the same as always, each trumping the last until the insect in Thandi’s eye had led to Mainza’s hyena, an elephant trampling in Zim, a mauled baby in Kasama, and a drowning in Lake Malawi…This was apparently the cue for the two local girls. They made their exit with a lucky guide, each clinging to one of his arms as they teetered over to his vehicle.
‘Wow, that’s deep,’ Scholie was murmuring about the drowning story. He was facing away but Thandi could see from a ripple in his shoulder that his hand was on the American girl and it was moving. The South African couple were snogging again. The conversation seemed destined to fragment. Then the American girl spoke up.
‘I had this really intense thing happen a couple of days ago.’
‘Ya?’ Scholie said.
‘Yeah, on my way to Livingstone. So, we were supposed to leave Lusaka at the crack of dawn, right? But we got totally wasted the night before so we didn’t leave till, like, noon. Then we stopped at the Choma museum – whatever,’ she shook her yellow hair, ‘point being, the sun set at like six and it was pitch-black out and we hadn’t arrived yet. This couple I was backpacking with, Jess and Matt, they were having a fight. So I was like, “Look, I’ll drive.” But then me and Matt, we start fighting. He’s saying I should gun it so we can get to the hostel and I’m like, no, let’s just pull over and sleep. I turn to ask Jess, who’s in the back. And bam!’
Scholie sat up. ‘Bam, what? You hit an animal?’
‘No, no, no,’ the girl said hastily. ‘We swerved off the road into a ditch. We literally felt the tyre blow, like’ – she trapped her curled fingers behind her thumb and flicked them in a spraying motion – ‘poof! So we’re in this ditch, the only light is coming from the headlights. It’s like pitch-black. All we can hear is the seat-belt alarm and crickets. Jess is yelling – like, what the hell is going on? I’m totally shaking. Then we see these eyes glowing in the dark. Jess is like, that is an animal…’
Thandi frowned. So it was an animal story after all?
‘…but it’s this little African kid. He runs up to the car and knocks on my window. He’s got no shoes on and he has that little pot belly, you know, from starving? He doesn’t speak English and he’s super young and I can’t understand what he’s saying but then he goes come, come, he knows that word. So I get out and my legs are like fuckin jelly but I go with him and he takes me to this man lying on the side of the road.’
Thandi’s head tipped back slightly, like she’d been knocked on the chin.
‘And I can see from our headlights, there’s a bike a few feet away, totally mangled—’
‘Wait, you hit him?’ Thandi asked.
‘No, no!’ the American girl exclaimed, her hands spinning again. ‘It was not us. Like I said, our tyre blew out.’
Thandi looked around to see if the others were buying this. They were rapt, silent. Maybe it was just the beery drowse but everyone looked like they had stumbled into a private room.
‘Some other car hit him earlier.’ The girl looked flushed. ‘Broke his leg. And they just left him there.’
‘My Goht!’ said the Nordic tourist next to Thandi.
‘Zambians,’ Scholie shook his head. ‘Typical.’
Thandi stared at him incredulously.
‘So the kid is holding money in my face,’ the American girl continued, ‘like waving it around, like that’s gonna help. There’s no ambulance, we’re nowhere near a phone – do you guys even have payphones out here?’ She shook her head. ‘Anyway, so this guy is out here alone in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, bleeding out on the ground. I tied my t-shirt above his knee…’
‘You should have made a splint,’ Thandi muttered. She had received extensive first-aid training to become a stewardess. Scholie flapped his hand to shut her up.
‘…kid is staring at me,’ the girl was saying, ‘because I’m in my bra. He’s in fuckin shock, and I’m in fuckin shock, and his dad’s bleeding out, and it’s just a clusterfuck. Matt and Jess come over with a flashlight and, first thing, Matt takes off his t-shirt and gives it to me to cover up. I’m like, dude, someone’s dying and this is your priority? With the flashlight, we can tell this guy’s in