into the compound. He inched into its busy inner recesses until there was simply no more road to traverse. Sibilla paid his exorbitant price as Naila stepped out, eyes wide. Sibilla joined her, breathing in the familiar smells of the compound. She felt comfortable here, among the poor. She understood the constant complaining that surrounded them like the droning of insects. They were right: it was all just luck, just circumstance.
She herself had grown up a servant in a tiny cabin in Italy only to end up a bwana in a big house in Zambia. Naila had grown up here in ‘the Third World’, but in a sheltered part of it. When she wasn’t at school, she was at home with her sisters, helping their mother sell the dross of their bodies. It made sense that the girl would be skittish in Kalingalinga, her eyes darting and her shoes stumbling on rickety boards and broken concrete as they picked their way towards its centre.
Boys and girls dressed in faded school uniforms and salaula strolled by. Old women sat in the shade, shouting to each other as they adjusted their chitenges under spatulate breasts. Young women walked with babies on their backs and buckets on their heads, the water tower in the distance carrying its oblong crown with equal grace.
Sibilla used a swatch of her hair to chase the flies orbiting her head and some of her locks tumbled from their fastenings and dragged in the scummy water. As she watched her granddaughter duck her head bravely under wood and metal beams up ahead, Sibilla felt something stir in her chest – her internal spin. She hadn’t felt it for decades. She sensed that same energy in this downy brown sapling of a girl. Naila: bright and curious and separate enough from her family that she could be pried away from her fearsome mother and that fascistic business.
‘Look,’ said Sibilla, pointing at the pink building with HI-FLY painted on it in green letters. As they walked up to it, Naila looked at her quizzically. Sibilla smiled and took her hand.
‘Odi?’ she called out the Zambian greeting as they stepped inside. ‘Anyone home?’
Blood, blood, glorious blood! Nothing quite like it for sating the gut. Don’t mistake our thirst for a catholic taste. In fact, it is rather selective. Only our females imbibe the red stuff, and only to nourish our ova. Nor are we wanton when it comes to bloodlust, just opportunistic and savvy. The more you brood and wallow about, the more we tend to devour you.
We have a hundred eyes, we smell your scent plume, we sense your heat as we near you. You might hear us sing as we wing through the dark, alighting on knuckles and ankles, but our feet are so tiny, we land without notice, the gentlest of natural surgeons. We use the thinnest, most delicate needles – our labia curl, our fascicle pokes, our stylets slide, then slice.
Counted in grams, the boon is a droplet, but it weighs up to three times our mass. Heavy, unsteady, it’s not easy to fly but the risk of lingering is tenfold. Ducking the swat of a hand or a tail, we aim for a vertical surface. We hang there a while, and in just a few minutes, we’ve done our deft haematology, dripping away the watery broth and storing the solids for later. These we feed to our babies in need and thus you become our wet nurses.
And what do we leave you in kind recompense? A salivary trace, a gum to stop your blood clotting. It’s harmless but foreign, and your body is foolish, so it attacks itself in dismay. Our gratuitous gift becomes curse in effect: it sparks a histamine frenzy. This is the curse of keeping too close, of binding and holding and steeping. To stay is to spoil; to settle, to stagnate; to protect, to become an ouroboros. Blood’s thicker than water, too thick by far – it clots and it scabs and it turns on itself in a heartbeat.
Trust our biology, it teaches you better. If you grip too tight, you’ll lose the fight. If you stay in one place, you’ll fester and waste. When young ones grow full, they must drift from the pool, lest it turn to a watery grave.
The word generations (from the verb generare, from genus, gener-, ‘stock’ or ‘race’) is related to genocide, genre and gender – they all come from *gene-, ‘to give birth’. Isabella’s a brooder