Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
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Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is a Zimbabwean Student currently pursuing her studies
at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. She has had short fiction
published in anthologies in Zimbabwe and has some fiction forthcoming in
African anthologies. She was the winner of the Intwasa Short Story Competition
2009, and will be attending the Caine Prize African WritingWorkshop 2010.
at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. She has had short fiction
published in anthologies in Zimbabwe and has some fiction forthcoming in
African anthologies. She was the winner of the Intwasa Short Story Competition
2009, and will be attending the Caine Prize African WritingWorkshop 2010.
WAITING
by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
They get there at 06.43, she and her father. That’s exactly what the plastic pink watch on her wrist
is flashing: 06.43. 06.43, and the queue is already an agitated snake stretching down the length of
the pavement and writhing away from the alley, into the street. He hesitates, her father, absorbing
the people stalking the entrance so that they don’t have to go to the back. Then he shuffles to the
end of the line, with his woollen hat meekly held between his hands, because this is a bank. Yes,
this is a bank, and they won’t tolerate any nonsense, a crazy crowd stampeding through their
doors. The way people always bombard the trucks arriving at the supermarkets with fresh stocks
of sugar or mealie-meal or cooking oil.
So there they stand, in uncomfortable silence. She is half a step behind him so that her firm belly, ill
concealed and bulging through the loose-fitting shirt—her Mama’s shirt—is in step with him. Then
after a while she considers this a bad idea—having her belly suspended right by his side like that—
so she stumbles forward and bumps into the Khulu in front of them and attempts an apologetic
smile. His kind old smile and the white strands on his cheeks that stretch into a smile as he says that
it’s ‘all light’, make her want to cry. Kind old eyes that flit over the shame she is barrelling in front
of her.
No, she does not want her father to think that she is insinuating anything by placing her belly right
next to him like that. He isn’t looking at her anyway, has his head angled towards the mesh of litter
swirling in the sewer water being vomited by a burst pipe, hurtling through the gutter. And so she
also looks away, with great deliberateness, interests herself in some unknown point in the foggy
frenzy of the weekday morning. Her eyes follow the school children strapping past, neat little
satchels slung across their shoulders, gray socks gathered haphazardly around Vaseline-smeared
ankles. She hunches forward, against the knifing June cold, huffs steam into her hands. Thinks
how after a while, the sewer stink renders itself bearable.
‘Look at the queues.’
‘And so early in the morning, yo! You know I woke up at four a.m thinking I’d be one of the first.
But.’
‘I slept here, in my car.’
Then the silence, before another temporary acquaintance is struck up somewhere along the queue.
‘I’ve been coming here since Monday. Still can’t get any money.’
‘Me since Friday.’
‘Hi, my name is James. What’s a pretty little thing like you doing in a queue like this? My brother is
the Manager. Can I have your number?’
Silence.
The clanging of the bank doors. Frenzied feet pumping up the steps. A stern look from the guard.
Impatient feet shuffling with difficult decorum. Her Father’s squat legs shuddering across the
parquet floor.
*
His squat legs shuddering. That stench of soda water splashed in place of after shave, clashing with
hot blows of beer breath. Did she scream? Kick? Bite into the arm pressing her down?
It all happened so fast, the seconds stumbling over themselves in a rush to complete the moment, as
though time too dreaded the experience and wanted to get it over and done with.
And sometime later, days, a week? as she lay among the tall grass stalks cackling a golden- brown
in the sun, she waited for Spiro to ask what was wrong. She waited so she could tell him, bury her
head in the pit of his arm and breathe the stink of his sweat, hear him say it was going to be all
right.
But he didn’t ask.
Instead he quickly entered her, half struggling, while her nails dug into the soil until they were
bleeding, completely still, choking from his marijuana-scented sweat.
Afterwards, belting torn pants to his slim waist, he said he had to go. Gums working furiously on
bubblegum, eyes darting furtively around for any spectators, he had to go.
He squeezed her nipple. See you later. Pop pop.
She flinched. See you later.
Pop.
*
The person behind her seems to think that if he shoves himself up against her, the queue will
somehow move faster. She longs for the vicious cold outside, fights the nausea of the unrecycled
air circulating in the spacious room that’s quickly become too tiny for the bodies crammed inside.
