intelligence, we must use what is around, even if it is our own wastage. Let us praise the termite! Although, we must be vigilant against them in our line of business.’
Pepa looked up. ‘What’s our line of business?’
‘Furniture.’ Ba Godfrey stood up, holding his sign. The three young people gathered around him to look at it.
‘But what does “rip” mean, bashikulu?’ asked Jacob.
‘Arra eye pee. This is standing for Resting in Peace,’ Ba Godfrey said. ‘RIP Beds and Coffins. The perfect kingdom for a dead man to rule!’
‘But bwana, are you really dead?’
‘Mwana, that is what government says with official documentation. So it must be—’
Ba Godfrey’s words were swallowed by the growl of a vehicle. A black SUV skidded around the corner of the clinic and parked, sending up a cloud of dust. They all stepped back, coughing and waving their hands. A car door swung open. Something bright flashed in the midst of the swirling red. It was a cross. The soldier from the E-Dump had found them.
* * *
Jacob often had dreams about the crashed aeroplane he had stumbled upon at the Lusaka City Airport when he was a boy. Sometimes it became whole again and he was its pilot. Sometimes he woke up just as it hit the ground and burst into flames. But even though he had complete freedom to roam around Kalingalinga, Jacob had never tried to sneak into the airport across the road to see it again. That adventure, that straying, had occasioned Lee Banda’s entrance into his life, which had in turn occasioned his mother’s exit from it. The airport had come to seem a chancy, cursed place.
The number of aircraft that landed there had dwindled over the years. Only once in a while would a zipping or rumbling overhead signal that a private plane was arriving, bearing a shah or a minister or a ‘special guest’ of government. Security had amped up. The bougainvillea fence had been replaced with a concrete wall topped with a musical score of wires – definitely electrified – and someone was paying for a powerful generator: though power cuts happened all the time these days, the lights blasting from the walls at night never trembled or died.
‘Over here!’ Pepa seethed, her eyes flashing under those lights now.
The three of them were behind the perimeter wall of the airport. According to the soldier, this was in fact the back wall of a warehouse and if you dug into the soil underneath it, you could pull out the breezeblocks in the bottom two rows. Pepa pointed down at the telltale signs of wear in the crevices where they had been chipped loose. The boys knelt down and started digging into the tough dry-season dirt.
When the gap in the back wall was big enough, Pepa wriggled through it into the warehouse. Jacob and Solo waited for their cue. Instead of Pepa’s soft whistle, they heard a screech and the cascading sound of falling boxes. Jacob jumped down and dragged himself through the gap, scraping his stomach.
‘Pepa?’ His foot hit something soft – ‘Ow!’ she said – then something hard.
‘Am fine,’ she snapped. ‘There is a cat in here.’
Jacob pulled out his old Nokia, turned it on and waved it around like a torch. Its blue light floated fairy-like over Pepa’s face, over the garish split in her lip from the soldier’s last visit. She was lying under a pile of small white boxes. She sheepishly unearthed herself.
Jacob picked up a box. ‘I. P-p-p…eepon?’
‘Oh, iPhone! I know those!’ Pepa rose excitedly from her crouch.
Just then, Jacob’s Nokia went dark and something swooped at their heads. Pepa squealed. Jacob felt something graze the tip of his ear, soft as Ba Godfrey’s velveteen suit. Jacob turned his phone on again and cast the light around the room. A shadow flickered and fluttered among the bigger boxes stacked against the walls.
‘It is just a bird,’ he said as the phone went black again. The just-a-bird screeched. ‘A bat?’
He felt Pepa’s glare in the dark. Why hadn’t he fixed the DVD player and the chopper in time? The short soldier had located them easily. Everyone knew the chidangwaleza in Kalingalinga: ‘I just asked for the white muntu!’ he’d laughed. When he had found them empty-handed in the yard by the clinic, he had recruited them to do this job in lieu of the electronics they owed him. Or rather, he had knocked them around for a bit – Ba Godfrey watching helplessly, tied to the