When Hoopoes Go to Heaven (33 page)

And when the men emerged from the undergrowth with a heavy shape entirely wrapped in a blanket and Mavis began to sob, Benedict knew for sure.

And he wanted Mama.

N
OT THE NEXT MORNING BUT THE MORNING AFTER
that, Mavis opened her eyes slowly and began to focus on the wall that she was
facing, curled up in her bed. There was something unusual about the wall, but she couldn’t quite understand what it was. She lay still for a moment staring at it, confused.

Then it dawned on her.

The wall was bathed in light.

Sitting up quickly, she glanced around the room. Lungi’s bed was neatly made and the curtain above it hung open, letting in a stream of daylight.

Eish
, what time was it?

As she reached for the alarm clock that sat on the small table between her bed and Lungi’s, her hand almost knocked over a bowl that was there, covered by a plate. It was after nine!
Swinging her feet onto the floor, she looked under the plate. The bowl contained some
lipalish
, some green beans, a bit of meat. All of it was cold. What was it doing here?

The door opened and there was Lungi, handing her a cup of tea and telling her Madam didn’t want to see her in the house today, she was giving Mavis an off. Lungi took the bowl away, it was
last night’s supper that Mavis hadn’t woken up to eat. Mavis must stay in bed, and Lungi was going to bring her something nice for her breakfast.

But Mavis had to get up, she needed the toilet. Afterwards, she splashed cold water on her face and did her best to flatten the side of her hair that was sticking up in the air, before she went
back to bed to drink her tea.

She remembered everything now.

After the men had found Petros, she had spent the whole night wandering about outside, wrapped in her blanket, shivering and weeping, trying not to sob loudly enough to wake somebody. All that
time! All that time she had thought he was in Nhlangano negotiating
lobola
, meanwhile he was lying on the hill, late. Maybe for some of that time he was lying there sick, calling for help.
And she hadn’t heard. She hadn’t known. All that time!

When morning had come, she had washed and changed, her bed still not slept in, and she had gone to work in the house. She had managed all morning, she was fine until she was cleaning the step
outside the front door, the one that was painted red and needed polishing. On her knees, rubbing the step with Cobra, she had suddenly felt moved to pray for Petros, and then, without even thinking
about it, she had found her prayer shifting and becoming a prayer for her own boy, and when she realised that she had never prayed for her own boy before, not even once in almost seventeen years,
she had lowered her forehead to the step and started to weep.

Madam had found her there on her way out to go and pick up the children from school. Her head was still on the step and she was crouched right down, her bottom jammed up against the back wheel
of
Gogo
Levine’s car. Madam had called for Lungi to come and help her to take Mavis to her room, but Mavis could barely stand and
Gogo
Levine, who had been getting ready to go
to her afternoon job, she had had to come and help, too.

Mavis had slept the whole afternoon and the whole night, not waking, not even once.

Now Lungi brought her a boiled egg and a slice of bread with peanut butter, and she ate hungrily. It was Madam who came to collect the plate and the mug from her tea, and she asked if Mavis
didn’t want the doctor. But no. Mavis wasn’t sick, she was just shocked and upset from seeing Petros unexpectedly late. In any case, she didn’t want Madam’s doctor. Madam
gave her another small bottle called Rescue, and told her to rest.

Not feeling like going straight back to sleep, and not comfortable with lying doing nothing, Mavis picked up her wool. Lately she was taking a break from crocheting to concentrate on making
umcwasho
tassels, there was a big demand for them at the market. They were quick enough to make, just simple thick bunches of long strands of wool without any knotting or knitting or
crocheting, and with pompoms near the end. Mavis wasn’t good with beads, but that didn’t matter. Somebody she knew made the simple strings of beads for around the girls’ heads,
and Mavis bought them from her before adding her tassels and having her friend sell them for her at the market.

Madam had bought one of the pale blue and yellow ones directly from Mavis for Innocence, though Innocence was still a bit young. Nomsa couldn’t wear
umcwasho
, it was only for girls
who were still pure, and everybody could see, without asking, what the girls who didn’t wear it had done. Titi had bought one of the red and black ones for herself.
Umcwasho
wasn’t something for a
kwerekwere
, but Mavis wasn’t going to tell her not to buy.

These nowadays everybody was talking about girls remaining pure. Mavis wished it had been like that when she was as young as Innocence. Maybe with
umcwasho
on her head she wouldn’t
have fallen in love and conceived. But if she still had, the boy wouldn’t have been able to run away as he had, as if it was nothing to do with him. The girls in her age group would have gone
to his family in their tassels and made them give a cow.

As she wove pale blue and yellow wool through the two rounds of cardboard she had cut from an empty Jungle Oats box, she thought about all the things that had brought her to collapse on
Madam’s front step the day before. Number one, it broke her heart in pieces that Petros was late, it was like her own boy was late for a second time. Number two, she hadn’t slept for a
whole night. Number three,
eish
, it was number three that had unravelled her like a fallen ball of wool and made her to weep.

Why had she never prayed for her own boy? How could that have happened? When she had gone home from the hospital without her baby, he had never been spoken about in her house, her mother and her
sisters had acted as if he had never existed. Weeks before the delivery, her mother had crocheted a blanket for her baby, but when Mavis had come home from the hospital without him, she found that
her mother had quickly added more squares all around it to make it bigger and to turn it into a blanket for Mavis herself.

