When Hoopoes Go to Heaven Page 14

  ‘Eh!’ said Benedict, as the Buffalo Soldiers van passed Mr Patel’s shop. ‘Look!’

  Somebody had sprayed red paint all over the walls and window.

  ‘Eish,’ said Mr Simelane, shaking his head behind the wheel.

  Sitting next to him at the front, Mrs Simelane tutted.

  ‘Why do they do that?’ Benedict asked.

  ‘Drugth,’ said Sifiso.

  ‘Drugs?’ Benedict wasn’t sure what drugs looked like, but he didn’t think he had ever seen any for sale on the shop counter. He supposed they could be hidden inside something there. If Mama’s cupcakes were still for sale there, they could even be hidden inside those. Once, back in Dar, Titi had eaten drugs by mistake, when a friend had given her a biscuit baked by the people she cleaned for. Titi and her friend didn’t know, but drugs were hiding baked inside that biscuit, and after Titi ate it she felt very confused. Then she got frightened and started to cry, and Mama had to give her tea and wrap her in a blanket and sit with her until she was better.

  Benedict couldn’t imagine Mrs Patel selling anything like that.

  ‘Yebo,’ said Mr Simelane. ‘Some years back now.’ He clicked his fingers together rapidly a few times. ‘When was it?’

  Mrs Simelane helped him. ‘Two years ago? Maybe three.’ She turned to face Benedict. ‘Their son... I forget his name...’

  ‘Thun Deep,’ said Sifiso.

  ‘That’s right! Sandeep. Eish, your memory is good, nè?’ She beamed at Sifiso before looking back at Benedict. ‘Sandeep got himself some bad friends, more especially boys who took drugs. They got caught at school.’

  ‘Expelled!’ Mr Simelane accelerated to get through the traffic light up ahead before it had been red for too long.

  ‘Yebo. Then Mr Patel took Sandeep to the Hhohho police headquarters and made him tell them all the people he knew who sold drugs.’

  ‘It was in the Times,’ said Mr Simelane. ‘Thereafter, Sandeep wasn’t safe. They had to send him away to India!’

  Eh!

  So, it was the Patels’ own son that had been sent away for doing nonsense, it was Mrs Patel’s own heart that was broken. Her heart was all in pieces, just like the hoopoe’s body when Jabulani pulled it from the funeral van’s grille. Benedict imagined Jabulani making a special casket for Mrs Patel’s heart, with a carving of Sandeep on its lid. He wondered if he should offer Mrs Patel a few drops of rescue medicine next time her saw her. But no. It wasn’t right that he knew she needed rescuing, not without her telling him herself. Besides, he only ever saw her inside Mr Patel’s shop; how could he possibly offer her medicine over curry and Russians and chips?

  If he ever had to be sent away himself, he knew it would break Mama’s heart, just as sending Sandeep away had broken Mrs Patel’s. And how would his family survive without their eldest boy? Eh!

  ‘Now ever since, they keep reminding Patel that he’s not welcome. Moreover,’ added Mr Simelane, changing gear to slow down behind a heavy truck, ‘Sandeep can never return back.’

  Mrs Simelane shook her head sadly. ‘Nobody thought such a thing could happen to people like the Patels.’

  ‘But at day’s end, drugs as a scourge can occur to any family, nè?’

  As Mr Simelane said it, Benedict felt an extra weight pressing on his shoulders. He had never before thought of the possibility of drugs coming to his own family. Okay, they had already come to Titi, just once, by mistake. But he had never before worried that they might come to his brothers or his sisters. Now, as the eldest boy, he had yet another danger to watch out for.

  The restaurant was a little further than Uncle Enock’s work, past where the pineapples were put into cans and in the same compound as Swazi Candles. Sifiso’s sister had put a vase of plastic roses and a Reserved sign on an inside table for them, away from the sunny outside tables where Wazungu from a tourist bus talked loudly in a language Benedict didn’t know.

  While the grown-ups drank tea, Benedict chose to join the other boys in having sodas: he preferred his tea to be milky, spicy and sweet the Tanzanian way, rather than watery and plain the Swazi way. The waffles were soft and delicious, more especially because Sifiso’s sister was kind enough to make sure that the boys got extra ice cream and plenty of sweet, sticky syrup.

