Rotten Row Page 3

  The sound of a ringing phone cuts into Gidza’s singing. It belongs to a young Coloured man who is right at the back. ‘I’m by town now,’ he says. ‘But I got no juice, you check.’ The man seated next to Gidza, who had put his hand to the inside pocket of his jacket when the phone started to ring, now pats his jacket pockets.

  ‘My phone,’ he says. He tries to stand up and fails. With difficulty, he pats his trouser pockets. ‘I don’t have my phone,’ he says. His voice begins to rise in panic.

  ‘My phone,’ he says again. ‘My phone.’

  Gidza shakes his head. ‘It will not come because you call for it,’ he says. ‘A phone is not a dog, you know, or a cow.’

  ‘Maybe you left it at home,’ Prosper calls out from the front.

  The man turns an accusing eye on Gidza.

  ‘It was you,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was you who took my phone.’

  ‘You must be mad,’ Gidza says.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ says the woman in the blue woollen hat. ‘He brushed against you and pretended to fall, I saw him.’

  ‘And me,’ says the man with the Malawian accent.

  ‘And me too, I saw the whole thing,’ says the Apostolic woman.

  Another voice comes from the back and says, ‘All these vanahwindi are thieves, we all know they will take anything if given an opportunity. He must have taken it when he brushed against you.’

  Amid Gidza’s protests, Prosper drives into Copacabana. As soon as the kombi stops at the rank, the passengers get out and crowd around Gidza. ‘I did not take your phone,’ he says. ‘I don’t have your phone on me. Look.’

  He holds out his empty hands.

  ‘I have nothing in my hands or pockets apart from the money I collected from you all, and this phone, my own phone.’ He takes his own phone from his pocket, a battered Samsung, and holds it up. Then he holds up his arms in submission to an inspection. The owner of the missing phone searches him roughly, particularly in the groin area, but finds nothing.

  ‘He must have given it to someone,’ the woman in the blue hat says.

  ‘Yah, that’s what happened,’ the man with the Malawian accent says. ‘He gave it to that man, the one he talked to on Samora. I saw him pass something.’

  Gidza’s eyes are round with fear now, his thoughts run confused in his mind, faster than speech allows.

  ‘It was nothing,’ Gidza says.

  ‘I saw it all,’ says a voice.

  ‘We are going to the police.’

  ‘It wasn’t a phone, what I gave him. It was, that is, it wasn’t. It wasn’t a phone. It was … I took … I took nothing. I swear on the grave of my mother, ngiyaphika lomama wami, I did not take your phone.’

  The man with the missing phone takes Gidza by the upper right arm and begins to march him away. His grip on Gidza is tight. The commotion has now attracted a crowd to the rank. What has happened, what has happened, what has happened? The answer sweeps across the rank. A thief has been caught, a hwindi, you know how they are, such thieves, every last one of them. He was caught red-handed, actually just imagine caught with his hand in someone’s pocket, no, he filched money out of a woman’s bra, no, it was a child’s school bag, imagine and it happened just like that. As the news distorts itself across the taxi rank, Gidza faces a hostile crowd.

  ‘M’koma Prosper,’ Gidza pleads.

  He is no longer the cocky brazen Gidza of a few moments before. His stammer, long conquered, comes back. ‘M’koma Prosper, please, tell them. I- I- I- have not taken a, a, anything. I- I- I- swear on my mother who is buried at Serima Mission. I- I- I- did not take a- a- anything from a- a- anyone. Vele handina.’

  Prosper tries to prise Gidza out of the arms of the man pinning him.

  ‘Vakuru,’ he says, ‘we will go to the police and sort it out.’

  The man with the missing phone rounds on Prosper. ‘You are in it together. He took it, you know he did.’

  ‘But how can you be sure, can you prove he took it?’ Prosper asks.

  ‘He has to prove he did not take it,’ the phone’s owner says.

  ‘I- I- I- did not do it,’ Gidza says. ‘I- I- I- swear on the dead. I- I- I- I swear o- o- o- on the grave of my mother, I- I- I- swear on her grave. Vele nyiyaphika.’

