things.’ Jacob glanced over his shoulder. ‘This place is clapped.’
‘Mmm.’ Ba Godfrey nodded. ‘Have you tried that new ka wood pile?’
‘Ah, no, I cannot use wood. I need tech.’
Ba Godfrey clambered out of the vehicle and brushed off the buttocks of his maroon flares. ‘They have some good electronical things as well,’ he said. ‘Let me show you.’
They met Solo and Pepa again on the way. As Solo walked ahead with Ba Godfrey, listening to a lesson on the political history of dreadlocks – ‘Ba Nkoloso would not cut his hair until Zambia was free!’ – Pepa nudged Jacob and whispered in his ear.
‘We do not have time to hang about with a bashikulu.’
Jacob shrugged, eyes fixed on the bedraggled hems of Ba Godfrey’s velveteen flares. He felt an obscure solidarity with the old man, who had been banished to the Auto Department just as Jacob had been banished to Gogo’s three years ago. Following Ba Godfrey they made one turn and then another until they were in a maze of kantemba selling cigarettes and Mosi. One more turn and they stood before a blue building with a white base.
It looked familiar. Jacob practised his new basic reading skills, mouthing the words: One Hundred Years Clinic. This was where the trail for his mother had gone cold. The place had been upgraded since then. Apart from the fresh paint job, there were security lights and a satellite dish and you could hear a generator chugging away in the back. Ba Godfrey was standing under a mopane tree a few yards away. ‘There!’ he pointed. It was a scatter of scraps, mostly wood but metal too, the leftover materials from refitting the clinic.
They didn’t find what Jacob needed to fix the DVD player, but it was a trove nonetheless. Under Pepa’s direction, the squad got to work dividing the stuff into piles – wood with rough edges like sugar cane, metal bars twisted like liquorice, a bent circular saw, some half-empty cans of blue and white paint. At the end of the day, they built a low grass fence to hide the stash and left Ba Godfrey there to guard it.
The old man settled right in. This was a softer spot to squat than the Auto Department, and more profitable: he whittled toys from bits of scrap wood and traded them for the booze and mbanji on which he seemed to subsist. Pepa decided it was a good place for them to hide their spoils until Jacob fixed the two machines she had promised the soldier. Solo was always happy to spend more time near Ba Godfrey, with his wild stories and rasta look. Jacob had his own reasons for wanting to keep an eye on the women going in and out of that clinic.
* * *
One morning, they found Ba Godfrey in particularly good spirits. He was sitting under the mopane tree, two drippy cans of paint open at his side, a plank of wood across his knees. He was using a leaf to coat it in white.
‘Greetings, revolutionary youths!’
Solo and Pepa waved and set about sorting through materials. Jacob sat with his grandfather under the tree, fiddling with his helicopter. Ba Godfrey offered him a Mosi.
‘Ah, no,’ Jacob demurred. ‘It is still morning.’
Pepa was shaking her head happily. ‘I still cannot believe we found this place.’
‘It is the mulu.’ Ba Godfrey raised a piece of bark to point at the crumbly redbrown termite hill. ‘It is our godsend! It has hidden the goods from everybody else.’
Ba Godfrey dipped the shard of bark into the can of blue paint, traced a short vertical line on the now white plank, and launched into a detailed treatise on the wonders of the African termite. You could use it for bait on a fish-hook or in a hunting trap. You could eat it for supper yourself, if you were so inclined. As builders, the termites were most magnificent. They constructed cathedrals, towers and spires, pillars and pavilions. You could use the material of their mounds to make clay bricks for housing. Their faeces fertilised grasses and crops and bowa…Ba Godfrey trailed off as he leaned back to scrutinise his sign.
Jacob glanced at it, trying to read it. What was a ‘rip bed’? And why was there an eight in the middle?
‘You know,’ Ba Godfrey mused, ‘Ba Nkoloso used to teach us about these insects for political purposes. We must be like ububenshi! We must work together, busy-busy, building things. We must scrounge with