useless. Tear after tear slid down her cheeks as she trudged back to Kalingalinga, a dribble that gurgled into a stream, then gushed into a great heaving flood as soon as she was inside the divided ramshackle cube that was now her only home.
* * *
In the beginning, Matha Mwamba sobbed on her back, eyes clenched, breath skipping like a record. When the fit ceased, she turned on her side, facing the old chitenge over the doorway – a pattern of birds in a thicket. As she lay there, tears collected in the cove between her eye and her nose. She blinked and the pool brimmed over and plopped in one big droplet onto the new chitenge she’d folded into a pillow. The droplet sat for a moment on the waxed threads, a clear sphere catching the sunlight that flashed inside whenever the curtain lifted from the door. Matha briefly forgot herself, forgot why she was even crying, as she gazed at that little globe of light. Then it collapsed to a stain like a shadow of itself. She blinked again. The next tear that fell was long and continuous. It grew the stain until her whole pillow was wet shadow.
For days, Matha cried. She lowed and keened and fell silent and wept. For days on end, she watched, through the warped lens of salt water, the dawning and setting of the curtain over the door, the pattern of thicketed birds dissolving as night fell and emerging line by line when the sun rose. Her eyes and nose grew swollen. Her cheeks were hot and taut, webbed with dry salt. The threads in her throat were an utter tangle. She relinquished herself to gravity, the cradle of its heavy arms.
As if from a great distance, she could hear her cousin coming in and out of their home. A couple of days into the weeping, Grace’s bustling sounds abruptly stopped. Between sobs, Matha heard an audible sucking of teeth. A minute later, a ripple moved along the rough unga curtain dividing their lives, and a tin plate of cooked samp appeared underneath it. Matha took it up and ate it eagerly – she was pregnant after all – salting the meal with her tears. With food came scraps and with scraps came insects, the cockroaches and flies and fleas and ants. They conquered the crusty remnants on the plate, and the pot she had been squatting over as a bedpan, and her damp and tender skin.
On the third day, she pulled herself together enough to throw out the soured remains and stinking waste, and to sweep the insects away. Then off she plodded through Kalingalinga, tears pittering from the overhang of her chin, seeping into the neck of her dress. In Zambia, crying is private and communal: women come together behind walls to wail. Matha’s public, personal grief seemed odd, rude even. Women stared and clucked. Men avoided her path. Schoolboys laughed at her. Matha spat in their direction and kept weeping as she made the hour-long trek to the hostels near Evelyn Hone.
* * *
As soon as Cookie opened the door, Matha collapsed onto her knees.
‘What’s wrong?’ Cookie asked as she crouched beside her sister. Matha’s belly was as big as a village pumpkin now but she had lost weight. There was a sandy scrim on her cheeks, which were usually as dark and shiny as the backs of beetles.
‘Godfrey’s gone,’ Matha croaked.
Cookie rolled her eyes. ‘Well, thank your lucky stars for that,’ she said as she dragged Matha back onto her feet, led her to the kitchen and plopped her in a chair. Cookie set about making them some tea.
‘Where is everyone?’ Matha hiccupped, glancing around.
‘Protests,’ Cookie waved dismissively. ‘The Eves have caught politics like the flu. The canteen served chicken feet and the girls want to know where the rest of the chickens went. As if government is now hoarding breasts and livers.’
Matha nodded blankly.
‘Where have you posted up?’ Cookie asked.
‘With Grace. In Kalingalinga.’
‘You’re living with Dis-Grace!?’ Cookie’s laugh died in her throat. ‘Okay, okay, sorree.’ She sat down across from her sister and willed herself to ask. ‘So what happened now?’
Matha let out a sob. ‘I can’t find Godfrey,’ she began, ‘and with the baby on the way…’
Cookie listened and offered occasional reassurances cribbed from Mills & Boon, about love triumphant, dreams and passion, visions and hope. She didn’t believe any of it, of course. As Matha went on with her sob story, Cookie tried not