The Death of Rex Nhongo (9 page)

L
ater, when Shawn was devouring a plate of salad, April approached him. She said, “You don't want a burger? Or ribs?”

Shawn answered through a mouthful of carrot and beetroot. He said he was keeping it ital. She raised an eyebrow. “Ital,” he said. “You know. Like, vital. Just natural foods. It's Rasta.”

“Are you a Rasta?” she asked doubtfully.

Shawn smiled, “Only like I do yoga,” he said.

April smiled too, nodded, then looked around, like she was scared she was being watched. She told him she'd been listening to what he'd said about needing a black Zimbabwean to comply with indigenization; someone honest, down-to-earth and, you know, politically acceptable. She said maybe she knew the guy: a lawyer she'd met, older, kind of an idealist, war vet, but seemed like his heart was in the right place.

Shawn said, “Cool. Thanks,” and asked her why she looked so nervous. She shrugged. She said she didn't know. She reappraised that: hooking up business deals wasn't exactly part of her job description at the embassy, though she kind of wished it was since her job was somehow conspiring to be stressful and tedious all at once and what was that about?

Shawn dropped his chin a little and looked up at her. “Well, thanks.”

“No problem.” She shook her head as if she were trying to loosen her curls. For some reason she couldn't identify, she felt momentarily embarrassed. “I'll call you.”

“Great,” Shawn said. Then, “I'm sorry about Kudakwashe.”

“What?”

“My wife.” He glanced over to where she was. “She's not usually like this—antisocial. She's not been well.”

“I didn't think anything,” April said. She was lying. “What's…” she began, then reconsidered the question and asked another instead. “Is that why you came back to Zimbabwe?”

“Something like that,” Shawn said, and he was lying as well, only better, and he experienced the light-headedness that told him he'd entered the realm of deception, a comforting world where he could make sense of everything with a few unimportant untruths. “Yeah,” he said, confirming it. “That's why I brought her home.”

April now regarded him with such sympathy that he had to look away, back to Kuda, who was sitting alone on the corner of the veranda, staring straight ahead. He followed her line of vision and saw Rosie leading Theo, April and Jerry's two-year-old son, by the hand. A smile played on his lips and fixed there as his daughter opened the gate to the pool fence, which should have been locked shut. Everything slowed as she closed the gate behind them. Shawn looked to his wife, the closest adult, but she was still just staring. Later, he told everyone that he'd shouted, but he wasn't sure if that was true. He wasn't sure what was true. Certainly, he watched, seemingly transfixed, as Rosie took the little boy to the water's edge and then, with a mixture of pulling and pushing, heaved him quite deliberately into the pool.

Shawn said, “Jesus,” and before the child broke the surface he was moving at a run. He shouted, “No!” and he heard voices behind him, April's scream, the shift of group attention.

He reached the fence. For some reason, he couldn't open the gate. He could hear his breathing. Rosie was looking up at him from the poolside. Her expression said nothing. She was unmoved by her daddy's panic. The little boy was under water. Shawn stepped back. He tried to vault the fence, caught his trailing foot, flopped heavily onto the paving around the pool and then rolled into the water. He opened his eyes and there was Theo below him, not thrashing around, just sinking. Shawn kicked down, grabbed an arm and pulled. The boy was dead weight. Shawn tried to control his rising panic. He was at the bottom of the pool, perhaps ten feet down. He put his shoulder into Theo's midriff and pushed off from the floor. It must have been less than a second before the two of them broke the surface, but it felt much longer. And now there were hands reaching for the boy and hauling him easily out of the water.

Shawn clung to the side of the pool, choking snotty fluid, sucking deep breaths. He opened his eyes and they stung with chlorine. He found he was millimeters from the boy's small, pale foot. The foot twitched. He heard the sound of retching. He heard Jerry say, “He'll be all right.” And then again, only sounding this time as if he actually believed it: “It's fine. He's fine. He'll be all right.”

Shawn was pulled out of the pool by two or three of the other guests. They slapped him on the back. They said things like “Thank God!” and “Fuck, man. I mean, fuck…” He wrung out his shirt. He sniffed. He emptied his ears of water. He looked to where his wife had been sitting and there she was still, apparently unmoved.

J
erry Jones drained his beer and ordered another while Dr. Tangwerai was in the Gents. Jerry had never met anyone who needed to piss so much. Tangwerai was on his fourth piss after a fourth Castle. Jerry was coming close to outpacing him two to one on drinks and had yet to spring a leak.

He looked around the Jameson Hotel's public bar. He checked the time on his phone: half six. The bar was probably around peak capacity: ninety percent men at the end of their working day, ten percent prostitutes at the beginning of theirs. At five thirty it had been more or less empty and in an hour it would be thinning out, but right now it was heaving with what Jerry identified, admittedly projecting for all he was worth, as a kind of desperate, booze-fueled garrulousness.

