lap, then started as if recalling something, and turned it around so it faced him.
A feeling crowded between his eyes, salty and stinging and sharp. Jacob knew all about machines and gadgets. He knew that electricity moved in a strange jerky way, and that when it flowed into several things, it could be divided without loss, though that might make things overheat and spark out. But though he was now fifteen years old and though he could recognise STOP signs and the number 74 on Gogo’s gate and the labels on his favourite foods, Jacob did not know how to read.
Gogo bounced a fingertip on the page and pointed at the helicopter to make her point: the same letters were on its nose. Jacob pulled the controller from his pocket and saw what Ba Godfrey had tried to explain last night. There were different words on the two gadgets. Jacob looked at his gogo, at her familiar rutted cheeks. Of course. Only Matha Mwamba, Star Afronaut, could teach him how to be a real engineer. He moved to sit next to her, keeping the book in his lap.
‘Show me?’ he asked.
And she did.
2012
It took a while before Jacob got that helicopter to fly. He found the right-sized batteries for it and the right controller to pair it with using Bluetooth. He unscrewed the belly of the toy to remove the circuit board. He resoldered the fritzed-out wires with his grandmother’s help, Gogo wearing kitchen gloves so that her slick palms didn’t short it. The mechanism was simple – lift and thrust – the goal even simpler: to fly. It should have been as easy as the moment in a dream when you realise gravity has no force and you step off a cliff and soar. But still the chopper did not rise.
Jacob couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He would connect the controller and the toy – the two blinking in counterpoint – and press ON. The helicopter, now mottled with fingerprints, would shudder to life, the propellers on its head and tail drifting round, spinning faster and faster until they were whipping blurs. The helicopter would lift one skid at a time and hang in the balance. But then, every time, it would tilt over and tumble into the dust.
Meanwhile, Pepa was pressuring him about the DVD player.
‘At least you can fix that one,’ she said, hands on her hips.
It had been several months but she worried that the soldier with the shiny cross would show up at Kalingalinga any moment to collect.
‘We do not have the right parts,’ he said.
They were in the old compound dump, picking through dregs. Jacob tossed the husk of a car radio aside with disgust. ‘We have to go back to the E-Dump in town.’
‘Were you not beaten? Did you not see that gun? What if he is a Youth Leaguer?’
The nation’s new president, ‘King Cobra’, was a rabble-rouser who railed against government cronies for being elitist and against Chinese mining companies for ignoring safety standards. When his Patriotic Front party had won the election last year, his Youth Leaguers had rioted in the streets. To the average Zambian, these young men seemed more like thugs than patriots.
‘He looked like Defence Force to me.’ Jacob shrugged and walked away from his friends and off towards the Auto Department. What did it matter? A man with a gun was a man with a gun. It wasn’t that Jacob wasn’t afraid of the soldier. He just felt helpless to do anything about him. Jacob wandered among the dead cars, their rusted frames like unburied bones. The Auto Department had been dry for ages.
A gruff voice called out to him. Jacob scanned the dump. It had come from a half-jeep – or rather from a shape inside it that now grew an arm. It waved. Ba Godfrey. Jacob hadn’t seen his grandfather since the night he’d come home bruised and bleeding from the E-Dump. As he neared, he saw a blue, red and white carton in Ba Godfrey’s lap. Shake Shake. Maybe that was why Gogo had turfed him out.
‘Mwana!’ said Ba Godfrey. ‘How is it?’
‘It is just okay, bashikulu.’ Jacob stuck his hand through an aperture to greet him.
‘So you see where I have landed?’ Ba Godfrey gestured at the grove of defunct vehicles. ‘In the graveyard after all.’ He laughed. ‘And what brings you to my humble boat?’
‘Looking for parts.’
‘Aha! For your choppa! Did you find the proper remote?’
‘Ya. But I need some other