were black and shut, her cheeks covered in a chalky rash.
‘Ba Mayo,’ Mummy said coolly.
Jacob looked up at her, then back at the woman. This was his gogo? He had never met her before but he had heard rumours about Matha Mwamba, Kalingalinga’s famous crying woman.
‘This is Jacob,’ Mummy said and nudged him forward. ‘Your grandson.’
Gogo reached out and patted his head searchingly. Mummy was speaking in a stilted Bemba, asking, or rather telling, his gogo to look after him. Mummy turned him to face her. She told him that she and Aunty Loveness already had a place to stay – she named a clinic – then promised that she would come back for him. She rubbed his cheek and made her exit. She did not say goodbye to her mother. She did not turn her head as she went, not even once.
* * *
After a week or so, Jacob went looking for her, but dozens of clinics had sprouted up in Kalingalinga to treat The Virus. It felt like it took as long as its name to find the One Hundred Years Clinic, and when Jacob enquired, a man wearing a white coat and a rubber and metal necklace told him that there was no Sylvia Mwamba living there. Gogo didn’t complain when Jacob returned to her home, stayed on for six weeks, five months, a year, two. She fed him and otherwise left him to his own devices. She didn’t seem bothered by his presence but she didn’t much bother about it either.
Jacob tried to make himself useful. He knocked together a bed and a table out of scraps from a woodyard. He sewed a protective canopy to spread over her tomato garden in the back. He rejigged an old filing cabinet so she could lock away her small moneys and convinced her to spend some of it to fit one wall of her cottage with a glass window, and to replace the old chitenge at the entrance with a wooden door.
His new home seemed empty compared to the hair salon. Gogo only had one seat, a school chair with the desk still attached, graffitied with the love poems of Musonda + Debbie; and one table, covered with a flowery plastic tablecloth, upon which sat a dented pot, a black pan, two cracked plates and a mixed family of cutlery. Several crates of old soft-drink bottles sat under the bed he’d built. He slept on a mat on the floor beside it.
Having long dwelt in two kinds of washing-day loneliness – being alone amongst the salon girls and being alone without them – Jacob now became accustomed to a third kind: spending a lot of time with one very quiet person. Gogo would wobble outside with the dirty linens and slowly lower herself to her knees in front of a plastic tub. She would suds them, beat them on a flat rock, rinse them in the bucket, wring them, then hand them to Jacob to hang on the line.
When they were dry, she would press them with the coal-filled iron, more to eliminate putzi fly eggs than wrinkles. They would fold together, doing that odd mirror dance – their arms stretching wide and coming together as they drew close, then apart, then close again – until the sheets were all bundled up in themselves. Just like his gogo. Though she sometimes made a low hum that he recognised as his name, her quiet, weeping presence made Jacob feel lonelier than ever, as if her solitude were contagious.
* * *
One Tuesday two years after he’d moved in, Matha’s grandson came into the house, closed the door, and told her that there was a dead man in the garden. It was rainy season. The smell of mud and the smell of concrete walls hugged in the air like long lost relatives. The tin roof clattered. The air was skittish with sheltering insects. Matha sat on a stool, head tilted so her tears ran off her face. She was shelling groundnuts, discarding the squeaky husks on the floor, preparing to make a special dish of chibwabwa ne’ntwilo for her grandson. She would roast the groundnuts and pound them; the pumpkin leaves were already boiling in a pot on the mbaula. Jacob came in and said, ‘There’s a man in the garden holding a piece of paper that says he is dead.’
Matha frowned and smacked his head for lying. Then she paused. She stood up and went over to her