shades over her eyes. Her brother, in a sky blue shirt with white writing and a picture of a crown, was loaded with loot too, straps criss-crossing his chest, bags dangling at his hips. One bag – a small black leather one – had the distinctive pout of a camera case. Jacob walked over and plucked it up from where it hung from the boy’s shoulder. Jacob turned to the girl, who was clearly the boss.
‘Zingati?’
‘That Aka kothyoka thingie?’ she said, her aviators blank. She named a price anyway.
Jacob unbuttoned the case, took out the camera and turned it over in his hands, dabbling at its buttons, fingering the loose lever. Then he knelt on the ground and pointed the lens at her.
‘Ah-ah, it is not even digito,’ she complained, meaning they wouldn’t get to see a preview. But her brother posed, crossing his arms over his chest and making American westside signs. The girl gave in, putting a hand on her hip and her other elbow on his shoulder. Jacob looked in the viewfinder, then pushed the air to signal that they should step back. The moment they did, he got up and bolted, twice-poached camera in tow.
* * *
When they next ran into him, the girl cried bloody murder and the boy stomped around him like a Nyau dancer, hackles and fists raised. Jacob lifted his hands in surrender, then pulled out the camera. He had fixed the lever and replaced the battery with one from the dump.
‘Not bad, hey?’ the girl said, running her freckled fingers over it.
She looked at him through the viewfinder, gave a smirk, then turned, motioning for him to follow. The three of them strode through the compound towards the market on its periphery. Jacob wondered for a moment whether they were taking him to Gogo’s tomato stall to report him. But instead the girl stopped in front of a stall that sold sweets in single units, down to the individual Smartie. The seller, listening to an evangelist bleating on the radio, barely raised her eyes as they clambered over plastic sacks to the back, where a canopy was spread on the ground. The boy lifted it with a flourish. Laid out in furrows was a cornucopia of plunder: a heap of spectacles like skewered bath bubbles, a sloppy stack of iPods and phones, a tangle of earbuds.
‘So you can fix these kinds of thingies?’ the albino girl asked, hands on her hips.
Jacob crouched over a heap of Nokias and picked one up with a grin.
Solo and Pepa were orphans. They had been passed between the homes of distant relatives so many times that no one remembered any more how they had got their names. Maybe they had been named ‘salt and pepper’ – the albino bright as light, her brother dark as night – without regard for which was which. Or maybe Solo was short for pensolo, the lead pencil to his sister’s white sheet of pepala. They lived alone together now. They stole as a pair, ate as a pair, slept curled together like a sloppy yin yang.
Jacob was the first person they had ever let into their two-part existence. Within a year, their little Kalingalinga squad had developed a perfect system: Solo hunted for goods or pickpocketed them, Jacob patched them up, and Pepa got them sold. But then warnings spread among the expats to avoid the albino girl on the road past Kalingalinga. And the Auto Department started to run dry of spare parts to fix the things they stole.
There were rumours that there was better rubbish to be found, however. So-called E-Dumps had started to spring up all over Lusaka. These housed leftover gadgets, not from the rich, the apamwamba, the been-to class of Zambians, but from the places they had been to: America, South Africa, China, all of the countries that had run out of room to discard their obsolete and broken tech. These nations were now paying to ship their ‘e-waste’ to what they considered the trash heap of the world. Little did they realise they were jump-starting a secondhand tech revolution.
* * *
In the midst of her plans for bitterness and grace, Matha hadn’t considered that, when Godfrey came home, she might not stop crying. As it turned out, she simply carried on. Drip, drop, a shower, a squall, and in between, the seep of time. Had her man not come back? Had her love not returned? Yes but after that first night, she