just felt his sister’s fists rising off his ringing bones and his mother’s hands replacing them. Mummy lifted him, arms and legs scurrying in the air, and carried him over to his neatly made bed across the room, the smooth pond to his sister’s messy waterfall.
Tears, more of injustice than pain, starred Lee’s vision again. But he could still see Mummy’s smile lines, and he could smell her powdery sweat like wet clay, and he could sense the liveness of her freckles, those tiny eyes in her skin that made it seem like she really could see, and that let him see himself in her – that brown speckling exactly the colour of his skin. My golden boy, she called him…
‘My golden lion,’ she whispered now. ‘My sweet boy. I named you for my dear friend, a wonderful man named Lionel Heath.’
* * *
As the years passed, Lee learned to track the seasons of his father’s animosity. Sometimes, Dad would lob insults like bombs with timers. The words would tick along innocuously – ‘foolish’, ‘soft’, ‘small’ – only to explode later into their full meaning: that his son was stupid and weak, a runt and a disappointment. Dad’s cruelty was not restricted to Lee. He would sometimes be dismissive of Carol and sarcastic to Mum and rude to Ba Grace, dropping cutting remarks about ‘the ladies’ to Lee behind their backs. Lee was befuddled by this. He hated his sister and loved his mother and took Ba Grace for granted. The idea of treating them all with the same contempt made no sense. It especially wounded Lee to hear his father speak ill of his mother. Lee worshipped her. He wanted to be a doctor when he grew up, just so he could cure her blindness.
Lee only came to understand how tenuous his parents’ relationship was – and to suspect he had a part to play in that – when he was thirteen years old. At the time, he was attending Falcon, a boarding school in Zimbabwe. Lee had grown more confident since entering that parochial schoolboy world, with its petty rivalries and incidental friendships. Coloured and foreign both, Lee felt superior to the black Rhodies, the majority in Zim but the minority at Falcon, and to the bazungu with chips on their shoulders and doubts about whether they were really smart or just rich. All the students wanted to talk like the coloureds – calling howzit exay? or ’sup own as they slapped a hand into a grip – and to dress with their sloppy grace: half-rolled sleeves, neckties loose as nooses. Lee enjoyed being neither at the top nor the bottom – after all, even reversals of fortune pivot safely around the middle.
The September of his third year at Falcon, Lee’s father decided to make a holiday out of driving him to school for Michaelmas term. The family would cross the border at Chirundu, then swing down to see the ruins of Great Zimbabwe before dropping Lee off in Matabeleland. Tours of the ruins had dwindled as President Mugabe had started to make his stance on foreigners clear. So the Bandas were alone as they panted up the Hill Enclosure and mounted the rocky set of steps inside. Their guide, wearing threadbare hang-em-high trousers, no socks, and businessman shoes, walked ahead of them, sending facts over his shoulder.
‘This is the Great Stone House from which our nation, Zimbabwe, has taken its name. It was built in the eleventh century or somewhere there. You can see the stones are packed in this kind of ziggyzag pattern. No binding mortar.’
Lee looked around at the crumbling towers and corridors. The morning sun spoked through odd gaps here and there, rending the air with gold. Great Zimbabwe reminded him of his childhood hero, He-Man, and his fortress on the planet Eternia called Castle Grayskull – the same dull grey bricks, the same chaotic turrets and curving arches. Carol, standing next to him, her neon clothes casting tinted shadows on the walls, seemed bored. She stared at the guide, smacking bubblegum, her giant headphones humming like bees in a hive.
‘You can see from the shape,’ the guide said, ‘this place was a palace. It quite definitely housed many kings, who had many cattle and many wives.’ He grinned. ‘Not to say that they are the same.’ Only Dad laughed.
‘The poorer villagers lived on the outskirts of the city down there.’ The guide gestured to the valley. They turned. Carol grabbed Lee’s arm, her