Kasama as soon as possible, before her pregnancy began to show. Matha had no choice but to go – she wouldn’t even have time to send word to Godfrey. But she vowed she would never hand their child over to this shivery witch, even for something as valuable as an education.
* * *
To her father, Matha’s pregnancy meant that her prospects for marriage and employment, not to mention life on heaven and earth, were ruined. Mr Mwamba had always been a congenital worrier, a man who took Pascal’s wager as a motto: Let Us Live As If. The experience of losing his wife to politics had bestowed him with a permanent distrust of the world. He had retreated from it entirely and now ran the family farm in Kasama with his younger sister. She was a widow, too, with a brood of children. They were cut from the same cloth, those two. They prayed together and worried together and quarrelled peaceably about farm problems: money and drought and equipment.
Mr Mwamba had put his previous life to rest with relief. Bernadetta had always been too much. Too eager to work, too bitter, too angry, too quick to blame the bazungu. The children she had left behind all seemed tainted by her too – Mulenga was as dim-witted as Bernadetta’s father had been; Nkuka had been happy to abandon him as soon as he was done paying for her education. And Matha! When he received a letter from his eldest sister Beatrice in Lusaka about Matha’s situation, Mr Mwamba had been disappointed but unsurprised. He had always suspected something bad would happen to his youngest. She had a cursed way about her. Always laughing.
When Matha pitched up at the farm three months pregnant – two burly aunties on either side of her like bodyguards – she looked up from her squat of greeting to see resignation rather than anger grooved in her father’s face. He had already slotted the news about her into an old story. The story went like this: no matter how the world shifts to accommodate her, this kind of woman finds a way to disturb the peace. This kind of woman is the nganga that sits at the top of the stream, kicking her feet to make it roil.
* * *
This was not entirely untrue. If village life had ever suited Matha Mwamba, it certainly no longer did. She sulked as she worked the fields with Mulenga – her dwanzi brother finally living the pleasant, listless life he’d always been destined for. She hung her head as she plucked squeaky visashi, sucked her teeth as she gathered hairy chibwabwa, sighed as she shelled groundnuts and pounded maize. Hot and hungry, doubly so because she was pregnant, she moped around in a state of perpetual irritation, as if the very air were laced with stings. In a sense, it was: there were swarms everywhere – why had she never noticed them before? The sky looked like the greyish pages of her old exercise books, the insects like a script of equations – commas and dashes, full stops and slashes – the way maths looks in a dream.
Often, Matha begged nausea or fatigue just so she could sit in the kitchen and listen to the Saucepan radio, the programmes barely quenching her parched curiosity. She missed Lusaka, its hectic streets and clamouring newsboys, the disgruntled Giraffes and Zinglish patois. She missed the Academy and Ba Nkoloso, and she even missed her sister and the Eves. But God, she missed Godfrey! As soon as she had arrived, she’d written a letter to him in Lusaka, apologising for their fight, telling him about the pregnancy, pleading for him to come to Kasama. Two weeks later, she received his reply. It was cluttered with spelling errors but run-on with joy – about the baby, and the Just Rockets, and his training to become a truck driver. Am gona driv to com and see you!
Matha resigned herself to withstanding this hell in the countryside until then. She wrote him letters in the meantime, but after Godfrey’s first reply, no more came. She lumped around, sulking, biding her time. But discontent was in her nature and it grew over the next three months, swelling with her belly, until one day, a conspiracy of chance events sprang a door wide and she found herself running through it.
* * *
It all began in the queue at the Boma in Kasama. Matha and her father had