She’s standing too close to him, her father, does not want to be so close to him. Her belly is
rubbing up against him, but there’s no space to move this way or that. The smell of soda water
splashed in place of after shave is irritating her nose, causing watery mucus to dribble to her lips.
She drags it back up her nose continuously.
A man in a tan suit swaggers through the ‘Staff Only’ doors, taps the desk with his pen, demands
hush. His Jesus shoes make squeaky sounds on the floor.
‘Our computers are down,’ he announces solemnly. ‘Try other branches.’
‘But they don’t have money, we were told to come here!’ somebody shouts, his statement quickly
validated by several murmurs.
The man with the Jesus shoes shrugs. ‘Our computers are down,’ he repeats. ‘Come and check
later.’
He disappears to disgruntled protests. Nobody moves. Then, one by one, people begin to find a spot
on the floor. She’s glad for the opportunity to move away from her father, to find a space by the
corner and make herself as small as possible amidst the packed bodies.
The man in the suit returns a few minutes later. His yellow face reminds her of a used teabag,
drenched in water over and over again until it has made a weak, tasteless concoction.
‘Come back later,’ he says, pinching his face.
Nobody moves. He stands uncertainly for a while, his hands suspended as though they are not sure
where to go.
‘I said come back later. Our computers are down.’ His voice is shrill.
After a few moments, he shrugs and disappears again.
*
How long before Mama had known?
She no longer waited for their shadows, Mama and Father, illuminated by a happy moon gushing
through the square hole in the wall, visible through the flimsy sheet that partitioned the single room
into their bedroom and the rest of the house. No longer cared to pick up new tricks with which to
revive Spiro’s waning interest in her. She burrowed deep into her ‘Rambai Makashinga- We Will
Survive’ T-shirt, scooped up at a rally during the last elections, now browning and sagging. Pulled
the sheet high over her head, and spanked her little brother whenever he tried to watch. Harder
than she spanked him the morning he woke up to announce to Father that she had weed blood in
the sheets, holding up the evidence away from him and wrinkling his little nose.
How long before Mama had known? Before they began communicating the little things with their
mouths and the big things with their eyes? Had it been when she began dragging her mat and her
brother out to the door step whenever the mattress began to groan? She could not ask her why,
Mama, the embarrassment muted her questions. So she began searching for answers elsewhere. Like
in the way Father began to avoid her, in the way she was no longer able to look him in the eye. In
the way she was careful to make sure their hands did not touch whenever she brought him his
meals. Mama had watched, and her eyes had begun asking questions.
‘Mama I…Mama—’ she began one day.
But she cut her off, Mama, cut in swiftly to remind her that it was getting dark and ZESA would go
any minute, the firewood.
‘Mama…’ she tried again.
She straightened from her pots then, Mama, all that height, loomed over her. It was in her eyes, the
big things.
How.
‘I…’ eyes dropping to the cracked cement floor.
How.
Mama…
‘Mama…’
‘Yes?’ her breathing laboured now, Mama, chest heaving up and down, up and down. ‘Yes?’
She began to cry.
Mama repeated calmly that it was getting dark, the firewood, and folded herself over her pots.
*
The woman with the carefully combed perm has the eyes of a vixen. Slanting, heavily layered by
pink and blue eye-liner. She has removed her stilettos; her feet are splayed so far apart that her
Rexin mini is sure to burst at the seams. People are tired of paying her attention, except for the fat
man in a stained suit who is busy ogling her with his eyes. She keeps on making calls on an
expensive little flip-up, shouting in a hoarse man-like voice to ‘JB’ about these ‘stupit Western
Union peple’, how she’s lost out on ‘dat deal’ and ‘zvinhu zvemuZimbabwe zvinonetsa heyi mani!
until the guard orders her to make her call outside.
There is a guy with an unkempt Afro slouching in the corner. He reminds her of an American
Movie she saw once, where there were these dagga-smoking fellas who called themselves
‘Radicals of the Free Movement’. Didn’t comb their hair. Let it twist and knot and gather blanket
hair and anything else that was eager to leech onto it. Didn’t seem to have jobs to go to. Homes to
go to. Spitting poetry on the street corner the whole day, sometimes in the alleys where the police
couldn’t see them. Smoke swaying seductively from the holes of their noses, through their brains,
giving them the intellectual power. Puff puff puff, throughout the entire movie.
