that, as if everyone were sneezing all the time. But then Matha remembered that Ba Nkoloso had taught her to read using the Bible. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Put thou thine tears into my bottle. The words echoed back to her from her childhood. For the love of money is the root of all evil.
Returning to those mouldy old pages, she saw for the first time how angry God was, how He smote and browbeat his way through the Old Testament, and raged His way through the New: cursing fig trees and whipping money changers, daring people to consort with lepers and poor people, posing such a threat to government, they’d had to hang Him as a warning. It made sense to her that as a girl, her image of God Himself had been Ba Nkoloso – round black cheeks, storm clouds of dreaded hair, fearsome flashing eyes. Her image of heaven had been the clouds that he had asked to step out onto during his first flight.
Did he live in the clouds now? Was he looking down upon her from up there? She could hear his booming voice. Back straight! Eyes up! A luta continua! You squandered your whole life on that dead man Godfrey! What has become of my Star Afronaut? What has become of the Matha I knew? And what has become of her daughter?
* * *
When Lee Banda’s son started pitching up at the One Hundred Years Clinic next door to RIP Beds & Coffins, Jacob was puzzled. UNZA students did not intersect with compound residents unless they were reaching through car windows to trade kwacha for packets of fruit or Christmas ornaments. They might look each other in the eye, comfortably touch hands and even exchange thanks. But to broach the class barrier beyond this consumers’ pact was rare.
Was Joseph slumming, enjoying the low life on the low down? Like father, like son. One of Jacob’s few satisfactions in life was that Dr Lionel Banda was finally dead. He wasn’t about to resurrect him by resenting this skinny, yellow boy, his ugliness spiced now with pimples.
But then Joseph started showing up at the woodyard itself. Ba Godfrey had managed to build RIP Beds & Coffins into a small enterprise, collecting scraps from the woodyards in Kalingalinga and knocking them into items of furniture that he sold on the side of the road. Returning from a meeting with the General in New Kasama one day, Jacob found Joseph sharing a joint with the old man under the mopane.
‘Bwana,’ said Jacob to his grandfather.
‘Mwana,’ said Ba Godfrey. ‘This one is Joseph. He works at the clinic.’
Joseph coughed and woozily tilted his head up. ‘Have we met?’
Jacob ignored him and reached down to pluck the joint from his fingers, then sucked on it so fiercely it singed his lips. He handed it back, holding the smoke in his lungs and sipping out a question to his grandfather – ‘Has. The. General’s. Driver. Come?’
‘Not today,’ Ba Godfrey said. ‘But stay, comrade. We are discussing politics!’
Jacob sauntered off with a backhanded wave. He was not in the mood for his grandfather’s chatter about the good old days of Marxist revolution in Zambia.
Evidently Joseph was, however, because he started coming by every other day on his way to and from the hovel at the back of the clinic, where he and Musadabwe were doing god-knows-what with chickens and prostitutes. Joseph didn’t seem very serious about it. He mostly hung about RIP, smoking weed, calling Ba Godfrey ‘God’, and peppering Jacob with questions about his drone project.
It was not going well. Jacob had been experimenting with different drone models, trying to figure out the best ones to shrink down to miniature size. He purchased them online with the Standard Chartered bank card the General had given him, picking up the shipping boxes from the DHS off Makishi Road. But after nearly a year of work, RIP Beds & Coffins looked like a robot graveyard. Compound kids snuck in at night to strip the corpses, stealing metal and plastics to model little vehicles, just like the ones Jacob had once made in the Auto Department. Those old toys and these new ones – they were not so different. Except that Jacob not only had to make his look good enough to sell to bazungu, he had to make them fly, too.
He was running out of ideas. The websites on small drones were all geared towards research