The Boy Next Door (6 page)

Roxy found the lighter somewhere in the vegetable patch. It had clinked on the driveway, and I was surprised by that because
Roxy usually had a poor lizard dangling from his teeth, which would only make a dull slapping sound when Roxy flung it on
the stone slabs. I stooped down, picked up the object. It was wet with saliva and dirt. And then I ran water over it and I
saw what it was.

It had been months since the sentencing. He was in jail now. I chanted the old playground claim,
finders, keepers; losers, weepers,
over and over again, but the more I held the lighter in my hands the more it became what it was, evidence. And I had it.

He came today.

We all saw him.

He stood outside the gate and looked up at the house.

He stood there just looking.

Mphiri came out and opened the gate.

Maphosa said that there will never be peace now.

Rosanna, who is pregnant, was quiet.

Mummy said he looked like a criminal. I didn’t think that she was right about that.

*    *    *

He helped us push start the car. The Cortina stalled again at the gate. I got out of the car and saw him standing by his gate,
looking. I felt shy to have my back turned from him, my head bent down, my bottom up, straining my weight against the car.

“I’ll give you a hand,” he said.

I hadn’t even heard him walking up.

Our hands were side by side.

The car finally started and I got inside. Daddy leaned his head out of the window and thanked him.

“It’s nothing, Mr. Bishop. Glad to help.”

In the car, Daddy looked at his windscreen mirror and sighed. I was thinking of his hands. I was thinking of the lighter in
them. The lighter that said Rhodesian Army on it. Hot and burning.

When I came home, I took out my diary, which was wedged in between the mattress and the headboard. I had bought it in March
in Kingstons at half price with my pocket money. It had a picture of a ballerina on the cover and a lock and key. I found
the date and put a big X in the space for writing. I counted; it was twenty-one days since he had been released. Then I locked
it up again and put the key back in my pencil case. I wasn’t supposed to have any secrets from my parents.

And then I took the lighter out from behind the mirror. I stood in the room trying to think of another place. I thought that
maybe I would put it in my pink handbag, which was too childish for me now and which I kept hanging in the cupboard. I was
opening the cupboard door when I heard Mummy’s footsteps, and I shoved it under my pillow.

“Lindiwe,” Mummy says. “Our interaction with that boy must be kept to the strictest minimum. If he comes here when there are
no adults around, you must not let him in. I have already informed Rosanna and Maphosa. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Mummy, I understand.”

Mummy is now treasurer of the Women’s Group. Monday and Wednesday afternoons she is away at meetings.

Mphiri says that the young master is sleeping in the boy’s kaya with him. Mphiri scratches his head and says that this is
not right. The young master sleeps right on the floor without even a mattress. He sleeps on the grass mat. Maphosa says that
maybe now Mphiri will see reason and go back home. Even white people are afraid of Amadhlozi, the spirits who want to avenge
a grave wrongdoing. Rosanna does not believe Mphiri. A white person would never do that. She cannot even imagine them using
the same toilet as Mphiri. Mphiri is just getting too old. White people need electricity. She cannot even think of a white
man sitting down to light a paraffin stove.

As the days and weeks went by, things remained normal; everyone seemed to just accept his presence. Nobody made any comments
about him, and nothing bad seemed to be happening to anyone. Maybe Mrs. McKenzie’s spirit wasn’t interested in doing anyone
any harm. Maybe the heat had dried it up, sapped away all its energy (and anger), like it was doing to everything else.

Every evening, Daddy was glued to the TV rain forecast report and the graphs on the level of the dams. Hillside dam, which
we had visited at school, was not even half-full. The drought wasn’t showing any signs of ending. The city council tightened
its water rationing measures. The use of hosepipes was completely banned, even if you were using borehole water. Maphosa had
to water the vegetables with a bucket.

Sometimes he would drive out of his gate at the same time in the morning as us. Maybe he had found a job. It was funny to
me that he would never overtake Daddy even though Daddy drove so slowly. It was like a mark of respect. Sometimes sitting
in the back, I was tempted to turn my head but I never did.

