who he was and asking if they might meet again.
* * *
The notes on the iPhone app took some deciphering. The logs were dated but coded in a cryptic shorthand, with test subjects labelled by number. Joseph had just cracked the key and was typing out the list of names – Chileshe K., Loveness J., Sylvia M. – on his laptop in the dining room when Gran walked in.
‘Darling.’ Her voice was thin as a string. ‘Could you find something for me?’
She was in her usual outfit – a faded collegiate sweatshirt and a wrap chitenge skirt from Sunday market. She had worn it every day since the funeral, except for the days that Ba Grace insisted she take it off to be washed. Gran’s eyelids were shadowed with purple and she seemed ruffled, her freckles shifting in her skin as she fidgeted.
‘Are you too busy?’ she said. ‘With your schoolwork? How is—’
‘No, no. I’m working on my own project,’ he said. ‘What is it you’re looking for?’
‘There is a—’ She stopped herself. ‘You know? I’ve been thinking. Since that conversation we had about the protests? “Rhodes Must Burn” and so on.’
‘Fall,’ he said.
‘What? Oh dear. Yes, “Rhodes Must Fall”.’ She paced in a circle, picking at her cuticles. They looked raw. ‘In any case, it has me thinking about these campus protests that went on at UNZA in the seventies, when – actually I was pregnant with your father at the time and I was in this group, The Reds, and we had a—’ She stopped to catch her breath. She was panting slightly.
He stood up and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, it’s just, I’ve lost something terribly important to me. A tape. Well – a book.’
‘A book on tape?’
‘No, it’s – I was hoping you could find it for me? It ought to be in my bedside drawer but…’
Joseph guided her down the corridor, though she could navigate by herself – his hand on her arm was just for comfort. In the master bedroom, he could smell traces of her body, a maundering mauve odour. She stood by the door and waited while he rifled through the leavings in the bedside drawer: a crusty earplug, old and new fifty-ngwee coins, a plastic chequebook cover, a Scooby Doo sticker, a box of Lion matches, a rusty pin that said MIND THE GAP.
‘It’s a book. Quite small. Red,’ Gran urged. ‘Perhaps the tape fell out…’
A small red book. Like the one Dad had been reading the day after he arrived back home? The one he’d taken golfing with him and had in his pocket when he collapsed? The one that had come home from the hospital in a plastic bag that was now stashed at the bottom of Joseph’s closet?
‘I think I know where it is,’ he said and sat Gran down on her bed.
He went to his bedroom closet and dug out the bag, then the book. He opened it. MAO-TSE TUNG. He turned past the title page and frontispiece and saw now that the rest of the book had been hollowed out and an old cassette tape was squeezed inside. He tugged it out and turned it over – it was labelled LIONEL. Just then, his phone buzzed. A text from Musadabwe: hi jo! meet clinic tmrw. kalingalinga. nxt 2 rip kapenta.
Joseph put his phone away, then took the book and the tape to Gran’s room and placed them in her hands. She nearly swooned with relief, running her hands over the book, opening it and expertly slotting the tape back into its choppy cave.
‘This is all very mysterious, Gran.’
‘Oh dear, I suppose it is,’ she smiled. For the first time since the funeral, she seemed happy.
‘What’s on that tape? And why’s it got Dad’s name on it?’
‘It’s actually his namesake. It’s a recording of these meetings that a lecturer named Lionel Heath used to run on campus.’
‘What were they about?’
‘Well.’ She tilted her head. ‘It’s—’ She shook her head. ‘It’s hard to explain. I suppose I listen to the tape more for – the sound. The voices. The feeling. Of that moment in time.’
‘What feeling?’
‘Why don’t I play it for you?’
* * *
Kalingalinga had become a little city by now, concrete blocks with flat colourful faces, windows criss-crossed with white grids. There were signs everywhere – BE ON TIME TRADING, OBAMA SALON, NITE DANCING CLUB – and misspelt lists of services: cooka, barba, filta, panting. Items for sale lined Alick