on her palm.
‘I made the wings with solar tape.’ He smiled admiringly down at his creation.
‘What does that have to do with what you’re using them for?’
‘Niles!’ Joseph piped up. ‘It’s just technology, it doesn’t have morals built in.’
‘And what are your morals?’ she asked Jacob, locking eyes with him.
‘Well, he sold the Moskeetoze design to government, so you can guess,’ Joseph sneered.
‘I made these ones on my own,’ Jacob said, looking in her eyes. ‘I can use them for whatever I want.’
‘It was still a mistake to sell them to the powers that be,’ Joseph said pedantically.
‘Everybody makes mistakes. I make mistakes all the time,’ Naila laughed and broke eye contact. ‘It’s a frikkin pastime. I don’t even know how to drink a glass of water any more. It’s like a wet t-shirt contest every time.’
Jacob cracked up, his stomach muscles clenching. Naila watched him. She’d always loved to make a man laugh.
* * *
Naila and Joseph quarrelled on the drive back to her office, a fight like a sneezing fit – automatic, expulsive. Combined with the weed, it left her with a headache. They had hit the end of lunchtime traffic and by the time they reached the turning off Independence Ave, the inroad was jammed. Joseph kept inching forward in bursts, a rhythm not unlike the accusations he was lobbing at her as she stewed in silence. Flirting with him! Mocking my research! Arguing for what?! One more, she thought. The car jerked. Naila got out, slammed the door and trotted the last few yards from the car to the Department of National Registration, Passport and Citizenship.
Everyone in Lusaka just called it the Reg Office. It was a long concrete building, its yard riven with staggered queues, which you could see even when no one was there because the shuffling feet had ruddied the dirt. The shortest queue led to a barred window in the outer facade, where a dwanzi of a clerk told people which of the other queues to join. Depending on why you were here, he might direct you to Marriage or Death, or to the long and tired Birth queue. Most people ended up in the longest queue of all, the generically named Reg Queue.
By noon each day, the Reg Queue had crept out of the gate and halfway up the road, its ragged tail curling around the fence. Naila thought of it as a kind of crooked mural of Lusaka. Old men in dark suits; young men in lighter suits; young women in skirt suits; old women in chitenges patterned with staplers, stars, turtles, forks. Hawkers ran alongside, singing out prices for apples, shoes, BeadTime and bubblegum.
Old green Reg cards littered the ground, with torn or curling edges, text worn to cipher. Sometimes, people played the game of sifting through them for relatives, friends, younger selves. They often treated the queue itself as an incidental reunion, calling out names, asking after kids, chuckling at the old gossip, gasping at the new. Only occasionally did someone naïve pitch up and start asking loud questions: why had she been asked to report? Why did her card need replacing? Where was the manager? What was registration even for?
Hearing the shouts, Naila went to the doorway of her office – Electronical Administration – and tried to make out what was happening in the Reg Queue. In the midst of the bodies twisting like water, arms raised with indignation, she caught a paler splash: a muzungu? A coloured? No, the shouting woman today was Chinese, although her voice sounded Zambian. As Naila approached the trouble, she saw that the woman was decked out in touristy gear – cargo pants, a t-shirt, and black sandals that zebra’d her feet.
‘Futsek!’ she was shouting at the guard. She insulted him, called him a muntu and an idjot, tried to stomp her flexible sole down on his boot.
‘Madamu, please come down,’ the guard said worriedly.
The Reg line had deviated into a loop, around them.
‘What is going on here?’
A high voice with a tremor to it: the chirp of an ailing bird. Miss Cookie, who was rumoured to be in her seventies but still refused to retire, usually stayed in her back office all day. This was a dark, cobwebby room that looked as ancient as she did and seemed to concentrate all the bureaucratic energy of the place, as if the rest of the Reg Office had secreted out from it eons ago, diluting as it spread. Her office had no