard the fight happened.’
Boy Boy gave me the directions to the shack and again pleaded most sincerely for cash. He looked to be in physical pain, so I relented and gave him R5.
Before I could call Anele or go look for my brother at the wunga merchant, a friend called: ‘We are around the corner to pick you up.’
One beer to kill the hangover led to a drinking spree that put the Simphiwe problem on the back burner and ended with me sneaking into the house in the early hours of Sunday morning.
I thought Simphiwe would be in our room when I woke up; thought he would be asleep fully dressed and snoring as usual, his socks stinking up the room. I was so convinced that his thin self was concealed in the bedding that I called out – to nothing. I also thought I’d wake up to Ma away from home and at church as always on a Sunday, but she was in the lounge on the sofa, her eyes red with worry.
‘Ma,
