does that make you Jesus?”’ – and about Ba Nkoloso’s morbid pranks and even about her sister – ‘Cookie was a too-pretty girl, that one!’
Not anymore, Matha thought pettily. Not that she would know. She hadn’t seen Nkuka in years. And Ba Nkoloso had died in 1989. Matha had read about the funeral in the newspaper, the weeping politicians and the crowd of mourners at the Anglican cathedral – there had been plenty praise for his freedom fighting and no mention at all of his Space Programme. Listening to Godfrey’s words carving a spiral into the past, it felt as if the great man and his dreams had risen from the dead.
Godfrey was vague whenever Jacob probed him about the actual technology, though: the mulolo swing, the mukwa catapult, turbulent propulsion. Matha frowned. Did Godfrey not remember the four stages of combustion? For months, she chopped vegetables or ironed clothes at the table by the window, her irritation gradually rising. Godfrey’s dullard answers reminded her of her time in disguise at the Lwena Mission School, when she’d had to suppress all she knew for the sake of secrecy.
Then, one day, while sweetening her tea, Matha overheard Godfrey call a piston a pistol. It could have been a slip of the tongue, but she was so flabbergasted that her teacup was half full of sugar before she noticed. She searched for a pencil, then snatched up the only book in the place, the Bible that old Mrs Zulu had left behind years ago. Matha opened the front door and squeezed herself between the two useless males on her stoop. She turned to an empty page at the back of the Bible. And as they stared at her wet and furrowed face, Matha Mwamba sketched out a diagram of an engine.
* * *
‘Stop! Thiefies!’
A short man in an army uniform was racing towards the rackety mound of electronic waste, waving a black club overhead. The belt at his waist sagged under the weight of a holstered gun. The E-Dump guard they had paid off with Hendrick’s gin stumbled along behind him, having obviously partaken in that liquid bribe. Shaking his head to sober up, he overtook the soldier and grabbed Pepa’s chitenge to pull her down the rubbish heap and onto a patch of dirt. He knelt heavily on her back. She bucked and shrieked, her feet hammering the ground. Solo was cowering behind his DVD player, but the soldier knocked that shield away, swung at the boy’s head with the club, and knocked him down.
The soldier turned to Jacob with a menacing look. Jacob curled away, cradling his toy helicopter to his chest as blows began to rain upon him. The beating was like the soldier himself – nasty, brutish and short. When it was done, he kicked at Jacob, bullying him over to where the other two were already lined up on their knees. Pepa was trying to hold her torn chitenge together. Solo’s crusty swollen eye looked like an anthill. Jacob clutched his chopper, bruises throbbing on his back. The drunken guard stood swaying before them. The soldier strolled back and forth, snorting with contempt, his glittering cross necklace swinging with each step.
‘Satanical children!’ he shouted. ‘Have you no rrrispect?! Stupit thiefies! You do not know we can detain you like that,’ he clapped his hands past each other.
The E-Dump guard nodded at this a little too hard and nearly fell over.
‘Must we beat you again so you can understand?’ the soldier continued.
At this, the guard stepped forward and slapped Solo’s head.
‘No!’ the soldier complained. ‘We must turn the other cheek!’
‘Sorry, bwana,’ said the guard, staggering back in confusion.
‘I meant the other cheeks! Maybe their backsides can understand better than their brains.’
‘Please, bwana,’ Pepa begged.
‘Turnaround, turnaround!’ the guard said as if singing the playground song. He prodded them until they were on their hands and knees, bums rounding up behind them. Then he backed away as the soldier raised his stick.
‘Don’t! Come! Heeya! Again!’ he shouted in sync with his blows. Solo and Pepa cried out with pain. Jacob stayed silent but the last blow knocked the helicopter out of his hands.
‘What have we got here?’ the soldier asked with slitted eyes and reached for it.
Jacob snatched it back with a snarl. The soldier laughed and raised his boot to kick him. Just then the guard vomited. The thin yellow gush splattered onto the ground and splashed up the soldier’s boots. As he stepped back in disgust, Pepa scrambled