  When they had finished, the boys went into Swazi Candles, where only Sifiso had been before. The front part was a big shop, with shelf after shelf of candles in the most wonderful colours. Big, round, square, egg-shaped – and eh, there were candles shaped like elephants, hippos, tortoises, giraffes, buffalo! So many animals! Some were patterned in blues and greens, others in reds and browns, others in all the colours you could imagine. And so many birds! Some of them looked so real!

  ‘They don’t look like candles,’ said Giveness.

  ‘No, they are,’ said Sifiso, pointing to the string sticking up out of the back of a warthog patterned in swirls of red, yellow, blue and green. ‘Here’th the wick, nè?’

  ‘Eish,’ said Giveness.

  Benedict could see that Giveness was battling to see the point of a candle that was anything other than straight and white. ‘A candle doesn’t have to look like a candle,’ he said, ‘just like a cake doesn’t have to look like a cake. It can look like a bus or an aeroplane or a cow. Or anything else you want.’

  ‘Come and thee them making them!’

  Sifiso led them into the room at the back where a handful of people sat at work, and one of them called the boys over.

  ‘I’m starting a new one,’ the man said, handing Sifiso a perfectly round ball of white wax.

  ‘It’th hot!’ Sifiso passed it quickly to the other two, who passed it quickly back to the man.

  ‘It’s going to be an elephant,’ the man said, and they watched him drape over opposite sides of the ball two thin disks of patterned colour so that the ball was entirely covered.

  ‘That’s going to be an elephant?’ Giveness sounded like he didn’t believe it.

  ‘Imagine!’ said Benedict, loving every second of the six or seven minutes it took the man to shape the ball into a head, ears, trunk, body, tail and legs before pushing in other pieces for eyes, stabbing a hole into its back for the wick and dropping it into a plastic tub of water to cool. Unmistakably an elephant, it floated there amongst the other elephants that the man had already made. And already he was busy with another ball of wax.

  Outside the shop, Benedict and Sifiso waited for a few minutes on the small shady veranda at the entrance while Giveness went back inside to say that somebody had taken his umbrella, which he had left out there before going inside. Nobody should have taken it anyway, but on a day without any rain it was just silly. While the staff went in search of it, Giveness joined them on the veranda.

  Hoop, hoop, hoop, came the call of a bird.

  Benedict scanned the tall trees in front of the restaurant until a movement high up caught his eye.

  ‘Look,’ he said, pointing excitedly. ‘It’s a hoopoe.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There! Look.’

  After a few minutes, the beautiful bird left the tree, flew over the roof of the restaurant and was gone. Benedict could hear Giveness and Sifiso making sounds of appreciation behind him, but when he turned round he saw that their appreciation wasn’t about the hoopoe at all. Somebody had managed to find the missing umbrella.

  Mama would love all the colours at the candle factory, and Benedict told her about it at supper to cheer her up. Baba had been away for three whole days now. Mama said that Baba had already been there for his work, and that he had said the candles were an excellent export to countries in the West, though most of the rest of Africa had only one requirement of a candle, which was neither decorativeness nor expense.

  ‘Too many books can blind a person to beauty,’ Mama said sadly, shaking her head. Then she smiled. ‘We’ll go there together, Benedict. You and me.’

  Benedict beamed. Mama’s driving test was tomorrow, and when she had her license they could go anywh
ere at all together.

  ‘Why not us?’ asked Grace, indicating herself and Faith. ‘Can’t we come too?’

  ‘And us,’ said Moses, almost choking on his mouthful of ugali.

  ‘I’m sure you can’t play ball in there,’ Titi said to the boys.

  ‘You’d be bored,’ Benedict said to the girls. ‘Like you were at the gorillas, Grace.’

  ‘I was not bored!’

  ‘Only because there was a girl for you to talk to about anything but gorillas!’

  Grace shrugged as if Benedict had a point, and as she went back to making balls of ugali to dip into the spinach and peanut sauce with her fingers, Benedict thought back to the trip they had been on to the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda. A neighbour of theirs who was going with his daughter had had space for two more, and Mama and Baba had wanted Grace and Faith to be the ones to go.

  ‘Gorillas are very big,’ Benedict had told Faith in the bedroom all the children had shared with Titi back then. ‘Much bigger than Baba.’

  She had looked at him with very big eyes. ‘Do they eat people?’