There’s a particular scene she remembers, of them running away from the police. Laughing
hysterically, real crazy like. One of them got hit by a car and they were still laughing. Blood spilling
over broken glass, and they were laughing.
Impulsively, she rubs her belly, thinks how she feels like laughing. Throwing herself in front of a
moving truck and laughing.
*
She spoke to Pinky, and after that, Mama knew for certain. Pinky was everybody’s friend, loud,
brash, didn’t know how to keep secrets. She spoke to her anyway, would later conclude that she
hadn’t been thinking straight when she had. But by then it would not matter.
‘Whose is it?’
She stared into the far off and knotted her fingers and pretended not to have heard anything.
‘Take Surf.’
‘Surf?’
‘Ya, Surf. It will get rid of the...it.’
She found a little packet in Mama’s drawers, labelled ‘Wega Washing Powder- super clean- it’s
supa!’ She took half a teaspoonful, only half a teaspoonful, because she’d forgotten to ask Pinky
how much to take and she was certain any more than that was likely to do more harm to her than
to…it.
A week of severe diarrhoea, vomiting, but no blood. No period.
She waited.
*
A woman has spread her baby’s towel on the ground and is busy shovelling oily chips into the little
mouth.
Her tummy grumbles.
She angles her face towards the soft fluorescence spilling from the fancy bulbs with grooves on
them. Stares at the round clock with the words Inspired. Motivated. Involved running across the
bottom, in gold lettering. Listens to the lazy seconds tick-tocking by.
Tears are glistening in her eyes. She shuts them.
She’s thinking of Spiro.
*
They were by their usual spot, in the bush between her house and The Spar. He didn’t make a move
to touch her, didn’t make a grab for her tits. She struggled to breathe. The humid air was pressing
itself down on her, layering the atmosphere like a waft of bad breath that refuses to go away. The
steely sky was blinding her, bringing tears to her eyes.
No bad poetry scribbled in pencil on the back of Spar receipts. No, those hadn’t come in a long
time.
She watched the thin film of marijuana haze settling over his eyes, red swollen veins pulsating in
his temple. She was busy sucking a glob of umuhlwa. He was busy chewing on a grass stalk. Chomp
chomp chomp. Refusing to meet her prompting gaze.
‘I hear you’re pregnant.’
She looked away, closed her eyes.
‘It’s not mine.’
‘How can you say that—’
‘It’s not mine you hear?’
Silence.
‘I have to go.’
Silence.
‘I have to go. Bye.’
‘See you later?’ she tried hopefully.
Silence.
She watched him walk away, a slap of buttock visible through the hole in his shorts. Continued to
watch even when he was gone. Looked up, to check the height of the trees. Wondered how they did
it, the people who tied ropes around their necks.
She planted her bum right there, among the grass stalks that were suddenly shivering, shivering
with her, and began to cry.
*
The woman with the carefully combed perm is shouting at the teller.
‘How long before the machines start working?’
The teller doesn’t know.
‘Well find out!’
The teller shrugs. ‘Go to enquiries.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Lady, go to enquiries.’
‘Such service! Everybody using the state of the economy as an excuse to ill treat customers!’
Silence. The hh hh of the nail file moving across the teller’s nails.
‘Do you know anything about customer service?’
‘If you don’t stop harassing me, I will call security.’
‘Who is the manager? Such second rate service, and a World Class bank for that matter! Why back
muEngland you don’t even wait one minute—’
‘ Wena Mama, this is not England yakho le okhuluma ngayo, nxa wa deporthwa sufun’ ukuzo
khupha izistress zakho la—’
‘Speak English mani iwe!’
‘ I said, ungabo fun’ukuzenzisa, futhi abangibhadali so please, ungazongimbuluzela la.Nx.’
‘The Manager will hear about this! Munhu haana musoro! Stupit!’
And out storms the woman with the carefully combed perm, balancing precariously on her stilettos.
The teller snickers.
Somebody laughs.
*
She didn’t know whose it was, she insisted. Glanced at her father, thought of Spiro.
Her father got up, stumbled out, embraced the blackness of the night.
She wrung her hands and said she didn’t know whose it was. Didn’t know how it could’ve
happened.
Mama began to cry.
