Out of Shadows (23 page)

My body was aching and tired; it took all the energy I had to winch myself up onto my elbows. The gloom was thick in here—wherever here was—the only light coming from a dim, naked bulb, but it was enough for me to see I was in a small room with no floor, just dirt, and that the walls were the same rusting metal as the roof. Along the far side, a time-beaten armchair and a set of decaying dining chairs around a table, while the mattress I was on was grime gray and full of holes.

From somewhere else I heard the high guitar twang of
Jit
music, the Bhundu Boys or someone like that, the sort of music we wouldn't have been caught dead listening to.

The man pushed back on his haunches and sat in the armchair. He was slight, with a wide and cheerful face that shone unstoppably beneath an uneven sea of hair. His temples were silver, so perhaps he was older than he looked, and I couldn't help noticing how long and slender his hands were as he held them, like a vicar about to deliver a sermon.

He unlocked them briefly to take a swig from a bottle of cream soda and said something toward the open door. A small child appeared with a bowl. Keeping his head down so I couldn't see his face, he placed the bowl on the table and hurried out again. Something about him disturbed me.

“My son is most shy.” The man beamed an apology. He leaned forward again and rested the bowl on my stomach. “You must eat more. It is goodness for you that will make you bett-ah.”

I flinched as he came near. “What is it?” My throat was still swollen, my voice wasn't my own.

“You must eat,” he gestured. “This will help you, for sure. Number one muti, make you bett-ah bett-ah one time.”

It looked like black porridge and tasted bitter and sharp like mulched leaves. I tried spitting it out but he gently kept the spoon in place so that I had to swallow.

He chuckled softly to himself.

“You feel it here?” He rested his comforting palm flat on my chest.

I did. Almost straightaway my heart began to pump hard and fast, and my strength ebbed back.

“What is it?” I still wanted to know.

“This is number one muti against the bees. Makes you bettah in quick-quick time, you will be straight back to school like nothing has happened. You feel it?” he said, and sat back, looking pleased. “You are ver-ry very lucky, you nearly died.”

I pushed myself upright.

“Where am I?

“You are in the workers' village still. This”—the man gave a proud wave—“is my home, Mastah Rhrob-ett.”

I looked at him. “How do you know my name? Do you know me?”

“I do not know you other than your voice. I have heard it ma-ny many times before.”

“When?”

“On the tellyphone, of course. I know the voices of all the peoples.”

“Weekend?” I said, relaxing at once.

“The one and the truly.”

“What are you doing here?”

He found this amusing. “It is my home. But we have not spoken for a long time, my friend. I have missed you. Why is it that you are not tellyphoning anyone? Your father? A lady friend?”

“I don't have anyone I want to call,” I answered.

“Ah, yes. But maybe perhaps if I had a tellyphone that would let you talk to those in the sky . . . ?” I realized he meant my mother. “I was most saddened when I heard this news. You must miss her.”

I didn't answer.

Weekend's son came back and hovered by the door, daring himself to peek half a face, then snapping quickly out of sight whenever I looked.

“How's your wife?” I asked.

“They are well, but sometimes . . . sometimes they fight so very much that I cannot hear myself thinking what is going on in my head. Always they want money, or a new hat, or to know where are the children.” The grin came marching back. “I have three daughters now. Tuesday here is the big brother to them all. He is seven years.”

“You must be very proud.”

“For sure. And tired! Always tired. Tuesday sleeps in here with me, the other children sleep next door with their mothers.”

For a moment I thought he was joking.

“You should ask the school to fix you up with a bigger place.”

“There is no need, my friend,” he told me, coming forward to share a happy secret. “Soon I will be moving. I will leave the school and we will have all the space we need.”

“Have you bought somewhere?”

“No.” He laughed loudly and slapped his knee. “I have no money!”

“Where are you going?”

“I do not know.”

“
When
are you going?”

He shrugged again.

“But you're definitely moving?”

“For sure.”

“Then . . . how?”

“He has promised it,” came the simple response. I knew who he meant: the prime minister, of course. “He told us. I was there when Mr. Mugabe came to the stadium. He said one day we would all have land, that this country now belonged to Africa and the Africans who have struggled for so long without it. I do not hate the White Man—I do not hate
any
man—but when they first came they did steal what was ours. They must share, it is only fair. And when it is my turn I am going to have a farm, and I am going to grow maize, sterek! So much maize. I am going to be a rich man, and my children will be happy and so will I because my wives will stop shouting at me.”

I thought of the man who'd taken Ivan's farm, the government minister with his big Mercedes and his big cigar.

“What if you
don't
get any land? I mean, what if Mugabe gives it to someone else?”

“
Every
body will have it. Black and white. You and me. We will all be rich with land of our own. He has promised.” Then his voice became serious. “I, for one, cannot wait to leave, for the sake of my children. This is not a good place to be living any longer. Bad things happen.”

“Demons?” I patronized.

He shook his head. “Only the demons inside of the men that do those bad things.”

He gestured to his son. Reluctantly, the little boy obeyed, and Weekend sat him on his knee. At first I thought it was just the poor light, then I saw what it was about him I'd found strange: one eye flicked nervously at me while the other was in permanent shade, missing, his scarred and wrinkled lid sealed over a hollow of sightlessness.

“You see?” Weekend spoke with calm emotion. “He does not speak about when this bad thing did happen, but other children say it was white boys throwing stones.”

My heart raced again. This time it had nothing to do with the home-stewed medicine I'd been given.

“Does he know who it was?”

My mouth had gone dry.

“He does hardly speak at all, not since that day. More than two years now.”

Tuesday stared at me. I felt ill and wanted to leave.

More than at any other time in my life, past or future, I hated myself. I loathed every little thing I'd done, for allowing it to happen.

