the far end of the veranda, slapping varieties of dead animal onto the smoking brai. Isa pulled up a low wooden stool. He reached down to pat her on the head in welcome but she ducked, ignoring his eyes and his chuckle. She didn’t like how the sweet scent of his soap mingled with the smell of the burning meat. He was singing softly under his breath:…waona manje wayamba kuluka…Probably some stupit song from the shebeen, Isa scoffed, repeating in her head a condemnation she had heard a thousand times from Ba Enela, her nanny.
There are three kinds of people in the world: those who, when they hear someone else singing, unconsciously start to sing along; those who remain respectfully or irritably silent; and those who start to sing something else. Isa began warbling the Zambian national anthem. She heard it every day at 1700 hours, when the TV came on, as the brightly coloured bars gave way to an image of soldiers standing at full salute. Stand and sing of Zambia, proud and free. Land of work and joy and unity. Ba Simon smiled down at her and gave up on his song, shaking his head as he flipped steaks he wouldn’t get to eat.
Ash from the brai drifted and spun like the children playing in the garden. Isa watched their gangly limbs with a detached revulsion, her elbows on her knees, her cheeks in her hands. Stephie was sitting in a lawn chair, depriving a grown-up of a seat, reading a book. It was Isa’s D’Aulaires! Scandalised, Isa glared at Stephie for a while and then decided to forgive her – her nose had such a perfect slope. Unlike Winnifred’s, which was enormous and freckled, almost as disgusting as the snot bubbling from Ahmed’s brown button.
Those two were trying to play croquet under the not-so-watchful eye of Aunt Greta. Younger than most of the adults at the Corsale parties, Aunt Greta always spent the day chain-smoking and downing watery Pimm’s and looking through everyone, as if she were endlessly making and unmaking some terribly important decision. Isa found Aunt Greta beautiful but looking at her for too long made Isa feel there were too many things that she didn’t yet know.
Emma, who had cried about Doll, was all smiles now, sitting cross-legged on the ground by herself. Her eyes were slightly crossed as she observed something – a ladybird, it looked like – crawling along her hand. Emma was so small. Isa tried to remember being that small, but the weight of her elbows on her knees made it hard to imagine. The ladybird was even smaller. What was it like to be that small? But anyway, how could Emma have been afraid of Doll, Isa wondered, when she clearly wasn’t afraid of insects, which everyone knew could bite and spread disease and were far more disgusting?
Isa had once retched at the sight of a stray cockroach in the sink. It had been a pretend retch. She’d heard from a girl in the class above her at the Italian School that cockroaches were supposed to be disgusting. But horribly, Isa’s pretend retch had become real and had burned her throat and then she’d felt ashamed at having been so promptly punished by her body for lying. Enough time had passed by now to transform the feeling of disgust at herself into a genuine disgust about small, crawling creatures. She watched as Emma turned her cupped hand slowly like the Queen of England waving at people on TV. The ladybird spiralled down Emma’s wrist, seeking edges, finding curves. Emma giggled.
Isa swallowed and looked away and saw a clutch of boys crouching in the corner of the garden near the low white wall. They were probably playing with worms or cards or something. Isa watched them idly. Every once in a while, the four boys would stand and move a little further away, then huddle down again. Isa grew curious. Were they following a trail? They inched along the garden wall towards where it broke off by a corner of the house. Just around that corner was the guava tree Isa climbed every afternoon after school. The boys stood and stepped and crouched once more. Isa grew suspicious.
She got up, absently brushing the ashes from her marigold dress, streaking it with grey. She looked down at the stains and bit her lip and squeezed one hand with the other, caught between her resolve to do a good deed and her