Pause as the soft spine stiffens.
Not too long! There are threats all around! It’s a cesspool, this puddle of Eden: birds and bacteria, fishes and ants, nematodes, whirligigs, lizards. One of our species, Toxorhynchites – their larvae even eat one another.
Sylvia knows well, love can be hell: familial, romantic, maternal. Oh, lovers are murder! They’ll cast you aside, they’ll run you out quick as quicksilver!
Isabella
1984
Isabella was eleven years old before she learned that she was white – white in the sense of being a thing, as opposed to not being a thing. It wasn’t that Isa didn’t know that her parents were white. Of course with her mother, this was largely a matter of conjecture, as a layer of dark hair kept her face a mystery. Though as she aged, this blanket of hair would turn grey, then silver, then white, a definite movement towards translucence, Isa could never properly make out her mother’s facial features. More distinct were her legs, the tufts of fur running like a mane down each thick shin, and her laugh like large sheets of paper being ripped, then crumpled. Isa’s father, the Colonel, was white, but it often seemed more like pink and grey were battling it out on his face, especially when he was drunk.
Isa’s parents had settled into life in Lusaka the way most expats do. They drank a lot. Every weekend was another house party, that neverending house party that has been swatting mosquitoes and swimming in gin and quinine for more than a century. The Corsales hosted their sundowners at their one-storey bungalow in Longacres, under a veranda with generous shade. Isa’s mother floated around in a billowy boubou, sending the servants for refills and dropping in on every conversation, distributing laughter and ease amongst her guests. Purple-skinned peanuts that had been soaked in salt water and roasted in a pan until they were grey cooled and shifted with a whispery sound in wooden bowls. There was soon a troop of Mosi beer bottles scattered around, marking the tables with their damp semicircular hoof prints. Full or empty? The amber glass was so dark, you had to lift each bottle to find out. Cigars and tobacco pipes puffed their foul sweetness into the air. Darts and croquet balls went in loopy circles around their targets, loopier as the day wore on.
The Colonel sat in his permanent chair just beyond the shade of the veranda, dampening with gin the thatch that protruded from his nostrils, occasionally snorting at some private or overheard joke. He was only in his fifties, but his skin was already creased like trousers that had been worn too long. Budding from his arms were moles so large and detached they looked ready to tumble off and roll away. And, as though his wife’s condition had become contagious, his ears had been taken over by hair – the calyx whorl of each had sprouted a bouquet of whiskers.
The Colonel liked to drink from the same glass the entire day, always his favourite glass, decorated with the red, white and green hexagons of a football. As his drunkenness progressed, the glass grew misty from being so close to his open mouth, then slimy as his saliva glands loosened, then muddy as dirt and sweat mixed on his hand. At the end of the evening, when Isa was sent to fetch her father’s stein, she often found it beneath his chair under a swarm of giddy ants, the football spattered like it had been used for a rainy-day match.
* * *
Isa had no siblings, and when the other expat children were around, she was frantic and listless in turns. Today, she began with frantic. Leaving the grown-ups outside, propping their feet on wooden stools and scratching at their sunburns, she marched three of the more hapless children inside the house and down the long corridor to her bedroom. There, she introduced them to her things. First to her favourite book, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Second to the live, broken-winged bird she had found in the driveway two days earlier. Third, and finally, to Doll. Bird and Doll lived together in an open cardboard box. Isa stood next to it with her chin lifted, her hand pointing down.
‘This is Doll. She comes from America. She has an Amurrican accent.’
Due to the scarcity of imported goods in Lusaka in the early 1980s, Isa was allowed only one doll at a time. This one had already gone the way of all