Mutale grabbed her hand and dragged her into the murmurous crowd.
The Agricultural Show always took place at Showgrounds, a 140-hectare expanse of land off Great East Road bounded by white walls on all sides. These were painted with ads for Dettol and Lifebuoy and Strike, for Maltesers and Maggi and Milo. There were redundant ads for car dealers (BENZ BENZ BENZ) and unlikely ones for salons (ASTOUNDING INDIAN HAIR) and it seemed every other wall bore a black and yellow ad for Harvey Tiles, with some skew Zinglish analogy: A ROOF WITHOUT HARVEY TILES IS LIKE A FACE WITHOUT A SMILE – IT MIGHT BE GLOOMY. A ROOF WITHOUT HARVEY TILES IS LIKE AN AEROPLANE WITHOUT A PILOT – IT WON’T FLY. A ROOF WITHOUT HARVEY TILES IS LIKE A SCHOOL WITHOUT TEACHERS – THERE WILL BE ILLITERACY.
In the off months, Showgrounds was an odd little leisure city. There were polo fields – sometimes green, sometimes brown – where in the old days, people had actually played that strange game that seems like a drunken bet about golf and horse riding. Next to the fields was the Polo Grill, an open-air restaurant specialising in sundowners, where over the years, whites and coloureds and blacks and now a motley crew of apamwamba drank and flirted away the afternoons. A handful of businesses operated year-round: a flower shop; a gift shop; a vet; the cylindrical Henry Tayali Art Museum; and the Gymkhana club with a peacock farm behind it – two species of preening males competing with each other. The grounds were otherwise empty, a concrete maze of stalls awaiting its annual raison d’être.
In the beginning, the Lusaka Agricultural Show had been literal: farmers from rural districts came to the capital to display their cows and goats, their bulldozers and sprinklers. Then the farmers started bringing their wives and children too, and the show became a fair. Candyfloss and popcorn vendors cropped up. A miniature train was imported, its tracks carving a long, twisty double scar across the grounds. Then radio stations began to set up dance floors. Alcohol crept in. The youth swarmed in to drink it. By 1984, the Agricultural Show had become a city-wide party.
Sylvia and Mutale held hands and walked around together. Mutale looked at the exhibits. Some of these were schoolish – signs and pamphlets with sciencey talk, unsmiling UNZA students giving brief lectures. Others were farmish – smelly, twitchy animals standing or kneeling in makeshift stalls. Sylvia looked at the people. Men in suits clapping each other’s backs, their wives fluting ‘hallos’ as their eyes darted discerningly over each other. Toddlers greased with Vaseline trotted around in the dust, their weirdly adult outfits – skirts and suspenders, hats and bow ties – in various stages of collapse. Babies rode their mothers’ backs, gazing at strangers or ducking their heads shyly. Sylvia focused mostly on the people her age, the young sweating bodies clad in shiny metal and bright colours, featuring.
A tall boy with skin dark as pencil lead walked by, his stride collapsing and catching itself in a 5/4 tempo. He glanced Sylvia’s way with casual grace, then paused his stroll and looked back, running his hand over his fade. Mutale pulled Sylvia away from this situation so roughly that Sylvia left one of her borrowed shoes behind. They both caught their breath as it tumbled away in the dust. Mutale rescued it just before a man trod on it, but just after a little girl dripped a gob of ice cream onto it. Mutale sucked her teeth, picked it up gingerly by the ankle strap, and used a mango leaf to wipe the muddy pink mess off. She skulked back to Sylvia, who was now standing with her bare foot perched on top of the other shoe. To keep her balance, she was holding the tall boy’s arm, which flexed whenever her weight shifted. ‘Chops,’ she mouthed with wide eyes.
The boy’s muscles were indeed on prominent display on either side of his black net shirt. His name was Daliso, he told them, then proceeded with a long and detailed chuffing routine, his voice dropping into false delays and slurred consonants in order to sound American: ‘Am a deeshaaay, you know, riiide?’ Daliso’s bloodshot eyes looked like they’d been popped out, rolled around in the dirt, and popped back in. He smelled like ma sawa sawa. Otherwise, he was perfect. If only the shoe in Mutale’s hands would disappear, Sylvia could keep holding his muscular arm