like truth were starting to seem rather flexible. For instance: who in the world knew that she had more than one aunty?
* * *
Cookie had got herself in a bind. Most girls run off as soon as they have taken advantage of an affair with a schoolteacher. Not Cookie. Cookie had kept track of Mr Mwape’s promises (a Panasonic TV, a Sony hi-fi) and demands (no babies, no men) over the years, as if in a ledger. After she’d graduated from Evelyn Hone, Mr Mwape had found her a job at the National Registration Office and secured her an Indeco ‘bedsitter’, with three rooms and a full kitchen. Most of the tenants here shared flats, coming in and out of each other’s rooms, cooking and cleaning together like village women, swimming in a stream of gossip. Cookie alone could insist on a flat of her own.
She had kept her ‘arrangement’ with Mr Mwape, borrowing her female friend’s birth control pills when she ran out, washing her vagina with diluted bleach, getting her male friends to buy condoms for her. She’d only had to get an abortion once, a few years ago. After her period had skipped town for the third month in a row, she had taken herself to a stall in Luberma market with a sign that said: SENIOR HERBALIST. IF ANY PROBLEMS CONECT YOUR CONDITION, COME IN FOR AN EXAMINE. The abortionist had been discreet but sloppy, mixing traditional and Western methods without care.
When Cookie came to after the operation, the banakulu had told her bluntly that she could never have another baby and that she should refrain from ‘cavorting’ for at least two months. Cookie stared up at the thatched ceiling, wracked with pain, wading through her various feelings until she landed, gratefully, upon relief. No more tricks to prevent pregnancy – no more herbs or condoms or sponges. No more worries.
Until now. A month ago, Mr Mwape had announced that he could no longer afford to pay for two households. Maybe his wife had finally caught on. Maybe he was just bored of keeping Cookie, who was no longer a young girl but a twenty-eight-year-old woman. In any case, he’d pitched up at her flat, a bottle of conciliatory Red Door in his hand, and broke it to her: he couldn’t support her any more. He needed the money for his children, who were coming of age, going to university. Cookie had been distraught but she had simply smiled and kissed him and led him to bed. Only when he left her lying there alone in the twisted sheets in the cool evening light did she sit up and put her head in her hands.
The irony of it all! She had gone to great lengths, for a decade, to keep from having this man’s child. Now she needed one. Only a child of her own, it seemed, would balance the scales with his wife; only a child would compel Mr Mwape to keep funding Cookie’s life and lifestyle. Blood was a stronger tie than any ring. Sitting in that damp tangle of sheets, the Red Door bottle like a brick beside her – Cookie knew what had to be done.
The very next day, she had gone to Aunt Beatrice and reported that her niece Sylvia was being mistreated. Matha was clearly mad – crying every day in the compound, gathering crying women into some kind of hysterical cult. Sylvia was stunted, malnourished, possibly mute.
‘Mmm,’ Aunt Beatrice had said. ‘This thing is running in the family. Your grandfather was off on the head and Bernadetta was never the straightest spoon in the box either.’
‘Yes, Matha is the same as our mother! We must take the child away. For the girl’s sake.’
‘Are they not living with that other one?’ Aunt Beatrice had asked. ‘The one who—’
‘Yes, Ba Aunty. Her name is Grace. I will talk to her. I’m sure she will help us.’
* * *
New Aunty was putting the final touches to the birthday cake. Sylvia was sitting on a chair before it. The only other guests at her party, Aunty Grace and a neighbour’s son, were standing on either side of her. Sylvia, still dizzy from sugar and from spending so much of the last two days indoors, stared at her hands in her lap. Her fingernails had never been so clean. They gleamed against her pink dress, which was slightly worse for wear after a night and a morning of bedjumping. A chain of yellow