The Boy Next Door (16 page)

At the counter he looks over at my basket and says, “Healthy living, heh?”

“At least I won’t die of a heart attack.”

“No, you’ll die because of a lack of
food.
How can you live in Africa and swear off meat. You must be penga.”

The lady at the counter smiles.

“Are you paying together?” she asks.

“No,” I say, taking out my purse.

“Yes,” Ian says and pushes past me.

In the car I say, “Thank you.”

“What for?”

“For paying.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

I close the window and I listen to the sound of the car moving. We catch a glimpse of the falls.

“We’ll check them out tomorrow. I hope you like hiking. What kind of shoes have you got?”

I lift my foot, show him the Bata tackies.

“They’ll do. You really need a pair of veldt skoeners, farmer’s shoes, if you’re going to be serious.”

It’s three o’clock when we arrive at the lodges. Ian gets out of the car to get the keys from the warden at the gate. The
warden walks around the car, takes a look at me, and says to us, “No hooting in the park, please, and drive with due respect.”

The cottage is right deep in the park, and it takes us another twenty minutes to find it. There are no other cars around.
I stand outside and feel for one moment, looking at the still water of the lake, absolute peace. I look up to catch Ian watching
me.

“That’s a picture I could take,” he says.

Inside, the cottage is simple and clean. Two old-fashioned sofas with sunken seats facing the fireplace. Four chairs, a table
with a formica top, like the one in the kitchen in Bulawayo. One main bedroom with twin beds and a tiny one with a single
bed. Ian throws both our bags in the main bedroom. Then we look at each other.

“Right,” he says.

“Right,” I say.

“Beer.”

He’s drinking a beer on the veranda.

“Come on, sit,” he says.

I drag the chair next to him.

“Want some?”

I shake my head, then change my mind. “Yes.”

“I’ll go and get you a glass.”

“It’s okay. I’ll just take a sip. Okay, you can pour it into a glass.”

“Jeez, you’re complicated. Just take a sip. You don’t have herpes, do you?”

“The question is, do you?”

“Check.” He purses his lips towards me. I laugh.

“It looks safe.”

He gives me the bottle. I take a sip.

“You don’t drink much do you?”

“No, I don’t like the taste.”

“I should have picked up a bottle of wine.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“Look, look, over there, look at that.”

Two large brown eyes in a clearing. Then another two.

“Waterbuck,” he says.

The two animals look at us intently, and then they skip off into the mist.

Sleeping arrangements.

I’m standing at the door with my bag.

“Good night,” I say.

“Where’re you going?”

“The other room.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because what?”

“I’ll just feel better, I mean, more comfortable there.”

“Really?”

“Really. Good night.”

“Come on, Lindiwe, stay here. How am I going to talk with you if you’re right at the other side?”

“We’re supposed to be sleeping, and it’s right next door.”

“Just for tonight.”

“Why? No.”

“Lindiwe, I just want to have someone, you, with me. Jeez, it’s coming out funny. Like friends, we’re friends aren’t we? It’s
been a helluva long time, six, seven years….”

“Yes.”

“So, come on. Look, I’ll move the beds way apart. Check.”

“Okay. No, okay. Just for tonight.”

“Yebo mama.”

I wake up in the middle of the night.

“What?”

“I’m cold.”

“It’s all the vegetables.”

“What?”

“Move over here.”

“What?”

“Body heat.”

“What? I just need a blanket.”

“You’ve already got the two blankets.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Push your bed here, and we’ll warm each other up.”

“What?”

“Jeez man, not like that. I mean, it’s warm my end of the room, just move. Come on, I’ll even push the thing for you.”

“Better now?”

“No.”

“Give it ten minutes.”

In the morning I wake up and my head is on his shoulder.

“You’ve got one heavy head, Lindiwe,” he says, shaking his hand. “What the hell is in there?”

“Gray matter.”

“Heavy-duty lead, more like.”

“So, why didn’t you move it?”

“No worries.”

“You look cute in those pyjamas.”

I can’t help it, I start smiling.

“What’s that for?”

“Last month was my birthday. This is a deferred celebration. Thank you. Being here is really great, Ian.”

“Don’t start the waterworks. Wait, stand there, like that.”

“No.”

“Yes. You look lekker. It’s a great picture. Tell you what. I take you out to a real fancy dinner tonight. Troutbeck Inn.
I reckon they have vegetables there.”

