Nkhata Road: thatch coops and kennels, wooden tables and chairs, bricks stacked in Tetris-like heaps. Joseph parked Grandpa’s car and got out and asked a Digit-All Time seller for directions. From Musadabwe’s text, he had assumed the clinic was next to one of those fish stands loaded with ponging heaps of silver minnows, flies buzzing over sizzling flesh strung with latticed bones. But as the sign came into view – RIP BEDS & COFFINS LTD – he realised that kapenta was just the doctor’s efficient if idiosyncratic spelling of the word carpenter.
There were two actual carpenters in the yard, both coated with white dust, a roiling sea of curled shavings at their feet. The older man wore goggles and gloves and was bent over a sawhorse, delicately applying a spinning blade to a log. The younger man sat on a turned-over oil drum, legs swinging, feet gonging, as he fiddled with a black box with a single phallic antenna. Nailed to the tree next to him was a kifwebe mask, a spine running down from its crown to form the bridge of its nose. Below it was a plastic version – the top half of a chigubu jug, its handle for a nose, its spout for a pout.
Next door was a blue building with a white base, like a schoolgirl in bobby socks. A satellite dish sat on its corrugated roof like a jaunty cap. The facade said ONE HUNDRED YEARS CLINIC and below that, in smaller letters, DR PATRICK MUSADABWE, and below that in even smaller letters: BA. BSC. DPHIL. MD. PHD. Lowest and smallest of all was a set of Chinese characters like squashed insects. The door was ajar so Joseph came in, gently knocking the frame.
He found himself in a corridor that ran the length of the building to the back door. To the left was a door labelled in white paint: EXAMINATIONING ROOM. Across from it, to the right was a modest waiting room, inside which a teenager in a grey school uniform sat behind a desk, desultorily thumbing his phone. There were three folding chairs against the wall, one occupied by a dark-skinned, big-boned woman wearing a white blouse, a pinstriped skirt with a side slit, and espadrilles. She looked up from her phone as he came in. She seemed familiar, not her face but her scent.
Joseph approached the schoolboy secretary and asked for Dr Musadabwe. Without looking up from his phone, the boy stood and left the room. He returned promptly, Musadabwe rushing in behind him, dressed in his dingy lab coat, his tattered stethoscope swinging.
‘Joseph!’ Musadabwe reached his hand out.
‘Doctor.’ Joseph shook it, ducking a wave of halitosis.
‘Come!’ Musadabwe paused and turned to the woman. ‘Am coming just-now, love.’ He grabbed Joseph’s shoulder. ‘It is velly-good to see you, young man. Come and see the lab.’
Joseph followed him down the corridor to the back door. They exited into a dirt yard strung with a clothes line bedecked in white – lab coats, towels, sheets. The laundry’s sparkle belied the stench back here, which was chokingly putrid. It grew as they passed a set of crates.
‘Testing animos,’ Musadabwe explained as they stepped inside a small concrete building at the bottom of the yard. ‘And this one is the lab.’
It was nothing like the labs at UNZA, which were shabby and chipped but functional. This was more like something you’d see in a post-apocalyptic movie, all bent tools and drifting debris. There was a black workbench in the centre, dusty pipettes and test tubes scattered over it. An incubator sat unplugged in a corner, its door ajar.
Musadabwe turned on the light – a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling – and motioned for Joseph to sit. Joseph perched on the one high stool, suppressing the urge to tidy up. Musadabwe ceremoniously pulled his stethoscope off his neck and placed it on the workbench – it looked like a snake with two heads set to attack each other. Then he leaned against the workbench, crossed his arms and ankles, and plunged right in.
‘Andi so? Your father. He was a blirriant man, your father. He was telling me we can even have science in Zambia. It is a technico world, hm? These Americans – they are too greedy! And the Chinese now? Mm-mm. But they can help us. They can supply matelios and whatwhat, from this Sino-American Consosham. But even us Zambians, with our limited rezosses, we can come together! Andi use? Our heads!’
Joseph nodded.
‘Now. This is