the weeyo-weeyo bus came. Blinding white lights, the smell of inswa and Dettol, a fire, playing nsolo with a monkey that bit his thigh and snatched a beer out of his hand, a long dark plain lit by a single paraffin lamp…
Jacob frowned, unsure if it was Ba Godfrey or the Mosi that had him buzzing with confusion. ‘Who is Ba Nkoloso?’ he asked.
Ba Godfrey’s head swayed with the interruption, his lips trembling as he turned to Jacob.
‘Ba Nkoloso?! A revolutionary! He said Zambia would go to the moon!’
Jacob’s spirits sank. Bashikulu had wandered off the path again.
‘Your gogo has not told you about Ba Nkoloso?’
‘Gogo does not talk much,’ said Jacob, wiping beer bubbles from his upper lip.
‘Hm, yes,’ Ba Godfrey laughed. ‘She can be quiet, that Matha. But she is a fiery girl!’
Jacob looked at him. How strange to imagine that this muddy old man – skin riddled as dirt, wormy grey hairs in his dreads, that slug-like scar on his neck – had known Gogo as a girl.
‘Ba Nkoloso taught us about history, politics, technology. And Matha – she even has math in her name! She was the smartest space cadet—’
‘Wait, Gogo was…a space cadet?’
‘Yesss!’ said Ba Godfrey. ‘That is what I’m telling you! Listen.’
And on he went, opening two more Mosis for them along the way. This space story was bizarre but it was more coherent and detailed – oil drums rolling down a hill with cadets inside, the headquarters in Chunga Valley, the Cyclops I shuttle – and it could withstand questions, unlike his other stories, which crumbled at the touch like Jacob’s clothes after the fire at the salon. By the time Gogo returned from the market, slouching under a Union Jack umbrella, Jacob almost didn’t recognise her. So taken was he with the vision of ‘Matha Mwamba, Star Afronaut’ that his grandfather had painted – a young woman decked out in a bomber jacket, arms akimbo, a sparkle in her eye – that it had displaced the swampy, lumpy Gogo moving slowly towards them.
Jacob slid his empty beer bottle behind him and got up to help her carry her bags of unsold vegetables. Ba Godfrey nodded at her as she passed inside but stayed on the stoop, sipping at his Mosi, his feet half-sunk in mud. Inside, Jacob sat at the table and watched Gogo stash vegetables and a rotten wad of kwacha in the filing cabinet. Did she like selling vegetables? Did she miss being a space cadet? Gogo switched on the electric kettle he’d found for her in the dump and made them each a cup of tea. She sat with him and they sipped. Only then did Jacob ask her his most pressing question.
‘You had twelve cats, Gogo?’
Her head tipped up with surprise. It was the first time Jacob had ever seen his grandmother’s smile. She was missing some teeth but it was beautiful.
* * *
Jacob was too young for a real job and too old to go back to school. His mother had never tried to get him a formal education, not that he wanted one – who would want to be a student with an itchy uniform and a ringwormy head, confined to a hot classroom all day, listening to the drone of a teacher who had barely passed Form II herself? Plus school was a dead end once you hit the dread wall of grade seven exams. Your best bet was to hustle – scrape some profit by hawking goods to those Zambians with better luck or richer relatives. You could grow those goods (vegetables, fruits, puppies). You could buy them on the black market (watches, hats, puppies). Or you could scavenge for them.
In the middle of Kalingalinga, there was a dump, a pile of rubbish even taller than the spires of the compound’s homegrown churches, and with a stench so potent it lingered like a song stuck in your head. On the edge of the dump was the Auto Department, a vehicular graveyard – a Mitsubishi more rust than red, a third of a Land Rover, a half-buried Beetle that resembled upended roots. The compound kids would climb inside these wrecks and ‘drive’, honking their noses, revving their throats, their feet pumping invisible pedals as they looked through the paneless windows.
The kids sometimes used leftover scraps to build toy cars modelled after those husks. These wire cars and jeeps and trucks were like three-dimensional line drawings, each detail bent into perfect place – windscreen, wheels, gear