The Boy Next Door (32 page)

“Oh yes, like those celebrated nudes!”

“Don’t remind me, Bridgette! Half of Harare has seen my breasts!”

“Oh Lins, you don’t tell me that underneath all that grown-up attitude still lurks the Miss Goody Two-shoes. My, my, I would
never have guessed and really, my dear, they are very fine breasts.”

“Very funny. By the way, David’s been asking about you.”

“That boy, he’s smart, Lins. I bet you his IQ is somewhere up there.”

“He must get that from me.”

She shakes her head. “You know, he’s a good guy, your Ian, Rhodie or not.”

*    *    *

When I get home, the boys are making a production of dinner.

“Smells good,” I say. “What is it?”

“Spaghetti Bolognese!” shouts David.

“I thought so, just checking. I hope you didn’t use ketchup instead of tomatoes.”

The silence is all the answer I need.

“It smells great. I’m going to have a bath.”

We’re sitting, the three of us, having dinner.

“Delicious,” I say.

“Good thing you’re not a fricking vegetarian anymore.”

“Mum, we used ketchup.”

“Oh, so
that’s
the secret ingredient!”

And we all burst out laughing.

“
Howzit, doll?
”

It’s a surprise to have him there, here. A good surprise.

He gives me a full-throated kiss right there in the Arrivals Hall, lifting me off the ground.

When I finally come up for air, I hand him the duty-free gorilla.

“Nice,” he says.

In the car I can’t stop looking at him, smiling. I’ve only been gone for five days.

And I’m suddenly swept by the sensation of being that sixteen-year-old girl once more, and I am alone in the car with Mr.
McKenzie/Ian.

“It’s quiet,” I say when we’re waiting at the traffic lights in front of the Coca-Cola company.

“Here, it’s quiet. The action is down in the townships, Chitungwiza, Mbare, after dark. Door-to-door sweeps, like I said.
Anyone caught with any new goods, shoes, clothes, guaranteed one hundred percent beatings. Government’s running shit scared.
Didn’t reckon docile Zimbos had it in them to go about rioting, vandalizing Private Property. ESAP is doing its job. And the
war vets are adding their two cents: that Hunzvi chap’s got them all riled up about their right to more dosh from the country
they liberated; we owe them big-time. I got some good shots of them prancing around ZANU headquarters. Don’t look at me like
that; I used a long lens.”

We don’t talk about his mother. Not until we’re turning into our cul-de-sac. He stops the car right there. We’re half in,
half out of the bend. It’s a dangerous place to be.

“So Lindiwe, like I said on the phone, it’s a temporary thing. Until I can find something. I’m looking. I couldn’t let her
stay in that place anymore; there were cockroaches crawling all over her when I went to see her, I…”

I put my hand on his thigh.

“It was so overcrowded in there. They were happy to let her out, I…”

“It’s all right, Ian.”

“Listen Lindiwe, she doesn’t look, she doesn’t look too good, her face is…”

He’s holding onto the steering wheel, looking straight out ahead.

“It’s all right, Ian,” I tell him again.

She is sitting on the veranda. Her hands are resting on her lap, her back straight, her head inclined to her left. Seeing
her like this, it seems she may be sitting for a portrait or simply be one of those people who can wait without having to
pretend to be occupied by something. Her hair falls over her shoulders. She seems so self-contained, and I wonder if, in there,
this was what she looked like, who she was.

“Ma,” Ian says walking towards her. “Ma…”

He kneels down beside her, takes her hand gently in his.

“This is Lindiwe,” he says holding out a hand to me.

“I told you about her. She’s been away. She lives here. She’s David’s mother, my…”

He looks up at me, and I see that he’s biting at the inside of his cheek.

“She lives here.”

“Hello,” I say.

She raises her head and slowly twists herself around. She looks up at me, her head perfectly still, and I have the strangest
feeling that she is giving me a chance to look, to gape, to have my fill, just this one time.

I stand there not daring to move, to look away.

“I’m very happy to meet you,” I say at last into those eyes, my words ludicrous and somehow insulting, offensive to my ears.

