compound dogs barking. She let her lip drop. Her left eye quivered. She watched herself decide.
* * *
To Jacob, the Hi-Fly often felt like a ship floating on a lake of boredom, its crew shifting about restlessly. The day wove and unwove itself across the salon in rays of light and shadow as the girls plaited and unplaited their own hair to pass the time. Any customer at all was welcomed in with giddy relief, especially the old white woman, Ba Sibilla. Every few weeks, she crouched in through the doorway, covered in a hijab’s worth of shawls, and one of the girls would rush off to fetch the boss. Mummy would hasten in to give Ba Sibilla a queen’s welcome, placing a stool for her feet, fixing her a cup of rooibos, radiating grace while Aunty Loveness sent the other customers grumbling away, their hair in various states of disarray.
As soon as the salon was empty, the girls would gather around and unveil Ba Sibilla, revealing the long white hair stringing down her body like a Nyau dancer’s raffia. The girls would grease her hair with the special olive oil she always brought with her and pull combs through it until it was a smooth, silvery sheet cascading over her. Mummy would carefully cut it, leaving wavy piles on the floor. When she was done, Ba Sibilla, a tiny creature without her hair, would shake herself off, wrap herself up, and make her exit.
Jacob sometimes helped the girls gather up the hair on the floor and carry it out to the yard behind the salon to distribute between three big buckets. Mummy would come out with her precious hair-dye kits, Clairol and Crème of Nature, black-market boxes with battered corners. She would pour the chemicals with their searing smell into the buckets, one for each colour: brown, red, yellow. Wearing thin plastic gloves, the salon girls would stir the hair with the dye for ten minutes, rinse it, then string it on the clothes line to dry. The next day, Jacob would wake to find it already wrapped in plastic for sale on the counter.
* * *
At first Sylvia was irritated by the way Lee clambered onto her like a boy, his fingers and tongue jabbing. But as soon as they were both naked and his erection made him serious, she loved him. She loved his worried face hanging over her, his frown lines twitching, his eyes elsewhere but somehow still present, his body fraught as he moved in and out of her. Tricking him with delay, she had tricked herself – the relenting was too sweet. It overwhelmed her with a feeling she’d never had before with a man: mutual desire. This sex-love spilled over to afterwards, when Lee became like a boy again – his damp head on her sternum, his lips parted and wet on her breast.
She let him sleep for a while. Then she carefully extricated herself from under him, replacing herself with a pillow, and tiptoed over to the dressing table. They were at his house in Thorn Park, in the master bedroom, his wife away with their son on a trip to Harare. Mrs Banda’s smell still hovered over this part of the room, a sugary musk, and the makings of beauty were laid out on her dressing table: bottles of foundation, a smidge lighter than the one Sylvia used on her own bleached skin; tubes of lipstick, pinker than the ones Sylvia used; mascara and eye make-up in green shades that would never work on Sylvia’s skin. Sylvia plonked herself naked in the dressing chair, pleased to feel Lee’s semen seeping out of her into the cushion. She rolled her hand over the tubes and bottles on the table, stirring them out of place.
In one corner, a red wig sat on a styrofoam head. A child’s hand had defaced the bust – it was pitted with bitty holes and graffitied with a felt-tip. Sylvia pulled her own plaits forward, feeling their brittle tug on her scalp, and ran her hand over the thin silky ropes. She had always assumed that Lee’s coloured wife would wear natural curls or maybe the straight perms that were so popular these days. It appeared that Lee’s two women had this in common – hair like a pet that you buy and groom and comb. Sylvia reached out to finger Mrs Banda’s wig and saw the reflection of the man in bed behind her. Lee’s eyes were