her freckles like tiny green eyes in the fluorescent light. She picked at a plate of chips while Joseph tore through half a chicken, his stomach slowly turning on itself until he was staring at the stripped bones in disgust. Mum ignored her plate of wings as she sorted through the papers she’d spread out over the table. An ancient printer had spewed them out – perforated side strips, faded ink – and spots of grease appeared on them, darkening as they seeped in, lightening as they dried.
‘It’s…it’s,’ Mum sputtered, shaking her head.
‘Oh dear,’ Gran said softly. ‘He has left quite a mess for you, Tendeeway, hasn’t he?’
When they got back home, they found Grandpa in the sitting room. He was still in his pyjamas, peering and jabbing at his new smartphone, a bulky plastic bag on the table before him.
‘You’re back!’ he said with relief and scooched his glasses up his nose. ‘The hospital sent someone with his things. I didn’t know if they would be relevant. For the will.’
Grandpa seemed somewhat offended that his son hadn’t named him executor. Gran sent Ba Grace to make some tea, then sat across from him. Mum went to check on Farai. Joseph knelt in front of the coffee table and looked through the things inside the plastic bag. He took out his father’s crumpled golf clothes, the green shirt and the plaid trousers still spattered with mud. The little red book that his father had been reading the other day fell onto the table with a thud. Joseph put it aside and pulled out his father’s wallet and iPhone, which was dead. He went to the wall outlet and plugged the phone in to charge.
The wallet was crammed with money in several currencies, an origami wedge of receipts, and four driver’s licences from different countries. Joseph almost expected different names, too, but no, they were all for Dr Lionel Banda. His National Registration card was at the back, laminated corners sneering around a picture of a startlingly attractive young man. Joseph felt a stab of envy – he had inherited all of his father’s bad traits and none of the compensatory ones – acne without the rugged scars, height without the muscles, yellow skin without the golden glow.
Over rooibos tea and Eet-Sum-Mor biscuits, his grandparents were discussing what they had learned about their son from the bank. There was a tangle of different accounts that each received regular transfers from his bank in Addis Ababa. There were other, shadier dealings in the bank statements, too: money going to commissioners, coming from drug companies, online purchases from URLs twisted around the words ‘pharma’ and ‘Rx’. And there were six accounts receiving monthly infusions of cash from his main account in Addis, all vastly different sums. One account was receiving nearly four times as much as the others.
‘Business partners?’ asked Gran hopefully.
‘Women,’ Grandpa shook his head.
Gran seemed upset, but Joseph didn’t understand why she was surprised. Even as a boy, he had picked up on the whiff of sexual drama his father carried with him when he had fetched him from school and toted him around Lusaka on his little ‘visits’. Joseph remembered it well – those long, dull afternoons sitting in some woman’s flat or hair salon or office, his eyes glued to his book as he waited for his father to finish. He wondered whether any of Dad’s women had been in that mourning room at the home funeral, if the one who had wailed so furiously was one of his widows.
Gran ought to have known how her son was. Did she actually think he had contracted The Virus, passed it on to a wife and a son, divorced, remarried, and then stopped fucking around? Did she not realise that sex was what had killed him? The charging iPhone blurbled to life and lit the wall around the socket. Joseph walked over to it, his body brimming with an unspoken ‘I told you so’, that satisfaction that lays over disappointment like the play of iridescence on the surface of an oil slick.
* * *
The last thing Mum had to do before flying back to England was to visit the three houses she now owned in Lusaka. This time they left Gran behind and brought Farai – he had been grumpy that morning and Mum suspected Ba Grace had fed him something with groundnuts in it. The real estate agent they had hired sat in the back seat. She had apparently once