fact, have to marry her fancy coloured doctor? It had been a year and she was pretty sure she was in love with Lee Banda. She’d met his parents. But they were both still so young. The thought of marrying him made Thandi feel like there was something empty and frenzied in her chest, a bee in a tin cup.
The LUN–HRE flight that day felt apocalyptic. The lavatory was awash in disintegrating tissue. Passengers dropped ice in the aisle and snorfled their food and snotted through napkins. A newborn issued a piercing wail that made Thandi brim with self-pity. Brenda had shrewdly crammed a closet with passengers’ extra baggage and pocketed the fee. The closet door wouldn’t shut, but Brenda ignored its thin racket, flipping calmly through her magazine, cleaning behind her manicure with a toothpick, cooing over the intercom. Somehow, this glib consistency, Brenda’s same-old-same-old reaction to the fact that they would all soon be fired, bothered Thandi the most.
When she let herself into Lee’s flat in Harare that night, she dropped her bag on the trashy floor, took off her standard-issue green pumps, went to the bedroom and lay on the unmade bed. She fell asleep fully clothed. She woke in the dark. She knew Lee was still on his rounds, but she felt annoyed. He needed to come home so that she could refuse his comforting words, then let him seduce her. She padded around the flat, judging its blatant maleness. A stiff leather sofa, a scratched glass table, clashing electronic equipment. No light, no warmth, no round bodies or upward movement. In the fridge, she found two Tuskers and a can of rust-coloured tomato paste spotted with fuzzy white mould. She sneered at Lee’s boxers on the floor. She spitefully reset his alarm clock. It didn’t take long to find the book.
It was A4 size with a flimsy blue cover, like an exercise book from primary school. Inside was a list of names, all women’s names, and dates both old and new. Thandi scanned mechanically, pausing only once, when she saw a name she recognised. It was her own, starting last year and appearing with more frequency amidst the others as the months went on. Her heart bobbing at the base of her throat, she put the notebook back and sat on the sofa, waiting.
Lee came in a couple of hours later, wearing scrubs, holding his keys and a file that said CONFIDENTIAL. Thandi began to accuse him, the volume and pitch of her voice rising steadily. Her jealousy, like his, was not real. It was an idea of jealousy, a tic picked up from films and friends. What she really felt was humiliation, like when he’d kissed her in front of everyone on the plane. How could he have exposed them like this? The stakes felt even higher now that she had lost her job. She didn’t breathe a word of that, though.
When she was done shouting, she slid on her green pumps, picked up her bag and strode to the front door.
‘Thandi, wait,’ Lee called out. ‘I need to talk to you about this.’
She turned to look at him. His eyes were on the file in his lap. His brow was crumpled, his lips curved down. This was the cringing face he wore around his father, as if his greedy entitlement had been replaced by fear. Disgusted, Thandi turned back around and walked out the door.
1996
‘I can’t believe you’ve never partied in the bush, man,’ Scholie said in his mongrel accent, a voice like flipping through satellite TV stations. ‘How long have you been in Livingstone? Six months?’
He touched the small of Thandiwe’s back as he helped her onto the first bench of the Land Rover. He tucked a blanket around her like she was a child and she thought he might kiss her forehead with those plump lips of his. Instead he patted her knee, jumped in the driver’s seat up front and started the engine. It thrumped like a dying animal, then accelerated to a screechy hum. They jerked forward.
‘Oops,’ Scholie said in his own voice and smiled back at her.
Thandi shivered and off they went. He drove out of the lodge and onto the smooth new tarmac, then along an older road pocked with potholes. After a few minutes, he turned the Land Rover onto the dirt road of the game park and the rumble of the tyres gave way to an uneven crunching, pebbles raucously raining up against the undercarriage.