to yawn, her eyes tracing patterns in the fastfading stains of the tears falling onto her sister’s dress: triangles and diamonds and stars. It’s always hard to imagine another person’s pain, especially a pain as abstract as heartache.
‘…why did you tell them?’
‘Hmm-what?’ Cookie blinked up from her mesmeric pattern-making. Matha’s face was covered in a sheen of tears that glinted under the new fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen.
‘Why did you tell the aunties that I was pregnant?’
‘Ah-ah, but I didn’t,’ Cookie lied without hesitation.
‘But—’ said Matha. The sobs ratcheted up again. Cookie sighed but did not offer to take her sister in. While Matha was away in Kasama, Cookie had made some calculations. She would graduate soon, and Mr Mwape was on the verge of leaving his wife, she could just sense it. He would never marry Cookie if she was carrying the baggage of an unwed sister and her unborn child. The prospect of Cookie’s ‘patron’ stopping by to see her, only to find a shorter, darker, prettier version of her, with a belly out to here? No. As far as Cookie was concerned, Matha had squandered all her gifts – her intelligence, her beauty, her sunny disposition – while Cookie had churned out profits from the scraps. She would not give them up for mere heartbreak.
‘…if you hadn’t told the aunties,’ Matha was blurbling, ‘they wouldn’t have sent me away to Kasama and then Godfrey—’
‘Godfrey what?’ Cookie scoffed. ‘He left you, Matha.’ She sipped her tea and lied again. ‘Everyone knows that while you were in Kasama, he was hopping from bed to bed.’
* * *
Kalingalinga, named for the bell on the door of the shop of the man who owned the land where the shanty town first squatted, was a busy pocket of the city. Men went to work weak and came home drunk. Women droned hymns and bemoaned the drunkenness of their husbands over a maze of hands shelling beans, grinding grain, selling things and buying them. Babies tied to their mothers’ backs sucked their thumbs and napped and stared. Teenage boys in borrowed clothes stole things and made jokes. Teenage girls cooked and danced, cleaned and flirted. Children built toy cars out of wire and pushed old bicycle tyres along with sticks. The compound buzzed and swarmed and lived and turned its head from Matha Mwamba.
She faded as her pregnancy swelled, her legs and arms thinning as if her flesh were gravitating towards the hub at her centre. Grace still left plates of food at the foot of her sleeping mat and emptied her bedpan each morning. But Matha’s connection to other people diminished as her crying continued unabated, as she wept on for her compounded losses.
Even as she slept, tears slid into her ears, seeping into her sinuses. Soon the inner membranes became so cushioned with salt that everything started to sound like pebbles clicking at the bottom of a river. Her lashes grew so tangled that they planted themselves in the pores of the swollen flesh around her eyes until, like Venus flytraps, they looked sewn shut. She could barely make out shadows and light through the mesh.
Eventually, the weeping stole her voice too. Matha was dreaming that she had found Godfrey at last, and he was drinking the tears she’d been collecting in empty Coca-Cola bottles. A stream of words issued from her lips – ‘Drink, you must be so thirsty, I hope it’s not too sweet, I hope it’s not too salty’ – but then her sleeptalk came apart, breaking into letters, which became like clusters of insects trying not to drown, knotting themselves together. When Matha woke up, there was a crawly lump lodged in her throat, like a hairy Adam’s apple, and if she tried to speak, her voice was but the barest scrape of sound.
* * *
When the baby came, Grace made sure to fetch the midwife. The old woman stayed only long enough to catch and smack it, cut the cord, and rattle a prayer over the two sticky bodies. She knew new mothers sometimes fell into a spell of unbanishable sadness, but this was excessive and premature. This was, in a word, witchcraft. The midwife gathered her toolkit – a razor, scissors, thread, Dettol – and as she left, she cursed in Nyanja. ‘Mfwiti!’ she spat. The cube was ripe with the human tang of amniotic fluid, urine and blood, cut with the chemical smell of baby oil and Dettol. The sack curtain was