I shake off my bad feelings about returning to school. He is here and sulking is forbidden. When he is here, we are happy. When he is here, we are grateful and well-behaved so he’ll have a good reason to come back and visit us again. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, Mother says, and don’t believe what people tell you, miss. Misery might love company, but misery has to learn to shut up and take care of itself.
I pop the cap from the beer with a metal opener, and white foam rims the lip. I step into the lounge room, and I remember to smile.
2
And the First Shall Be Last
We are late. Of all the times and places to be late, the Manzini bus station is the worst. Men drag goats through the maze of buses while women hold live chickens with their feet tied together. The women push through the crowd while the chickens flap and squawk. Children and women sell roasted corn, boiled peanuts, and bags of deep-fried fat cakes to passengers about to board the smoky buses, from pans they carry awkwardly in their arms. Passengers also buy pineapples, mangoes, and bananas from woven baskets carried on sellers’ heads. Pickup trucks reverse out of narrow spaces, with their horns blaring, their worn tires flattened by the weight of the passengers packed shoulder to shoulder in their open beds.
Dust is everywhere. The purple heads of the bougainvillea strangle the chain-link fence outside of B&B Farm Supplies: YOU NEED IT. WE GOT IT. Red dirt weighs the flowers down. A million motes suspended in the air catch the early-morning sun.
Animals bleat, children cry, and bus-ticket sellers call out their destinations in singsong voices. “Quick, quick time to Johannesburg. No stopping. Best seat for you, Mama.” “Smooth ride to Durban by Hlatikulu, Golela, and Jozini. Brothers, sisters . . . all welcome.”
We hurry through the dust and noise to the far end of the bus ranks. My heart lurches against my ribs. We are too late. All the good spots are already taken. If Delia, my best school friend, hasn’t saved a place for me, I will be forced to the middle of the bus, where the lower-class students sit dressed in hand-me-down clothing, or, worse still, I’ll have to make the long walk to the very back of the bus, where the poor and smelly students group together like livestock. I walk faster, and the corner of my suitcase bumps against my knees.
“There.” Rian points to a decrepit bus with a faded blue wave painted on the side.
All the buses have names. There’s Thunder Road, True Love, Lightning Fast, and finally, the Ocean Current, which drops students off at Keziah Christian Academy at the beginning of the school term and picks them up again on the first day of the holidays. It’s a public bus, but today the exclusively mixed-race students of the academy will take up most of the spaces. Black people with common sense wait to catch the next bus heading south to the sleepy part of Swaziland. They know that mixed-race children only stand up for white people.
On paper, we are all citizens of the British protectorate of Swaziland, but really, we are one people divided into three separate groups: white people, mixed-race people, and native Swazis. Each group has their own social clubs and schools, their own traditions and rules. Crossover between the groups happens, but it’s rare and endlessly talked about on the street corners and inside Bella’s Beauty Salon for All Types.
My sweaty palms grip the handle of my suitcase, and my shoulders ache from hauling its dead weight from the crossroads where Father dropped us off on his way back to Johannesburg.
“See? The bus is still here.” Mother’s breath comes fast. She is annoyed that I rushed us to get here. “All that fuss over nothing, Adele. We have plenty of time.”
I give my suitcase to a skinny black man, who throws it onto the roof of the Ocean Current, where another skinny black man, barefoot and shining with sweat, adds my case to a mountain of luggage already piled there. Faces peer out of the dusty windows. I look frantically from the front row to the back. I cannot see a vacant window seat.
“Here.” Mother gives me a small cardboard box of impago, food packed especially for long road trips and enough to tide me over on the eighty-eight-mile journey ahead. Inside will be boiled eggs, strips of air-dried beef, thick slices of buttered bread, and maybe an orange. Whatever the cupboard had to give.
I say, “Sorry for the rush.”
The real reason I have rushed us to the bus station is my secret. Mother grew up in a shack with dirt floors, and the poor girl that she was still haunts her: the two pairs of underwear made from old flour sacks that chafed her skin, a broken comb with six uneven teeth to do the combing, and the daily walk from a mud hut to Keziah Academy in shoes with more holes than leather. She never caught the Ocean Current to school, so she has no idea how the seating on the bus works. If she knew, she’d smack me for playing a part in keeping the rich students and the poor students apart, so I’m not about to tell her.
“Be good.” She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and blinks back tears. “Mind your teachers and keep up your marks.”
“I will.” I let her hug me in front of the crowded bus. Snickers come from the open windows. Hugging is for babies. I love the feeling of being held close, but I keep my face blank. Showing my emotions will get me teased by the bully boys for weeks.
I pull out of Mother’s embrace and go to ruffle Rian’s hair. He steps back and offers me his hand instead. Already man of the house. Rian’s independence annoys me, because showing him affection in public is actually allowed. Everyone knows that Rian is sick. The last time he had a major asthma attack was smack in the middle of second term last year. May 12. I remember the date. Mr. Vincent, the white American principal of Keziah Academy, drove the dirt road from school to the Norwegian hospital in Mahamba with the high beams on and the accelerator pressed to the floor. Steep mountain passes fell away into darkness, and stones pinged the underside of the car. Death rode with us. We heard it shortening Rian’s breath, willing him to surrender. To stop breathing.
Mrs. Vincent sang the Halls of the Holy hymn book from the first page to the last while I clutched my brother’s hand and prayed—not for show, the way I do in chapel, but for real. Please, God. Don’t take him. Take another boy. Take one of the mean ones. Take Richard B, Gordon Number Three, or Matthew with the lazy eye. Please. They deserve to suffer.
The doctor at the Norwegian hospital said that Rian had severe asthma—up until then, we’d called what he had “the struggles”—and he needed a mother’s care and a clinic nearby. Our house is three miles from Christ the Redeemer Hospital, where the Catholic sisters inject the sick with needles and pull rotten teeth out with pliers.
Now Rian stays home and gets his lessons via the mail. In any case, he’s too delicate to survive the bullies who control the boys’ dormitory, and I am secretly relieved that he has stopped coming to Keziah. Although I tell him I miss him at school, things are easier now that I don’t have to defend him from Richard B, Gordon Number Three, or Matthew with the lazy eye.