to take the box out. Jacob lifted it onto the ground – it was surprisingly light – and shut the door. The SUV rumbled away.
Jacob knelt down to open the box, sounding out the letters on it in his head. Pandom?
‘Is it a gift?’ he asked his grandfather.
‘It is a ghost!’ Ba Godfrey laughed.
‘No,’ said Jacob as he tugged away the styrofoam packing. ‘It is a drone.’
He recognised it from the Internet – the latest model from a Chinese company called DJI.
‘What’s this?’ Ba Godfrey reached into the box and pulled out an envelope. It was thick with fresh kwacha bills. ‘Two thousand, three thousand,’ he counted. ‘Ah, but this is not much.’
‘No, bashikulu,’ said Jacob. ‘You have forgotten that they changed the currency.’
The kwacha had been redenominated last year, from multiples of a thousand to multiples of one. K3,000 was no longer equivalent to less than $1. It was equivalent to nearly $500.
‘Oh!’ Ba Godfrey’s eyes grew wide. ‘Iwe, what did you do for this money?’
But the real question was: what would Jacob do for it? He was staring at the drone on the ground. It was a bribe and a temptation and a command all at once.
* * *
Sylvia woke up on the floor of her mother’s house. It was afternoon. The sunlight in the room was brazen and casual, pouring in through the new glass window and the cracks around the new wooden door. She watched the dust drift and flash in its rays. Turning onto her side, she pulled her knees to her chest, examining the wounds from the broken glass. The scabs had a comforting smell, like warm ngwee. Time passed. Even when the sun had snuck away, leaving the air to cool and the shadows to gather, Sylvia stayed curled up on the floor, not waiting, but not not-waiting, either.
When her mother came home a few hours later, her feet knocked right into Sylvia’s legs. Sylvia yawned and stretched and said hello, her voice crackling with sleep. Matha sniffed and made a pot of tea. They sat across from each other at the wooden table – also new – and sipped tea from tin cups in a silence strung with unspoken words. Evening arrived: woodsmoke and cooking oil, homegoing footsteps, people talking and eating. Then the children went to bed and the bars woke up and night arrived: twinkling light and tinkling glass, bass tremors, people laughing and drinking. A juicy, drunken laugh splashed in through the window from a shebeen.
Matha sucked her teeth and Sylvia looked up. Since when? And so what if she had spent her life in that kind of place, enjoying the company of a man or two? At least she hadn’t been stuck inside a room, crying over one. Her head shook no; Matha’s head shook no. Their heads were like flowers swaying in the rain, like there would be no end to the back and forth. Finally, Sylvia stood and cleared their cups, taking them out to the tap in the yard – another upgrade to No. 74.
She squatted and washed up, the colliding tin cups making an open-mouthed echo, the gritty spray needling the cuts on her knees. Her thoughts struggled to float free but a string held them, kept them fluttering. Where can I go? Where can I go? Where can I go? It had been years since Sylvia had worked the profession, years since another man’s mouth had clenched over her with pleasure. She was too sick now, anyway. Who would trust a face like hers, with its dark, rough patches? Many of her former clients had The Virus too, but they could afford the ARVs to pretend otherwise. She still didn’t know who had given it to her, which anonymous man had carried death instead of life in his amabolo, banking the wrong currency in his money bags. Her precious mutations had only delayed the inevitable. The Virus had several subtypes and more than two ways to enter the body.
She shook the tin cups dry. Was it Lee? That man and his bloody promises. A house, a cure. His love. Even the smallest promise – that he would come to her before he died – he had even broken that one. She had learned of his death from the funeral announcement in the Post. The Anglican cathedral. No way would she have shown her face there or at the crematorium. Had his skin burned like bark? Like paper? Where can I go? Where can