which streamed the images recorded by the GoPro.
Jacob saw its flight unfurl from his seat on the stoop of No. 74. It was like watching a film of the compound taken from above. The dwellers of Kalingalinga went about their business, little black heads trailed by their shadows. The motley roofs of their homes resembled the chitenge patch-quilts people sold at Sunday Market at Arcades.
On a whim, Jacob sent the helicopter across the road to the Lusaka City Airport to meet its gigantic relatives, the parked aeroplanes with their drooping noses. It zipped between two barbed electric wires and over a rolling heap of oil drums. He saw the warehouse in a corner of the screen and instinctively veered towards it. He approached from behind, clucking at what a poor job he and Solo had done of concealing their digging under its back wall, then navigated around to the front. Four men were loading boxes inside. They wore green army uniforms and black belts sagging with guns. Soldiers. Rich ones – gold glinted from their necks and wrists and fingers and earlobes.
As he neared, one man whipped around and gazed right into the eye of the camera. Shit. Jacob started back and reversed. An eddy of action broke onto the screen – men yelling and waving gold-spined fists – then receded into a blur as Jacob lifted the chopper’s nose up into the air and banked sharply left. Shitshitshit. He zoomed off, his heart pounding, and in a fever of acceleration, he overshot the compound. He caught a glimpse of Gogo’s roof and himself on the stoop – a cross-legged splotch – and looked up just in time to see the helicopter fly overhead, the camera like a black moon in its white belly.
There was a warning sound and he looked back down at the phone. A low-battery window was covering the view. Sucking his teeth, he tapped the x in the corner to close it. The helicopter was still moving rapidly. Jacob recognised the green expanse of the UNZA grounds, the Goma Lakes set into them like giant mirrors. Arcades came into view with its white canopy like a cresting wave in the middle of the car park. Then the building-buttoned maze of Showgrounds. The Manda Hill parking structure, grey and immense as ancient ruins. The green metal pedestrian bridge where Great East Road met Addis Ababa Drive, infested with Airtel and Digit-All ads.
Just after the Northmead shopping centre, Jacob made a right. Paseli Road. He didn’t know the exact house number but it didn’t matter – a boxy white frame came into view and he swerved towards it as if magnetised. It was Uncle Lee’s old pickup, parked in the drive in front of a reddish L-shape – a roof – with a green lawn filling out the rectangle. Jacob descended and sent the chopper around the house, angling the one-eyed belly of the beast up to a window but he could see nothing through the curtains. His mother had always preferred privacy to light. Annoyed, he reversed from the window too quickly, ricocheted off the edge of the house and tumbled into the grass.
Jacob stared at the picture on the screen: sharp green blades jutting through thin white skids. He jabbed the launch button but the chopper shuddered uselessly against the ground. Shit. The low-battery window appeared again. He tapped it closed. A chongololo began slinking upward from the grass, probing a skid with its antennae, then creeping up it. What if he sent the chopper forward and up at the same time? He pressed both buttons at once, but this just sent the blades sputtering like an overturned plough. The knubby centipede was now curled around the skid – the vibration had triggered its spiral clutch. Shit. With this new burden, the chopper was once again too heavy to launch. A little white circle began to whir over the screen. Shitshitshit. Jacob stood up from Gogo’s stoop in Kalingalinga, staring helplessly at the iPhone as it went black.
* * *
He ran to RIP Beds & Coffins to get the phone charger, which Pepa insisted on keeping there at all times. He found her alone, sitting under the mopane with a resting frown, rifling through an issue of Mademoiselle. With a sinking feeling, he noticed the telltale bulge under her tight blue skirt – she had stuffed something in her panties to absorb her menstrual blood. That bulge usually appeared along with the cloudy mood that