  It would have been easy to lie, but that wasn’t right. ‘No. But they can chase you and then you can get lost in the forest. Specially if you’re small.’

  When her eyes had begun to fill with tears, Benedict had put an arm round her, feeling bad that he had scared her quite so much. ‘I’m only joking, Faith. They’re not so scary, but they are big.’

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ she had whispered. ‘Benedict, please don’t let them make me go.’

  Benedict had gone in Faith’s place, and the gorillas had interested him so much that he had very quickly stopped feeling bad about scaring Faith so that he could go in her place. Grace had been only a little bit scared, but their neighbour’s daughter had been there for her to hold on to and giggle with, and to talk with about things other than the gorillas, which really hadn’t interested her much.

  Benedict knew that if he hadn’t found the gorillas so exciting, he would have felt lonely and sad on that trip. It was one thing for Grace to prefer the company of her sister, but when any girl at all was more interesting to her than he was, it really didn’t feel nice. The neighbour’s daughter was visiting Rwanda for less than two weeks, but she and Grace seemed closer than Benedict and Grace had been for a very long time. It didn’t hurt him in the way that banging his toe or his elbow hurt, nor in the way that Mrs Patel’s heart hurt now, being all in pieces about Sandeep never coming back, but in a way that made him feel like a small part of him had – like Sandeep – gone so far away that it might never come back. Whatever that part was that had gone, it had left behind a small space inside him that was filled with emptiness.

  Benedict asked Titi if she’d like to go and see the candles with him and Mama, but she smiled shyly and said thank you but no, Benedict and Auntie should go together. She would ask Henry to take her there.

  On the Friday of the week of Baba being away, Auntie Rachel was in a bad mood when she collected them from school, on account of having spent the whole entire morning taking Mrs Levine across the border into South Africa so that they could do a U-turn and come back into Swaziland again. A holiday visa lasted only so long, and whenever Mrs Levine’s was going to expire, she had to leave and re-enter, and Auntie Rachel had to take her.

  On the way home, Vusi Mazibuko told everybody about something that had happened during break at the high school. A group of boys in his class had found a scorpion amongst a pile of old bricks at the edge of the schoolyard. One of them had run to get some exercise books, which they had used to scoot the creature away from the bricks onto a patch of bare ground. Surrounding it with books to keep it there, they had then encircled its prison of books with a ring of dried leaves and small twigs, which they had set alight before lifting away the books.

  ‘Ag no, man!’ said Auntie Rachel. ‘Shame! I hope you weren’t involved?’

  ‘Of course not—’

  ‘And why did they have matches?’

  ‘They smoke. Some of—’

  ‘But not you, hey? Because if—’

  ‘Ngeke! Never!’

  ‘Why?’ asked Benedict, who was sitting up front next to Auntie Rachel. ‘Why did they do that?’

  ‘To make it kill itself,’ said Vusi, from the row behind him.

  ‘Eh!’ How could people be so cruel?

  ‘Ja,’ said Auntie Rachel, ‘they used to do that on my parents’ farm. Just for entertainment.’ She shook her head. ‘My mom would go ballistic when she caught them at it.’

  ‘Why?’ Benedict asked again. ‘I mean... I don’t understand.’

  ‘Ag, the scorpion runs around inside the circle of fire, it sees there’s no way out, so it gives up. Kills itself. Curls up its tail and stabs itself in the back with its own sting.’

  ‘Eh!’ Benedict thought about how frightened the creature would have to be to do that.

  ‘That’s stupid,’ said Innocence, who was next to Vusi. ‘Why doesn’t it just wait for the fire to go out?’

  Vusi began to laugh.

  ‘What?’ asked Auntie Rachel, looking at him in her rearview mirror.

  ‘I’m just thinking of those boys not letting the fire go out, trying to keep it going forever,’ said Vusi, still laughing. ‘More and more sticks, then chopping down trees. Soon there’s no more forest left—’

  ‘Just desert!’ said Benedict.

  ‘Meanwhile those boys have become old men, they’ve had no schooling, all they can think about is keeping that fire burning!’ Vusi shook his head, grinning widely.

  ‘Stupid,’ said Innocence again.

  ‘Ja, hey?’

  A woman with a baby on her back and a huge basket on her head tried to flag down the yellow Hi-Ace and everybody chorused, ‘We’re not a bloody taxi!’