“I'm sorry,” I said. And then, quickly: “For Tuesday, I mean.”

Tuesday squirmed on his father's knee until Weekend put him down and he went running out. I gazed at the space where he'd been long after he'd gone.

“I am sorry, too,” Weekend said. “But I thank God that is in the sky that I have him still.”

“He almost died?” I practically wailed.

“No,” came the somber response. “But others . . .” His hands wrestled. “Come, Mastah Rhrob-ett,” he said. “I will show you.”

He was right, his medicine had worked quickly; all I felt was tiredness in my limbs as I moved. It was still light outside, if only just. In the west the sun had started to set in a screaming sky; I can't have been there much more than a couple of hours.

Weekend took me through the middle of the compound, where everyone stopped to look. It was hard not to feel like a prisoner on parade—I deserved to be, and a lot more besides, but Weekend was constantly by my side like a best friend.

About halfway down he pointed to another shack, and to a group of children younger than Tuesday playing. One was clearly different from the rest, the skin of her cheek and neck pink and raw.

“Fire water,” Weekend explained, “like that in your laboratories. They threw it at her as she walked home one day.”

On the other side, a teenage boy battled for a football. He ran holding his left arm because whenever he let it go it flapped, and much of the hair on the back of his head was missing. The other boys seemed to let him score a goal easily.

“They whipped Philip and beat him with sticks until he could no longer stand.”

And there were more. Drifting through the compound he pointed to another five children: burns, scars, a permanent limp . . .

I couldn't look.

This wasn't me
, I wanted to tell him.
I had no idea. If I'd known
 . . .

But
hadn't
I known? Deep down, hadn't I always realized how sour the milk had turned? What Ivan and Klompie and Pittman had been doing? The long walks, the jokes, the
innuendos, the whispers of shared secrets . . . Why else had I chosen to stop going with them?

“And then there are the children who do not return.” Weekend finally halted near the point where the bees had attacked me. “One day they went and never came back. I still cry for their mothers and fathers.”

In the dying of the light, I saw tears welling in his eyes.

I looked to the path that would take me back to school. Across the distance I heard the house bells ringing, calling for showers, calling for roll call, calling for life to continue. But now I saw how life—my life—had been detached from reality with its own sick laws and cruel order, and how I had willingly been a part of it.

“This is not a good place,” Weekend told me again. “Bad things happen here. But soon . . . soon I will have my land. He promised us. And I will farm. And I will be happy again.”

I stared at Ivan
all through supper, watching him fill his face up on Top Table and laugh with the other prefects.

What have you done?
I kept thinking.

I broke my gaze to find Klompie and Pittman smirking and sniggering at me.

“Hey, Jacko”—Pitters threw a balled lump of bread—“what'you get up to this arvo, you poof?”

“Looking a little off color, Jacko.” Klompie chewed meat with his mouth wide open. “Anything the matter?”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. Maybe you dropped a grade and got a C instead of a B for your essay. I know how much you like
bees
.”

I pushed my plate and walked out.

I didn't go back to Selous at first. Instead, I found myself in Burnett House, staring at the photograph of the young Mr. van Hout as he sat in his Haven uniform. His smile cut his face at a cruel slant, his eyes buried deep into me.

“Why couldn't you have just stayed away?” I heard myself say.

His smile remained, unfaltering, mocking.

Above all else, I needed to get rid of that picture. Then maybe everything would be all right with Ivan, like it had been in the beginning. I didn't care how I did it, I'd break the glass if I had to, but right then a group of younger boys returned from supper and checked me with my hands about to punch forward.

“Evening, Jacklin,” some of them greeted subserviently, confused and probably slightly afraid.

“Howz,” I said.

I was sweating. I wiped my forehead and left.

Perhaps I should say something, I wondered. I should confront him, hear him deny it.

But I didn't see Ivan in the house at all the whole evening. I didn't know where he was, just that it couldn't have been good because his two sidekicks had gone with him.

By the following morning I'd managed to convince myself I was making something out of nothing, merely an overactive imagination going crazy. It was Weekend. It was his fault. He hadn't done me any favors.

Then, during history, I noticed Miss Marimbo straightaway. She was ten minutes late, for a start, and she spent the whole lesson locked in an invisible cage: nervous and timid, scarcely looking up to the class and completely unable to meet Ivan in the eye. When she spoke, her voice wavered and cracked. Her hands trembled so much she couldn't write on the board.

Ivan seemed to be relishing her discomfort, splaying his legs wide, occasionally giving his crotch a meaningful grab.

When he got up at the end of the lesson, Miss Marimbo practically jumped into the corner.

And I just knew. For the first time I understood who Ivan really was.

But I still needed to prove it.

Ivan spotted I was taking my twice-a-term privilege earlier than usual.

“What's so important you can't take your weekend with the rest of us?” he wanted to know. “You avoiding us?”

I shook my head perhaps a little too vehemently.

“I need to get some heavy revision in,” I replied. “Plus there's a shooting club I want to check out near home. You know, for after we've left school.”

He sucked on this. “Sure. Whatever you want. But when you get back I want to have a serious talk.”

A serious talk.

I'd never been so pleased to get beyond the school gates.

Home weekends never lasted long so I didn't waste time.

“Hi, Adele.”

“
Bobby?
” A long pause. The phone felt hot and slippery against my ear. Then: “Hi, how are you? What are you doing?”

Being out of school or taking this risk?

“I was hoping to talk to you. It's important.”

She hesitated. “O-kay.”

“Not on the phone.”

“Well . . .”

“Please. Ivan doesn't need to know. Today?”

“Well . . . A bunch of us are heading out to Mermaid's Pool this arvo.”

I mouthed a curse.

“You can come if you want.”

“Sure,” I said. Anything. “I'll meet you there.”