had gone straight from Falcon into med school at UZ in Harare. It was the 1990s and Zim was on the brink, the newspapers clamouring about strikes and land and Mugabe’s lugubrious persistence. But Zim was always on the brink, after all, and life for a wealthy émigré remained eminently liveable. Lee continued to take comfort in his half-belonging, and started to enjoy his newly clear skin and towering stature and easy intelligence – he had finally come into his genetic inheritances. Med school itself was a blur of booze and blow and low-burning lights. Lee barely ate and went booting at Rumours or Circus and took his exams on three hours of sleep.
Testing his endurance became addictive, a way to empty himself so that he felt only the energy of pure skill – the haptic knowledge of syringe, scalpel, intubation – singing through his nerves. The same edgy emptiness possessed him when he took women to bed. Lee chuffed them like a machine, pulled them like a machine, fucked them like a machine, and was impassive as a machine afterwards. His buddies called him Automatic, or Vicious. Even after he met the beautiful stewardess on that Zambia Airways flight home to Lusaka, Lee kept pulling chicks.
One night, a few months after he and Thandi had started dating, Lee took a posh girl named Yvonne back to his studio flat in Harare. They sat on his leather sofa and drank Zima and smoked Pall Malls as R. Kelly’s perverse, practised yowling issued from the stereo, cajoling them to bump and grind. Lee started a gentle snog, cupping Yvonne’s face in his hands. He leisurely slid one hand up her shirt, the other down her skirt, expertly unlocking that complex apparatus – a clothed woman.
Within minutes, Yvonne was naked on the sticky sofa and Lee was hovering over her, thumbing her clit, mumbling at her nipples, the three springy protrusions hardening in tandem as her breath caught and released. She moaned his name – Lee, Lee! – her British accent evident even in that single syllable. He kept one eye on her breast, trying to stay erect for the big event, but his other eye kept darting to her chin. His stubble had rubbed her make-up off, revealing a rash of raised purple bumps there, almost like burns or plaques. Before he knew it, Lee was examining Yvonne like a patient, scanning through the encyclopedia of conditions in his mind as he brought her to orgasm. Finally, just as she came, he landed on a diagnosis: Kaposi’s sarcoma.
* * *
Thandi fell for Lee because he was a body that handled and understood bodies. And then she fell for his mother. They met on a sunny August day in Handsworth Park. After a brief introduction, Lee’s father, Ronald – a short, dark man who smelled of expensive aftershave – left Thandi and Agnes to have tea in the garden.
‘So. Tendeeway,’ said Agnes. ‘Tell me about yourself.’
‘Um, well, I grew up in Harare. My dad works for the national electric company—’
‘No, not your father.’ Agnes tilted her head. ‘I asked you to tell me about you.’
Thandi paused, then laughed. ‘You know, no one has ever asked me to do that.’
‘Really?’ Agnes smiled, her bottom lip catching on a big tooth. ‘How perfectly strange!’ She was pouring tea into a cup, a finger hooked on the rim to check the level.
‘These teacups are very pretty,’ Thandi said, then hesitated. ‘I mean, nice.’
‘Are they? Won’t you describe them for me?’ asked Agnes. ‘As you see them.’
‘Oh. Um, they have these ridges going up. Like something pouring up, like shooting up…’
Agnes traced her cup with her fingers and nodded. ‘Like a fountain?’
‘A fountain, yes!’ said Thandi. ‘Like in Trafalgar Square.’
‘Trafalgar Square? In London?’ Agnes sounded surprised.
‘Yes, my sister lives there,’ Thandi explained. ‘I pass through on stopovers. I love Trafalgar Square!’ She found herself babbling about the little white pigeons and the big black lions and the strangeness of a place like that in the middle of London – at once so regal and so public.
‘Did you go to the National Gallery?’
‘Yes! I love the paintings by Mr Turner—’ Thandi hesitated again, then went on. ‘The sky and the sea and the light. The light especially. It looks like a body and…’
‘How remarkable. Like a body, you say?’
‘Yes, you know how they say “a body of light”. An angel maybe?’ Thandi tried to tame the thought. But Agnes pressed Thandi about how exactly light was like