Even the new Chinese-built student hostels were rumoured to have cockroach nests for wall insulation. Joseph still felt deprived and infantilised, eating home-cooked meals, reading the news to Gran, arguing with Grandpa over the remote. And on campus, his smart-alec arrogance was lost in a sea of conceited and talented students, most of whom were better looking than he was. The truth of the matter was that Joseph had left his heart in Cape Town. He constantly checked for updates on the protests and planned to transfer as soon as possible. In the meantime, he enrolled in UNZA classes on ecology and microbiology.
He couldn’t stop thinking about his father’s research, and he hoped learning about these topics would help him make sense of it. He had systematically read through all the unopened emails and texts on the iPhone. They confirmed what he already knew: that Lionel Banda had been on the cutting edge of the scientific search for the Virus vaccine. Joseph printed out the scholarly articles that Dad had emailed to himself but they prickled with unfamiliar abbreviations – CCR5, CCR2, SDF-1α, CXCR4, CD4, CD8, NK, T-cell, B-cell – the letters crowding together as if marching to battle, superscript numbers and punctuation perched like birds on their shoulders. Googling the terms didn’t help; he grew lost in a labyrinth of internal reference.
Joseph felt pained. He had done well in his biology IGCSEs. He had imagined that, when Dad had come home to die and they had cracked jokes about Golgi bodies and the ‘smooveness’ of the endoplasmic reticulum in the TV room, they had been mutually impressed. Now he realised how out of his depth he had been, and how obliging his father. It wasn’t a gap in intelligence, he assured himself, just in knowledge.
Despite the standard lecture style at UNZA (a skinny bespectacled man droning in front of an ashy blackboard), Joseph thrilled to the lessons. The Darwinian model he had learned for A levels was essentially a child’s drawing: big fish eats little fish which eats littler fish. Now he learned that the very littlest fish, microorganisms, sometimes entered the little fish on purpose so as to be eaten by the big fish, which helped the microorganisms spread. This wasn’t survival of the fittest. It was survival of the slyest. It began to make sense to him that his father, a man of subtle infiltrations, had chosen virology.
Indeed, the workings of animal biology seemed to mirror the workings of human society. Joseph’s ecology lecturer introduced the students to three terms for how organisms coexist: ‘Parasitism,’ he intoned, ‘is when one organism benefits, while the other one is harmed – this is what viruses do. Mutualism is mutually beneficial, like when the plover bird cleans the crocodile’s teeth of scraps. And commensalism,’ he concluded, ‘is when one organism benefits from another without affecting it, like the lice that eat human skin flakes or the vultures that trail lions for carcasses.’
Later that day, using the hotspot at the Mingling Bar campus cafe, Joseph googled the term commensalism on his phone and found out that it came from the Latin commensalis, or ‘sharing a table’. He looked up at the open-air canteen, students clustered around square grey tables with red brick bases, sharing their meals under the concrete overpasses that criss-crossed campus like intestines. Here we all are, he thought, sharing our lives in a former colony, each of us filled with bacterial colonies whose edges are as fixed as the borders of the country – which is to say, not very fixed at all.
Joseph often found himself doing this on campus, positioning himself outside of the hubbub, observing the gestures and glances of social microcosms. No one really talked to him, anyway – he reeked of coffee and ethanol from the lab – but he told himself that he preferred to watch the world rather than be in it. Maybe that’s why he noticed the thief before anyone else did.
* * *
He had headed into the student bar by the Goma Lakes for a quick snack – just a Mosi and a locobun. He was surprised to find the bar packed, the volume up, strobe lights wafting. Then he remembered – it was Friday. Well, he would finish his meal before walking home to Handsworth Park. He shouted his order to the bartender over the bass drum that was trying to reset his heartbeat. He paid, took a munch and a swig, leaned against a wall, and pulled out