“No, you don’t have to. This is fine. More than fine.”

“Troutbeck Inn.”

“Look,” he says pointing to the map. “We can walk to the falls. Slow and easy.”

We’re drinking coffee and eating toast inside. Outside, a shroud of mist covers the lake. I rub my shoulders.

“Cold?”

“A bit.”

“I thought you had a jumper.”

I point to what I’m wearing.

“That? Here, take mine. It will get warmer soon.”

“It’s okay.”

“Take it, woman.”

“Thanks.”

“Twenty-three. I can’t believe.”

I want to tell him something. Some thing. I want to begin. I want a word. A single word. A way of saying it. “Ian, I…”

“Yah?”

And I can’t do it, I can’t.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t get cross now, but why weren’t you celebrating with your Frenchie?”

“He was working.”

“Working, on a Saturday?”

“He’s a doctor. He works with the Tongas.”

“Shit. So how did you two meet, if he’s way up there?”

“At the Alliance Française. I go for French classes. There’s a café there and I bumped into him, spilt his coffee all over
him, and so that’s how we met.”

“A doctor, heh?”

He starts drumming the table with two fingers.

“He must be a bit older than you. Doesn’t it take yonkers to train? Cough up, Lindiwe, how old is the fossil? I can tell you’re
mahobo embarrassed.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Yah, yah, how old?”

“Forty-five.”

“Jeez man. Old enough to be your—”

“Shut up.”

He leans back on his chair, his hands under his head, a broad smile plastered on his face.

“You look very satisfied with yourself.”

“I bet he’s got white hair and I reckon bad teeth.”

“Could you leave it please.”

“Touch touchy.”

“Okay, tell me about your—what do you call them?—birds, all those suburban madams throwing themselves at your feet.”

“Few are chosen.”

“Few want.”

Then he becomes serious. “I reckon I’ll never get tied down.”

“Why?”

“Way too many spooks on my back.”

And that’s all he says.

“Tired?”

“A bit.”

“Worth it though, huh?”

“Yes.”

We’re standing at the foot of the falls.

The light catches the water as it splashes and spills over the stones, and yellow butterflies slip and float out of the streams
of falling water. I read in one of the pamphlets from the national park that the air in Inyanga has been described by well-heeled
travelers as “dry champagne”; I’ve never drunk champagne, but standing here now, I think I must know what it tastes like.

Elixir, I say quietly to myself and imagine a knight from King Arthur’s Round Table standing there, a goblet in his hand;
Maid Marian sitting languidly on the grass, the pale mauve flowers grazing her legs.

I think of Ian laughing out loud if he knew what was in my head.

“Jeez,” he might say, “you’re full of mush, Lindiwe. Lead
and
mush.”

I imagine running, stripping myself of clothes, and diving into the wide pool, skinny-dipping, yelping and splashing about,
something I’m sure young white people, exuberant and fearless, do when they come here, playing games. I watch Ian duck his
hand into the water. I watch him lift his shirt from his body, tug and pull, and I wonder if he will be one of those white
people. He stands there, bare chested. And I see that there is nothing wasteful about his body. I notice the flick of a scar
on his right shoulder blade. And I quickly look away.

I watch him soak in the sun; its rays fall on the hairs of his chest, glisten gold.

He bends down again, splashes water over his head, onto his skin.

I think for a moment that he will not be able to resist it. He will let himself go, dive smoothly into the cold water; already
his jeans are wet up to his calves.

He turns to me with a grin, flicking water at me. “You should try it.”

He shakes the water off his head. “Nice. I needed to cool down a bit. That was quite a hike, huh?”

And I think of how many times he took my hand, helped me over a log, a rock, a ledge, cleared the path for me, as if it was
the most natural thing in the world. How we both stood still when we came to a little meadow with a stream running through,
and just as he had done with the birds so many years ago, he named the flowers and grasses for me. The ferns and orchids at
the edges of the crystalline water. Bushes of sweet peas, traveler’s joy, purple lassandria, and the sugar pink Rhodesian
creeper with its fragile bell flower. (When I said “
Rhodesian?
” he charged back, “Jeez, Lindiwe, when I was a lightie they
were
Rhodesian.)

He pointed out to me the woodland of dwarf msasa trees further away on the slopes of the mountain.

