had lost. Every day, she woke up, felt her daughter’s small squirming body beside her, remembered, and despaired. Yes, truth be told, before the panic had set in this morning when she found the girl missing, there had been another feeling – a flash of relief that, for once, there was no skin pressed up against hers. What would life be like without Sylvia? Lying there on Aunt Beatrice’s steps, thinking on that question, Matha drifted to sleep. For the first time in a long while, she was at peace, alone and gladly dreaming.
She dreamed of a messy mass of blood slipping back inside her with a suctiony sound. A thick cord ravelled into tight loops. A baby clambered up feet first, bestowing weight and tightness to her belly. Her swollen breasts ebbed, their milky tide receded. Tears travelled up her cheeks, tickling into her eye ducts. There was a gradual, deep unwrenching. Then streams of pleasure surged together, imploding with a swallowing action. She hiccupped a moan as sperm sprang back into a penis, which withdrew from her and deflated. A pair of hands left her cheeks. A pair of lips drew away. Matha saw him clearly. Godfrey. Those lips as plump as her tomatoes, the keloid on his neck as thin-skinned, his tightcurled lashes like the tendrils on their stems. ‘Comrade,’ he whispered and vanished into the dark.
* * *
Grace felt bored and distressed. She had been hired to put the little girl at ease as she was transferred from Matha’s care to Nkuka’s. But Sylvia’s unexpectedly fierce resistance had forced Grace to slap her into submission in the kitchen. This had stirred up some long-forgotten curdle in Grace’s stomach. It had felt both too bad and too good to strike a small person. Maybe it was because the small person in question was such a dullard. No surprise there. Grace had long thought that, while salt water was a fine thing – she longed to see the sea that her Madam Agnes was always talking about – it had to do funny things to a child to be soaked in it all the time.
Over the years, watching Matha dribble tears into her baby’s mouth along with the milk, watching Sylvia toddle around Kalingalinga, playing pitifully with her own shadow, Grace had more than once thought about rescuing the child. But it had always seemed too much trouble, especially when The Weepers had started coming around No. 74 like some kind of cult. Grace had reconsidered only when Matha’s sister, a decent and smart woman if a little snooty, had proposed that they save the child from Matha’s abuse – and offered Grace money for expenses. Maybe if she did this favour for the family, Grace had reasoned, the aunties would finally forgive her for what she’d done all those years ago.
But now, watching Nkuka’s face light up at Sylvia’s stupid antics with her fancy new toys, Grace felt disgusted. The child needed a bath, she thought sullenly. She certainly wasn’t going to give her one. Grace’s job with the Bandas involved childcare – she was responsible for bathing baby Carol for instance – but Madam Agnes’s daughter was clean and bright, not a dirty little muntu. Besides, hadn’t Grace done enough? She had brought Sylvia to Nkuka. A strange sum but it added up: a neglected child plus a barren woman, a woman who was now whispering to Grace, asking whether Matha knew yet that her daughter was gone.
‘I do not even think Matha will care,’ Grace shrugged. ‘She hates the girl.’
Sylvia looked up from the spinning top before her, but Nkuka distracted her by declaring that tomorrow, they would throw a birthday party, and wouldn’t that be fun? Sylvia grinned and clapped her hands like a monkey. Grace rolled her eyes. Yes, she had done plenty for these two. And she had done it quickly, and quietly, without much violence. She had done it in a crowded compound, without being spotted. Grace had always thought she would make a good spy.
* * *
How great is the distance between what we are and what we think we are. Grace had been spotted, of course, by one of The Weepers. That morning, Bonita, a mawkish girl with the look of a goat – pointy-chinned, bony-legged – happened to be on the bus when Grace pulled a sleepy Sylvia onto it by the wrist. Canny enough to recognise wrongdoing in action, Bonita had trailed them. She’d got out