She didn’t move, Stared at the plastic flowers in the broken cup in the middle of the cement floor,
and thought how fresh they looked.
When Mama was done crying she said, ‘You are going ekhaya straight.’
Her head snapped back sharply, as though she had been slapped.
‘No more schooling for you. You are going to eat ubulema bakho.’
She stared at Mama. Thought of her father, thought of Spiro.
‘What about father.’
‘What?’
‘I said, if I’m going to eat ubulema bami, then so is father. I’m going to tell everyone. Let me stay,
and let me go to school, or else I’m going to tell everyone.’
The slap was for real this time, a sharp pa! that sent her tumbling to the floor.
‘You think I don’t know? You think I don’t know about that stupid boy of yours from the shops?
You think I don’t know?’
And she was crying again, Mama. And now they were crying together.
*
The man with the yellow face has returned. His suit is now crumpled, is as forlorn as the haggard
faces staring back at him.
‘We are closing now. Come back tomorrow.’
‘How am I going to get home?’ somebody shouts.
‘What are my children going to eat tonight?’
‘Give us our money, we have money sent from the UK so how can you say you don’t have it? You
are lying, the machines are all right, you’ve eaten our money!’
The man shrugs. ‘If you don’t leave now, I will call security and we will not open tomorrow.’
People hesitate. The fat man with the stained suit is the first to leave. Then, slowly, grumbling,
mumbling, threatening to sleep inside the bank, people begin to drag themselves away.
She’s tired. She’s hungry.
One more day means one more day for her in the city. No bus to the rurals tomorrow. She does
not know what to feel.
She’s behind her father as they trudge out of the bank, down the steps like an elderly couple, into
the dim early evening light. The whip of bitter winter evening air is comforting. They join the early
evening rush to the train station, the silence screaming between them, arguing, confrontational.
He sighs.
She sighs.
GLOSSARY
zvinhu zvemuZimbabwe zvinonetsa heyi mani!- Zimbabwean issues are a problem
Wena Mama, this is not England yakho le okhuluma ngayo, nxa wa deporthwa sufun’ ukuzo
khupha izistress zakho la— - Mama, we are not in this England that you're talking about, if you got
deported don't come and take out your stresses on me
I said, ungabo fun’ukuzenzisa, futhi abangibhadali so please, ungazongimbuluzela la.Nx.- I said,
don't try and get funny with me, besides they pay me peanuts so please, don't be funny. Nx
by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
They get there at 06.43, she and her father. That’s exactly what the plastic pink watch on her wrist
is flashing: 06.43. 06.43, and the queue is already an agitated snake stretching down the length of
the pavement and writhing away from the alley, into the street. He hesitates, her father, absorbing
the people stalking the entrance so that they don’t have to go to the back. Then he shuffles to the
end of the line, with his woollen hat meekly held between his hands, because this is a bank. Yes,
this is a bank, and they won’t tolerate any nonsense, a crazy crowd stampeding through their
doors. The way people always bombard the trucks arriving at the supermarkets with fresh stocks
of sugar or mealie-meal or cooking oil.
So there they stand, in uncomfortable silence. She is half a step behind him so that her firm belly, ill
concealed and bulging through the loose-fitting shirt—her Mama’s shirt—is in step with him. Then
after a while she considers this a bad idea—having her belly suspended right by his side like that—
so she stumbles forward and bumps into the Khulu in front of them and attempts an apologetic
smile. His kind old smile and the white strands on his cheeks that stretch into a smile as he says that
it’s ‘all light’, make her want to cry. Kind old eyes that flit over the shame she is barrelling in front
of her.
No, she does not want her father to think that she is insinuating anything by placing her belly right
next to him like that. He isn’t looking at her anyway, has his head angled towards the mesh of litter
swirling in the sewer water being vomited by a burst pipe, hurtling through the gutter. And so she
also looks away, with great deliberateness, interests herself in some unknown point in the foggy
frenzy of the weekday morning. Her eyes follow the school children strapping past, neat little
satchels slung across their shoulders, gray socks gathered haphazardly around Vaseline-smeared
ankles. She hunches forward, against the knifing June cold, huffs steam into her hands. Thinks
how after a while, the sewer stink renders itself bearable.
‘Look at the queues.’
