The Boy Next Door (2 page)

“What would have possessed that boy to do such a thing?” Mummy asked when we were having supper in the lounge.

“South Africa,” said Daddy. “Pure and simple. They pick up fast ways over there. Drugs. Mandrax and even worse.”

“But,” said Mummy, “to do something like that…?”

I was looking at where Daddy was sitting, thinking that not too long ago that boy had sat in the exact same place, cradling
a car radio on his lap, like a cat, waiting for Daddy to take a look at it.

Daddy caught me staring at him and said, “In life, anything can happen.”

He had rung
the bell at the gate. Maphosa went to see who it was, and then he called Rosanna. Rosanna let him in because he was a white
boy. He’d just brought his radio from South Africa, and the thing was already playing up. “Those South Africans,” I heard
him say. “They’re a bunch of crooks, right skellums, not like us honest blokes down here, lights off.” He sat on Daddy’s chair.
I was sitting across the room from him, doing my homework on the dining-room table. Rosanna went to make his tea.

“Hey, lightie,” I heard, “what you’re doing?”

I’m not a lightie I wanted to tell him. I’m not tiny. And,
I’m not a boy.
But his voice didn’t sound as though he meant to be mean to me.

“Homework,” I answered in my best European voice.

“Homework,” he said, leaning forward to put the radio on the table. I thought of how annoyed Mummy would be to find it there,
possibly scratching the wood. It only needed to be moved a bit to go on top of the linen doily, but I couldn’t do it.

“Talking about skellums, you should have seen what we guys got up to, how we mucked about, did fuck all at school.”

Fuck all
echoed inside me.

I couldn’t believe that this white youth was sitting on my father’s chair, his white tackies planted on the brown carpet.
I tried to concentrate on my math problem, but the numbers would not stay still.

His hair was cut in the same style as Craig Davies’s, the youth leader at church: very short at the sides with a little tail
at the back and the front looking like the bristles of a brush. When he reclined his head on Mummy’s lace sofa back, it made
me think of a porcupine.

Craig had announced on Friday that he was heeding God’s call and going to Pretoria to spread His word. Daddy said it was funny
how, of late, God was targeting whites and being very specific in his relocation directions. I had overheard Craig tell one
of the church deacons that there were way too many Affs now, the atmosphere had all changed….

For a long time we were the only nonwhite members of the church. On our very first Sunday at church, Mummy, Daddy, and I had
the whole row to ourselves and no one sat behind or in front of us. An old white lady gave Mummy a dirty look when their elbows
brushed.

“Mind my language. So homework, heh?”

Rosanna brought him the tea and a plate of Marie biscuits. She looked at me as though I had done something wrong.

He gulped down the tea and munched on the biscuit. He seemed very hungry.

“You look like a boffin,” he said. “What number you come in class, heh?”

I didn’t want to tell him. Somehow I was embarrassed by it.

“Come on, cough up. Don’t be shy.”

“Number one,” I said in my best European voice.

“Number one, heh.”

He slapped his thigh and some tea spilt on the carpet.

“I told you so. I can spot a boffin from a mile away. Me, I was right off the scale, the other end of it.”

He coughed and choked on his biscuits and tea. He went red in his face, and I could see the schoolboy in him.

“I tell you what,” he said. “Since you’re so smart, I’ll give you a problem to solve. It’s something that’s bothering me a
lot.”

But before he could tell me the problem, Daddy came home and took a look at the car radio. They moved out to the workshop
and I finished my homework. For days I thought about the problem, his problem that was bothering him so much. I wondered if
it had had anything to do with Mrs. McKenzie and this made me feel guilty as if I could have done something to save her life.

Because, three days later, Mrs. McKenzie was dead.

The Friday after
the chief constable’s visit I went to the public library. I didn’t go down straight to the Sue Barton series or to the Nancy
Drew shelf like I usually did; I went upstairs to the medical section. The librarian gave me a funny look but didn’t say anything.
She was busy chatting with a farmer, telling him all about the mobile library.