In recent weeks, particularly since the
braai
fiasco, Jerry had taken to regular heavy drinking, a pattern of behavior that April had decided to counter with a contained fury in which the effort of containment was all too plain. Although her chosen attitude had unarguable moral superiority, it meant that she had directly addressed his drinking only once: in a sustained volley during which she blamed it for the state of their relationship, which had unquestionably slipped to an all-time nadir. Of course, Jerry knew this was ridiculous and said as much with (somewhat drunken) moral superiority of his own: if one insisted on establishing a sequence of events, there was no doubt the failing relationship had driven him to the bottle rather than vice versa. But later, in the self-imposed exile of the spare room while staring dazedly at the mysterious paisley shapes of pitch darkness, he had had to admit that playing the game of cause and effect amid the complexities of a collapsing marriage was inherently deceitful, and the only thing that could be said with any certainty was that his current behavior was resolving nothing and helping nobody. Consequently, he became a regular at various bars around town, recruiting a variety of drinking buddies, since the only possible outcome of his late-night moment of clarity (other than to stop drinking) was to drink more, and more often, in the company of the like-minded.

He soon discovered that Harare was full of these: every bar stool was seemingly occupied by some fellow, somewhat inebriated, who would happily swap anecdotes about wives, girlfriends or both in a tone that was sometimes frustrated and sometimes lascivious but always contemptuous. Jerry didn't know if this phenomenon of clubbable male estrangement was specifically Zimbabwean or if his experience of it simply reflected his new circumstance (after all, back in the UK, he couldn't remember ever sitting in a pub alone), but he took guilty pleasure from his membership of what felt like a louche and daring secret society.

His guilt stemmed both from the misogyny he revealed, and from the fact that nothing he said even touched upon reality, except in so far as to express his general discontentment with his wife. Once, for example, at the Maiden, the pub in Harare Sports Club overlooking the cricket pitch, he told a complete stranger how his wife was always in a bad mood and, using a mixture of euphemism, insinuation and mumble, managed to convey his belief that this was because she didn't have sex with him enough and, what was more, that this exemplified the crucial point that she—like, in fact, all women—didn't know what was good for her. Much to Jerry's surprise, his companion not only took his story at face value, but had experienced the very same trend in his own marriage, a discovery that even had Jerry briefly believing his own bullshit.

Tangwerai emerged from the Gents. When it came to Jerry's drinking companions, the doctor was the exception to whom the Englishman never mentioned his marital problems. This was partly because the pair worked together and Jerry instinctively (if not consciously) knew better than to pollute an ongoing relationship with untruths that might one day require justification or denial. It was mostly, however, because Tangwerai was a widower. For Jerry to start bad-mouthing his wife in the company of a man who'd lost his seemed…well, it seemed lots of things, but foremost among them was
wrong.

Jerry had found out the raw facts of Tangwerai's status within a couple of days of their acquaintance: he had asked the doctor if he was married and been told plainly, “My wife is late.” However, in the subsequent weeks, he had uncovered little further information. He knew that the bereavement was recent (“Last year,” Tangwerai had said, when asked in that same exchange) and that the doctor now lived with his sister and six-year-old son, but he had no idea how the woman had died and, for some reason, struggled to ask. Jerry considered how he might feel if April had died in the last twelve months and imagined it would be something ever-present: a chronic pain, a weight in his stomach, a desperate breathlessness that would roll through him in peaks and troughs and regularly reduce him to tears or strike him with panic or leave him stultified. “And I don't even like her,” he said to himself, drunk and bitter.

But Tangwerai, at least superficially, seemed to have moved on from his wife's passing: never pausing mid-consultation to look away, never dabbing at a welling eye, never taking a moment to sit alone and wallow in the horrible injustice of it all. And, for some reason, Jerry thought this apparent lack of emotion simultaneously intriguing and somehow threatening; particularly when drunk, he found question after question crowding the tip of his tongue, like commuters at a rush-hour bus stop.

Jerry held up his beer bottle by way of an offer. Tangwerai shook his head. “Enough for me. I want to get home before my sister puts Bradford to bed.”

“One for the road,” Jerry pushed.

“You don't want to go home or you are trying to get me drunk.” The doctor smiled. “You know, my boy doesn't like it when I have been drinking. ‘Daddy, you smell of beer,' he says. Just like that.”

“There's nothing wrong with drowning your sorrows once in a while.”

“True enough, my friend.” Tangwerai nodded. His eyes, magnified by the thick spectacles, betrayed nothing. He gave Jerry his hand. His grip was firm and his palm warm and dry. He said, “Till tomorrow.”

Jerry watched the doctor's exit, the confident grace with which the small man negotiated the crowded bar despite the somewhat comedic flapping of his oversized suit, and felt suddenly and profoundly ashamed of himself. Jerry knew why he felt ashamed, but the reason the feeling had chosen that moment to surface so poignantly was beyond him.

