do,’ she said matter-of-factly, her head slowly traversing ninety degrees until it was tilted the other way. The breeze picked up. Litter fluttered against Lee’s ankles.
‘How?’ he asked.
‘We had sex. On your birthday.’
Lee chuckled and told her exactly how impossible that was, turning the back of his hand towards her to show his wedding ring. She lifted her eyebrow a millimetre higher.
‘It was some time ago,’ she said. ‘Maybe ten years.’
‘Well. If it happened, I must have been cut.’
‘Oh, thank you. Very flattering.’
‘No, that’s not what I – I mean, I don’t recognise your face, so I must have been—’
‘Maybe you would recognise other parts.’ Laughter glimmered in her eyes, but the rest of her face was as placid as a gazelle’s.
‘You’re very forward, you know,’ Lee said. ‘You’ve got no brakes.’
‘And what is the point of brakes if you do not have petrol to drive?’
‘What?’ Lee sputtered, struggling to keep up.
‘Shame. You’ve forgotten paying me as well?’ The woman shut the door in his face.
Lee closed his mouth. He slowly turned around. He stared at the spot in the sky where the sun had burnt out, slate clouds drifting there like ash. He rifled through memories of nights out on the town: him and his butahs, slapping hands, slapping car bonnets, slapping asses. He tried the files from both clinics – the old one and the new one here in Kalingalinga – the nurses and the cleaners, the Virus patients and their morose daughters. But still he could not find her.
A breeze dragged the smell of rubbish into his nostrils. Lee thought of his wife. Across the compound, women were clapping and singing a hymn. Lee thought of his work. Flies buzzed around him, black bits of life rebounding off the invisible planes of the air. A bicycle bell rang halfway, closer to a click than a ring. Lee turned back to the door of the salon and knocked again.
* * *
Once Sylvia had forced Loveness’s hand and proven herself capable of withstanding the trade and its occasional brutalities, the two women had joined forces. For years, they’d worked the high-end hotels together: Ridgeway, Pamodzi, Intercon. When their faces had become too familiar, too faded, they’d shifted to less fancy places – Ndeke, Chachacha Backpackers. Once they had run even these tourist hubs dry, they’d decided that their best bet was to catch the apamwamba as they flew in and out of the country. So despite Sylvia’s reluctance to move back to a compound, one where her mother lived, no less, she and Loveness had chosen to land in Kalingalinga, across from City Airport. And with the help of an unexpected patron, they had finally opened their hair salon.
Hi-Fly Haircuttery & Designs Ltd was essentially one large room, a chitenge curtain hanging across it to set off a private area in the back where Sylvia and her son Jacob slept. In the front, the salon girls blow-dried and hotcombed and slathered lye on recalcitrant kink. They held lighters to the ends of braided wig extensions to keep them from unravelling, rolling them between spit-dampened fingers. The whole place reeked of burning – electrical, frictional, chemical – Sylvia’s girls sifting varieties of incineration as indifferently as demon drones in hell. There were usually five or six of them in rotation – Loveness had an itchy firing finger – but there always seemed to be more, as if multiplied by the mirror that took up one wall of the salon. The customers would sit before it and the girls would stand behind them facing the mirror, chatting to them – strange conversations where you lock eyes with someone with her back to you.
Jacob’s punishment for his airport excursion was to stay in the salon, all day, every day, ‘helping out’. This was a torture to a boy built for roaming. Grounded, he sat in a corner watching sulkily as the girls cultivated their hairy crops, carving scalps into neat mukule rows and shelling beads from braids. The girls barely noticed him. Jacob was just the boss’s son, courier of tools and creams and the fuel of their labour – endless cups of tea. The girls danced to the radio, showed each other their new panties, freely discussed their periods and lovers, giggled at dirty jokes over his head.
Jacob liked the washing days better. In the yard behind the hair salon, under the jacaranda tree he sometimes climbed, the girls would set out the metal tubs, fill them up and do