knowing that this skinny man, with his hang-em-highs and spotty afro, could give her a way out. And he did.
Two years later, Mr Mwape smudged some numbers and used his connections in Lusaka to procure a job for himself and admission for Nkuka to the secretarial course at the Evelyn Hone College of Further Education. Previously a whites-only facility, it now admitted a few dozen freshly minted Zambians.
It took Nkuka four days, a car, a train and two buses to get from Kasama to Lusaka – a chongololo journey, as slow and segmented as a caterpillar. By the time she arrived, she was too exhausted to be impressed by the height and span of the main campus building off Church Road. She did notice the clock attached to its outer facade though. Nkuka had seen clocks before, of course. But this one was not bound inside a circle; its numbers were its frame. This was wondrous to her, less because she cared about time or technology, and more because it was her first encounter with a design that made her feel something. It made her feel free.
The Pitman’s secretarial course was easy: typing, shorthand, filing. This kind of work – training the fingers to sally and sort – suited Nkuka well. Mr Mwape gave her a stipend for food and for lodging in a city council hostel – a small bedroom shared with one student, the kitchen and bathroom shared with six. Cookie, as the other girls immediately nicknamed her, spent the rest of her allowance keeping herself in fashion. Mr Mwape visited on Sundays when his wife and children were at church; the only condition of their arrangement was that Cookie not get pregnant.
Most of the other girls at Evelyn Hone – they called themselves the Eves – were apamwamba, the black and brown daughters of government officials and civil servants. Cookie took advantage of their fancy magazines and wardrobes for fashion ideas. She would match these to the closest McCall’s sewing patterns, which she reused by tracing them onto newspaper. For material, she had the leavings of stain-and-fade-resistant Dacron, waxed cotton and Crimplene that the rich girls bought at Mistry’s. And when she couldn’t borrow someone’s Singer sewing machine, she sewed her outfits by hand. Her stitches were so neat, her designs so clean, that she was soon taking commissions and receiving payment in kind.
Cookie was the first Eve to start wearing trouser suits (McCall’s #2087 and #2169). The trousers were so long and wide that the cuffs dragged, collecting detritus that orbited her ankles. As soon as she came back from class, she would take off her flares and replace them with a withered chitenge. Staring through the gridded window above the kitchen sink in the hostel, she would scrub the bottoms of her flattering trousers, then drape them on a wire over the sink. She would carefully dry her hands and coat them with Vaseline. And only then would she join the other Eves at the kitchen table, painting their nails with infinite coats of polish, reading out the raciest passages from withered Mills & Boon paperbacks, drinking cup after cup of tea, and humming to the soul music scratching out of their blue Supersonic radio.
* * *
When Matha pitched up at the hostel one evening, her bedraggled boyfriend in tow, Cookie sighed, welcomed them into the kitchen, and put the kettle on to make them some tea. She had no choice – Matha was the only family member who knew that a married man was keeping Cookie in comfort, school and fashion. Matha was wearing dusty maliposa and an old, cracked bomber jacket over a chitenge wrapper and a sweat-stained UNIP t-shirt. The sleepy dude standing behind her, whom Matha introduced as Godfrey, was decked out in an absurd silver cape. Ba Nkoloso’s work, Cookie thought bitterly.
That lunatic had killed her mother, undone her father, turned her brother to drink. But worst of all, Ba Nkoloso had reduced her little sister – lovely laughing Matha – to this. This boyfriend of hers was a common muntu. Tall and handsome, sure. But ignorant. Rabble. Godfrey had vegetable-dull eyes and an mbanji-slow tongue and a thick keloid scar on his neck, a lump bursting through the skin that reminded Cookie of a knot in baked bread. She couldn’t stop staring at it as Matha let her tea go cold, explaining in great detail why the Zambian Space Programme was over. Good riddance! thought Cookie until she