her pelvis. She had put on weight but she was still his Thunder – still quick and strong. He nudged his head towards hers and kissed her big, slippery lips. Her legs slowly parted and bent to kneel on either side of his hips, like a hesitant jockey. He cupped her breast – a mother’s breast, lowswung but buoyant – and she moaned and hitched her nightie up, then her panties to the side. She worked him inside her and began to rock her hips. Lee’s eyes slid shut. He forgot himself completely, forgot his resolve to keep her safe from his secret store of deviousness.
* * *
As soon as it was over, they fought. Lee was panting from his orgasm. Thandi was collapsed on him, vibrating, still pent up. Then he twitched. It was the slightest buck of the body, just enough to signal I’m done. Thandi scudded off him, sat up and exploded. She had not known that her mouth harboured such a reserve of vile clichés. She called him a faggot, a dambe, a drunkard with a useless dick. She threatened to leave him, to move to London to live with her sister.
‘And I’m taking your fucking son with me!’
Lee sat up and raised his hand. He stopped himself – even drunk, there were too many checkpoints between Lee’s mind and his body for him to lose total control.
‘What, you’re going to hit me now?’ she spat.
He lowered his hand and lay back, chest heaving, a tendon in his jaw writhing like a maggot.
‘At least you’d be touching me for once!’ Thandi shouted. ‘Fuck you, Lionel Banda!’
She got up and stomped off to the bathroom down the corridor. She peed and wiped, semen sopping the toilet paper, and turned her panties inside out before putting them back on. Her hands were shaking with rage. Instead of returning to the master bedroom, she went to the guest room, locked the door, and lay on the pristine bedspread. She grabbed a pillow and put it between her legs and humped it furiously, trying to put out the fire he had sparked in her. But after a while, her hips stilled and she pulled the pillow up to her face and wept into it instead.
She woke up a few hours later with crust in the corners of her eyes. She dampened her finger with spit to wipe them, thinking of Scholie, the vibration of his breath when that insect had flown in her eye more than a decade ago. Handsome, charming Scholie, Prince of Livingstone, blithely rescuing her, then abandoning her for some white chick…
Thandi felt a sudden touch of paranoia. Scholie had been a player for real. Wasn’t it risky to spit in someone’s eye like that? Wasn’t it what Lee’s Virus research papers called ‘mucous membrane contact’? How would Dr Lionel Banda have handled that situation? A saline eyedropper? An antibiotic ointment? A pirate’s eyepatch? Thandi realised she was smiling. She knew him so well. A throb of love for her husband – even still, even now – clutched her throat and raised her up and out of bed.
But when she crept back into the master bedroom, he was gone. It was early morning, the light in the room amber. Thandi disrobed, put on a shower cap, and took a hot shower. She towelled off and massaged cocoa butter into her skin. She put on clean underwear, a skirt suit and high heels. She sat at her dressing table and applied her make-up, priming her face like a canvas, then shaping its beauty with shadow and shine, line and glitter. Last of all, she lifted her wig off its decapitated styrofoam head. Joseph had long ago defaced the bust with a green felt-tip pen, but the Lovely Luxe Locks wig she had bought in Kamwala was exquisite, a shiny copper orb. Thandi crowned herself with it.
* * *
‘Where does your father take you when he picks you up from school?’
Mummy looked so serious standing in the doorway to his bedroom that Joseph replied immediately. Dad had never expressly told him not to tell Mummy where they went. But as soon as Joseph told her the truth and saw her face go from shocked to sad, he realised both that it was indeed a secret and that he was tired of keeping it.
‘He takes you to a hair salon?!’ Mummy asked.
‘Mostly,’ he said as the tension released in his breastbone.
‘Okay, then. You must show me where it is,’