Who would bother making an electric fence in Lusaka?
He reached out to touch it, then began thrashing around wildly. ‘Zzz-zzzz! Aahhh! Aaahh!’ He paused and patted the leafy fence dramatically. ‘Ah?’
‘PAWA CAT!’ the other boys shouted and laughed.
Power cut or no, the fence was clearly safe enough to climb. Mabvuto hoisted himself up one of its metal poles. He didn’t get far – the peeling white paint got under his nails and there was razor wire at the top – but he got a glimpse of the airport grounds before he dropped down.
‘There is construction just there!’ he exclaimed as he healed the leprosy of paint on his thighs with picking fingers. ‘There are materials!’
The boys’ eyes sparked entrepreneurially. They often scavenged in the dump to find scraps to sell to Kalingalinga residents looking to add a new roof or wing to their homes.
‘But we cannot go in there!’
‘How can we even cross the razor wire?’
‘I know a way in,’ Jacob said, his voice dropping like a stone into their excitable chatter.
The other boys glanced around at each other daringly. Mabvuto gave an authoritative nod, as if this was all his idea, and off they went. Jacob led them along the fence to a tree that had grown enmeshed with its metal loops. The tree’s crown barely crested the fence but its roots, in their tumbling sprawl, had partially unearthed the base. Jacob had tried in vain to wrench the warped weave back by himself last week. Now, six pairs of hands finished the job and six pairs of legs wriggled through into the airport grounds.
A few metres away they could see an entrance road, a straight grey bridge over a yellowbrown sea of grass. Just beyond it were the materials Mabvuto had spotted. In the distance gleamed the tarmac runway where, they knew, aeroplanes dozed and landed and, astoundingly, took off. But between there and here was a roadblock: a metal bar with red and white diagonal stripes lay across the road, supported by squat pillars. There was no way to skirt that bar or hop the fence on either side of it – there were two guards sitting outside a hut, monitoring it. They wore green uniforms and knee-high boots, and casually propped beside one, and over the lap of the other, were big black rifles.
The boys approached cautiously, crawling in a ditch beside the road. Shading their eyes, they saw a red sedan drive up the entrance road and slow to a stop. One of the guards sauntered over to it, gun swaying from his shoulder strap. He scanned the sky as if rereading protocol, then leaned down to talk to the driver. The muzungu passenger closer to the boys looked out of her window but did not seem to notice the crop of brown heads in the ditch. She turned back to face forward and suddenly Jacob was running. Chipolopolo! Fast as a copper bullet.
In seconds, he was squatting under the car’s back window, as if he’d mushroomed from its side panel. His friends could see the white woman’s profile, chin lifted, her skin blue inside the car. Below it was Jacob’s profile, chin tucked to his chest, his skin metallic in the sun. He was hidden from the guard, but the boys stirred uneasily at the thought of angry bazungu, an angrier muntu, plus a car, plus a gun. The guard stepped away and raised the candycane bar. The car pulled forward, a parasitic Jacob clinging to its side. Still hunched over, he broke into a trot as the car accelerated, then darted behind a bush on the other side of the roadblock. The car sped on. The guard went back to his post.
In their ditch, the boys whispered their boasts. Each boy claimed he would be the next to try Jacob’s trick. They were just waiting for a bigger vehicle to hide behind. A Land Rover, maybe. Or a lorry.
* * *
Jacob raced on, his head down. He kept to the side of the road, looking for a safe place to stop. The sun was simmering like a coppery soup, the trails of woodsmoke like its steam in the distance. His panting breath competed with his thudding feet and the creaking chorus of crickets in the grass until all sound was engulfed by a roaring deluge from above. He froze and looked up but he couldn’t see the plane. He headed in the direction of its rushing sound.
At each step through the sea