Joseph’s mother and younger brother, Farai. Only Joseph had escaped its clutches. But Dad had never shown the symptoms before. He was thin now – as thin as sixteen-year-old Joseph – and his beige skin looked leathery. In grey slacks and a flag-green golf shirt that rippled in the breeze, he looked like an old tree in rainy season, especially backed by the blue glow of the canopy.
Grandpa Ronald stayed in the car while the others got out to hug the prodigal son. Ba Grace loaded suitcases into the boot while Joseph helped Dad into the passenger seat. His arm felt light – Joseph thought again of parched wood – and his eyes glassy and blinky. When they were all in again, Gran leaned forward from the back and clutched the edge of his seat.
‘How was the flight, darling?’ she asked, her voice trembling.
‘Not too bad,’ he replied, turning so she could hear him. ‘These days, flights feel like nothing. I have had more flights than I’ve had beers. Well, that’s not true, since I’ve had beers on flights, but you know what I mean.’
He chuckled and inhaled expansively as they picked up speed, the breeze purring through the open windows. The outskirts of the airport whipped by. Men on bicycles stacked high with firewood seemed to zip backward as the car passed.
‘You know what? I’m good,’ he said to Grandpa Ronald, who had not asked, who was busy driving while old, his spectacles pincering the round tip of his nose. ‘It’s good to be home.’
Home. When he had called last week to tell them he was coming, he had offered to stay in one of the houses he owned in Lusaka. Joseph had overheard Gran’s end of the conversation.
‘How bad is it?’ she’d asked.
Pause.
‘What?’ Gran had paced the kitchen in her patapatas. ‘You ought to be with your family!’
Pause.
‘One of your properties? No, please, darling, don’t be absurd. Just come home.’
What home? Joseph had wondered then. What home? he wondered now, staring at the pale spotty rag of Gran’s hand still clutching the edge of the passenger seat. The family home in Thorn Park where Joseph had grown up had been sold in 2012, after the divorce. Joseph had gone to stay with his grandparents in Handsworth Park while his mother took little Farai to London to get medical treatment. A few months had turned into a year, then two, as a series of infections haunted the boy’s lungs. Mum had said it wasn’t worth it for Joseph to join them until he was done with his IGCSE exams. The thread connecting him to her was going slack.
Dad had drifted away, too. He technically lived in Addis Ababa with his new wife, Salina – no one in the family had met her, no one had even attended their wedding – but he had spent much of the past five years hopping between international conferences and workshops about The Virus. Joseph had been deemed too young to travel alone to visit him. Their relationship these days consisted of terse WhatsApps, mostly about Joseph’s studies: How’s Rhodes Park, how’s exam prep? Fine, where r u? New York, Cape Town, Beijing. Dr Lionel Banda was anywhere but Lusaka, spreading the word about his research on a vaccine for The Virus, which was now about to kill him – a world tour of futility.
This was apparently his last stop. Joseph didn’t really believe his father was dying and he didn’t understand why he would come back to Zambia if he were. Would Mum come home from England to help him die? What sort of preparation, what sort of entertainment does a dying man want? Last things? Joseph had no idea what those would be – he was still obsessed with first things.
When they got home from the airport, Dad’s first thing was tea. To please Gran, of course. Except then, at the last minute, he chose coffee – ‘I’ve become too used in Addis. Black as night, please’ – and they all joined him even though it was late, and they would all have insomnia, bad dreams, a bad morning. Such toppling effects seemed inconsequential in the face of Death. Joseph stared at his father, trying to see if Death hung over him like a smell or a colour – egg-yolk sulphurous and yellow. But he was the same – tall, handsome Dr Banda, just thinner and darker, the colour of honey on toast. Was that from the Ethiopian sun? Or The Virus?
‘Did