questioned him about Dad’s whereabouts and they had gone to Kalingalinga and the Indian girl had fallen from the tree. Dad had clearly continued his relationship with Sylvia after that if she was living in his house, rent-free. It came to Joseph again, the phone call he had overheard between his father and his grandmother about where Dad would stay when he came home to die. One of your properties? Gran had asked. Dad had wanted to come here. To this house. To her.
Sylvia’s crying had taken on more momentum now, her sobs as rhythmic as a pulsing vein. There were two parallel purple marks on her neck – burns perhaps. It was disquieting to see her sealed off in her grief yet crying so publicly. She knelt there in a spotlight of sunshine, her face tilted up to the fresh blue sky, the folds of her robe shaking around her, her mouth stretched wide and her throat vibrating with the wretched urgency of a baby bird.
* * *
Joseph saw the fire on his way to take his IGCSEs. Grandpa was driving, Joseph in the back with his textbooks spread out over the seat. He wasn’t studying so much as calming himself, whispering words like one of his Aunt Carol’s Buddhist mantras. He barely noticed the burning smell and the frustrated honks of the cars until Grandpa slowed to a stop. Joseph looked up.
‘We can’t be late today, Grandpa.’
‘And where should I go?’ Grandpa gestured at the windscreen.
Beyond the grey wash of old rain and scratched glass was a scene out of a BBC Africa Special Report: young men in old clothes running through smoke and dust.
‘Hooligans,’ Grandpa said and turned on the radio. The DJ, his voice an ungainly hybrid of Zinglish and American accents, bellowed over this month’s ubiquitous Drake song. Grandpa tutted and pressed SCAN. The radio bumped from station to station: strident exhortation (God! Is in control!) to oldies (out of my dreams! and into my) to the smooth baritone news (Ebola outbreak in Liberia will) to more oldies (candy-coated rayiyin dro-ops)…Grandpa turned down the volume as the cars oozed forward again, pulling onto the dirt bank to bypass the burning pile in the road.
‘Savages,’ Grandpa said as he inched the car around it and back onto the tarmac.
Joseph turned to look out the rear window and saw a woman in a bathrobe standing on the side of the road, shouting furiously over a pile of charred objects at her feet. It was Sylvia – he recognised the distinctive colour of her robe, as shiny and orange as a naartje. It had been a month since his mother had found her squatting at the Northmead house. The bailiffs must have finally ousted her and put her belongings in the road. Someone had set them on fire – chaos to cover looting. This sort of thing happened often in Lusaka these days.
Joseph saw a young man dart out of the fray, carrying a black box over his head. At first, Joseph thought he was one of the ‘hooligans’ and ‘savages’, but his ventures into and out of the road had the methodical rhythm of saving rather than the scattered logic of opportunistic theft. The young man placed the black box at Sylvia’s feet, smacked his hands, and ran back in. Who was he?
Joseph’s buttocks vibrated. He pulled his phone from his back pocket but the screen was black. He turned it off – it would have to be off for the exam anyway. He turned to look back at the fire again but a car had cut in behind them and hidden the scene from view. He felt another buzz to the bum. Oh, it was Dad’s iPhone. He had been carrying it around with him out of a kind of nostalgia. He pulled it from his other back pocket. This screen was lit – a preview of a text. He tried to unlock the phone to read it but it asked for a code. He sank back and turned it off. He had only caught the contact name before the message preview disappeared. The Doctor. Doctor who?
2015
Joseph’s exams went well despite his worries, or perhaps because of them – he secretly held a superstition that his anxiety fuelled his intelligence. He immediately began studying for his A levels – his father had left him money for university fees and Joseph wanted to go to Oxford. Waiting for his stellar international education to start was both