‘Hey, you even listening to me?’ the shoppie snaps.
And suddenly, the Aito lunges forward, leaping over the woman’s body, shouldering me aside, and grabs one of the street kids who has gotten too close, fastening its mouth like a bear trap on his arm and crashing him down to the street in one movement. There is a branch-crack of bone, followed by the inevitable screaming.
The other kids scatter. Gone before the Aito looks up, like roaches skittering away into the city’s dark places. Without thinking about it, I already have my Zion out, snapping the dog-hybrid standing hunched over the child, growling, the boy’s left arm twisted underneath his body. The shoppie is sprawled on the pavement where he’d tumbled over backwards with surprise. And I know this is illegit, that you’re not supposed to photograph police procedurals without a media permit, but I don’t care.
Behind me the woman sees her opening, scrambles to her feet and takes off down the street. The Aito cocks its head at me with what I swear is disbelief. It snaps at the boy, closing its teeth with a sharp clack a hair’s breadth from his face, and then bounds after the woman, almost playfully.
And then – it’s gone. The feeling, the compulsion, whatever it was, has vanished. I snatch my bag from where I was kneeling – was that what the kid was after? – and stow my camera deep inside.
A citicop emerges from the liquor store, doing up his belt, relief apparent on his face, but his face drops when he sees the scene and the kid screaming and writhing.
The shoppie turns on him. ‘Finally! Look what your dog has done while you were dicking around in the toilet!’
‘Excuse me? You can’t talk to an officer like that.’
‘Look at this! This is scaring away my customers!’
‘You want I should fine you for verbal abuse? Hey, you, girlie, get away from that kid. You don’t want to interfere.’
‘His arm is broken.’
‘I can see that, lady. But this is police business.’ He softens this with a sugary smirk. ‘Don’t worry your little head, sweetness, he’ll get the medical attention he needs.’
‘Hey, she was taking photos!’ The shoppie, seeing his opportunity to worm out of the hot spot, flings an accusatory finger. All the attention is now diverted to me, no one is paying the slightest heed to the kid sobbing through his teeth.
‘Was she now?’ The cop saunters over, so I can smell his sweat and the cinnamon of his gum, the pink chewed lump lurking in the back of his mouth. ‘I’m sure she didn’t mean anything by it. Né, cherie?’
‘I’ll delete them. I’m sorry.’ I’m furious with myself for apologising, for the instant wave of guilt.
‘What’s with this hair? One colour not good enough?’ He moves to touch my hair and I twitch away, which makes him laugh. ‘What’s your name, meisiekind?’
‘Kendra.’
‘Ag, don’t worry, Kendra. I’m not going to take your camera or even put in a log on your unauthorised activity. This time. But I’ll be watching out for you.’ For an awful moment, by the way he’s leaning in, I think he’s going to ask me for a kiss. ‘Now shoo, we’re busy here.’
I turn on my heel, burning with humiliation, in the opposite direction to the Aito, which is standing guard over the once-again subdued homeless woman. I walk briskly away from the howling child and the burly cop and the snickering shoppie. And into the first spaza I can find, for a Ghost.
Lerato
Zama calls. And it’s not even my birthday. Of all of us, Siphokazi is the only one who cares enough to try to hold the family together, and naturally, that’s what Zama’s calling about.
‘You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?’ says my sister, her tone dripping accusation.
‘No,’ I say, ‘of course not.’ But I have. Who has time to keep track of these things? And it’s morbid, dredging it up year after year. The past only holds you back. It’s like a drift net. The kind you get tangled in and drown.
‘It’s important to her.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know. Which day is it again?’
We tried to do a pilgrimage a few years ago, at Sipho’s behest, to visit the clinic where they died, because we don’t have a clue where the graves are. But two days before we were set to leave, government inc. announced a new round of quarantines, which made travelling into the Ciskei impossible. When Zama and I pulled out, she tried to go anyway, on her own, without a car, with some of her Buddhist buddies tagging along. You can guess how far she got. Turned around at the first checkpoint.
She nagged for a year after that, but there was always an excellent excuse not to go, and I didn’t fabricate all of them either. I’ve been doing a lot of travelling lately. For the moment, she’s content to settle for the memorial ceremony, but I live in dread of her suggesting another attempt at our own personal hajj.
Zama gives me the day and the time we’re going to meet at Cape Point for the ‘ceremony’. She guilt-trips me into agreeing to host dinner as well, although she’s horrified when I suggest using Communique’s chefs.
‘We have to cook a meal together, it’s traditional.’
‘I don’t cook.’
‘Fine. Sipho and I will cook. You do have a kitchen, right?’ I have to think about that one, about when last we used the hob. I manage to convince her we should just go to a restaurant, maybe the one at Cape Point, because if Sipho cooks, we’ll be eating some vegan lentil glob that you have to chew for ages. This is my idea of family, actually, a sticky morass you can’t chew your way out of. We wrap up, but I try and spin the conversation out a little. I can tell Zama is secretly pleased and flattered, but it’s only because I need extra material for my prerecords to throw off the spyware.
Zama likes to play the family historian. She’s a font of all these great stories about our parents, but the Eskom orphanage – let’s not cop to the PC term of ‘trade school’, even if they are cultivating proprietary workforces – has always been more vivid in my head than my idea of home, which is a patchwork of broadcast images. Green hills and sky and a threadbare chicken with long scrawny legs scratching through dust that would never yield a juicy maggot, let alone mielies. It’s all cliché, a communal sepia-toned memory that all us Aidsbabies have in common.
I was only seven at the time. The baby of the family after Zama and Siphokazi, and Tebogo, who succumbed even before our parents. I just have to accept whatever Zama says, the stories polished and brittle from so much repetition.
I think I remember a clinic with walls painted a sickly avocado green, and playing Darth Vader in the sterilmask until I got a smack. In my memory it’s Zama who hit me, but I suppose it could just as easily have been a nurse.
She says we used to walk miles along the railway tracks, picking some raggy weed, cosmos I think, to give to our mother. Predictably, the nurses confiscated it all when we got there for fear that we might contaminate our parents. We weren’t even allowed to touch them.
I remember rows of beds crammed together and sour metal smells and a man, limbs as spindly and sharp as a locust, who terrified me. It’s going to sound harsh, but I’m glad I never had to go back there, never had to deal with the reality of Thomokazi and Sam Mazwai, which is all I have of them, their names on my birth certificate. And the legacy of two sisters, one turned hippievegan-Buddhist-dropout, the other fermenting in her dead-end job at Eskom, never having graduated beyond our first parent company.
It may be partially my fault Zamajobe never made it out of Eskom. I probably had some kind of familial obligation to tell them when I realised that only the brightest and most productive get out – to better companies that pay a premium for the privilege. But they were older. They should have been guiding me. And besides, I didn’t need the competition.