A long time later when I’m stinking and sweating, sunk in the listening mine-sleep, watching leering monster-faces and rockfalls chasing each other across the inside of my eyelids, someone says my name.
“Regile?”
Taiba’s voice has slowed right down now, slurring, maybe because of broken teeth. It comes from so close, I know he must have shifted nearer to me. No one else is talking. One boy snores. He is lucky to be able to sleep like that. I open my eyes. There is only darkness.
“What?” I’m harsh.
“Sorry, my brother.” I can hear it’s difficult for him to speak.
“What?”
“Sorry. Me, I do it. Make Faceman to hit you.” His breath wheezes in and out of his chest, making me think of my mother and my youngest sister when they have the attacks the doctor said were asthma.
I feel angry with Taiba. I don’t want to remember things from home, not bad things like the asthma or good things like how when I first took money home it paid for the doctor and their new asthma pumps.
“Shut up,” I tell him.
“I must talk at Faceman, please to understand.” He doesn’t listen to me. “Aires, he can’t work –”
“I know why you did it.” I break into his story. “You’re crazy. Mad. Now, phumula! Rest. Or you can’t work the next shift and then there’s big trouble.”
“My light . . . lamp.” He takes a whistling, bubbling breath. “It is broke.”
“Tomorrow you and Aires can work close, with just one lamp. Then we’ll tell that man who brings food for you boys. Papa Mavuso will send a new lamp.”
“No. No.” It always sounds like “nor” when Taiba says no. “This is my idea I have, Regile. Aires, we hide him. These small-small places? Take food for him. I take his lamp. I work. Faceman says where is the other one? We say he died, the beating was too hard. Faceman, he won’t know, is it me or Aires working. Same-same for him. Then it’s time we go back, up to Papa Mavuso, we take Aires. And Spike Maphosa, he come get us.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Please, my brother Regile, listen me. Aires, he is not strong. The work, he cannot do it. I do it. I can. Even now. Me, I am strong.” He has to stop and take big breaths and swallow twice, a clicking sound. “Always at home Aires, he is with me. He follows me. So the first man, when he says he has work, I say nothing. And Aires, me and Aires, come for the work.”
“So Aires is a stupid boy, following you like that,” I say, and I’m thinking that if one of them can survive, it’s Taiba, but only if he dumps Aires – stops trying to save him. “And you’re stupid, taking such a beating from Faceman.”
“Aires, he is my friend from home. Since long time.”
This is another strange thing about Taiba, the same as the smiling is strange. When zama zama boys’ bodies get broken, by beatings or in accidents, something inside them gets broken too. You can always tell. Taiba is different. Maybe it’s because whatever is inside him is different. It must be, the way he is still thinking about helping Aires, and still believing in Spike Maphosa.
“You’re insane,” I say because it’s easier to believe that than to wonder about what keeps him the way I was before my first few weeks underground. “Do what you like. Hide Aires, anything. Just don’t tell me about it. Don’t tell me where he is. If I don’t know, then I can’t tell the men anything if they come asking questions.”
That’s the most I’ll do for this lunatic, and I’m probably being a fool, as crazy as he is.
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