“Ma…”

“Mum!” I look up and see David sprinting from next door, Jade leaping and barking at his feet.

I watch him do that Indiana Jones thing of his of leaping over the stream, while Jade wisely scrambles up onto the wooden
bridge.

“Mum!”

He dashes up the steps, tripping on the last one, and then he’s up again.

“Mum!”

And as he dives into my arms, I catch sight of her hand raised, her fingers splayed, brush against his head.

He wriggles in my arms, turns around.

“Gran!” he laughs.

Late 1990s

Ian’s mother is
sitting at the kitchen table, drawing circles with the tip of her finger. I stand there for a moment leaning against the
door, watching her.

There are times when I wake up in the morning with the feeling that she has stood by my bedside during the night; when I breathe,
it’s her breath I take in. I haven’t told this to Ian because I’m not sure if it’s real, if it’s not my imagination getting
carried away, my fears taking over.

It’s taken me a while to admit it. I’m afraid of her, of her quiet. Of her eyes that seem bluer than they were in that picture
when she was young; I don’t know if this is because of the contrast between them and her shiny, scarred skin pulled tight
over her bones.

There are moments when she seems to me the stereotype of a madwoman, when she’s pulling at her hair or scratching her scalp,
when she’s mumbling words to herself or walking in what looks like some kind of pattern up and down the garden.

But when I catch her eyes, I’m not so sure. There’s something there. They’re alert and, perhaps it’s my imagination again,
sometimes it feels like she’s amused. That’s the word, amused.

She raises her finger and draws something in the air. No, she’s writing something. Letters. M-O-R-T-U and then she turns and
looks at me. It feels as though she’s known I’ve been there all the time, spying.

“Good morning,” I say.

There won’t be an answer, I know this. She hasn’t said one word to me. Not one.

It’s David she talks to. Long, whispery monologues. I wonder sometimes if she thinks she’s talking to Ian.

I’m amazed at how unfazed David is by her, taking everything in his stride. Maybe he’s had the practice, knows all about dealing
with otherworldly grandmothers.

She gets up from the table, and a book slips from her lap to the floor.

She doesn’t seem to notice because she walks around the table, opens the kitchen door, and steps outside, and I watch her
walking in the garden in her white nightdress, floating, like Wilkie Collins’s
Woman in White,
the ghostly apparition disappearing into the mist.

I shake myself free from what I used to call the heebie-jeebies when I was a girl.

I go to the table and take the book from the floor. It’s Ian’s notebook. I sit down by the table and open its pages once again.
I see that in a very soft hand with a pencil she has drawn a spidery web over his words.

I think of what Ian has told me. The four years he lived with her in South Africa. She had just been recently divorced when
he found her. She was living in a squalid flat in Johannesburg, supporting herself by doing housecleaning work. She was a
poor white. She had the old yellow Sunny, one of the few things she’d been able to take from her marriage, which had made
that journey to Bulawayo once upon a time.

I open the book again and look at the pictures of a boy falling over the edge of a cliff, blood spewing from his lip; another
of the boy standing on the same cliff, an eagle swooping down, its claws so near to the boy’s head; another, the eagle’s claws
digging into his shoulders, and somehow the boy’s chest has been cut open and his blood is bleeding out into the air, but
the boy wears such an euphoric smile as if he’s being set free at last.

As I hold the book in my hands, I know one thing with absolute certainty: Ian’s mother has been in our bedroom. She has opened
my bedside drawer and she has taken this book out. She has done it perhaps while I was sleeping, and as I lay there, she must
have for a moment stood there over me, watching.

I go back to our room where Ian is just getting up. I take the deepest breath of my life, it seems to me.

“Ian, your mother… ,” I begin, wading into treacherous waters.

He is rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He looks so much like a boy, a kid, his hair all rumpled, his head still in the warmth
of his blankets.

“Yes, my mother…”

“Ian, I don’t know her. I don’t know who she is, what…”

He is standing up, stretching, and he’s starting with his stretch and touch my toes routine.

“Ian, I think we should…”

I try the words out in my head:
I think we should keep her locked up at night in case; it’s for her, to keep her safe…

“Lindiwe, stop worrying. She’s fine.”