  ‘Ari kuti a- e- i- o- chii chacho,’ says a voice. ‘Kutokakamira nhema nechiNdevere! He is stammering for nothing. Take him to the police, they will beat the a- e- i- o- u- out of him.’

  Gidza laughs a nervous laugh.

  A voice shouts out, ‘Ari kutoseka futi, he is actually laughing.’ It comes from a bald, stocky man in a green dustcoat who has been watching from the door of a barbershop on Cameron Street. He is so incensed by Gidza laughing at such a moment that he approaches him and gives him a ringing slap across the face. Prosper tries to intervene but is pushed away. He turns and flees in the direction of the police station. Three men in the crowd chase him, but he outruns them. They go back to the real matter before them.

  Gidza breaks free and tries to follow Prosper. Two vendors selling different ice-cream brands abandon commercial rivalry as they join forces to grab him. They shove him against a pile of rotting vegetables and ice-cream wrappers. It is not certain where the next blow comes from, or the third, or the fourth. More and more people join to kick him again and again as the news of the captured thief streams across Copacabana. It reaches Kaguvi Street and Kwame Nkrumah Avenue and all the way to the flea market, as people rush to see the thief.

  ‘Watch my box,’ a woman called Ma’Nelly says to her teenage daughter Shylet. She arrived that morning from a funeral and is late to go to her stall at Mbare Musika, but that can wait. She heads to where everyone is headed, brow perspiring with the effort of running, and joins a crowd that swells now with everyone who ever had a grudge against a hwindi, anyone who has ever had anything stolen, and anyone who has nothing to do but enjoy the spectacle of a man being beaten by a crowd.

  Ma’Nelly pushes her way to the centre. She has to fight to get in, her face is scratched, and the sweat of other bodies almost defeats her. But she is built like an East German shot putter, Ma’Nelly, with extra padding too, she is what her ancestors would have called chitsikapanotinhira – when she walks, the earth shakes. She pushes through until she is within sight of Gidza. Just as Gidza raises his head she kicks him back with her left foot. His head strikes the ground. There will be more kicks to his poor broken and bruised body, but he will not feel them. It is seventeen minutes to ten o’clock.

  Her effort almost costs Ma’Nelly her balance. She rights herself, and, with a surge of triumph, lets others take her place. The assault on Gidza continues until there is a shout of ‘mapurisa, mapurisa’ followed by blasts from three police whistles. With the police is a bare-chested Prosper holding his shirt to his bleeding head. As quickly as it had gathered, the crowd melts. The angry horde becomes individuals again.

  Ma’Nelly walks across to her daughter, eager to recount to her friends the kick she gave the thief. She finds Shylet flirting with a hwindi and scolds her for smiling at thieves. She scolds Shylet almost all the way to Mbare until the incident is forgotten as she tells the story of the beaten thief. At the market, the story of Ma’Nelly and the kick she gave the thief is the sensation of the morning.

  The large man with the missing phone also walks away from the crowd. He is afraid that he will now be late for his meeting. He has seen the thief beaten up, he saw him lying, bloodied and unconscious, but that’s not enough. He wants him dead, he hopes that he is dead. He heads up Speke Avenue. As he walks past Cleveland House, he hears a voice call his name.

  ‘Bam’k’ru’Ba’Selina.’

  He turns to recognise his muramu, his wife’s young sister Makanaka, walking quickly and out of breath. She has clearly been running. ‘I am coming to your office,’ she explains. ‘Maigur’-Ma’Selina sent me. She said you would not be happy unless you had it with you so she sent me to get you thirty minutes after yo
u left the house.’

  ‘Unless I had what?’ he asks.

  ‘Didn’t I say,’ she laughs. ‘Here.’

  She holds out his phone. ‘Did you know,’ she says, ‘someone said there was a thief who was beaten up just now at Copacabana. I always miss these things.’ Now he has to buy her a pie and a Coke, she says, or maybe she should have a Cherry Plum and Nandos, no, she would much rather have a Stoney Ginger Beer and Steers. Not in a plastic bottle, though, but in a can because isn’t it funny how the drinks in cans always taste better than the drinks in plastic bottles? And she will need money to go back home. As they cross the flyover above Julius Nyerere Way, he puts his phone where he always keeps it, in the inside pocket of his jacket where it rests next to his heart.

