willing her eyes to adapt until they could just make out three dark figures sitting in a corner. There was a young woman, younger than the one outside; an old woman, who was mumbling something; and Chanda, who sat cross-legged, fiddling with an ancient cloth doll with a familiar shape. Isa worked out that it was the faceless ghost of the doll who had preceded Doll. She felt a little shocked that it should be here then even more shocked that she had forgotten it to such a fate. She stepped towards Chanda with a notion of accusing her.
Only then did Isa see the baby sitting on the young woman’s lap – she moved closer – and sucking on the woman’s breast. Isa knew about breastfeeding, but she’d never seen it in action before. She couldn’t tell whether the baby was a boy or a girl. It had short hair and was naked but for a cloth nappy. Isa wanted to turn away but she couldn’t stop looking at how the child’s lips moved and how the breast hung, oblong and pleated like a rotten pawpaw. The women were still deliberating, clearly about her. Chanda, who was responsible for this intrusion, for this straying, sat staring at Isa, absently twisting the old doll’s arm as if to detach it.
The baby began to cry. It did not wail – this was an intelligent sobbing, like it wanted something. Isa stared at it and realised it was staring back. Its mother lifted it and bounced it on her lap. After a moment, the old woman started laughing, a rattling laugh that devolved into a cough and then rose back up again to the heights of gratified amusement. She said something to the woman. The woman laughed too. Chanda joined in with a forced high-pitched trill.
‘What?’ Isa asked.
They kept laughing. The woman stood, holding the baby so it faced Isa. She gazed at its sobbing face, which was distorted with wet concentric wrinkles, like its nose was a dropped stone rippling a black pool. The baby shrieked, wriggling its arms and kicking its legs. Was she supposed to take it in her arms? The room echoed with laughter and weeping. Was she supposed to laugh too?
‘What?’ Isa demanded.
The laughing woman began shoving the baby towards Isa’s face in little jerks.
‘What?! What?!’ Isa shouted.
The baby’s face came so close to hers that their noses touched.
‘Muzungu,’ the woman said.
As if at the flip of a switch, Isa burst into tears. She turned and ran from the building, tripping down the steps in her haste, her breath hitching on every corner of her young-girl chest. As she ran past the mulberry trees, the beat of her feet released a flock of birds from their boughs. They fluttered past her and flickered above her bobbing head, their wings a jumble of parentheses writing themselves across the sky.
* * *
The night brought the breeze and the mosquitoes. The guests waned in number and spirit. Isa’s mother planted bristling kisses upon their cheeks and sent them off to navigate Lusaka’s roads and their drunken dramas on their own. The Colonel was still in the garden, dozing in his chair. One hand clasped his football glass to his belly, the other dangled from the armrest, swaying like a hanging man. In the old days, his wife had dragged him to bed herself. But over the years, his boozing had swollen more than just his ankles. These days, she just ordered Ba Simon to do it.
‘A-ta-se! I’m not carrying that cornuto to bed. The man’s earlobes are fat,’ she grumbled, leaving her husband to the night, the breeze and the mosquitoes.
Isa wandered around the yard, yawning, picking up Mosi bottles of various weight under Ba Simon’s direction. She hadn’t told anyone about the dead puppy yet, or about the residents of the servants’ quarters – did they realise how many people lived there? – or about the laughter and the baby and how she had been named. Isa felt tired and immensely old, old in a different way from the times she played teacher to the other children. Old like her father was old, a shaggy shambling old, an old where you’d lost the order of things and felt so sad that you simply had to embrace the loss, reassuring yourself with the lie that you hadn’t really wanted all that order to begin with.
She collapsed on the grass beside the Colonel’s chair. The wicker creaked in rhythm with his snoring.