inhaled, holding the smoke in until it seared her lungs. Sylvia coughed and coughed. Loveness laughed and laughed. The coughing fit opened Sylvia’s bloodstream to the nicotine. The buzz hit like a swarm and she canted back, her head bumping gently against the wall of the security hut.
* * *
With Loveness’s tutelage, Mr Mwape became more manageable. The girls prepared for his afternoon visits in advance. Inside the security hut, Loveness would pinch Sylvia’s nose to make the hill a peak; plait a labyrinthine mukule into her hair; rub pink lippie into her cheekbones; paint her fingernails for her; and dab baby oil behind her ears in lieu of perfume. Sylvia would head inside the Indeco Flats, Loveness waving at her from the gates. There, in Aunty Cookie’s bedroom, she would choose a dress to wear, and wait for Mr Mwape to arrive.
After a few weeks of this, the girls resolved that Sylvia should skip the dress entirely and go straight for the satin lingerie Aunty Cookie kept in the back of a drawer. Sylvia had to tie a knot on the side so the panties fit her hips and stuff tissue into the cups of the bra so it wouldn’t sag. But when Mr Mwape found her in this get-up, sprawled out on Aunty’s bed, the tic under his left eye went manic, twitching like a moth against a lit bulb. He panted and sweated, his hands like animals trying to escape, his trousers tighter than they’d ever been. Despite all this strain, however, he did not pull off Sylvia’s borrowed panties that day.
‘What does he mean, I’m still a little girl?’ she complained to Loveness that evening.
‘Maybe you haven’t pulled enough,’ Loveness shrugged.
‘What do you mean, pulled?’
Loveness told her all about it. How you have to pull your malepe until they stretch – as long as your thumb – so that with the right stimulation, they swell with blood and grasp the man’s mbolo. ‘It’s simple,’ she said.
Sylvia stared at Loveness. ‘Show me?’
And she did. The girls took off their chitenges and panties and sat facing each other, knees bent, thighs spread. ‘Like this,’ said Loveness. Later, she showed Sylvia how to use Vaseline and umuthi juice from impwa to ease the pulling, and gave her a splitted stem to wedge the labia open. Sylvia was late to this and it burned at first. But it soon became her favourite game: to sit knee-to-knee in the sweet, yeasty funk of the brick hut and pull with Loveness, gazing at her lips, the pink inner flesh bared like a fruit bursting from its peel.
If a customer came by for a chitumbua, the girls would pull their clothes on in a fit of giggles. They would emerge from the shadowy chamber and perform tasks in silent coordination over the mbaula – ladling the lumps of dough into the vat of oil, exchanging cash and change, draining the crispy golden balls, wrapping them in newspaper and handing them over with a ‘zikomo kwambili’. Loveness was uniformly languid in her movements, aloof and drifty, and she’d often sell vitumbua with her head turned the whole time, as if looking at something infinitely more interesting.
* * *
The lingerie did wonders: Mr Mwape started to bring Sylvia gifts – a bottle of perfume; a new, better-fitting bra. She was on the verge of making specific requests from her Wishful List when they got caught. One afternoon, the bedroom door banged open and Aunty Cookie was there in the room in a powder-blue trouser suit, home early from work. Sylvia expected to be cursed at or beaten, but Aunty barely looked at her. Keeping her eyes fixed on Mr Mwape, who was trying to cover himself with a frilly pillow, Aunty simply stretched out her arm and pointed at the exit. Sylvia hastily wrapped herself in a chitenge and hopped through the door, which was promptly slammed in her face. Sylvia pressed her ear to it.
‘…long have you been plotting this…this…this sheer perversity?!’ Aunty cried.
‘Ha! How old were you when you seduced me in Kasama? Fourteen?’
‘Eighteen! The girl calls you Daddy for goodness gracious me!’
‘And whose fault is that?’
‘Are you saying that I raised this female for you?!’
‘Female?!’ he scoffed. ‘Don’t you mean blackmail?’
Sylvia snuck across the corridor to her bedroom and closed the door, her heart bouncing unhappily. She put on her pyjamas and lay there watching the sun set outside her window. After an hour of shouting, she heard the front