M
ay I?”

A thick-set man, late forties, suit, was hovering by the seat Tangwerai had just vacated.

“Be my guest,” Jerry said.

“Thank you.” The man struggled to maneuver himself onto the bar stool, huffing somewhat and exuding the sickly smell of flesh and booze. “You're drinking alone? Nobody should have to drink alone.”

“My friend just left.”

“But you decided to stay. I will keep you company. Two tots of Scotch whisky, that's my poison.” He settled onto the stool and looked at Jerry closely, a thick furrow above his brow. Jerry looked right back at him, unblinking. He'd spent enough time in the city's bars to be familiar with these macho games of pressure and obligation, even if he couldn't quite figure out their rules or precise purpose. He wasn't in the mood. The man cracked a smile that revealed pale pink amphibian gums and reached into his jacket pocket to produce a silver money clip. “I am joking. What will you have?”

Jerry shrugged. “A Castle. Thanks.” He stared at the money clip. It was thick with bills, though he had no idea of the denomin­ations. Jerry had never met anyone who carried a money clip before and for a moment he thought he might burst out laughing. It appeared to crystallize something he'd been thinking, which hadn't previously cohered into words. The bar's décor, the waiters' bow ties, the clientele's mustaches, cigarettes and polyester suits, the money clip: Jerry had the sensation that he was in a 1970s cinema ad—“For a swinging night out, visit the Jameson, adjacent to this theater.” He found that he was smiling. He picked up his fresh beer, clinked with his new companion, and they dropped easily into conversation, the man opening with the usual questions and Jerry wheeling out his usual replies—“Leatherhead”; “Not London exactly, kind of like a suburb”; “Almost five months”; “My wife's work”; “The British Embassy”; “Me? A nurse”; “No, never my ambition”; “No, haven't got a visa. I'm just volunteering at a clinic”; “Just one. Theo. He's two”; “Greendale. You know Arcturus Road? Just off there.”

The man asked how Jerry found Zimbabwe and Jerry said he liked it very much and it was certainly an easy place for a Brit. The man nodded, and observed that this was unsurprising, considering almost a century of colonial rule: “More British than the British.”

Jerry studied his expression for signs of hostility but found none. He said he knew what the guy meant but, actually, the longer he stayed, the more foreign he felt. “Everyone speaks good English and watches American TV and listens to bad rap music—just like the UK. But whenever I scratch the surface I find I just don't get it.”

The thick-set man patted him matily on the arm. “We are Africans,” he said, less explanation than marker to allow the conversation to move on.

But now, fizzing with fizzy lager, Jerry didn't want to move on and he heard himself say, “Take death, for example…” And he launched into an expansive explanation of his colleague Dr. Tangwerai's situation (so far as he understood it), a detailed description of his behavior and a thorough account of what he, Jerry, found peculiar about it.

Jerry's companion listened politely, then said, “What is it you expect this colleague of yours to do?”

“I don't know. Nothing. Something. We've become friends. We have a drink together. I'm just surprised he doesn't talk about his wife.”

“To you. He does not talk about her
to you.
”

“No.” Jerry shook his head. “I'm sure he doesn't talk about her at all.”

The man shook his head too. “She is dead, isn't it? What do you want him to say?”

“I don't know.”

The man drained his Scotch. He flashed the glass at Jerry, who ordered him another. “Here in Zimbabwe,” he said, “I don't think we see death like it is in UK.”

“I know,” Jerry interrupted. He'd heard this before. “Death is part of life, I get that. And I know in the West we all think we're immortal.”

“It is not just death. It is catastrophe. The whites I have met don't know what to do when there is catastrophe. They think it will never happen. Zimbabweans, blacks, we expect a catastrophe and we know what to do. We don't panic. Our economy collapses, money's worth nothing, HIV, angry ancestors, failing crops, crashing cars, all of these things…and still we get up in the morning and still we have to feed ourselves and our children, isn't it? You guys with your insurance and credit and pensions and welfare state, I think you have plenty of time to worry. Whites…” Jerry wasn't looking at the man. He was examining the hair on his knuckles, picking dry skin from around his fingernails. But this repetition of “whites” made him glance up and, though there was no visible change of expression, he was sure he hadn't mistaken the contemptuous tone; and now it came again. “…whites. It is the mark of how civilized you are, your freedom to worry.”

Jerry sipped his beer. Now it was his turn simply to want to move the conversation on. He looked the man directly in the eye. “You know what Gandhi said about Western civilization?”

“What's that?”

“That it would be a good idea.”

His companion smiled and any tension was gone. There were those pink gums again; not amphibian, Jerry thought, but piscine. The man examined the ice cubes in the bottom of his glass as if he expected to find something there.