‘And so early in the morning, yo! You know I woke up at four a.m thinking I’d be one of the first.
But.’
‘I slept here, in my car.’
Then the silence, before another temporary acquaintance is struck up somewhere along the queue.
‘I’ve been coming here since Monday. Still can’t get any money.’
‘Me since Friday.’
‘Hi, my name is James. What’s a pretty little thing like you doing in a queue like this? My brother is
the Manager. Can I have your number?’
Silence.
The clanging of the bank doors. Frenzied feet pumping up the steps. A stern look from the guard.
Impatient feet shuffling with difficult decorum. Her Father’s squat legs shuddering across the
parquet floor.
*
His squat legs shuddering. That stench of soda water splashed in place of after shave, clashing with
hot blows of beer breath. Did she scream? Kick? Bite into the arm pressing her down?
It all happened so fast, the seconds stumbling over themselves in a rush to complete the moment, as
though time too dreaded the experience and wanted to get it over and done with.
And sometime later, days, a week? as she lay among the tall grass stalks cackling a golden- brown
in the sun, she waited for Spiro to ask what was wrong. She waited so she could tell him, bury her
head in the pit of his arm and breathe the stink of his sweat, hear him say it was going to be all
right.
But he didn’t ask.
Instead he quickly entered her, half struggling, while her nails dug into the soil until they were
bleeding, completely still, choking from his marijuana-scented sweat.
Afterwards, belting torn pants to his slim waist, he said he had to go. Gums working furiously on
bubblegum, eyes darting furtively around for any spectators, he had to go.
He squeezed her nipple. See you later. Pop pop.
She flinched. See you later.
Pop.
*
The person behind her seems to think that if he shoves himself up against her, the queue will
somehow move faster. She longs for the vicious cold outside, fights the nausea of the unrecycled
air circulating in the spacious room that’s quickly become too tiny for the bodies crammed inside.
She’s standing too close to him, her father, does not want to be so close to him. Her belly is
rubbing up against him, but there’s no space to move this way or that. The smell of soda water
splashed in place of after shave is irritating her nose, causing watery mucus to dribble to her lips.
She drags it back up her nose continuously.
A man in a tan suit swaggers through the ‘Staff Only’ doors, taps the desk with his pen, demands
hush. His Jesus shoes make squeaky sounds on the floor.
‘Our computers are down,’ he announces solemnly. ‘Try other branches.’
‘But they don’t have money, we were told to come here!’ somebody shouts, his statement quickly
validated by several murmurs.
The man with the Jesus shoes shrugs. ‘Our computers are down,’ he repeats. ‘Come and check
later.’
He disappears to disgruntled protests. Nobody moves. Then, one by one, people begin to find a spot
on the floor. She’s glad for the opportunity to move away from her father, to find a space by the
corner and make herself as small as possible amidst the packed bodies.
The man in the suit returns a few minutes later. His yellow face reminds her of a used teabag,
drenched in water over and over again until it has made a weak, tasteless concoction.
‘Come back later,’ he says, pinching his face.
Nobody moves. He stands uncertainly for a while, his hands suspended as though they are not sure
where to go.
‘I said come back later. Our computers are down.’ His voice is shrill.
After a few moments, he shrugs and disappears again.
*
How long before Mama had known?
She no longer waited for their shadows, Mama and Father, illuminated by a happy moon gushing
through the square hole in the wall, visible through the flimsy sheet that partitioned the single room
into their bedroom and the rest of the house. No longer cared to pick up new tricks with which to
revive Spiro’s waning interest in her. She burrowed deep into her ‘Rambai Makashinga- We Will
Survive’ T-shirt, scooped up at a rally during the last elections, now browning and sagging. Pulled
the sheet high over her head, and spanked her little brother whenever he tried to watch. Harder
than she spanked him the morning he woke up to announce to Father that she had weed blood in
the sheets, holding up the evidence away from him and wrinkling his little nose.
How long before Mama had known? Before they began communicating the little things with their
mouths and the big things with their eyes? Had it been when she began dragging her mat and her
brother out to the door step whenever the mattress began to groan? She could not ask her why,
Mama, the embarrassment muted her questions. So she began searching for answers elsewhere. Like
in the way Father began to avoid her, in the way she was no longer able to look him in the eye. In
the way she was careful to make sure their hands did not touch whenever she brought him his
meals. Mama had watched, and her eyes had begun asking questions.
