irritating and boring, like that French word: ennuyeux. Then, one day, Gran mentioned offhand that his father’s will had stipulated that Joseph’s tuition money go to an African university.
‘He was right.’ Grandpa gave an approving nod. ‘Too much brain drain nowadays.’
Joseph was furious. He resented this belated pan-Africanism – this petty swipe from the grave. He called his mother in London to ask if he could use some of the money from selling the Lusaka houses instead.
Joseph was not handsome, but he was clever and rich. And for a long time, that had been enough to dwarf the social marks against him: his pebbly acne, his skinnymaningi long legs, his fat banana feet. Now it turned out that being top of the class, cream of the crop, guaranteed him nothing. He fumed until he learned that the University of Cape Town had a study-abroad programme at Leeds. Surely that didn’t count. It was not Oxford, but it would do.
* * *
In between studying for his A levels, Joseph tried to unlock his father’s iPhone. He kept it charged, an electronic memento mori, and it still buzzed all the time, Digit-All ads and messages flashing over the locked screen. But he couldn’t unlock it and he didn’t know how long he had before the SIM card expired. He had googled ‘forgot iPhone passcode’, but he didn’t have enough of his dad’s details to reset it. He tried to guess the code instead. 0000. 1234. Sets of four from his father’s Reg card. His birthdate, his dad’s, the nation’s. Nothing. Zee. And for every ten wrong guesses, the phone locked for an hour.
One day, while he was watching The Hunger Games in the TV room with Aunt Carol – she had been visiting more since the funeral, to spend time with Gran and Grandpa – the iPhone buzzed on the table. He picked it up and saw the preview of a text – another one from the mysterious ‘Doctor’. This time Joseph caught the words vaxin and kalingalinga before the screen went black. Kalingalinga. That was where that hair salon was – the one owned by Sylvia the Widow – but what did that have to do with his father’s vaccine research? He clicked the phone back on, but the preview had been banished by the keypad.
‘Shit,’ he said. Locked out again.
‘What are you up to?’ Aunt Carol leaned forward from the sofa.
‘Nothing.’
‘Children, children,’ Aunt Carol sang, then turned back to the movie with a chuckle. The rest of the nursery rhyme ran through Joseph’s head as he left her and went to his bedroom.
Children, children?
Yes, Papa.
Eating sugar?
No, Papa.
Telling lies?
No, Papa.
Open your mouth.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
The whole point of that song, Joseph thought as he sat at his desk and opened his laptop, was to give the sugar enough time to melt in the mouth of the culprit. What was the name of that salon again? Some silly wordplay on aeroplanes? Right. The Hi-Fly. He googled and found an article from 2009 – the salon had apparently burned down – that gave the proprietor’s full name: Sylvia Mwamba. Joseph found twenty or so Sylvia Mwambas on Facebook but none of them seemed old enough. Then he thought to search for her son.
Scouring through dozens and dozens of Jacob Mwambas, Joseph finally found a bitty picture of the young man he had seen rescuing electronics from the fire in the road last year. Joseph scrolled through the timeline: unsmiling selfies showing off Jacob’s clear brown skin and bulging muscles; links to news sites – BBC, Quartz, AllAfrica – with tech articles like ‘Flight of the RoboBee’ and ‘Facebook to Build Solar Drone’. Finally, Joseph came upon a photo of two women in cone-shaped party hats. It was fuzzy, taken with a camera phone, and nobody was tagged, but he recognised Sylvia’s doe eyes and noted a glow from below – birthday candles.
Would Dad have been bold enough to use his mistress’s birth date as his passcode? Joseph picked up the iPhone and tried the day and month from Joseph’s Facebook post. No. Estimating Sylvia’s age, he tried the month and year. No. Maybe she was older than she looked? Down the year went until he hit 1970. Open Sesame. The keyboard vanished and the iPhone’s home screen bloomed with its neat garden of icons. Little red badges told Joseph that his dead father had 873 unopened texts and 5,012