sides like the unmortared bricks of Great Zimbabwe was a cassette tape labelled with his name.
* * *
Thandiwe was not immediately charmed by Lionel Banda. It was at least four more flights before she could even take him seriously. He was younger than he looked – at eighteen, a year younger than her – and in his first term of med school at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare. He wasn’t quite as stupid as his jokes suggested. She attributed his poor sense of humour to laziness at first, then realised that he reverted to boarding school behaviour when he was nervous, falling back on chummy banter and rough-and-tumble antics to cover it up. It was only bearable because he was so handsome.
Lee stole a first kiss from her in the middle of the third flight – not in the kitchenette or the lavatory but, humiliatingly, from his seat. When she leaned over him to clear his tray, he brushed his lips past hers, light and quivering and quick. If it weren’t for the maroon smudge that her lipstick left at the corner of his mouth and his miserable grin afterward, she might have dismissed it as an accident, like the brush to her bum the day they had met. He still denied that it had been his hand.
‘It was Dr Phiri!’ he laughed. ‘That lecherous old rat across the aisle!’
‘Don’t you mean Mr Phiri, PhD?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Some doctor.’
Once it began in earnest, Brenda gave snide compliments about their affair, saying it was ‘destined’ – again, because of their skin colour. Yes, Lee and Thandi were both ‘coloured’, but not the same kind of coloured. Lee was Zambian, with a black father and a white mother. He had grown up in Handsworth Park, a suburb in Lusaka where university lecturers lived with their families, and was well off enough to rent his own flat in Harare. Thandi was Zimbabwean, a second-generation coloured: her parents were both goffals, her mother slightly darker than her father and with red hair and green eyes that she’d passed on to Thandi and her sister. Thandi had grown up in a middle-class coloured neighbourhood, Arcadia, as insular as Harare’s white enclaves. After decades of oppression during the colonial period – denied citizenship, their pay docked, housed in Coloured Quarters – Rhodesian coloureds had turned inward, generations of genetic mingling yielding a population with light skin, emerald eyes, bronze hair and freckles.
To wit, Thandi had grown up with plenty of handsome coloured dudes with imported clothes and squeaky tackies and slick moves, fly butahs who took their beauty for granted and did all the usual coloured guy things – car races at homegrown tracks, bottle-service at night clubs, sundowners at brais. In short, Lee thought his body and mind were unique; Thandi knew they were not. His looks, his confidence, even the precious way he cupped her breasts and placed a pillow under her bum when they fucked: none of this practised connoisseurship appealed to her.
Thandi was interested in bodies, though, just not in the way you might imagine. She had been having sex since she was fifteen – everyone started that young back then, even if no one talked about it – and she had always been careful. She had used condoms until one of the Zambia Airways girls helped her get a diaphragm from a free clinic in London. It was messy but its curved shape – its bendy inversion – appealed to Thandi. She was an up-close person. She zoomed in. She traced the lines between the moles on Lee’s chest and pressed the nobs on the pads of his fingers. She often asked him questions about anatomy. She liked his medical mind, the cold intensity that entered his eyes when he clicked into that mode of abstraction.
To Thandi, bodies were shapes. Her love for maths had ended in Form II with geometry but there was a parallel universe where she had become an artist – except she was no good at drawing either, and had never tried to paint. On stopovers in London to visit her sister, she would push through her jet lag and take the Tube to visit the Tate in Millbank. A battered, pen-streaked guide hanging limply from her fingers, she would stand too close to the paintings and sculptures, then step slowly backward, letting the shapes – the smooth intricate bodies of humans and flowers and fruits – fill her frame of vision.
* * *
Lee