‘Mama I…Mama—’ she began one day.
But she cut her off, Mama, cut in swiftly to remind her that it was getting dark and ZESA would go
any minute, the firewood.
‘Mama…’ she tried again.
She straightened from her pots then, Mama, all that height, loomed over her. It was in her eyes, the
big things.
How.
‘I…’ eyes dropping to the cracked cement floor.
How.
Mama…
‘Mama…’
‘Yes?’ her breathing laboured now, Mama, chest heaving up and down, up and down. ‘Yes?’
She began to cry.
Mama repeated calmly that it was getting dark, the firewood, and folded herself over her pots.
*
The woman with the carefully combed perm has the eyes of a vixen. Slanting, heavily layered by
pink and blue eye-liner. She has removed her stilettos; her feet are splayed so far apart that her
Rexin mini is sure to burst at the seams. People are tired of paying her attention, except for the fat
man in a stained suit who is busy ogling her with his eyes. She keeps on making calls on an
expensive little flip-up, shouting in a hoarse man-like voice to ‘JB’ about these ‘stupit Western
Union peple’, how she’s lost out on ‘dat deal’ and ‘zvinhu zvemuZimbabwe zvinonetsa heyi mani!
until the guard orders her to make her call outside.
There is a guy with an unkempt Afro slouching in the corner. He reminds her of an American
Movie she saw once, where there were these dagga-smoking fellas who called themselves
‘Radicals of the Free Movement’. Didn’t comb their hair. Let it twist and knot and gather blanket
hair and anything else that was eager to leech onto it. Didn’t seem to have jobs to go to. Homes to
go to. Spitting poetry on the street corner the whole day, sometimes in the alleys where the police
couldn’t see them. Smoke swaying seductively from the holes of their noses, through their brains,
giving them the intellectual power. Puff puff puff, throughout the entire movie.
There’s a particular scene she remembers, of them running away from the police. Laughing
hysterically, real crazy like. One of them got hit by a car and they were still laughing. Blood spilling
over broken glass, and they were laughing.
Impulsively, she rubs her belly, thinks how she feels like laughing. Throwing herself in front of a
moving truck and laughing.
*
She spoke to Pinky, and after that, Mama knew for certain. Pinky was everybody’s friend, loud,
brash, didn’t know how to keep secrets. She spoke to her anyway, would later conclude that she
hadn’t been thinking straight when she had. But by then it would not matter.
‘Whose is it?’
She stared into the far off and knotted her fingers and pretended not to have heard anything.
‘Take Surf.’
‘Surf?’
‘Ya, Surf. It will get rid of the...it.’
She found a little packet in Mama’s drawers, labelled ‘Wega Washing Powder- super clean- it’s
supa!’ She took half a teaspoonful, only half a teaspoonful, because she’d forgotten to ask Pinky
how much to take and she was certain any more than that was likely to do more harm to her than
to…it.
A week of severe diarrhoea, vomiting, but no blood. No period.
She waited.
*
A woman has spread her baby’s towel on the ground and is busy shovelling oily chips into the little
mouth.
Her tummy grumbles.
She angles her face towards the soft fluorescence spilling from the fancy bulbs with grooves on
them. Stares at the round clock with the words Inspired. Motivated. Involved running across the
bottom, in gold lettering. Listens to the lazy seconds tick-tocking by.
Tears are glistening in her eyes. She shuts them.
She’s thinking of Spiro.
*
They were by their usual spot, in the bush between her house and The Spar. He didn’t make a move
to touch her, didn’t make a grab for her tits. She struggled to breathe. The humid air was pressing
itself down on her, layering the atmosphere like a waft of bad breath that refuses to go away. The
steely sky was blinding her, bringing tears to her eyes.
No bad poetry scribbled in pencil on the back of Spar receipts. No, those hadn’t come in a long
time.
She watched the thin film of marijuana haze settling over his eyes, red swollen veins pulsating in
his temple. She was busy sucking a glob of umuhlwa. He was busy chewing on a grass stalk. Chomp
chomp chomp. Refusing to meet her prompting gaze.
‘I hear you’re pregnant.’
She looked away, closed her eyes.
‘It’s not mine.’
