mopane tree – until they had agreed to steal for him. They were the perfect skinnymaningi weasels, as he put it, to crawl through the hole in a wall.
‘Come on,’ Jacob exhorted Pepa now. Under the intermittent light of the Nokia, they ferried the boxes in the warehouse out to Solo through the gap in the wall. When they were halfway done, Jacob felt a flapping wind at his cheekbone. Pepa shrieked again.
‘Enough!’ she said and tore through the plastic wrapper of one of the iPhone boxes. She tugged the lid off, plucked the new phone from its bed and pressed a button on its top edge.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We will leave it. I just need…’ She swiped right to open and up for the control centre and touched her finger to the torch app. ‘Light.’
She placed the phone on the ground, pulled her jumper off, and they resumed ferrying. The next time the bat swooped at their heads, Pepa threw the jumper over it and down it tumbled. Jacob almost applauded. They continued their labour, ignoring the sounds from the corner – flibberti-thump, flackata-bump – and the jumper’s manic flapping. When they had taken as many boxes as they could carry, Pepa wriggled out first. On an impulse, Jacob picked up the iPhone and aimed its light at the jumper. Two red pinpricks gleaming evilly through the weave. He shuddered, pocketed the phone, and birthed himself outside again.
* * *
That bundle of agitation with its beady eyes needled into Jacob’s mind and stayed there. A few days later, he realised why his helicopter wouldn’t fly. Just as Pepa’s jumper had kept the bat earthbound, he had added too much weight to the helicopter when he had soldered the circuit. The moment it tilted too far, the airlift vacuum created by the spinning blade weakened. The balance of energy and mass was off. Jacob couldn’t make the circuit board lighter now. So he broke a plastic window and pulled out the little pilot, who was bent permanently in a seated position as if taking a shit. Unburdened, the toy buzzed to life, lifted right up and flew.
It flew so easily that Jacob found himself chasing after it. He hadn’t even figured out how to turn it off or how far it could go before the Bluetooth link severed – in the many months of trying to fly it, he had never needed to. His eyes fixed on the hovering chopper, Jacob pushed through Gogo’s gate and ran down the guttered path, swerving around a wheelbarrow and darting down a narrow passage behind a nursery school. He raced diagonally across its yard, where the girls skipping rope stopped their chanting song and gaped up at the wondrous toy, then giggled as he bumped into a guava tree and fell on his bum.
The helicopter swerved towards the metal yard, where Ba Solomon’s crew was busy welding, twisting, pounding and painting iron into playground equipment. Jacob stepped on a merry-go-round, leaving a footprint in the fresh paint, jumped through a swing, tangling its chains, bounced off a juddering slide. Ba Solomon gave a lazy shout, his boys laughing at the slapstick. The helicopter gusted higher, caught in an updrift. As he watched it rise, Jacob’s competing impulses – to fly the thing and land the thing – suddenly both seemed pointless. He just had to let it crash. His hand went limp on the controller as he slowed.
The toy came sloping down, Jacob trudging after it. It had led him to the edge of Alick Nkhata Road, where a blue and white minibus was just pulling onto the dirt bank to pick up passengers. He watched the helicopter swoop down as if on the end of a heaven-hooked string. Just before it crashed into the dust, it nosed into the back of a woman in the bus queue. She turned to stare at the intruder at her feet. She was wearing stiletto heels and a tight chitenge skirt with a pattern of dollars, euros and yen. Her shirt was twisted, her lipstick smudged. Glittery nails curved around her bus fare. She looked up with a frown and blinked.
‘Jacob?’ she gasped dramatically. She shuffled forward in her binding and stilts and fell upon him. Jacob reluctantly accepted the hug. He hadn’t seen Aunty Loveness since the Hi-Fly had burned down three years ago.
‘You’ve grown, haven’t you?’ she smirked. ‘What are you up to? Making trouble?’
‘No, ma,’ he mumbled, picking up his helicopter