like a chicken in the rain.’
Scholie sounded more Zambian when he spoke to her, his accent shorn of the twangs and twirls he’d accumulated over years of trying to make his meaning clear to foreigners. Thandi smiled. He would like it that she had been so helpless in front of him. Their ongoing joke was that she was Kariba Dam and he was the water and, if he persevered, she would one day open her floodgates.
The white girl was looking at Thandi. Or through her: the girl’s gaze was thick with drink and she scratched absently at the tattered bracelets strung on her wrist like scraps on a clothes line. Her hair was ragged as the flames and almost the same colour. Thandi reached across Scholie’s legs to introduce herself. The girl gave her forgettable name in an American accent and as she clasped her hand, Thandi caught a whiff of her: tea biscuits on a tin plate in the midday sun.
The wind lifted, making the bonfire holler and the tents sound like clapping hands. Scholie and the girl resumed chatting. There was nothing for Thandi to do but stare at the fire’s gradual, unruly death, and eavesdrop. Among the tourists, it seemed, nobody knew anybody but everybody knew everybody: recognisable knots in the informal net of backpackers draped over southern Africa. There was a group of Nordic creatures gleaming under the crisp of their sunburn; a gaggle of British girls who had already taken over the drinking, dictating its pace and quantity; a South African couple with limbs entwined; and the American girl next to Scholie, wobbly and giggly and all on her own.
She had apparently started drinking early – not at her hotel, but at a bar frequented by locals. Scholie asked how she’d heard of the place.
‘My bungee instructor,’ she smirked.
‘He’s Zambian? And who was that?’ he asked, testing her.
‘His name is something like Chungo?’
‘Chongo! I love that guy, he’s mal,’ Scholie laughed. ‘His name means shuttup.’
Thandi rolled her eyes at this translation-as-flirtation.
‘So.’ Scholie sipped his beer. ‘When did you jump?’
‘I bungee…jamp?’ the girl giggled. ‘I mean, jumped, yesterday.’
‘They only started doing it last year, this jumping off the bridge thing. It’s madness!’
‘Oh-my-god. Spiritual experience. It was like…I was truly alive for the first time in my life.’
‘Radical,’ Scholie murmured. ‘Have you seen any of the other waterfalls?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ she exclaimed. ‘We went to that really tall one, Kalambo Falls? In Impala?’
Mbala, Thandi thought irritably, it’s a town, not an animal. She got up and moved over to the other side of the fire, a few feet away from one of the Nordic tourists, who lifted a hand in greeting. Thandi smiled and smoothed her hair, subtly slapping the seam of her weave. She wished she had rescheduled her plaiting appointment for sooner. She would have to withstand this needling itch for at least two more days.
The Nordic tourist stood and walked over, handing her an open beer. She thanked him. He sat. They sipped in unison and conducted a pro forma interview: their names, where they were from, what they had studied at uni. His cool, keen curiosity reminded her of Lee’s mother. She told him that she had gone straight from uni to Zambia Airways, then taken a job at JollyBoys after the airline went bankrupt and she was let go the following year. She had just asked whether his job suited his degree any better than hers did when she heard Scholie pitching his voice high – ‘It’s biting me from the inside!’ – followed by his baritone laugh.
She glared at him across the fire. He was lying on his side now, his cheek propped on his fist, three empty Mosi bottles leaning against his thigh, a fourth in his hand. The Nordic tourist called out to him.
‘Vhut is so funny over dare?’
‘It’s her story.’ Scholie gestured to Thandi with his beer. ‘She should tell it.’
Anxiety engulfed Thandi’s irritation. Everyone was looking at her. She took a sip of beer and told the story quickly, mocking herself to temper it.
‘It happened just now,’ Scholie confirmed with a grin. ‘I’m the one who saved her.’
‘Saat. Shuttup, iwe,’ she said, sucking her teeth under a smile.
Scholie goaded a guide named Mainza into telling another animal story. Mainza’s voice rolled smoothly, his tone mellow with Mosi. His story about a pregnant hyena unfolded at its own pace and grew more and more amusing until everyone was fitting their laughter into his pauses. The stories that followed were