been a model and her red skirt suit and plexiglass stilettos and heavy perfume seemed to confirm this. Joseph didn’t have his licence yet but he drove, wanting to impress his mother.
The first house was very nearby, on Senanga Road. No one was home, not even the servants. They had to peek through the gap in the locked gate to see it. The glances Joseph caught – white bricks, a red-dust driveway, a boulder in the garden painted as a chessboard – stirred something in his memory, but his mother said this wasn’t possible. They had moved out of this house just after Joseph was born. He must have been remembering it from photos.
They drove on to Munali to examine the second house, a bungalow with drooping eaves and a well-coiffed garden. Joseph and Farai sat on the warm boot of the car, the metal flexing around them with popping sounds. Only the cleaner was home this time. The estate agent and Mum stood talking at the threshold. The cleaner, in a faded tunic and bare feet, was nodding at the ground, waiting for them to finish their conversation so she could go back to work. His mother would have forgotten this – she had been abroad too long – and the estate agent didn’t care.
They headed to Northmead to see the last house, Joseph carefully dodging potholes so as not to wake Farai napping in his mother’s lap. They drove past the shopping centre, and just as they turned onto Paseli Road, the estate agent reached a sheet of paper forward between the front seats. Joseph glanced at it as she scraped a curved pink fingernail down a column of numbers.
‘You see?’ she said to Mum. Pairs of zeroes, each pinioned with a full stop: 0.0, a column of eyes. The car crunched into a pothole. Farai bumped his head against the window, woke up and started crying.
‘Shit-sorry,’ Joseph said and looked back at the road.
‘That’s where the payments should be,’ the estate agent was saying. She had nearly wedged her torso between the front seats. Despite her perfume, Joseph could smell the Marmite on her breath. Farai was still whimpering.
‘Almost there,’ said Mum, hugging him close. She shrugged at the estate agent. ‘We’ll just boot them out.’
‘Hm,’ the woman frowned. ‘Yes, but—’ She leaned forward to say something.
But then they had arrived and she had to communicate in the pauses between Joseph honking the horn and the gardener opening the gate and the car creeping into the flagstone drive, where a white pickup truck was already parked – Joseph did a double take, it was Dad’s old Peugeot! – but Mum didn’t notice because once they were out of the car, Farai refused to walk on his own and she was picking him up and the estate agent was just repeating herself about the payments when the front door opened and a woman stepped out of the house.
She was in her forties maybe, wearing a shiny orange robe with no bra underneath, her nipples beading the satin, her uncovered hair in shrubby clumps. She was beautiful, nevertheless.
‘Oh!’ said Mum.
The woman knelt heavily onto the stone driveway – Joseph and the estate agent both instinctively reached towards her – and clasped her hands together. She began mumbling through tears, as if praying to Farai, who stared down at her with wide eyes from his perch in Mum’s arms. Mum spun and stalked back to the car, her face frozen in an odd little smile, sudden tears leaving runnels in her make-up. Joseph touched her arm as she passed but her flinch held the quick of anger.
He turned back to the estate agent, who was already shouting questions, her manicured fingers pursed like she was aiming at a dart-board. When the weeping woman didn’t reply, the estate agent clipped past Joseph to join his mother and brother in the back seat of the car. Helplessly, Joseph watched her shut the door. Through the open window, he heard her begin to explain that this woman was an illegal tenant, she had not been paying…The estate agent turned and closed the window, the sunbright glass rolling smoothly up over the contempt on her face.
This time, when he turned back to the woman, he recognised her. It was one of Dad’s mistresses, a hairdresser named Sylvia – God, he had called her Aunty Sylvia back then, hadn’t he? The last time he had seen her was at her salon, the day Mum had