see the name of the bus painted in red on the window – CHE GUAVA – and the messages scrawled in the dust coating it: JESUS LOVES ME, I LOVE MARY, MARY LOVES KASONDE.
Daddiji honked and indicated, then sped up to overtake the bus. As they drove by, they heard the humming swarm – it was a song, each note swelling to capacity before it tipped into the next. Daddiji told the girls that the people on the bus were singing a hymn to ward off danger and mourn the dead. He pointed at the valley below, at the metal frames burnt black or rusted red there – a graveyard, a warning. Naila stared at the glinting guardrail, at the bends and gaps in it, until it slunk back into the ground.
Once they were past the minibus, Daddiji had to slow again behind a lorry struggling up the hill. Its bed was a barn: a cage of wooden planks brimming with sacks and crates and a chicken coop. A how-now-brown cow was pressed against the back slats, moaning loudly as the lorry climbed. Daddiji pointed and laughed. The girls laughed because he was laughing. Mother tutted. Daddiji accompanied the cow’s moans with an excitable ‘whoaah…whoaah…’ The girls joined in – ‘whoaah…whoaah…’
It happened all at once. The slats of the lorry splintered, then broke. The cow tumbled out of the truck, landing awkwardly on its front legs. Even with the closed windows, it was a horrible sound – nearly human. The girls shrieked as Daddiji swerved sharply off the road. The tyres tumbled off the tarmac onto pebbles and dirt. The Mazda skwerched to a halt, its front bumper nuzzling a bush. As always, emergency bred hierarchy: everyone fell into place.
‘Wait!’ Daddiji barked. ‘Don’t open the windows.’
Mother turned a stern face to the girls to reinforce his message. Naila squeezed Gabriella’s hand. Lilliana stroked Contessa’s hair. Behind their catching breath, they could hear the groaning beast and the heedless lorry chugging up the hill. Dust spun, surrounding them in cinnamon light, then drifted left, giving the illusion that the car was sheering right. Two men emerged from the haze. They were stumbling, dragging the unconscious cow between them. Framed by the windscreen, it was like a cartoon. One man’s t-shirt was bullseyed with sweat. The other man, holding the thrashing tail end, paused to wipe sweat from his face. They vanished into the bushes and re-emerged on the other side, an awkwardly hobbling mass.
‘Looky-look!’ Daddiji roared with laughter. ‘That was quick. At least someone got a supper out of it!’
Mother glared at him. He kissed her forehead, then manoeuvred the car back onto the road. To cheer his girls up, Daddiji launched into a story about the men and the cow, about their ‘tribe’, which he said lived at the bottom of the hill and caught all the things that rolled down it. The girls moaned.
‘No! Daddiji, snot possible.’
‘That doesn’t even make sense,’ Naila muttered.
‘Okay-okay,’ his head see-sawed in the rearview mirror. ‘You don’t believe Daddiji.’
‘Ugh, Daddiji.’
‘Just tell it, Daddiji.’
‘Rightee-o. Once upon a time…’
In Daddiji’s story, the tribe was called the Hilly Bottoms and one day, a lorry had stalled halfway up it and the driver had gone for help. As soon as he left, the Hilly Bottoms gathered at the base of the hill and deliberated. Then a breeze blew and the doors of the lorry swung open, just like arms opening for a hug. Twelve soft-drink bottles fell out. Some of them burst, making a sticky sharp carpet, but others went rolling unharmed down to the Hilly Bottoms, who cupped their hands with their knuckles to the ground to catch them.
The next time a lorry stalled, the Hilly Bottoms were blessed with bales of wheat. Then Bata shoes. Popcorn – blue, yellow and pink like at the Agricultural Show. Bunches of bananas. Ears of chimanga. Dartboards rolled down the hill, then rocked onto their split faces. Shoe polish. Mattresses. Daddiji never got around to the moral of the story – about opportunity? Ingenuity? Things coming to those who wait? Instead, he fell into a rhythm of naming the things that tumbled down from the lorries that paused on the slope of the Hilly Bottoms. Buckets. Marmite. Watches. Chickens. The girls sang along, adding to his list.
They drove east, away from the orange sun. It rotted behind them, leaving pulpy stains in its place. They reached Chipata just as night fell. By the time they had got through customs and