I wanted to find out how long you would have to burn to become just bone. I wanted to know if Mrs. McKenzie had burnt all
night while I had been sleeping. I tried to think what I had been dreaming of. I wanted to know if something had happened
in my dreams that should have made me wake up, draw back the curtain and see… what? Would I have seen her? Heard her? Smelt
her? I tried to remember when was the last time I had seen her alive, but I couldn’t see it, that exact moment. Sometimes
I would think I had spoken to her or she had said something to me, but when I thought harder, I couldn’t see the two of us
anywhere like that. Mrs. McKenzie didn’t like me. Even though I was a girl and too old, she still thought that I was one of
those kids who ran down the road ringing bells and scooting off. She would send old Mphiri, her gardener, after them. He couldn’t
match their long skinny legs, and Maphosa would get angry and start his muttering: That old man should be back home, but what
is he doing? Look at him—boy this, boy that—with their broken Mukhiwa Ndebele. Bastards, amabhunu
.

Maphosa called any white person who personally outraged him a Boer, Bhunu. Daddy said that this was probably because he had
worked for a while in the mines in Johannesburg and had been thoroughly mistreated by the Afrikaners. I wondered if that’s
where he had lost his eye. But, would he have been accepted as a fighter in the bush without an eye?

Maphosa came to our house six months ago. He came with a small suitcase and a knobkerrie. He had been demobilized. He came
from Entumbane where there was heavy fighting between the two Liberation Armies housed there. School was closed for two whole
weeks, and from home we could hear loud bangs and blasts coming from that direction. Maphosa said that the Shonas were trying
to wipe out the Ndebele Fighters. But the Ndebeles had the blood of the great Ndebele warriors, kings: Mzilikazi and Lobengula,
flowing in them and could not be bothered by such little insects as Shonas.

Mummy had made him wait outside for Daddy from half past eleven to five o’clock. She only gave him a glass of water to drink
in all that time. When Daddy came home and saw Maphosa waiting like that he raised his voice at Mummy. I didn’t know if he
was upset with Mummy or Maphosa or with them both. Daddy said that Maphosa was a relative, and he should be accorded due respect.
Mummy mumbled how was she to know and keep count of every single member of Daddy’s family.

Daddy has many stepbrothers and sisters.

The new Zimbabwean Army did not want Maphosa and his like among its ranks; it only had room for Shonas. He had to live life
in Zimbabwe just like everybody else.

Early on Daddy tried to get Maphosa an apprenticeship with the post office. At the job interview, Maphosa said that he was
not willing under any circumstances to work for a white man.

Maphosa puts Ingram’s Camphor cream on his bald head, and you always smell him before he arrives. Sometimes he doesn’t rub
it in very well and his scalp is covered with patches of white. I heard Mummy remark to Daddy: “Does he think that the cream
is medicine that will grow back his hair?”

To make up for the lack of hair on his head, he has a tuft of beard which he pulls at when he is upset as if he is trying
to snatch off a disguise. Some days he ties a black cloth over his bad eye and he looks like a pirate.

He is the chapter president of the Baysview War Veteran’s Association, which has five active members. They meet at Maphosa’s
room when Mummy and Daddy are not around. Maphosa cooks a pot of sadza on a fire outside his room, and they sit around and
discuss the war and the failure of Independence to deliver the land. When the sadza is cooked, they eat it with some meat
that Jacob has brought with him. They nyosa the meat on the fire. Jacob is a butcher boy at the Baysview butchery. He doesn’t
hear very well and he doesn’t talk. Sometimes the association is still meeting when Mummy comes home, and the members have
to sneak out at night.

The twenty-fifth of each month Maphosa goes to town to collect his war veteran allowance and his disability benefit. When
he comes back, he is in a bad mood. He says that he is not at all interested in pieces of paper. This is how our people were
tricked in the first place. He wants the land. That is what they fought for.

