– after the Agricultural Show, Mutale had shunned her, masking her hurt with a stagey disdain. But Sylvia did miss the casual crowdedness of school, the brush of skin on skin, the feeling of being amongst many people doing many things – typing or netball or even just standing in line at the tuck shop.
Without school, she grew lonely and listless. To step outside her aunt’s flat was to be sent – the neighbours always had an errand for an unoccupied teenager – so she stayed in all day. She perused old Ebony magazines and painted her nails with polish eked out from old bottles. She waited for the cartoons to come on the Panasonic TV, staring at the prison of thick coloured bars until they dissolved at 1700 hrs. Sometimes she tried on the home-made dresses hanging in purgatory at the back of Aunty’s closet. Too small for Cookie, who had put on a stone over the last decade, they fit Sylvia’s figure beautifully.
One afternoon, she was turning and posing in front of the closet mirror, pouting her lips, when the bedroom door unexpectedly opened. It was Mr Mwape, his head hovering over her shoulder in the mirror. She stared at him. He stared back with frank admiration, then smiled.
‘Are we being naughty?’
‘No,’ Sylvia said, refraining from rolling her eyes.
Mr Mwape was a familiar visitor at the Indeco Flats, but he had been stopping by more often recently. He was in his forties now, working for the Ministry of Education. He had started shaving his patchy afro, so he had a shiny bald head to match his taut round belly. Sylvia still called him Daddy out of habit but she had no delusions about this ‘patron’. She watched as he sat on Aunty Cookie’s bed with a proprietary air.
‘Come.’ He patted the duvet cover next to him, a twitch under his left eye.
Sylvia approached in her bare feet, her nipples scratching against the inside of the low-cut sequinned dress, its pleated skirt swishing at her thighs.
‘Sit,’ he said, shifting his patting hand from the bed to his knee as if she wouldn’t notice the difference.
Sylvia looked at his pinstriped thigh. She looked at the oblong bulge where it joined his body. Her ears felt hot. She gingerly hitched herself onto his lap, not quite relaxing into a seat. Mr Mwape smelled of aftershave and pipe tobacco.
‘Good girl,’ he said gummily. ‘You must show respect. You must not say no.’
Mr Mwape didn’t do much that day, nor in the weeks that followed. But Sylvia felt torn about it: the sly touches, the near kisses, the nuzzling, even dressing up in Aunty’s clothes, which she felt somehow obliged to keep doing because of that first time. She couldn’t pinpoint why all of this felt wrong. She knew he wasn’t really her father and, though he was an older man, he tapped a current of curiosity in her. Did he love her aunt? Did he love her? Could she love him the way she loved Mwaba and Francis?
* * *
Sylvia found herself avoiding the flat, ducking Mr Mwape since she could not quite bring herself to push him away. She hung around outside the complex instead, on the side of the road where various kantemba sold food to people who worked in that part of town – cleaners from the hotels down the way, taxi drivers, road repairmen. She would sit on a big flat stone, not really thinking, just letting life in, listening to the song of all this anonymous busyness: the authoritative shouts of unmonitored children; the relay and laughter of greetings and bargains; Michael yelping or Whitney belting from the chimanga boy’s boombox: How will I know…
‘…if he really laafs you…’ sang a voice beside her, whirring as if from inside a bottle.
Sylvia looked up. The girl was tall and dark, pretty with a pointed chin. She had just ordered her lunch from the chimanga boy, who shook his brazier to keep the current batch from burning, then started peeling a fresh cob for her. A bulging plastic bag swung from the girl’s fingers as she rocked to the music against the post of his stall. She wore a white t-shirt, a waxed wrapper, and patapatas – all shiny and pristine, even the rubber sandals, which gleamed like snakes on her feet under her chitenge. A crisp chitambala cut across her forehead.
‘Nice polish,’ she purred and stepped closer to examine Sylvia’s sandalled feet.
The chimanga boy called out, thinking