Always Another Country. Sisonke Msimang
Suzie, the oldest and bossiest, explained that they still had Jet Lag. ‘That happened to me when we went to London,’ she said authoritatively, dragging out the word London the way I imagined Londoners would. ‘I couldn’t sleep for weeks because my body clock was ticking all night and the tocks kept me awake.’ I wasn’t sure whether ticks and tocks worked in this way. Still, I rarely questioned Suzie on matters of international import. Instead, I whispered to myself in a Benny Hill voice, ‘Let me hold my bloody tongue since I’ve never been to mother England.’
Her sister did not show Suzie the same courtesy. Suspicious by nature, Wongani was not convinced by the jet-lag theory. ‘They are doing something naughty in there,’ she declared. Half a decade into her life, she already had an air of resignation about the state of the world. She was prone to sighing and referred to everyone as ‘that one’. For example, apropos Daphne, the maid, one morning Wongani suggested, ‘Hmmn, that one thinks we haven’t noticed she’s visiting her boyfriend at the kiosk? How can we need to buy milk so many times a day?’
Having surmised that Uncle and his guest were up to no good, Wongani decided to undertake an investigation. Once she had asked the crucial question, ‘What exactly are they doing with the door shut in the middle of the day when normal people are busy?’ – it was impossible for any of us to ignore the possibility that they could be up to no good.
It was on the basis of this question, and this question alone, that we found ourselves standing in front of their bedroom door, peeping through a slight crack. Inside the room, the mad visitors were wriggling under the sheets. Their legs were intertwined; their fingers and lips and hands and hips grinding ever so slowly. We got an eyeful and, for our sins, we were struck dumb and momentarily paralysed. We watched the contortions with our heads cocked to the side. We were caught flat-footed, our mouths agape. After a few minutes, we began to move, our grubby fingers clutching one another for balance as we strained on our tippy toes and struggled to take in everything that was happening under the covers.
Then reality hit.
‘They’re gonna see us,’ I whispered. ‘Let’s go!’
‘No,’ Wongani and Suzie hissed. They were mesmerised.
We watched for a few more minutes until we heard someone coming down the hall. Petrified that it might be Aunt Tutu, we scampered away. We ran outside and stood in the dusty yard. We looked at one another and then looked away, flushed and embarrassed and aware that we had just witnessed something that was Absolutely None of Our Business.
For weeks after this we could talk of nothing else. We discussed the Girlfriend and the Uncle long after they had gone. They had disappeared as abruptly as they had come, leaving Aunt Tutu a vegetarian cookbook and pressing a ceramic hand-painted bird whistle from Hungary into the palms of a startled-looking Uncle Ted.
We agreed that we had actually seen them having S.E.X. We always spelled it out when we said it, in case the babies heard us, and we always, always, whispered it.
Until this incident, I had only had a vague sense of what sex was. I knew that it was something private and forbidden but now – thanks to my astute companions – I was also aware that it was simultaneously bad and pleasurable. Wongani was clear that people who liked doing it were dirty. Given that the two people we had witnessed in flagrante delicto were not exactly models of hygiene, it was hard to disagree with her on this score.
We weren’t just fascinated with what we had seen, though. We were especially fascinated with her. We spent inordinate amounts of time talking about her. In part it was because, as we peeped into the room that afternoon, she was the one who was sighing and moaning and generally carrying on, while he whispered and grunted a bit but generally kept his cool.
Perhaps we talked about her because we were girls and she was the girl, and we knew from previous sources of knowledge that she shouldn’t have let him do those things to her in the first place. We had known this from before we suckled our mothers’ breasts. Every girl knows this. The rules are different for us than they are for boys and any girl who pretends that she doesn’t know this, or who momentarily forgets, will find out sooner or later. As different as we were from one another in temperament, the three of us could agree on this. There are some things you just know.
A few days after the peep show, I was sitting outside in the barren yard next to Suzie and Wongani. Their heads had just been shaved and Aunt Tutu had slathered a liberal dose of Vaseline onto their scalps to ward off lice. She had ordered Daphne to ensure that they sat in the sun the whole morning to burn off any vestiges of the bugs. Given her relationship with Wongani, Daphne relished the opportunity to enforce Aunty’s instructions. I sat next to them and drew a line in the ground as Vaseline dripped down their necks and onto their shoulders. Every time one of them tried to move, Daphne ran out of the house and said, ‘Your mother said three hours. You stay there. It’s not yet time, not yet.’
Aunt Tutu may have known the burning sun would do nothing but bake her children’s heads, but the shame of having lice in her house had most likely driven her to administer this particular cruelty. Aunt Tutu did not want it said that she had known about the lice and done nothing to prevent their return.
So we sat and sweated together in the grassless yard – a sacrifice to appease other mothers who would ask where the girls’ hair had gone. Aunt Tutu would say, ‘They had lice so I shaved it and made them sit in the sun to burn the germs,’ and the other mothers would respect her in that fearful way and inflict the same on their own children next time, repeating both the unnecessary punishment and the boastful pretence of motherly sternness. Suzie wiped a trickle of runny Vaseline, preventing it from seeping into her eye, then picked up the conversation where we had left it when Mummy had come to take us home the day before.
‘As I was saying,’ she began.
Wongani and I swivelled our heads to face her and she continued, ‘They aren’t even married.’
‘Yes,’ her sister agreed, ‘which is a pity because they are going to burn in eternal shame.’
‘Straight to hell,’ I sighed, ‘especially her since she’s the lady.’ I was surprised by how nonchalant and worldly I sounded.
We nodded and then shook our heads in resigned consternation.
In the coming weeks, we went into overdrive, spreading the story far and wide. My friends at Burley Court could have told you what happened as if they had seen it with their own eyes, as could my other set of friends at Uncle Stan and Aunt Angela’s house, which was where I spent most of my weekday afternoons when school was in session.
Once the juicy details were shared, and on every street where they had been disseminated, there was almost unanimous agreement that the Girlfriend must have been A Lady Of The Night, brought to Lusaka specifically for the purposes of Doing Sex.
Again and again we returned to the scene in feigned horror. Suzie was especially good at recounting the most salacious details. She always seemed to circle back to the one point: ‘Did you hear her saying “Yes, yes, yes!”?’ She would pant in a lurid pseudoGermanic imitation of the Girlfriend’s voice. We would giggle, and shift uncomfortably. Invariably one of us would wind up the conversation by saying, ‘Everyone knows, it’s only Street Walkers who like S.E.X.’
I felt increasingly uncomfortable when the subject came up. The Girlfriend had actually been nice to us. It had only been for two weeks, but she had lived with us. She had shared our nsima and made us laugh. She had even made us think about school and about President Kaunda. With her questions and her wispy shirts and lowhanging skirts, she hadn’t been a monster – she had just been a girl. She had given me a fragrance stick that smelled like vanilla, and she had given Suzie an empty matchbox with a picture of a dragon on it, and had left a tiny little square of magenta-coloured felt for Wongani. The Uncle had not even bothered, yet here we were saying nothing about him and telling every kid within a fivekilometre radius about her moans and groans.
The Girlfriend’s mistake was not that we had caught her; it was that she liked it. We may have been little, but we knew enough to forgive him and call her the sinner. We were big enough to see that she was not