  The News of Her Death

  Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth.

  – The Epistle of James –

  Saizozo vo rurimi mutezo muduku, runozirumbidza zikuru. Tarirai, mnoto muduku unotungidza huni zhinji sei!

  – Nwadi yaJakobo –

  By the time Pepukai emerged from the kombi at Highfield, it had just gone half past eight. She was thirty minutes late. Kindness had said she should come at eight or just before. She had followed the directions in the text message: take kombi to Machipisa, get off at Gwanzura, cross road, walk past Mushandirapamwe Hotel, go left after TM, go past market, saloon (that is how Kindness had spelled it) is next to butcher.

  She found the salon with no problems. The name ‘Snow White Hairdressing’ appeared below a painting of a woman with hair that flowed and curled into the letters around her. From the butchery next door came the whirring sound of a saw on bone. Everything about the salon spoke of distressed circumstances, the peeling paint outside, the worn chairs and dirty walls inside, the faded posters for Dark and Lovely and Motions Hair Relaxers.

  Snow White Hairdressing made her usual hair place in Finsbury Park look like the Aveda in Covent Garden. Then again, none of the Nigerian and Kenyan women at her salon in London would have done her hair in long thin braids that lasted four months and cost only fifty dollars. If they had, it would have cost £500 and lasted two days or more, if she was lucky.

  There were five women inside. Four were standing talking together in a huddle, while the fifth swept the floor. They could have been a representative sample of the variegated nature of local womanhood. One was large with a big stomach and bottom and skin like caramel; another was her opposite, thin and sallow with long limbs and dark gums; the third was medium-sized in everything – height, breasts, bottom, complexion – while the last was short and slight with delicate hands and bones, and skin so light it was translucently yellow.

  The one thing they all had in common was their hair. It was dressed in the same weave, a mimicry of Rihanna’s latest style with dark hair tumbling to the shoulder, and reddish hair piled up over one eye so that they had to peer out of the other to look at anything. It was a hairstyle that neutralised features rather than enhancing them; it suited none of them, giving them all the same aged look. Pepukai thought back to the Greek myths she had loved as a child. They looked like the Graeae might have done, had they had one eye each and had there been four of them.

  Away from the group of four, the youngest of the women, not a woman at all, Pepukai realised, but a teenage girl of maybe sixteen or seventeen at the most, was sweeping the floor, leaving more hair behind her than she swept before her. Her hair was not in the Rihanna weave of her workmates, but was half done, with her relaxed hair poking out in wisps from one side of her head, while the other half was in newly plaited braids.

  All five looked up as Pepukai entered. She was the only customer. She felt their eyes on her, giving her that uniquely female up and down onceover that took in every aspect of her appearance and memorised it for future dissection.

  ‘Can we help,’ the largest of the women said.

  ‘I am here for Kindness.’

  ‘Kindness?’ they exclaimed together. The large, caramel-skinned woman threw a hand to her mouth. The sweeping girl stopped, her hands on her broom, and looked at her open-mouthed.

  ‘Yes, Kindness, I had an appointment with her at eight.’

  Almost simultaneously, they turned to the right to look at a hair dressing station above which the name Kindness was written in blue and red glitter. Pepukai’s eye followed theirs. There were bottles and brushes and combs, but no Kindness.

  ‘Kindness is late,’ said the large woman.

  ‘I am also late, quite late in fact,’ Pepukai said. ‘How late do you think she will be?’

  ‘No, I mean late late. She is deceased.’

  ‘I am sorry?’ said Pepukai.

  They did not hear the question in her tone.

  ‘Yes, we are all very sorry,’ the black-gummed woman said. ‘She passed away last night. We are actually waiting to hear what will happen to the body.’

  ‘She has gone to receive her heavenly reward. She is resting now, poor Kindness. May her dear soul rest in peace,’ intoned the small slight woman.

  All five of them came to her and, one after the other, offered her their hands to shake, as though they were condoling with her. As she shook hands with them, Pepukai did not know what to say. Things were now more than a little awkward. She was sorry, of course, that this woman that she had never met was so suddenly dead, she was about as sorry as she could be at any stranger’s death, but, after all, she had not known Kindness. She had never even talked to her – she had only exchanged a series of texts arranging the appointment.

