the antiretrovirals stop working?’ Gran asked then blew over her mug. She was always unwilling to ignore the elephant in the room. It was the least Zambian thing about her.
‘The ARVs are still effective,’ said Dad. ‘It isn’t The Virus that’s doing it, it’s the side effects of the vaccine.’
He shuffled off a rack of obscure technical terms to make his point: he was going to die; he was a doctor, he would know. Joseph sipped his bitter coffee. What else is like that? An obstetrician knowing she’s pregnant? A priest knowing he’s sinned? Heal thyself. Grandpa lit a pipe and changed the topic. Dad’s laugh was still outrageously loud, his chin shirring as he cackled, but he fell asleep in the middle of their conversation. He had to be nudged and prodded and in the end, half-carried to bed.
‘No, no,’ he kept saying. ‘I just got here!’
Dad slept in Joseph’s bedroom and Joseph slept on the sofa. The tinny aqua light from the stereo turned the sitting room into a dull aquarium through which Joseph’s eyes swam back and forth, thinking proud prod prodigal prodigious, until sleep finally drowned him.
* * *
When Joseph got home from school on Friday – he was in grade ten – he found his father napping in front of the TV, a red book closed in his lap. It was small but its musty smell perfumed the whole room. They shared a mango and laughed about Joseph’s teachers. Joseph was at that stage of feeling superior to them. He was at the top of his class and auditing online MIT courses in his spare time. Dad was amused by this arrogance in a son he had always believed to be shy; Joseph was pleased that he had changed enough to surprise his father. They indulged each other for a while, bantering about biology and chemistry. Then they bickered over DSTV. Joseph wanted to watch Mzansi Magic, Dad wanted to watch Real Madrid: the dancing girls vs the kicking lads. Dad won. Joseph fell out of humour. Just because you’re dying – he didn’t say it but his father rubbed his head as if he had, as if condescending to his worry.
On Saturday morning, over breakfast, Dad announced that he was going golfing. They all stopped eating Ba Sakala’s cold, rubbery pancakes.
‘This is no laughing matter,’ said Gran.
‘Don’t be foolish,’ said Grandpa.
They refused to drive or accompany him to Lusaka Golf Club. Unflappable, Dad sent the gardener down the road to whistle for a taxi and took off by himself. He came back hours later, the ankles of his plaid trousers red with dried mud. He had hit par.
‘A toast!’ Dad said and sent Joseph for some liquor.
He hunted around the larder for a while but all he could find was an old bottle of Grandpa’s cognac, which he poured into crystal glasses that he had to wipe clear of dust. The four of them toasted. Joseph sipped and winced at the thin sweet tang.
‘Lusaka, you cannot compete!’ Dad kept boasting. He was full of dirty jokes about the arthritic caddy, about his swollen knuckles. ‘You know what they say about busy hands!’
‘Oh, you’re terrible, Lionel,’ said Gran, sheepish about how anxious she had been.
‘Don’t be obscene,’ said Grandpa, puffing his pipe.
‘Don’t play innocent!’ Dad scoffed. ‘I know how you guys did back in the seventies.’
Grandpa cleared his throat. There was an awkward silence. Joseph stared. The notion of his grandparents anywhere near sex was both self-evident and terrifying, like seeing a ghost.
* * *
That night, Dad had a stroke or a heart attack or both. Gran stumbled into him lying unconscious on the bathroom floor, still in his plaid golf trousers. An ambulance would have taken too long, so they drove him to the hospital, Dad’s head on Joseph’s lap in the back. They arrived just as dawn chinked through the clouded glass of the sky. The doctors determined that it was best to leave him unconscious, in the hopes that the swelling in his head would go down.
They sat and waited. They alternated between speaking to him and about him, and pronouns and verb tenses began to muddle – you are, he was. His hospital bed looked more like a contraption than a place for rest. He seemed tangled in it, held prisoner by the machines monitoring him. At 11 a.m. or so, his eyes locked open, the tendons starting in his neck.
‘Where is she?’ he said, gazing around wildly.
Gran scrambled for his