  ‘The scorpion,’ said Benedict. ‘Did it... Is it late?’

  ‘No!’ said Vusi, slapping one of his legs and leaning forward as far as the seatbelt would let him. ‘A girl saved it!’

  ‘Eh? A girl?’ Benedict twisted right round to look at Vusi.

  ‘Nomsa from my class,’ said Innocence, flicking something out from under one of her fingernails. ‘She’s mad.’

  Vusi told them that Nomsa had pushed between two of the boys who were standing around the ring of fire chanting for the scorpion to kill itself. She had stomped on some of the flames with her school shoes, scooped the creature up in her hands and put it down safely amongst the bricks where the boys had found it.

  It had all happened very quickly, and while most of the boys had been too shocked and surprised to say anything, a couple of them had shouted at her. But Nomsa had said nothing back. Then one of the teachers, Mr Thwala, had come and shouted at Nomsa as if everything was her fault, and he had told her to stay after school.

  Then Olga Mazibuko and Grace began to tell Auntie Rachel about Mr Patel upsetting a lady outside the high school by searching through the sweets that she was selling, and Benedict looked out of the window and allowed his mind to wander as the vehicle filled with the children’s chatter.

  ‘They say it’s not true,’ Auntie Rachel said to him quietly as she slowed the Hi-Ace and eased it over the cattle-grid at the farm’s gate. ‘It’s just a myth.’

  ‘Hm?’ Pulled from his thoughts, Benedict had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘Scorpions don’t really commit suicide. You mustn’t be upset, hey?’

  Benedict gave her a smile to show her that he was far from upset. He knew the spider-girl’s name now, and he turned it over and over in his mind like a smooth pebble in his hand.

  Nomsa.

  Later that afternoon, Benedict made his way down past the Mazibukos’ house towards the dairy. Mrs Levine was busy in the garden, pulling some plants out of the flowerbeds.

  ‘Hi there, Bennie,’ she called, her eyes shining brightly.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Levine. What are you doing?’

  ‘Just getting rid of these.’ She pulled so hard on a plant tha
t when it finally let go of the ground it happened so suddenly that she landed on her buttocks on the grass. ‘Eina, man!’

  The shock of it made Benedict want to laugh, but when he saw tears in Mrs Levine’s eyes, he went and sat next to her, asking if she was okay.

  She nodded, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue from the pocket of her gardening apron, suddenly seeming to have no energy left.

  Benedict looked at the plants she had pulled out. ‘Are they weeds?’

  She smiled. ‘In a way. They were all flowers at my wedding. I don’t want to see them.’

  ‘Um...’ Benedict tried to think of a polite way to ask, but he couldn’t. He asked anyway. ‘Mrs Levine, you do know that this isn’t your garden?’

  Her smile grew wider. ‘Ja. I’m allowed in the garden, as long as I don’t go near the dairy.’

  Benedict wasn’t sure what to say next. He looked at the plants again. ‘I’m sorry about you and Mr Levine.’

  She let out one of the longest sighs he had ever heard in his life. ‘Ja. I thought it would last forever, hey. Every bride does, I suppose.’ She gestured towards the plants that lay wilting on the grass. ‘When we danced in that hall, with those flowers everywhere... man, that was the happiest day of my life!’

  Benedict smiled with her. ‘How did you meet Mr Levine?’ Maybe Mr Levine had seen her rescuing a scorpion or a spider.

  Mrs Levine lent back so that she was lying on the grass, and propping both hands behind her head, she spoke as if she was having some kind of a dream. ‘I was working at the hospital. Solly’s sister had had a premature baby there.’ Benedict didn’t know what premature meant, but he didn’t want to interrupt. ‘The baby didn’t know how to suck.’

  Now he had to interrupt. What kind of baby doesn’t know how to suck? It was what babies did. But Mrs Levine explained that no, a baby can be born too early, before the instinct to suck is there. Benedict knew about instincts; all animals had them.

  Anyway, Mrs Levine was qualified to teach babies to suck, and she taught Mr Levine’s sister’s baby. Mr Levine came to the hospital every day to see his sister, and then when his sister went home but her baby stayed, he came every day to see the baby. When the baby went home, Mr Levine still came to the hospital every day, on account of falling in love with Mrs Levine.