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 drink and smoke too much, and all they ever seem to do is have babies. I want to be Ted Capwell in Santa Barbara.”
Nomsa giggled. “You’re too black to be Ted Capwell in Santa Barbara.”
But she kissed me anyway, a soft “mwah” on my lips, before she bunched her skirts around her waist and scampered off giggling. That was the first kiss she ever gave me, the first kiss I ever got from a girl.
“Do you ever see your baba?” I ask.
Nomsa looks at me curiously. She shakes her head. She looks down at the brown mixture she is stirring with a stick.
“Ah, look, my soup is almost ready,” she says. “Check if the veges are ready. I think the sadza is ready.”
“Boys don’t cook,” I reply, turning away.
We are playing amatope beneath the shade of the lemon tree that sags over our neighbour’s fence. Nomsa has placed bottle lids on top of a stone, which is the “stove” cooking a meal – hard mud cakes are the sadza, lemon-tree leaves are the veges, and watery mud is the soup. She is the mother and I am the father in our game of amatope.
“I have many fathers,” she says after a while. “Just like you.”
“I don’t have many fathers. I don’t have a father.”
“That’s so stupid. Everybody has a father.”
“No. I don’t have a father, and neither do you.”
“Well, I have many fathers. Though I like Mr Richard the most. Sometimes Mama doesn’t like him, when he gets drunk and bumps into things.” She giggles. “He’s sooo funny when he’s drunk.”
I