And then, it was a Saturday morning and I was standing at the bus stop, getting nervous because the bus was already thirty
minutes late. I was going to be late for the netball match if I didn’t leave straightaway. It was an interschools quarter
final, and we were taking on the Convent Girls who had beaten us badly last year. Everybody on the team wanted revenge.

He took the corner, passing me, and then he reversed.

He rolled down his window and called out, “Do you want a lift?”

I got into the yellow Datsun Sunny.

I put my bag on the floor on top of my feet.

I put my hands under my mauve skirt, and then I placed them on my lap. I wished that I wasn’t wearing my tracksuit bottoms
under my skirt. I looked like a country girl.

He drove all the way down Jacaranda Road, up the bridge onto Acacia Drive, where all the acacia trees along the road were
in bloom, their yellow flowers making me think of how when Daddy got called to fix a fault in Hwange National Park, he saw
giraffes feeding on the flowers and said that they looked like very tall, elegant ladies ruminating about life. And then he
annoyed Mummy by saying, “Not like you big Manyano ladies.”

I looked straight through the front windscreen, and then my neck began to hurt so I turned and looked out my window.

There wasn’t much to see because most of the houses were behind durawalls, except for the white double story, which was at
the corner of Athlone Avenue and Moss Street. When I had first seen it, I thought that it must be full of children running
up and down stairs, laughing and screaming, something like in
The Sound of Music.
But only an old white man lived there who was rumored to have shaken hands with Hitler.

I had the strange feeling that my head was shaking, vibrating.

“Don’t be nervous. Lindiwe, isn’t it?”

I was shocked that he knew my name, that he had said it out aloud to me. I liked the way it sounded coming from him.

“Yes, Mr. McKenzie,” I said.

“
Mr.
McKenzie,” he almost shouted. “Now, you’re trying to be funny, heh. Ian. Just Ian. I’m not an old bally.”

“Ian,” I said in my head.

I didn’t know why I had blurted out “Mr. McKenzie” and why I kept thinking of him as that. Was it because he had been in jail
and had experienced things that adults do? Or was it because he was so big and made me feel like a child who didn’t know much
about life?

I didn’t think it was because he was white, that I was a little frightened of him. Mummy was always telling anyone who would
listen that when I was a baby I would wail if cotton wool or a white person happened to touch me.

We drove in silence all along Main Street, all down Fourth Avenue, and then at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Borrow Street,
I said, “You can drop me here. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

He didn’t say anything.

I opened the door and said thank you.

He said, “Here, your bag, and good luck.”

*    *    *

The second time we passed each other along the escalators at Haddon and Sly. He was going up. I was going down. We looked
at each other. That was all.

The third time was at the Grasshut. It was dark inside, and I didn’t see him until he was out front at the till paying his
bill. He was taking money out of his wallet, looking right at me. I was with Bridgette and she said, “Isn’t that…?”

The fourth time was when it really began.

I was at the National Museum in the Minerals Hall collecting information for my science project. He was sitting on one of
the benches lining the glass wall. I saw him first because his face was turned away, looking down.

Just as I was about to walk away, he turned and said, “You again.”

I stood there in my school uniform not knowing what to do or say.

He got up. “Would you like something to drink?” he asked. “I’m thinking of going down to the kiosk to get a Coke.”

Without thinking, I said, “Yes, thank you.”

This time I noticed things about him: how his hair was cut so short it looked as if he had meant to shave it and then changed
his mind at the very last minute, how his hands were bruised.

He saw me looking at his hands and said, “So did you win?”

The netball match had been weeks ago, so I didn’t understand at first.

“Your netball,” he said.

“Oh, yes. Fifteen to three.”

I had a Coke, too, and we sat there just sipping, drinking. After that we walked back down. We stopped a bit at the mammals’
exhibit where all the stuffed animals are. He made a funny noise, as if he was trying to let out a laugh but was choking on
it.

“My word, this brings back memories.”

We were looking at two lions tearing apart a baby antelope. Its stomach was spilling out and blood was everywhere.

“Bawled my eyes out when I saw that. My old man gave me a good clip around the ear, a kick in the backside plus. What an embarrassment
I was, a damn prissy boy. And the old man, a fricking Selous Scout. What a git.”

