over the bulges in Matha’s pockets. When Matha was finished, Grace nodded and beckoned her inside. She gave Matha the leftovers from supper, laid out a sleeping mat for her, then lay down on her own and curled away like a provoked chongololo.
* * *
Matha woke to an empty shack. She felt ruffled – or rather, rifled. The obsolete bills she’d stuffed in her jacket pockets were scattered around her mat, several of them crumpled in little balls. Grace had apparently discovered the useless stash. Matha got up, washed at the communal taps, and began the hunt for her lover. The same round of places, the same dearth of Godfrey. Nothing. Zee. No sign of him, she complained that night as she wolfed down the remainders of Grace’s supper. Grace hitched an eyebrow and picked up her sewing.
The following week, Matha managed to locate Godfrey’s Just Rockets bandmates, who had started a new band called Dynamite Rock without him. Reuben told her not to worry. Godfrey had probably just gone to see his family in the Copperbelt. But Godfrey was not back the next week, nor the week after that. Matha gave up on retrieving the Peugeot. It had surely been stolen or stripped by now, she told Grace as she wiped down the patapatas she’d borrowed from her cousin. Grace shrugged and resumed her sewing.
Matha mailed a letter to the Ndola Boma looking for him. No reply, she complained two weeks later to Grace as she beat the dust out of her sleeping mat. Grace sucked her teeth and bit through a thread. Matha stayed up all night drafting a missing-person notice to print in the Times of Zambia.
Late the next morning, she woke up with an itch on her nose. She batted it off, thinking it was a mosquito, but there it was again. She blinked her eyes open to the sight of a brown blur. She swivelled her head back like a chicken and the blur clarified into a rough weave. It was a sack. Several sacks, in fact, stitched together, hanging from the ceiling. Matha sat up and poked at it. It swayed. Over the last month, Grace had sewn a wall of old unga sacks, dividing the shack in half, making their banishment complete even unto each other.
* * *
Matha finally quashed her pride and went to see Ba Nkoloso at the African Liberation Centre. He was in his office, at his desk, typing a memo.
‘Miss Mwamba!’ he announced without looking up.
‘Shani, Ba Nkoloso,’ she said, cupping her hands and curtsying. ‘You are busy?’
‘Yes.’ He squinted at the typewriter. ‘Our neighbouring nations have not achieved independence, so we are vigilantly pursuing…’ He looked up. ‘I thought you went back to Kasama.’
‘I am here now. I am looking for Godfrey.’
‘Oh, my star astronaut?’ said Ba Nkoloso, rifling roughly through some papers. ‘The only chap in this nation fit for moonwalking? The star of the Just Rockets?’
‘Yes, that one of it,’ she giggled. ‘He seems to be missing. It is a bit worrisome.’
‘Worrisome!’ Ba Nkoloso slapped the papers against his desk. ‘If I was you, Miss Matha Mwamba, I would be more worrisomed about what he left behind!’ He pointed at her stomach.
Matha glanced down, putting her hand protectively over it. Smarting from her family’s rejection; living in poverty with a frowning cousin who despised her; not just bearing, but actively resisting Godfrey’s absence – his persistence in not coming home to her – had already strung threads of hurt in Matha’s throat. Ba Nkoloso’s words strummed across them, making them vibrate. She swallowed.
‘When the baby comes,’ she ventured, ‘maybe I can join your work here?’
‘You? Here?’ he laughed bitterly. ‘This is revolutionary business, Matha. Serious business. Not for girls who cannot keep their…’ He broke off.
Matha looked at this man she had known her whole life, this small man who had always had such power, such force in his booming perorations. She felt like she was hearing his real voice for the very first time. She divined the store of disappointment inside it, like a cave hidden by a waterfall.
‘Do you know what they said when you started to grow that baby in your stomach?’
The threads in her throat thrummed.
‘They said that I was the one who put it there,’ he said softly, angrily.
A tear rolled down her cheek. Ba Nkoloso shook his head. ‘The Academy could never survive that.’
Matha turned and stalked out of his office, dashing the tear from her face, but it was