new window to look outside, but she couldn’t see properly through the heavy rain. She patted the windowsill to find her matchbox of razor blades, opened the little drawer, pulled one out, and plucked its tip to check its sharpness. Then she swiftly ran the blade lengthways between her right eyelids. She heard Jacob gasp and rush over, but by the time he reached her, she had already done the other side, slicing through the tangle of lashes that usually kept her half-blind. She nipped a final knot and blinked wide. She stared out of the window until she was sure.
She went over to the bed Jacob had built for her and dragged a crate out from under it. She pulled out three soft-drink bottles – a Coke bottle shaped like a bishop chess piece, a Fanta bottle engraved with ridges that you could play like a guiro, and a Sprite bottle indented with fingerprints as if a baby had handled the green glass before it hardened. The bottles were full – not with bubbly black, orange or silver – but with a clear, still liquid. She picked up all three, reconsidered, and took just two. She walked to the door of No. 74 and opened it.
A man moved towards her through the downpour. Drops bounced off his body and crossed the falling rain, their clash shaping an aura. He stepped under the slim shelter formed by the jutting tin roof. His hair was long and matted in greying dreadlocks. A slip of paper hung from his slack fingers. Matha saw the scar on his neck. She reached across the threshold and handed him a bottle. He took it with a nod. They clinked and drank. He spat.
‘Heysh, woman! But it’s salty!’
Matha raised an eyebrow and drank again.
‘May I have a beer instead?’ asked Godfrey Mwango.
* * *
A few days later, the rain still clamouring on the roof of No. 74, Jacob found the dead man on the stoop, barefoot and muttering in a low steady current. His dreadlocks hung like different kinds of seedpods, some thin, some thick. He wore a tattered maroon suit with flared trousers and wide lapels. It had once been velvet but large mangy patches had worn away. Jacob joined him. Ba Godfrey handed him a Mosi – he didn’t seem to notice or care that Jacob was fourteen.
‘…radical! The Godfather of Soul! In Zambia! James Brown…’
Jacob took a swig of beer – it tasted bitter and round like impwa – and tried to follow the meandering account of the concert. He latched on again when Ba Godfrey mentioned his gogo.
‘…Lusaka to see Matha because I heard she was back from Kasama but then the lorry I jumped on in Choma broke down so I walked with the driver to a village somewhere there to find materials to fix the lorry. I have some mechanical knowledge from the Doctor, he taught us about revolution but also about these electronical things, I know how to fix an engine…’
But when Ba Godfrey reached the nearest village, he had ended up drinking three or four cartons of shakeshake with the locals – this was unwise, he admitted – then he had made a bet and lost and had to work to pay it off and a white preacher had baptised him with cooking oil and put the host on his tongue – but it was a beetle, he vomited it up – and he had joined a church and played the guitar like KK but the white hanky turned black after KK lost the election—
Jacob knew about Kenneth Kaunda and his white handkerchief, but KK had stopped being president in 1991, six years before Jacob was born. Ba Godfrey was still going.
‘…minibus stopped at Mazabuka but I found a bicycle. Then it broke but Ba Nkoloso taught us how to put the chain back on and ratchet it tight so I was riding fine but then a Land Rover hit me and I broke my leg and there was a hole just here…’ Ba Godfrey pointed to a deep scar, a ravine in his cheek.
A long night had followed – there was a muzungu woman and an Arab man who had vanished in a burst of kwacha and a boy who had brought him water and then the muzungu woman had returned but her hair had gone from black to yellow, from night to day. She had cradled his head in her lap and kept him alive until