The words
Selous Scout
echoed in the chamber so full of blood and entrails. I was glad that there was no one else to hear them.

“The Selousie,” Daddy says on one of the days when he remembers the war and something takes him back there, maybe a newspaper
article or a TV program. “Those guys were something else, I tell you.”

I can hear fear and wonder in his voice and also the way he stops a bit, his mouth moving silently as if he is arguing with
himself: Should he go on? Should he just stop right there? He has said quite enough already, but then his mouth opens and
the words come spilling out. He doesn’t look at anyone when he is talking like this. He looks at the war. He is talking with
the war.

“You don’t want to get on the wrong side of them. They are sharp. Sharp! And they know the bush. You put a Selous Scout in
the bush with nothing. Nothing, no water, food, weapons, nothing, and I’m telling you that is how they are trained, dropped
in the bush by helicopter and not city, town bush. Bush, bush with
nothing.
Seven days they must survive, just like that. Anyone who survives that, you can become a recruit.
Just
to be a recruit. We ordinary soldiers, you meet a Scout with his FN submachine gun, you don’t even look. Forget it. Those
guys disciplined, sure, but anything can trigger them.
Anything.
And mind you, they don’t hesitate. Trained machines. Afraid of nothing.
Nothing!
Even the boys respect them. One Selousie can take out thirty, forty, I’m telling you, in no time at all. And the African
ones, the worst or should I say, best. Masters in disguise, infiltration. How many went right into guerrilla camps and took
those boys out like that. And when…”

Daddy had stopped talking when he saw Maphosa opening the gate.

Outside, we walked through the park, all the way up to the main entrance.

“I’ll give you a ride,” he said.

He dropped me in South Grove by the cemetery; as he was pulling away he stopped the car and shouted through the window—“Hey,
Lindiwe, meet you here tomorrow round about this time”—and then he drove away before waiting for my answer.

I took the bus the rest of the way home.

It was only later, lying on my bed, that it came to me—not once sitting there with him did I think of him as the boy who might
have done that terrible thing. Not once.

Thirteen missionaries have
been killed in Esigodini by dissidents. The dissidents went into the farmhouse with pangas and hoes. One boy and two other
people, who pretended to be dead after they had been hacked by pangas, escaped. The boy hid in the bathroom and crawled out
of the window and ran all the way in the dark. The dissidents even killed the babies. The mothers said the Our Father as their
babies were held high and dropped onto the floor. Just like the terrorists used to do.

Maphosa says that it is all lies. He says that this is a setup. Mugabe is trying to create trouble in Matabeleland so that
he can launch a full-out attack. He is impatient to have his one-party state. He wants to crush all opposition. Look how Tongogara
was eliminated; if he was still alive, he would be in charge, not that little man. Maphosa says these killings are the work
of Shonas posing as dissidents. True ZIPRA fighters would only attack military targets. When I ask him how he knows this,
he looks at me as though I have accused him of lying. “You can believe what you want,” he says. “The truth is the truth.”

Geraldine Ainsley is immigrating to England. Her father says that there is no future for whites here. “They will hunt us all
down,” he says. “This is only the beginning. All this so-called reconciliation and working yourself to the bone adds up to
a baby smashed by munts onto a concrete floor. No ways, man, are we staying here.”

“We’re reclaiming our British citizenship,” says Geraldine, tossing her hair. “We have brand-new passports. Thank goodness
for that.”

During break time she hands out the invitations to her farewell party. Everyone is invited, even me. And Bridgette, of course.
On the cover there is a picture of her family: Mum, Dad, Geraldine all waving and smiling brightly and the two poodles leaping
up trying to catch the speech bubble that exclaims “Cheers.”

“Just wait,” says Bridgette. “They’ll come back running when they get a dose of reality. No servants, no gardens, just some
horrible poky little flat in east London, where they will have to rub shoulders with so many Indians they will think they
are in India, and the cold
brrrrr!
They think that the royal family will be waiting at the airport to receive them with open arms, they’ve got a big shock coming.
I give them two months,
mmmm,
not even that. Look at her, do you think she has the slightest idea of how to make her own bed?”