Lesego had her eyes wide open. She looked at me from her bed and her eyes pleaded silently for me to get rid of them as soon as possible. The prayers Lesego and I understood these days were those of people in a far-off place called Marakong-a-Badimo near Mafikeng. We would go there as soon as she was back on her feet again.
I shrugged and smiled ruefully. She smiled too. A small smile, but a smile all the same. She had begun doing that lately. And she was also getting impatient with her immobility and incapacity. We waited until the last amen of the longest prayer. The women snapped their eyes open and saw me at the door.
I greeted them and they responded a little shyly and self-consciously. We chatted about this and that, avoiding the central issue. We might have been casual acquaintances passing the time at a bus stop.
“Well, I think we should now go and see the baby,” my mother said. Lately, she seemed to have put herself at the helm.
“We’ll come back on our way out,” Lesego’s mother seconded the motion. There was general agreement and, as they bustled out in stiff, sombre-coloured dresses, Lesego’s mother cast a stabbing eye at me, just as I saw a gleam of triumph in my own mother’s eye. They were soon clattering down the corridor.
I placed the bag near the night table next to the one I had left for her the day before. That was one of Lesego’s conditions regarding hospital gifts: she would open the bag after I was gone. The fact that she didn’t actually use anything seemed neither here nor there.
“So that a little something of you remains with me. It feels more special if I open it alone. Like something from a secret lover or a gift from far away,” she had said when she had started talking to me.
I felt guilty each time, because it was a little of Tumi I was leaving behind. Was this one of the small lies that led to the big lies, the often talked-about slippery slope to disaster and separation for grieving parents? I did not think so; not because of this, anyway.
We were silent for a long while, holding hands like shipwreck survivors on a disintegrating ice floe. There are things too vast and deep for normal words.
After a while she asked me about her construction business. I stressed the difficulties and problems to make her want to get out of bed to go fix them. She was not one to let things get out of control when she could do something about them. She smiled and said, “You are exaggerating. My people were here in the morning and they say everything is fine, except that they can’t wait to get out from under the thumbs of the new tyrants.”
“We all want you back. And who are these tyrants anyway?”
“I mean your gang of smooth thugs – Thekiso and Ditoro.”
“Ah, hell. I asked them not to tell you.”
“Hey, hey, hey! I’ve come a long way with these people, starting from nothing. Before I even met you.”
“Ah, hell.”
“Ah, hell, you too. Anyway, I will be there as soon as I can. This weekend I’ll be home, as I told you. Fetch me on Saturday afternoon. These disgusting bruises will be better.”
I myself had long stopped giving much significance to those livid bruises.
“The baby . . . ” I whispered.
“I’ll be home just to see if everything is all right. But I am coming back straight here on Sunday. I have arranged for a private room for both of us. It is expensive but, ah, hell, as you say.”
“That’s better. Your business runs itself anyway.”
“That is not what I want to hear. No business runs itself !”
On that explosive note I bid her goodbye and speedy health.
“Ah, hell,” she said when I kissed those unsightly bruises.
Of course no business runs itself: hers and mine included, and I would be attending to hers after clearing the last of the deadweight files from my desk. Lesego was getting contracts from government but she was wary, as she should be – as we all should be. The money was good but it came with tangled strings attached. It was a delicate tightrope that she was walking on – in the overall scheme of things, she was both irrelevant and expendable. A rainbow-nation showpiece.
The new file would be my bedtime reading. There had been a regulation against taking files out of the office, but I don’t exactly have sleepless nights if I sometimes depart from the rules.
On reaching the Bedlam Building in upper Pritchard Street, where we have our offices, I was just in time to intercept Thekiso on his way out. As usual he was wearing one of his dark, mismatched and outsized suits that make him seem smaller and more decrepit than he actually is. They hide his tough-as-a-cowhide-whip body so well that many have regretted their rash assumptions about his strength and agility.
“Are you through for the day?”
“Maybe,” he said cautiously.
“You see, I myself had thought of leaving early to check on Lesego’s –”
“Not necessary. I’m going there.”
“I could come with you.”
“Pointless. Finish what you are doing and get into that file. Anyway, I’m meeting Ditoro there.”
“Which site?” Lesego had two building crews working in the field. Having previously worked for a large multinational construction company, she was now an independent small builder with a few government contracts for some minor but profitable projects. It was a form of gender and racial advancement. Being reliable and hardworking, she did not need to kiss anybody’s ass to get these contracts. But she was proud of her reputation of always delivering – and on time.
“Both, but we’ll start with the library in Katlehong. It’s more urgent. Ditoro and I are enough for that.”
What he meant was I would only get in their way. After observing my incompetence in getting things done, Thekiso had with his usual diligence turned himself into an instant if still haphazard expert on the construction business. He took care of the gaps in his knowledge by getting people who knew what they were talking about to assist him.
Also, with me around, he and Ditoro would not be free to put on their full-blown act of terrorising those poor workers; I was always too ready to tolerate and excuse. He wanted to finish the library in record time, ahead of schedule. Snail-pace, official timetables were just a useful cover for malingering and evasion, was his decided opinion. The nation-building bug had bitten Thekiso and if given free rein he would have filled the whole country with bricks, cement, an army of press-ganged workers – and a lot of angry worker unions. There was the fanatical glint in his eye of a man who had at last found his true mission in life.
He walked to the basement garage next door to get his car.
“We need a new girl at the front desk,” he said over his shoulder.
I . . . what did I think then?
“Tumi is getting married and leaving us next month. Try and think of someone suitable, not just anyone.” His voice was swallowed up by the unceasing growl and grind of the traffic.
Chapter
