the washing together. Church and radio songs bounced around the air, notes like motes. Brown fingers sloshed about in the frothy water. There were always several mumbly conversations going between the girls, who stored wooden pegs between their teeth as they pinned clothes to the line. Jacob loved those pegs, their carved rivets, the mechanics of their snap and hold. He’d clip his lips shut with them and waddle around like a duck, to make the girls laugh, to make his mother notice.
‘Too nice,’ she would chuckle. ‘A child that shooshes itself? I should have named you Chongo!’ Then she would kiss his head and go and stand next to Aunty Loveness, lean against her, their fingers linked like children.
Yes, at Hi-Fly Haircuttery & Designs Ltd, Jacob was around many people, but not necessarily with them. This was one kind of loneliness. The other kind came at night, when his mother was out with Aunty Loveness. Jacob would drag the dry linens off the line and press them with the hot iron that had given off an eggy smell ever since he took it apart to see how it worked. He would fold alone, pinning sheets to his chest with his chin, draping them over his forearms, hands moving together and apart like ground control for air traffic.
* * *
Lee Banda had always been beautiful. It was clear even in his baby pictures, where his lashes curled more voluptuously than his mother’s. This beauty meant that Lee knew himself only through other people, who held up mirrors to him, different ones depending on the person. Women on the street wore their mirrors in their eyes and shiny teeth: Pretty man. Chops. Fit. His guy friends carried mirrors in shades of envious green. His father’s mirror was cloudy, his mother’s a sheer plane of gold. His son’s mirror reflected his body parts in gargantuan proportion: shoulders beyond the frame, a bulbous Adam’s apple, massive thighs on either side of an equine member. His wife’s mirror reflected him exactly as he was.
Only the mirror that Sylvia Mwamba carried was in motion: it spun around in her long fingers, alternating images of his naked body and hers so rapidly that they seemed to merge together like a Kenyan sculpture or a Picasso painting: his eyes above her nose, her breast bulging from his stomach, his toe protruding from her vagina, a perverse quadralabial mouth. It was not beautiful, this image of their mating, but it was the picture of himself that most fascinated Lee, perhaps because it had not yet taken place. Or had it? He had mulled over that first alleged encounter between them. He had checked his records and found nothing. Maybe if they had sex now, it would come back to him, like when you retrace your steps to find a lost thing. But Sylvia was making him wait.
One time, he thought he remembered it. On a visit to the salon to scope out test subjects, he had lit a cigarette and she’d scolded him.
‘You are busy burning fake hair, why can’t I burn nature’s leaves?’
‘Do you not see these wigs on display? I cannot be selling hair that smells like old men.’
‘I’m not old,’ Lee huffed. He was thirty-one.
‘You’re not young, either.’
‘You’re six years older than me!’
‘That’s not the point. Saat. Put it out.’ She sucked her teeth and walked off.
‘Sylvia!’ Lee called her back to the argument.
Still moving away, she glanced over her shoulder and answered vaguely: ‘Anh?’ And in that moment, Lee felt he recognised her. Not from these past few months – not from his visits to the salon, their rendezvous at the shebeen, their lunch dates at Chicken Inn. No, Lee felt he recognised her from before. Behind that vision of a retreating shape, calling to him as a child might, was a memory. Of the first time they’d had sex? Ten years ago, on his birthday, as she claimed? Maybe it had happened – that difficult year before his wedding had been a druggy blur. Maybe it was déjà vu. Either way, it changed shape as soon as he grabbed it, like one of the morphing stone animals from his dreams.
Lee Banda was not a man to be swayed by visions. He needed subjects for his lab and Sylvia would give him access – her salon was clearly a front for a brothel. These were precisely the women who might have the genetic mutation he sought. As he courted her, he took samples