Putting down the pompom she was making, she stretched both her hands forward and rubbed them over the central part of the blanket. Her mother had been so skilful, it wasn’t possible to
tell exactly where the part for the baby ended and the part for Mavis began.

Then a thought came to her, a thought that put an ache inside her heart.

Eish!

Did her boy want his blanket? Was it him waking her in the night, asking for it?

Her family had always pretended that he never existed. They had done that to protect her. She was only a child, what would talking about her loss be for?

But nobody in her family had allowed themselves to mourn, they hadn’t allowed themselves to grieve. And they had never cleansed themselves of their loss. His blanket should have been
burned, the ashes should have been mixed with the cleansing water. It should all have happened after just one month, and then her boy could have been released to be with their ancestors.

Eish.

When she went home for her Christmas, that was what she would do. Mavis, her mother and her sisters, they would all do what they needed to do to let her boy go.

E
VERYBODY WAS CLEAR ON WHAT HAD HAPPENED TO
Petros: the snake had bitten him and then he had sliced it in two, most
probably so that it wouldn’t bite his dog, too. Krishna would have been trying to protect him by attacking it. It was a puff adder, which Uncle Enock knew for sure because he had picked up
its two halves to show to the police. Benedict knew from the book that it was a lazy kind of snake that didn’t like to get out of your way as most other snakes did. Its bite didn’t
always make a person late, but Petros was sick already and his body couldn’t cope with anything more.

Benedict remembered the stormy night that he had found Krishna in the garage. Had she been trying to tell him that Petros was lying sick further up the hill? Or was he already late then?
Eh!
How could Benedict possibly have known?

The night of the day he found Petros, Grace and Faith had fussed over Benedict at supper, which he had still felt too shaky to eat, and then again at breakfast, which Baba accused him of eating
like a refugee who had survived on nothing but leaves for weeks. Daniel and Moses kept asking him for more details, and he knew that they were going to be telling everybody at school the story of
what their big brother had done. It didn’t matter to his brothers and sisters that he hadn’t actually saved Petros: he was still their hero.

But it did matter to Benedict, and he didn’t feel very much like a hero at all. How could he, really, when he hadn’t rescued his friend while he was lying sick and hurt just up the
hill? How could he feel proud of himself when his friend was late? Hurtling down the mountainside, he had been so panicked and afraid that he certainly hadn’t been able to imagine himself
running in slow motion dressed as a fireman or a paramedic. It had all felt too real for that.

But still, he couldn’t help enjoying the attention and the praise.

He really was exhausted, though. Mama kept him home from school for two days on account of him having had a fright, and Baba said he deserved some days of rest as a reward for having been so
brave. But it wasn’t either of those reasons that made him glad to be staying at home. No. It was entirely because of the question that had woken him in the middle of last night.

Yesterday he had spent the whole entire day in his bed, drifting in and out of sleep. Mama had said he was worn out by shock, but she didn’t know that he and Petros had been friends. She
didn’t understand that he was sad, that being asleep felt easier than being awake.

Uncle Enock had tried to understand. He had come to check on Benedict, sitting on his bed and asking him all about his friendship with Petros. How much time did they spend together? Did they
ever play wrestling games together like Daniel and Moses played with Fortune? Had Petros ever actually coughed on him? Back when Uncle Enock was a boy, friends had sometimes made themselves
brothers by cutting themselves and holding their cuts together to mix their blood. Since Petros had called Benedict
bhuti
and Benedict had wanted him to be his brother, had Benedict and
Petros ever done anything like that?

Eh
, it felt good to be able to talk to somebody about Petros! Uncle Enock said he would go to Nhlangano to look for Petros’s girlfriend, even though he thought she might be late
from being sick, or she might even be just pretend. The girl herself was real, she was in a photograph. But maybe the relationship was just a story that Petros had made up when his head
wasn’t right from being sick or when he was confused from his
dagga
in the same way that Titi had been confused from that biscuit. Uncle Enock said Petros had never before taken
holidays to go and see the girl, he had never lent a phone from anybody at the dairy to call her, not even once.

Benedict had no trouble going to sleep that night, even after he had spent the whole entire day in his bed. But after he had sat up in the middle of the night with the question suddenly in his
head, there was no going back to sleep. In the morning, he was impatient. He was impatient for the children to go off to school, and then he was impatient for Mama to start working on her cakes.
Her cake students weren’t coming today. They were done with their training, really, but they still came three days a week to work with Mama around the dining table on account of their new
workplace not yet being ready. As soon as Mama was busy with her icing syringe and Titi was busy with her cleaning and dusting, Benedict slipped quietly out of the back door.

The shoes he had abandoned there two nights ago were still caked with cow
kinyezi
, but it was dry now and he tapped it off quietly before slipping his feet in and tying the laces. Then he
picked up the small spade that he kept out there for clearing the monkey
kinyezi
from the garden, and crawled on his hands and knees past the window of the dining area so that Mama
didn’t see him. Even more certain now of the danger of snakes, Mama would have told him to come back inside.