‘How can you say that—’
‘It’s not mine you hear?’
Silence.
‘I have to go.’
Silence.
‘I have to go. Bye.’
‘See you later?’ she tried hopefully.
Silence.
She watched him walk away, a slap of buttock visible through the hole in his shorts. Continued to
watch even when he was gone. Looked up, to check the height of the trees. Wondered how they did
it, the people who tied ropes around their necks.
She planted her bum right there, among the grass stalks that were suddenly shivering, shivering
with her, and began to cry.
*
The woman with the carefully combed perm is shouting at the teller.
‘How long before the machines start working?’
The teller doesn’t know.
‘Well find out!’
The teller shrugs. ‘Go to enquiries.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Lady, go to enquiries.’
‘Such service! Everybody using the state of the economy as an excuse to ill treat customers!’
Silence. The hh hh of the nail file moving across the teller’s nails.
‘Do you know anything about customer service?’
‘If you don’t stop harassing me, I will call security.’
‘Who is the manager? Such second rate service, and a World Class bank for that matter! Why back
muEngland you don’t even wait one minute—’
‘ Wena Mama, this is not England yakho le okhuluma ngayo, nxa wa deporthwa sufun’ ukuzo
khupha izistress zakho la—’
‘Speak English mani iwe!’
‘ I said, ungabo fun’ukuzenzisa, futhi abangibhadali so please, ungazongimbuluzela la.Nx.’
‘The Manager will hear about this! Munhu haana musoro! Stupit!’
And out storms the woman with the carefully combed perm, balancing precariously on her stilettos.
The teller snickers.
Somebody laughs.
*
She didn’t know whose it was, she insisted. Glanced at her father, thought of Spiro.
Her father got up, stumbled out, embraced the blackness of the night.
She wrung her hands and said she didn’t know whose it was. Didn’t know how it could’ve
happened.
Mama began to cry.
She didn’t move, Stared at the plastic flowers in the broken cup in the middle of the cement floor,
and thought how fresh they looked.
When Mama was done crying she said, ‘You are going ekhaya straight.’
Her head snapped back sharply, as though she had been slapped.
‘No more schooling for you. You are going to eat ubulema bakho.’
She stared at Mama. Thought of her father, thought of Spiro.
‘What about father.’
‘What?’
‘I said, if I’m going to eat ubulema bami, then so is father. I’m going to tell everyone. Let me stay,
and let me go to school, or else I’m going to tell everyone.’
The slap was for real this time, a sharp pa! that sent her tumbling to the floor.
‘You think I don’t know? You think I don’t know about that stupid boy of yours from the shops?
You think I don’t know?’
And she was crying again, Mama. And now they were crying together.
*
The man with the yellow face has returned. His suit is now crumpled, is as forlorn as the haggard
faces staring back at him.
‘We are closing now. Come back tomorrow.’
‘How am I going to get home?’ somebody shouts.
‘What are my children going to eat tonight?’
‘Give us our money, we have money sent from the UK so how can you say you don’t have it? You
are lying, the machines are all right, you’ve eaten our money!’
The man shrugs. ‘If you don’t leave now, I will call security and we will not open tomorrow.’
People hesitate. The fat man with the stained suit is the first to leave. Then, slowly, grumbling,
mumbling, threatening to sleep inside the bank, people begin to drag themselves away.
She’s tired. She’s hungry.
One more day means one more day for her in the city. No bus to the rurals tomorrow. She does
not know what to feel.
She’s behind her father as they trudge out of the bank, down the steps like an elderly couple, into
the dim early evening light. The whip of bitter winter evening air is comforting. They join the early
evening rush to the train station, the silence screaming between them, arguing, confrontational.
He sighs.
She sighs.
GLOSSARY
zvinhu zvemuZimbabwe zvinonetsa heyi mani!- Zimbabwean issues are a problem
Wena Mama, this is not England yakho le okhuluma ngayo, nxa wa deporthwa sufun’ ukuzo
khupha izistress zakho la— - Mama, we are not in this England that you're talking about, if you got
deported don't come and take out your stresses on me
I said, ungabo fun’ukuzenzisa, futhi abangibhadali so please, ungazongimbuluzela la.Nx.- I said,
don't try and get funny with me, besides they pay me peanuts so please, don't be funny. Nx
