Susan’s brown suede boots take up the pedals like little leather men. We swing past the live man on stilts advertising Eddie’s Gas.
‘Here we go. Lesotho. The arse end of the world.’ Susan glances sideways at me.
I save my laugh. One day, when I have my tongue, I will laugh out loud about driving through the arse end in a bulletproof suppository.
Susan tears open a Bar One and takes two huge bites, like it’s a burger. She offers a chocolate to me, opens another one without apology.
‘My next assignment is in China.’ She taps the screen of her car media system. A man speaks gently, entreating us to speak Mandarin. Susan asks, ‘Did you learn Mandarin at school?’
I press the air with my fingers and thumb.
‘You’re lucky. In those days they didn’t bother with it in the US.’
I don’t know about lucky, I’d like to say. In elementary school, they taught us the words you might need at a conveyor belt. Lift. Twist. Alternative item. Red light. Green. Later, our Mandarin teacher, Mr Li, began to groom the chosen few. We learned to say, ‘Tell section seven to accelerate.’ Or, ‘You no longer have a job.’
* * *
After two hours in Susan’s car, I could smoothly recite corporate management Mandarin. How will we benefit from this arrangement? What guarantee can you give us? Do you have a digital privacy armour package? I have seen the sights, thank you.
Susan leaves a fingernail space between the front of her vehicle and the bumpers before us.
‘What’s this?’ she mutters. ‘A Sunday drive?’
A slight shift causes a hard drift of the car to the right, a hurtle towards an oncoming car. A mere twitch slaps us back in front of three flatbed trucks, just missing a string of car comets.
Once, Susan glances at my cheek and starts to ask, ‘That scar, was it from . . .?’
She ramps a blind rise, freefalls into a double-lane speed belt. Her question is a passing curiosity, dust from the recent past, part of the unremembered distance streaming behind us.
* * *
Susan doesn’t look at the view, even when we get near Egoli with its repopulated mine dumps, their terraces glinting black, their fountains so high you can see the water evaporating. ‘Shit heaps’ they call them, the workers like me. The shit heaps glimmer with rim-flow pools. I learned the term in the surplus Good Living magazines that came to the refugee camp still in their wrapping. We flicked through pictures of solar-charged chandeliers, garden statues of Mr Mandela in his suit among the ‘poor man’s orchids’ of the rich. There were wall-length sofas with floor connections for massage and warmth, photographed with huge house-cats fed on chicken intestines. Positively Feline, said the heading. One sofa had a young, live lion arranged across the back rest. Its golden eyes looked drugged, its body well fleshed like the lions Templeton Industries bred for the trophy hunters to prey on. The rogue lions, on the other hand, were skinny and wild, refusing a clumsy death at the hands of the panting, flaccid men who came all the way from America on jet planes to kill cats bigger than the ones that kneaded their pillows and meowed for tinned chicken.
No.
I shut my eyes. Why Bhajo? Why now?
* * *
Three hours from the city, the BMW slides past slow white figures on a golf course. A small white ball climbs the sky. A pale airport runway unrolls past the pressed green fields. Susan stops before a tall, gaunt guard. He meets my eyes once, sneaks a hostile shot. I know what it means. It means, Refugee.
‘How are things, Matla?’ Susan asks him.
‘Problems with kids on motorbikes. Racing.’
‘Brats,’ Susan says.
The guard flicks the boom up like it’s a toothpick. In the distance, three white helicrafts dip their noses at a white building.
* * *
Susan fetches her copper urn from the back seat, clamps a hand into my shoulder muscle.
‘Don’t let me down.’
As if, now that I’ve endured her chocolate farts and listened to her labouring through corporate Mandarin, now that I’ve sweated before impact perhaps five hundred times, we are friends.
I get out, embarrassed for Susan.
A pale hand waves from the door of the nearest helicraft.
I follow Susan’s shoes, crushing loose pebbles like little sadomasochists; keep my eyes off the white beast looming before us. I was airlifted on a stretcher to a field hospital, they said, but I was deeply descending then, clawing towards death.
I am about to fly for the first conscious time in my life.
Susan climbs the five stairs. Dragonfly, 554 FP, it says on the underbelly.
‘Malachi. This is Mr Rawlins.’ Susan turns to the captain, ‘Malachi’s mute.’ She drops her voice, murmurs, ‘Not deaf and dumb.’
‘Ah, good,’ the pilot smiles like he is genuinely pleased for me.
He has sliding silver hair in a side parting, white chinos, a collared white shirt. His teeth glow white. He has a white film on his tongue too, perhaps from the coffee in his polystyrene cup. Susan gives Mr Rawlins the copper urn with the red ribbon, holds out her hand to me. ‘Godspeed.’
She pounds down the stairs, swings her broad rear towards her too-thin BMW.
I drop into a seat, buckle up before the pilot tells me to.
Mr Rawlins leans across, taps the window. ‘Watch out for golf balls.’
Is he joking? The pilot smells of tobacco smoke. The hairs in his nose are coated in nicotine. I need him to be perfect, but I am dismayed to see two small spots of sweat at his underarm seams. A second bad sign, apart from the fungus on his tongue. Mr Rawlins opens a tiny Perspex fridge filled with stumpy Coca Colas and nine pie packets with pictures of little pigs.
‘All yours,’ he says. ‘It’s a nine-hour flight. We cross a time zone, so we arrive the same day.’
One piggy pie for every hour of flying.
The pilot folds into his cockpit and
