thought Ba Nkoloso was honking the horn again but then she saw it: a goat kneeling in the corner of the pickup bed, its eyes rolling with fear. She looked around but the other cadets just shrugged at her with conspiratorial smiles. Godfrey handed her a Mosi. She sipped it, queasy with anticipation. After a twenty-minute drive, the pickup turned off Cairo Road and parked behind a low concrete building. They all hopped out, Godfrey lifting Matha out like a child. They walked up to a door with a sign that said LUSAKA MORTUARY.
Ba Nkoloso knocked softly. After a moment, the door opened, releasing a fog of white light around a black head. Ba Nkoloso quickly slammed the door against the man, pinning him to the wall inside, his round spectacles tumbling down his nose. The mortuary assistant resisted at first but Ba Nkoloso’s five-shilling note was very persuasive, more so than his promise of a house ‘when Independence arrives with its celebration of our nation’s new hegemony!’ Independence was still two years away at least, far too long for a promise to hold in Lusaka.
‘Just one body?’ the malukula asked, staring at the money in his hand.
‘Just one.’ Ba Nkoloso patted the attendant on the cheek. ‘But it must be a white woman.’
After a few minutes, the malukula reappeared, wheeling a gurney bearing a covered grey oblong. Ba Nkoloso cut the cloth open to see the face and nodded. The four male cadets stepped forward, lifted the body onto their shoulders – it hung between them like a machila – then carried it to the pickup and slid it feet first onto the bed. Godfrey tugged the sack off and they all stared a moment. The woman’s skin was mapped with green veins. Her lips were pulled into a grimace. Her breasts were half-empty sacks, one nipple drawn down as if melting. Her frozen pubic hair looked windswept.
Matha had grown up in a village, so the killing of the goat was less shocking than what they did with its blood. Bambo gripped the shuddering beast between his thighs and clamped its jaws shut with his hands, pulling its head up so its neck stretched tight. Ba Nkoloso knelt before it and slashed its throat, holding a tin bowl under the cut until it was full of the thick, dark liquid. Then he carried it to the truck and poured it over the dead woman’s pale chest and neck. The blood puckered and bubbled – its heat reacting to the skin, cold from the mortuary ice blocks. Something about the blood, its foreignness to the body it touched, made Matha sway weakly. Godfrey put his hand to the back of her neck to steady her.
Ba Nkoloso wiped his hands brusquely on his trousers. ‘Now she looks freshly murdered!’ he laughed as he climbed into the cab of the pickup.
The cadets clambered in the back, squatting against the edges, as far from the corpse as possible, keeping it in position with their feet as the pickup swivelled its way through Lusaka. The corpse lay face up, the goat’s blood glistening darkly on her chest. The frilly shadows of the jacarandas on either side of the road made it seem as if she were underwater, thready waves passing over her. The label affixed to her big toe fluttered in the wind. Her teeth glinted grimly in the passing headlights. Whenever the pickup slowed, the smell would be upon them – cold rank flesh, coppery goat’s blood, the sour hops of spilt Mosi. A sense of wrongness began to swell like a swarm of angered bees. Matha’s nostril hairs curled. The back of her neck tingled.
The pickup finally slowed and turned into the drive of the Ridgeway Hotel. Ba Nkoloso found a parking spot near the entrance. The pickup stopped with a lurch and the body slid back, its skull ringing the metal siding like a dull bell. The cadets flinched away from it but Ba Nkoloso got out of the cab and slapped the side of the truck to make it gong again.
‘Let us show these bazungu who they are dealing with!’ he shouted, black eyes gleaming.
The cadets hopped out. As the men prepared to heave the corpse onto their shoulders again, Ba Nkoloso instructed Matha to go in and find the bellboy, who had been paid in advance. She ran in through the glass doors, blinking at the brightness of the lobby after the long drive in the dark. She found