over her skin, using his fingers to tug at her plaits and her nipples and her panties, as if they were all the same sort of object.
When he finally put his thing inside her, it hurt but not as much as Loveness had said it would. Sylvia turned her head away from his astringent breath, wondering whether sex had been painful for Loveness when her uncle had first ‘started’ her. Sylvia closed her eyes and tried to picture the big fat man bouncing on top of the skinny little girl – Loveness before she was Loveness. Was she in the middle of doing this exact thing, at this very moment, across the road at the Pamodzi? At the thought, Sylvia felt a purring heat inside the pain below…The Danish-Dutchman interrupted her by cramming two crooked fingers into her mouth. Did this count as kissing? She wasn’t supposed to kiss customers. Sylvia decided that it didn’t and remembered to make some noises. The man responded immediately – bucked hard once, twice, stopped.
There was a strained silence as he rolled off her and reached for a pack of cigarettes on the nightstand. Sylvia asked him for one and he lit it for her. She sucked gently to draw the ember to life, then lay back on the damp pillow, trying to recall the price she had whispered in his ear at the bar. The exact centre of her body was ringing with a stinging, smarting sweetness. She was still drunk – a corner of the ceiling dove repeatedly, in a loop. She felt a double feeling: she missed her friend and she hated her friend. Sylvia took another drag, held the smoke in her mouth, then inhaled until her lungs burned.
‘Vhut is your name again?’ asked the Danish-Dutchman.
‘Loveness,’ she exhaled just as the buzz swarmed in.
2007
Back when Lusaka was a dusty old town, before it became the capital city, propeller planes would stutter down the dirt runway at City Airport, bearing expats and dry goods into the country. After Independence, after the big international airport was built 25 kilometres east, the Zambian Air Force took over the old runway, and now only the rich and powerful landed their private planes at City Airport: soldiers, industrialists, bankers, politicians.
Government built a fence around the perimeter and sprinkled some seeds at its base. Over time, bougainvillea spread along the wire mesh, dabbing like a paintbrush on canvas until the fence was a messy wall of green and pink. It shielded the wealthy and the foreign from having to see the local destitution across the road in Kalingalinga compound. For their part, the compound mothers forbade their children from going anywhere near those fences. ‘Who knows what those rich people are tossing?’ The bazungu especially, so temperamentally irritable, so red in the face for nothing, seemed capable of dropping anything out of the windows: books, diseases, car parts, bottles, cutlery, their own bodies even. But fences can rise only so high. People in the sky could see Kalingalinga from above – the roofs of shacks weave such a pretty patchwork! – and people on the ground could gaze up at the big silverbellied creatures flying overhead.
As soon as the compound kids heard a roaring in the distance or felt vibrations in the ground, they would start running. ‘TEKAS TO AMELIKA! TEKAS TO AMELIKA!’ they would shout up at the plane as it buzzed above them. They would try out flight themselves, outstretched arms tilting to imitate a shaky lift-off, noses humming to make engine noises. They would run in a horde, throw their palms onto the ground and flip over, their thudding feet like a giant thrumming its fingers. Yes, all the Kalingalinga kids loved aeroplanes, but only Sylvia Mwamba’s son was obsessed with them. Long after the plane had passed and the other kids had moved on, Jacob alone would sit cross-legged, ground-bound, looking up.
* * *
Every day, the compound kids who didn’t go to sukulu followed the pattern of the rich in cities: they started off in the centre but, eventually, the promise of freedom and wider spaces had them moving towards the outskirts. That’s how, one afternoon, Jacob found himself with a group of six boys, walking beside the verboten airport fence. The boys were chatting about the electric pulse that supposedly throbbed through it now to keep them out. Mabvuto, the eldest, witty enough to appreciate the irony of his ‘Kiss Me, I’m Irish’ shirt, said this had to be a rumour.