And birds, so many of them, calling out to each across the rolling hills and granite cliffs.

Blue duiker and samango monkeys, he told me, only found here.

There was a quiet pride and satisfaction in his voice. I could tell he felt home.

He flings his T-shirt over his shoulder and rubs his hands. “So, stand there, picture.”

“Oh please!”

“Oh please what? There. Done.”

We sit on some rocks, under the shade of a tree, eat our cheese sandwiches, drink some water.

“Tell me about the six years. What have you been up to, Lindiwe?”

I think of the letter I wrote at the end of that Christmas day. I’d spent the whole day hoping and hoping. Hoping and fearing.
That I would hear a car at Number 18. He would be there standing beside the yellow Datsun Sunny, looking over the fence at
me. And then he would know. But he didn’t come. He didn’t come for six years.

“School, studying, that’s about it.”

There is everything that is unsaid between us. He knows it, feels it.

“So,” I say. “Let’s talk about the next six years.”

Which, of course, is a mistake. I want him so much to know. And not to know.

“Jeez man, who the hell knows? Could be jolly well dead.”

Where (from whom) did he pick up that word,
jolly?

“What kind of fundie are you going to be when you finish, when is it, next year?”

“Yes, I don’t know. I’ll have a bachelor of science in psychology. I don’t want to get into personnel which is what most people
are doing, and I don’t know if I even want to practice as a psychologist.”

“So why the hell are you studying this stuff?”

“I’ll probably go into personnel actually. That’s where the money is. I’ve got a part-time job with an advertising company,
three afternoons a week. Last week I had to go around Harare looking for a dozen doves.”

He looks at me in a way that suddenly makes me feel shy.

“And what you’re reading these days?”

“Reading, oh, for pleasure you mean?
She Came to Stay
by Simone de Beauvoir.”

“Simone de who?”

“A feminist, a French feminist, she wrote the first real book about the condition of being female,
The Second Sex,
how women are born under subjugation and—”

“Does this chick even have a boyfriend?”

“Yes, a guy called Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote
Nausea
and
Being and Nothingness
about the existen—”

“Another Jean, man, these Frenchies…”

“Jean.”

“Yah well, they’re everywhere, your Frenchies, huh?”

I choose to ignore the comment. I think of the look on his face if I let on that it was Marie who introduced me to Beauvoir.

“You were always into your books; I reckon the library in Bullies misses you a lot.”

Before I know what I’m saying it’s said.

“Please, tell me, what happened that night?”

It’s so quiet here between us.

I think of the lighter falling on the stone, the look on his face then.

“Jeez man, Lindiwe. Jeez.”

We are alone here. A man. A woman. Anything can be said, done. But I am not afraid. I want to tell him that whatever happened,
we are connected; we will always be connected. I want him to trust me with his secrets; I have my own to tell him.

I was sleeping, dreaming while Mrs. McKenzie burnt.

“Why, why now? Like I told you, Lindiwe, I woke up and she was burning.”

“Because I’m not fif— sixteen anymore.”

He looks at me.

“Because I’ll believe you.”

I fill my head with the sound of the water falling over leaves, on the stone.

“I went to the police station to tell them what had happened. The next thing I know is that they’re arresting me. On suspicion,
they keep on saying. On suspicion. They hadn’t even checked out the house, didn’t know what was what, but they had a white
boy in the stocks and they were pleased as hell. I reckon there were some CIO guys that day. Then they finally go down to
the house, talk to Mphiri, and they come back and say that I am no longer under suspicion, and I’m thinking I told you what
happened and next thing I’m under arrest for murder. And then it’s, ‘I’ve made a confession,’ and they change everything to
sound like I did that, I did this, and all the time these guys—the ones I think are CIO—are tshaying that they have me for
sure, how nice it’s going to be to see a white neck in the noose, the first mukhiwa who is going to hang, that maybe if I
cooperate they can do something, appeal for mercy in view of my age, for my mother’s sake, so by this time I’m scared as hell
and there’s no talk of lawyers and rights like on TV. I’m alone with these blokes, who look as fierce as hell, and then they
start about how a small, white boy like me will have many admirers in the stocks, big, strong African men who have not seen
a woman for years, decades even, how they will enjoy, and, but if only I cooperate they can organize a special cell. So I
sign the paper. And that’s how it is.”