boot-cut jeans to avoid wetting their hems in the dewy grass. Thandi stayed in the Land Rover, watching them follow Mainza over the grass. When he reached a cluster of grey rocks, he stopped, turned to them and opened his hands like a preacher.
‘This is the Old Drift cemetery,’ he said. ‘The very first European settlers to this place came here in the 1890s. But they say this place was cursed and most of them died. From what?’ He pointed at a girl slapping at her neck. ‘From the same reason you’re smacking yourself!’
‘Mosquitoes?’
‘Malaria, you twat,’ her friend said.
‘Yes!’ Mainza said, pretending to be impressed. ‘But in those days, they called it black fever.’
‘OoOOoo,’ another girl tittered. ‘Is that like jungle fever?’
‘That ka American movie?’ Mainza pretended to be scandalised. Then he smirked and leaned towards them to murmur confidentially: ‘I wish!’
The British girls giggled and glanced back at Thandi in the Land Rover. She avoided their eyes. She knew they were thinking of Scholie and the American girl at the bonfire. They had all seen him and Thandi arrive together. Mainza saved her by resuming his speech.
‘Take a look around. Not all the headstones are marked, but you might even find one of your ancestors.’ He swept his arm wide and stepped to one side as if welcoming them into the graves.
Thandi was completely exhausted by the time Mainza finally dropped her at JollyBoys. There was no time to sleep – she had only half an hour before her shift. She showered, climbed into her skirt suit as if into a torture apparatus, and took up her station behind the front desk. The clock said 6.04 a.m. The hostel guests who had booked a morning drive were already in the lobby, rustling around a table with an electric kettle, a basket of teabags, a jug of milk and a plate of biscuits. Thandi stared at the Italian woman with dark brown hair. Her husband, a big Indian man with a moustache, was handing her a cup of tea with a cloying solicitude.
The couple had checked in two nights ago, for their honeymoon. They had arrived at night without a reservation, flustered from a long drive. The man had carefully counted out cash for the room. Their mismatch – in age and in race and in accent – seemed worse now, wrong somehow, as wrong as Scholie’s dark hand on that girl’s pale back as they’d rocked their hips in tandem. Thandi snatched up the reception phone receiver. She bit her lip – she couldn’t remember her sister’s number in London or her parents’ in Harare. Instead, she dialled the one number in Lusaka that she knew by heart.
* * *
A week later, Thandi was sitting on the kerb, waiting to board the Mazhandu coach to Lusaka. The coach was expensive but she knew she couldn’t withstand a minibus today, not with this hangover. The going-away party the JollyBoys staff had thrown her the night before had left her wrecked. She sipped on ice water, wishing she hadn’t had her hair plaited with extensions yesterday. A tender, stinging force field now cradled her scalp – too much discomfort for a six-hour journey.
A group of tourists showed up at the coach stop around the same time as her. There was a group of guys who had stayed at JollyBoys: Thandi remembered their unplaceable accents. She smiled weakly and waved but they just looked at her vaguely. Now that they had checked out, they wouldn’t bother with her – the young woman who spoke uncluttered English to them as she handed them keys and printed their bill. A girl sat with them, squatting on her bag, knees tenting her long batik skirt.
Thandi stared at the girl, an itch in her mind. She didn’t seem attached to any of the men but she was enjoying their lazy morning revelry: coffee in flasks and vitumbua and morning-after stories. Then the girl gave a deep, raspy laugh that dredged up a memory from Thandi’s mind: the night at the bonfire. In the daylight, the American girl looked nondescript. She could have been any girl from any time during the months that Thandi had spent in Livingstone. But she wasn’t. She was that girl from that night and Thandi swiftly hated her.
The moment the driver had loaded the suitcases and opened the coach doors, Thandi boarded. She plonked herself in an aisle seat and her kiondo on the window seat. She was flabbergasted when the American