It’s as if he’s gone right through my head, extracted the nugget of thought there, and is giving it back to me.

“No, she isn’t Ian. She should be seeing someone, a doctor.”

I can’t even say the word
psychiatrist.
I remember those years ago when he was right about David and the psychologist. But he’s not right now. He can’t be.

“Lindiwe, she was locked up for all those years, and now you want me to put her in a position where some clown is going to
say she needs to be put away again or that she has to be dozed up on pills? No, Lindiwe, it’s not going to happen.”

“Ian, she went through my drawer. She… she just stands there…. I… I don’t feel safe.”

He drops his arms.

“You don’t feel safe.”

He says the words slowly as if he is trying to fully comprehend their substance, what may lie behind, in them. I can’t bring
myself to say about the fire. How yesterday I went through the kitchen drawers and took all the matches, the lighters, and
I drove to Sam Levy’s Village with them and dumped the lot in a dustbin.

“I would never endanger this family.
Never.
You either believe that or you don’t know me, Lindiwe.”

I want to believe him.

“Ian, did she start the fire?”

It’s as if a bomb has detonated in the room and then I throw another one.

“Did she do it on purpose?”

Ian looks at me and then sits down on the bed.

“You won’t let that go will you, Lindiwe? It’s always there, that story, no matter how many years pass. It always comes back
to this point.”

“She is living here, Ian. There’s David to think of.”

“And you think she’s going to go after him?”

“Ian, it works both ways, trust.”

“Lindiwe, she found out about all that shit that was happening in the house. She found out on the day of my dad’s funeral.
I was so mad with the bitch; the way she comes over drunk when we’ve just put the bastard under the ground and goes on about
how I’m trying to steal her inheritance. Your father was there… and I lost it… sobbed the whole sorry story out to my mother.
Every bit of it. The men who’d come there. Everything. So, you see, I’m responsible for what happened. I should have left
well alone, driven us back to South Africa, but my mother said, no, no, we had to stick around to deal with all the legal
shit, and then that evening we had come to discuss the house with the bitch and…”

He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands.

I sit down next to him.

“Anyway, she was out cold drunk when we got to the house. I went out back to check what was happening with Mphiri. I don’t
know, it must have been ten or so minutes, and there was shouting coming from the house. As I’m rushing back in, she… she
comes running out on fire. I froze, Lindiwe. I froze. And then my mother’s out there, and she’s trying to put out the fire
except she catches on… God.”

We sit there together in the room. One.

And yet, a single thought elbows its way between us,
the story always changes.

Bridgette breaks the
news to me at the Italian Bakery.

I’m not sure, watching her walk to the table, if she has gone plain mental or is making a fashion statement that only people
in the know are privy to. The long white skirt and blouse. The white doek. My first thought is oh, my God, she’s joined the
apostolics, and then I see the belt in green and yellow cloth tied at her waist and the woolen Rasta hat tucked into it. She
looks both odd and impossibly stylish. People keep turning around to look at her. I expect her to say at any moment, “jah,
man.”

“You like?” she says, giving herself a twirl.

“I like. What’s the occasion?”

“I’ve found the Promised Land, Lins.”

Her eyes are cloudy. Her movements lazy. I wonder if she’s been smoking dagga, if she’s floating on rainbows. The long skirt
doesn’t hide how skinny she’s become. I tried once to ask her if she needed help getting some of the drugs, and she got angry
and said that all she needed were natural foods and vitamins. The chemical shit was messing up her body.

“Listen girlfriend, I’m off. Jamaica. ASAP. One love.”

“Jamaica, Bridgette? When?”

“Wednesday.”

“Wednesday? Next week, Wednesday? You mean in five days’ time?”

“Yes man, I’ve been given a place at the University of the West Indies. Clever me.”

“You serious?”

“Jah man. I’m going to see the ocean, Lins, have some red, red wine. That’s where I want to…”

She shakes her head, banishing the thought.

Even though I can hardly believe her, I say, “We have to have a party, Bridgette. Blast you off with some quasi-homegrown
reggae, Lucky Dube and company.”