open. She gazed at his face in the mirror, at her own face, at their reflections above the clutter of make-up. They were both so beautiful. How strange that such love should be born in the midst of such trifles.
* * *
When a real man walked into the Hi-Fly with whichever galifriend he was treating to a hairdo that day, the salon girls turned sweet and fey, cooing softly as Mr Mistah handed the cash over to Loveness. Of course, as soon as he went to wait at the shebeen next door, Miss Galifriend became just another head, pulled this way and that. Teeth were sucked, eyebrows raised over the negritude of her hair. Her head was subjected to a swarm of fingers like brown mice nibbling at her scalp. By the time Mr Mistah got back, reeking of beer, Miss Galifriend was exhausted, eyes dazed under a shiny forehead. The girls chimed sugary praises.
‘Now you see, she has hair that talks! Ati zee-zee-zee…’
Miss Galifriend tossed her head feebly to swish the fine, straight strands, hers or someone else’s.
‘Me, mine is KWY-YET,’ Mr Mistah said, patting the archipelago of baldness on his crown. ‘Instead of zee-zee-zee, it just says Zee. Nothing!’
The girls fluttered and tinkled. Jacob seethed in his corner, wanting to burn it all down. The only other person who received such treatment was Uncle Lee. With his bold jaw and muscles like snakes twining his bones, Uncle Lee would swing his enormous presence into the salon, trailed by the scent of expensive aftershave. He’d kiss Jacob’s mother on the top of her head. Then he’d sit with legs sprawled and regale them with stories of Jo’burg and Addis and Nairobi – the places his work as a doctor had taken him – or enquire about the salon girls, their ‘habits’, mostly.
Jacob’s mother gave curt answers to his questions but the corners of her mouth betrayed her. She let him swab her workers’ cheeks once, the girls giggling awkwardly around the long Q-Tips. Jacob had participated too, just to have something to do. Uncle Lee sometimes brought his son with him, a skinny coloured boy named Joseph, who sat in a corner, reading a book, wrinkling his nose at the smells in the salon. Jacob wrinkled his nose back, at the book. Bored as he was, he refused to play with that apamwamba boy, and he did not take kindly to another competitor for his mother’s attention.
* * *
A few months into their affair, Lee’s head between Sylvia’s breasts, he turned his head up to her and asked about her mother’s condition. Perhaps because he was a doctor, he always asked after people’s health – her son’s, Loveness’s, the girls’. He had even brought a needle to one of their early dates at Chicken Inn. A vaccination, he had said, though it seemed like he was drawing blood rather than dispensing medicine. An odd ‘gift’, but Sylvia had just chalked it up to the ways that men expressed affection to women like her – always a little protective, always a little violent. She was surprised to hear that Lee knew about her mother’s crying, though. It turned out he had heard about it from Joseph, who had heard about it from Jacob.
‘Jacob?’ she frowned. ‘He doesn’t know about my mother. They’ve never met.’
‘So she cries constantly? She has depression?’
‘Ah! No. That’s just what you Westernised doctors like to think.’ She pinched his arm.
‘Ow!’ he flinched, grinning. ‘I actually think she has an autoimmune disorder.’
‘Auto-what?’
‘Autoimmunity. It’s when the system that protects the body turns against it, attacks it. Tears wash out foreign bodies – like dirt – from the eye but it can go too far. Your mother’s condition might be due to genetic abnormalities—’
‘Ya,’ she said coldly. ‘She’s even blind from this disease. But it’s just – she chose that.’
Lee’s complicated words always made Sylvia feel bad about not finishing school. She stared at his arm where she’d pinched him. His skin was so light that she had left red marks. She felt self-conscious about the skin-lightening cream she had been using for years on her face and neck and arms. Those parts of her body were taupe, but all the rest was brown, the contrast as sharp as tea with and without milk.
‘You’re saying the heartbreak queen of Kalingalinga is faking it? Crying on cue?’
‘Ha! You should go and tell her that,’ Sylvia laughed. ‘Loveness says that if you are going to insult your mamafyala, you may