and hiding it behind his back.
‘Madamu!’ the bus conductor called. ‘Please come up now so we go, eh?’
‘Iwe, shuttup if you want my money,’ she spat, slapping the air with a clutch of kwacha bills. She turned back to Jacob and smiled, her teeth bright as moons in the dark sky of her face.
‘You should go and see your mother, darling,’ she purred meanly. ‘She misses you.’
Jacob swallowed. ‘But Ba Aunty, where is she keeping up?’
‘You haven’t been to the house?’ Aunty Loveness’s laugh tinkled up then fell to a sigh. ‘It is just pa Northmead. Paseli Road.’
Before he could ask for the house number, she had turned, her weave sweeping the air.
‘Right, darling, I’m off. Ciao,’ she said and stepped onto the bus, delicate as a queen in her stilettos. The conductor turned to watch her squeeze into a seat. ‘Key to the grave,’ he muttered. Then he swung the door shut in Jacob’s face and the bus crept into the traffic.
* * *
That warehouse shipment of smartphones had come in to take advantage of the completion of the AFRINET project. Fibre cables now floated in the three seas around the continent like immense electric eels, zapping currents between servers and routers that spewed Wi-Fi into the air until a swarming, flashing stormcloud of it hovered over Africa. Korea and China and Japan had all caught Afrotech fever, flooding the market with cheap mobiles with built-in Wi-Fi ports. In a leapfrog of technology, the majority of Africans, the poor included, had access to the whole wide world through its web.
Jacob connected the iPhone he’d nabbed from the warehouse to AFRINET and searched online for Audis and Benzes; Solo watched Nollywood clips on YouTube. The boys had been swapping it back and forth for weeks before Pepa noticed. She was furious. Christian, as they had started calling the soldier with his dangling cross, had been satisfied with their warehouse heist. He had even rewarded them with a carton of Pall Malls, which Ba Godfrey had promptly resold. But if he found out that they had stolen from him, who knew what he would do to them?
‘Are you not the one who opened the box?’ Jacob accused Pepa.
‘Just to see!’ she protested. ‘We could not do the job with that nasty thing flying at our heads! But I told you we must leave it there. Not start thieving-thieving.’
Jacob defended himself. It had been an impulse theft, the way Pepa herself had once snatched glasses off the sunburnt noses of foreigners.
‘Solo, did you not say your sister took mbasela?’
Solo was too busy scrounging around Ba Godfrey’s mat for bits of marijuana to reply.
‘He pays us to steal for him!’ said Pepa. ‘Not from him!’
‘Isn’t he stealing from the bwana who owns the warehouse? How can he deny us the same?’
‘Waona manje,’ she said sullenly. ‘That man has a gun.’
Solo sidled up and put his arm around his sister, the iPhone in his hand. The browser was open to a picture of a South African model, Refilwe Modiselle. Pepa’s eyes widened: Modiselle was an albino too. Soon enough Pepa was snatching the iPhone out of the boys’ hands every day, shouting ‘Bags I!’ and hunkering down to open her book-marked fashion blogs. And when Christian asked them to do another warehouse job, and then another, with nary a word about a missing iPhone, she decided he must have missed or forgiven it.
Over the next two years of working for Christian, the Kalingalinga squad skimmed a little off the top of all of their heists. They alternated who got first choice of mbasela. Pepa selected a sky-blue dress from a shipment of clothes. Solo took a neon boomerang from a crate of electronic toys. The siblings were surprised that Jacob let Solo choose that time – didn’t Engineer want this-here remote-controlled car, or that-there robo-dog? No. Jacob saved his pick for a shipment of sports equipment. Aha! A bicycle! Pepa winked at Solo. But no, what Jacob wanted was a small white box labelled GoPro.
* * *
Jacob downloaded the GoPro app on the iPhone, then popped a battery in the eyeball camera and suctioned it to the bottom of his helicopter, right between the skids. He had to chip away six panels, the pilot’s chair and the steering wheel to make up for the camera’s weight, and the chopper still wobbled when it went up. But Jacob had become an expert at flying it and it was unexpectedly easy to navigate via the iPhone,