whispered.
She glanced back but Jacob was rummaging in a duffel bag at the back of the stage. She laughed, her throat tight. ‘Are you really asking me that right now, men?’
‘Answer the fucking question, Niles.’ Joseph’s green eyes looked swampy.
Jacob came towards them, buttoning up his own secondhand Nehru jacket. He shooed them together, oblivious to the tension in the air. They stood next to each other – Joseph, Jacob, Naila – and he took a group selfie with an old iPhone.
Just before it gave its fake camera click, Naila noticed a boy standing in the football field looking up at them. So this was how kids faked taking pictures these days: not by bracketing their hands into a camera, but by raising a middle finger as if for a Bead selfie. Naila smiled. The boy smiled back. The sun glowered behind his head. He turned and then Naila heard it too: the rumble-drum of approaching feet.
* * *
The roads were chock-a-block with rush-hour traffic so the people flooded around the slo-go, trickling between the cars, and even clambering on top of them. Fed-up drivers left their vehicles in the road to join the surge of bodies. It was surprisingly quiet. People laughed. Babies squawked. Opportunistic hawkers called out wares and prices. Two news drones hovered above the compound with their truculent whine. But curiosity is not a loud sound and this was neither protest nor riot. It was more like an indaba, a gathering to discuss a problem, the problem pending until everyone has arrived.
Naila took a breath and glanced at Jacob and Joseph on either side of her. They were ready. Except – she looked behind them – they hadn’t had time to paint their message on the billboard. It sat there, its all and nothing surface, that dumb blankness full of meaning. The slick paint was coppering in the sunset. Traces of a BOOM shadowed its surface. Jacob saw Naila looking at it and with a nod, he walked over to a can of blue paint, bent down, and levered its lid up.
He had only managed to paint a big sloppy S and half of an O by the time the crowd was complete. There was still some motion within it but no longer that of a gushing flood or a river breaking its banks – it was the shimmering of a dark, pensive lake. Naila stepped back. Joseph stepped forward. He shuffled his papers, sniffed into the mic and looked up.
‘My name,’ he began and the mic bansheed with displeasure.
The crowd reeled. Joseph stepped back. Jacob scampered around adjusting cables. Naila, sensing restlessness afoot, quickly stepped to a corner of the stage. She raised her fist and started a simple chant – ‘S! O! T! P!’ The crowd picked it up, delighted to be instructed. Naila saw the speed of sound as the chant travelled back – by the time it hit people twenty yards off, it had stuttered off-rhythm. It became an echo, then a round, then died away.
A sweaty target had spread on the back of Joseph’s Kaunda jacket. He cleared his throat then hesitated and glanced back. Jacob, kneeling over a tangle of cables, motioned for him to go on.
Joseph turned to the mic and yelled furiously: ‘My name is Joseph Banda!’
No echo. No screech. Just his high, clear voice. Relief hummed across the crowd.
‘We have gathered here today,’ he smiled, ‘to—’
The sound cut completely and the rest of his sentence was drowned out by groans of pity and disappointment, which swelled and grew spiky with complaint. Joseph stepped away from the mic. There was a movement in the crowd, just visible in the purpling gloam of the sunset: a new contingent of bodies was wriggling through the masses, heading towards the stage. Naila heard a droning sound, punctuated by clapping: someone was singing a hymn.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ Joseph shouted.
‘Power cut,’ Jacob replied brusquely as he strode past and squatted at the front edge of the stage. An undulating serpent of bodies was squeezing towards him – all women, wearing all black – and now the head of the serpent emerged: a short, round woman in a cracked leather bomber jacket. Jacob reached his arms down into the twisting pit. The crowd knotted and boosted the woman up into his arms.
Joseph was yelling in Naila’s ear now, clutching his undelivered speech. She brushed him off and ran forward to help lift the woman up onto the stage. Jacob’s gogo