into the foliage.
* * *
Jacob knew well what a good climbing tree the jacaranda behind the salon was. Its bark was just rough enough, and its branches started low, forking with curving angles that did not require great leaps of effort or faith. Inspired, he took off his aeroplane belt, tossed it on the ground, and followed the mwenye girl up. He heard her panting above him and he felt the soft kisses of the blossoms against his skin and he sensed the tension in his legs and arms as he balanced himself in the familiar stages – here, now there, now here – of his zigzag up the tree. Halfway up, he looked down between his straddled legs and saw Joseph’s face frowning up at him. The apamwamba boy was still on the ground, of course, with his hang-em-high jeans and fly green trainers.
Uncle Lee had always been nice to Jacob. He brought him the occasional treat or toy, and he made his mother laugh, softened her. But his son? This skinny, ugly, banana-coloured boy, reading all the time, and acting like a goody two shoes, as if there were rules about tree climbing – Jacob hated him. Staring down at that smug yellow face, Jacob felt a crackle in his throat, and without even thinking about it, he spat. The glob landed squarely between Joseph’s eyebrows. The coloured boy clutched his face, shouting in horror. Chuckling, Jacob scurried up the tree, pushing off its branches, ducking its shaggy purple locks, reaching away from the boy gagging and cursing below.
The girl came into view, facing away. She was sitting with one bum cheek on a limb, her other leg swinging. She was peering down intently, trying to make out what Joseph was shouting about. Her hair fell forward, revealing the damp back of her neck, the curls distinct as cuts.
‘Bwanji?’ Jacob shuffled himself along the limb towards her to sit.
‘Bwino.’ She turned with a grin. Her eyes widened. She was pitching forward. Jacob gasped and reached out for her, his hand sweeping through the air as if swatting a mosquito.
* * *
Joseph heard the boughs snapping before he saw the girl plunging towards him through the canopy. She caught at a branch, which broke, then another, which didn’t, and for a breathless moment, she swung, safe as a monkey. Then she slipped. The silence as she fell through the air was terrible. The sound when she landed was worse. Joseph stepped towards her, his throat still sore from ranting, his brow sticky with spit. Naila was on her side among the jacaranda blossoms, her eyes closed, her hair splayed up and behind her in the shape of a splash. If it weren’t for the moans pulsing from her lips like water from a hose, she might have been asleep in a purple bower.
Joseph crouched down and saw her cheek ballooning before his eyes, a slow hydraulic rise. Blood trickled from her nostril and curdled the dust. She cracked an eyelid. That was when he leapt back. When he saw the blood flooding her eye – that was when he ran. He bolted into the salon through the back door, pushed the curtain aside, raced past the women inside, yanked the front door open – slamming it against the wall in his haste – and fled into the compound.
Joseph didn’t hear his trainers pounding, his breath snagging on the spikes of his sobs. He didn’t hear the pedestrians shouting as he bounced off them or the cars honking when he darted into the road. Only one sound could penetrate the panic suffocating him. His name. When it came, he stopped and turned and everything surged at him. It was as if he had pulled a plug. A river of colour and movement and smells and noise – life itself – washed over him: Kalingalinga with its brightly coloured signs and chitenge-patterned people, and in its midst, in the distance, a broad-shouldered man in a long white coat striding towards him.
Joseph put his hands on his knees to catch his breath and blinked down at his dirty trainers. Where had he been running? Was the girl dead? He stood up straight just as his father reached him, put his big hand on his bony shoulder, and asked: ‘Joseph, where is your mother?’
* * *
Thandi was sitting in a plastic seat, her head ensconced in the rattling inferno of an old hairdryer. Her relaxed hair had been rinsed and wrapped around