One thing that he cannot tolerate is cruelty to birds. When he sees any boys tormenting birds and nests with their catapults,
he shouts and chases after them; sometimes he even throws stones at them. Then he will go and check that the birds are all
right, and once I saw him climb a tree in the bush opposite Baysview Superette and look inside a nest to see if the boys had
broken any eggs. He says that birds saved his life in the bush more than once. When I asked him how, he said that there were
some birds that would become very quiet when the enemy was close. Other birds would start singing in a certain way. Then you
knew. Once a bird had flown right onto his left shoulder and started tapping on it with its beak. He understood the bird’s
message: They must prepare. The enemy wanted to ambush them. When Maphosa tried to tell his commander the bird’s message,
the commander told him to shut up. If only the commander had listened. As the bird had warned, the enemy ambushed and the
commander and five other guerrillas lost their lives.

He was at Rufaro Stadium when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe on April 18, 1980.

Actually, we were Zimbabwe-Rhodesia for less than a year from June 1979 when Bishop Abel Muzorewa formed a Government of National
Unity with Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front. Everybody said that Muzorewa was a puppet and that he was put there to try and get
international sanctions lifted and to isolate the Nationalists. Daddy said that Bishop Abel Muzorewa was not very able at
all and that he was a laughing stock. And, “Where have you ever heard of a country with a surname?”

Bob Marley came to sing; he wrote a special song: “Zimbabwe.”

Maphosa says that he was right out in front, and as soon as “Zimbabwe” started, the crowd went wild and began misbehaving.
They were pushing and trying to climb over the barriers onto the stage to sing with Mr. Marley. He says the little man, which
is what he calls Mr. Mugabe, did not look amused at all. Everyone knows he wanted Cliff Richard, not Bob Marley, to be there.

The next day, after the news, the new prime minister gave his first Address to the Nation. Rosanna, as usual, was sitting
too close to the TV, but Daddy didn’t scold her this time; he was concentrating too hard.

“Well, he sounds quite reasonable and sincere,” Daddy said afterwards.

“Reconciliation is the best and only policy.”

Daddy sounded as though he was trying to convince himself with good arguments. “He’s a very educated man. Did you hear his
Engl—?”

“He’s a Shona,” Mummy interrupted him.

Ever since the elections when Mugabe and ZANU-PF had shocked them by winning fifty-seven of the eighty seats while Nkomo and
ZAPU had only won twenty, Mummy had been making daily predictions about what life under Shona Management would bring.

“This is their chance now. Everyone will be forced to speak Shona. Watch, he will even make his Address to the Nation in Shona.

“They will flood this place. Those jongwes of theirs will be crowing all over Matabeleland.”

Mummy was very scornful about the ZANU-PF symbol of a cockerel.

Rosanna shook her head. “There is just something about him,” she said. “He is too serious.”

It felt as though, sitting so close, she had seen much more of Mr. Mugabe than the rest of us.

I didn’t say anything. I was wondering whether, sitting in front of the cameras, Mr. Robert Mugabe had felt all those millions
of Zimbabwean eyes looking at him, whether he knew how much power he must have to have everyone waiting to hear what he had
to say.

When I went
to see Dr. Esat at Galen House, the ladies at the reception were talking about the trial which was on the front page of
The Chronicle.
They were saying what a shame it was, such a good-looking boy.

There was a big picture of him; he was looking down at his feet. The headline was “Murder!”

One of the older ladies said her son had gone to school with him and there had been something going on in that house for sure;
he would come to school with welts all over his legs, even the Welfare Department had been called in, and now that he had
come for his father’s funeral who knows what that woman had schemed and let loose.

She was interrupted by some patients who had to fill in the Medical Aid forms. I had the
Femina
magazine open on my lap, and I was praying that Dr. Esat would be running late as usual.

And she had been talking to John, her son, she started again, how sometime near the end of Form One, close to four years now,
the boy had disappeared; word was that he’d taken off to South Africa to find his mother. And that was another story, how
that woman had abandoned the poor bugger, gone chasing after some sweet-talking salesman in Jo’burg, left the little mite
to the house girl not even a month old. He’d been back a couple of times, never stayed too long, though. You could tell just
by looking at the poor lad he’d been driven to it. And why had they put him in prison khakis; he hadn’t even been convicted;
yet another strategy to humiliate us whites….

One of the ladies nudged her and hissed, “Shush, June.”