the driver’s side of the Peugeot, undid the brake, put it in drive and chugged down the dirt road away from the farm. She laughed even as each rut in the road added another bruise to her bum. She was going home! Home was not these old people shouting in a field. Home was Godfrey, his hands gripping a microphone, wailing for love and for country. Stealing the car, driving it off, the money for the sprinkler in the satchel on her lap as her father dug up the rest of his livelihood in the rearview mirror – all of this freedom shook Matha up, filled her with giggles like bubbles in a Coca-Cola.
* * *
The bubbles burst when she hit Great North Road. What had she done? The dual carriageway was still mostly dust and gravel, widely known as ‘Hell Run’. Trucks and lorries raced by, terrifyingly close, sending violent sprays of stone against her windows. The Peugeot’s shudder over the rough road was so intense that when she hit the new tarmac at Kapiri Mposhi, the skin on the backs of her thighs began to itch, as if lingering in vibration. She finally pulled over under a pitch-black sky, the headlights barely grazing the darkness. In that eerie glow, she battened down in the back seat, her bomber jacket for a blanket, the satchel clutched to her stomach.
She woke at dawn, cold and hungry and disconcerted by the sight of the windscreen. She had been staring through it with such concentration the day before, she hadn’t noticed it becoming almost opaque – streaked with mud, scratched with pebbles, blotted with bird droppings and the ashes of butterfly wings. She got out of the car and peed behind a tree. She cleaned her teeth with a stick, ate the four bananas she had bought at the petrol station in Kasama, and wiped off the windscreen with a leaf. When she got back in the Peugeot, it wouldn’t start. She had left the headlights on the whole night and the battery was dead.
She managed to hitch a ride in a van packed with passengers, the air thick with their breath and sweat and palpable judgment about the tight stretch of her dress over her stomach. The sun was setting when they reached Lusaka. As she disembarked, Matha pressed a crumpled Federation pound from the satchel into the driver’s hand. When he complained, she realised that she too had missed the currency deadline. She stuffed the bills in the pockets of her bomber jacket and bartered for her ride with the satchel itself – good, strong leather even if it was old.
She zamfooted to the shebeen in Kalingalinga to find Godfrey, shivering at the thought of seeing him, and hoping he had the connections to go back for the Peugeot and trade this outdated cash. They would need money and transport if they were going to navigate this baby situation. But she bounced at the shebeen. And she bounced at the old shed behind it where the Just Rockets practised. No Godfrey. No lazy smile, no sleepy eyes, no kiss to her belly. She stood there staring at the bare shed, the stake in the ground bereft of even its cornhusk practice mic.
Matha made her way slowly through Kalingalinga. Where would she sleep for the night? Then she remembered that an older cousin of hers lived here now, having been ostracised from the Mwamba family for a crime no one remembered any more. Matha asked around the compound until she found it – a five-foot-square cubical shack shaped by wood and metal sidings, a chitenge hanging over a gap in the facade. She knocked on the metal siding and a woman of about twenty-five poked her scowling face around the curtain.
Matha hadn’t seen Grace in years. She had grown into a tall, sullen woman, with a frown so deep it looked like a scar. Matha reminded her of who she was and launched into an explanation: about Godfrey, and the baby, and why Kasama was no good for her, and why there was a Peugeot on the side of Great North Road awaiting jump leads, and how the Just Rockets’ practice shed had been empty, and how she just needed a place to sleep for the night because she would surely locate the father of her child tomorrow. Grace stood with her arms crossed, an old Kaunda chitenge wrapped around her waist, listening in silence to this saga, her eyes lingering