  The truth was that she was feeling slightly panicked at this news. Her flight to Amsterdam was at ten that evening. Her afternoon was to be given to a whirlwind of last-minute shopping at Doon Estate and Sam Levy’s and farewells that would see her criss-crossing the city. She had only this morning left to get her hair done, and, according to her sister, the now late lamented Kindness was one of the rare hairdressers in the city who had both the skill and the willingness to do the kind of braids she wanted.

  Even as these thoughts pressed on her, she did not think that she could be brutal enough to say, effectively, that the death of this unknown woman was a major inconvenience, but she need not have worried because the women came to her rescue.

  ‘What did you want done?’ said the black-gummed woman.

  ‘Braids,’ Pepukai said. ‘I would like long, thin braids like this.’

  On her phone, she showed them her Facebook profile picture.

  ‘Oh, you are the one who wants the Shabba?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Kindness told us that there was someone who had sent a text to say she wanted those Shabba Ranks braids. We could not believe it, they are so old-fashioned, why not just get a weave like this?’ The black-gummed woman caressed her own hair as she spoke.

  ‘Well, I like my hair done that way.’

  ‘We can do it for you that way if you really want,’ said the large woman. ‘We would have finished off your braids even with Kindness here, she would never have finished alone in one day. It would have been the five of us doing your hair at the same time. It will be eighty dollars, and it will take all of us three hours. Do you have your own extensions?’

  This was not the fifty dollars and two hours that Kindness had promised her, but Pepukai did not have the heart to argue. She handed over the five packets of hair extensions she had bought at Daks in Finsbury Park. They settled her into a chair at a station belonging to Matilda, who, Pepukai gathered, was the largest woman. The others introduced themselves. The black-gummed woman was Ma’Shero. The small, slight one was called Genia, and the medium-sized everything one was Zodwa. As Ma’Shero combed out Pepukai’s hair to prepare it, the other three separated and prepared the extensions.

  Pepukai broke the silence by asking what had happened to Kindness. Even as she asked, she knew what the answer would be. It would be the usual long illness or short illness, the euphemism for an HIV-related
disease. Wasn’t it one in four dying, or maybe it was slightly less now that cheap anti-retroviral drugs were everywhere. Kindness, who had gone to receive her heavenly reward, would probably be another death to add to the national statistics.

  ‘She was knifed by her boyfriend,’ said Matilda.

  ‘Not knifed,’ said Genia. ‘She was shot.’

  ‘That’s right, sorry,’ said Matilda, ‘at first they said she was knifed but it turns out that she was actually shot by her boyfriend.’

  ‘You mean to say by one of her boyfriends,’ added Zodwa.

  This exchange was so entirely unexpected that the only thing that Pepukai could ask, rather feebly, was, ‘Where?’

  ‘Northfields,’ said Zodwa.

  ‘Northfields?’ Pepukai asked.

  ‘You know, Northfields, those flats opposite the sports club where they play cricket when the Australians and South Africans come,’ said Zodwa.

  Ma’Shero said, ‘It is that expensive complex where they pay three thousand dollars a month for rent. It’s close to State House.’

  ‘Three thousand, who has that sort of money?’ asked Matilda.

  ‘Obviously dealers, just the type Kindness would go for,’ said Ma’Shero. ‘She was killed right there in one of those expensive flats. They have lifts that open up to the whole place. She will probably be in that Metropolitan paper tomorrow.’

  ‘You mean you go from the lift straight into the flat? You don’t say?’ This was Matilda.

  ‘It is called a paint house-sweet but I don’t know why,’ said Ma’Shero. ‘They are actually bigger in size than many of those houses in the suburbs, you can have a whole floor just for yourself alone. The only thing you won’t have, being so high, is a yard.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ said Matilda.

  ‘Well,’ Ma’Shero continued, ‘the cleaner came at six this morning, got in the lift, went to this paint house-sweet, and there she was, Kindness, just lying there, all shot, with bullets and blood everywhere.’