Secretly wishing for the superhero powers of invisibility, her eyeballs swivelled first to the door, calculating the distance, relative to her top speed, then to the bottom of the car and to the car door. Pale, sun-starved breasts shook violently, amid clenched-jaw curses – “Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!” – as she wrestled with the car door, which, after years beneath the elements, refused to budge.
Flustered hands ran through Einstein hair, as she pondered, momentarily, the advisability of attempting the door handles on the other side of the car but abandoned the idea, upon realizing the proximity of the windows of the ground floor dormitory, where the pustule-dotted foreheads of boys were imprinted on steamed up window panes.
Switching to option two – the retrieval of her towel – she dived beneath the car, with her spine arched, granting the ever-swelling audience a full view of her raised buttocks. The grateful teenaged eyes watching from foggy windows would never have blinked, even if, at that moment a sandstorm had erupted.
Then came a gravelly snarl and the sound of the snapping of teeth, followed by a woman’s anguished scream. With blood gushing from the stump of her right pinkie, she rose and sprinted – breasts slapping against her chin – towards the closed kitchen door. A further scream of distress escaped her lips, upon discovering that the dead-bolted door had locked.
At the windows, competitive elbows dug into the ribs of schoolmates. Just then Diamond, who had prudently disappeared from the scene of his crime, reappeared with a hostel-issue counterpane slung over his shoulder. Expecting the worst, Mrs Isaacs, screamed and, adopting a comical Kung-fu pose, uttered impotent threats, “Stay away! I know Karate!”
Muttering words of assurance – “it’s okay, let me help you” – he inched nearer before enveloping her beneath the blanket. A collective groan of disappointment – akin to that heard in sports bars, when electricity is cut in the midst of a cup final – was heard from the dormitory windows. Un-knotting his necktie, Diamond’s kind, sensitive twin took Mrs Le Roux’s dainty hand and swathed it in the improvised bandage.
Reading the movement of her lips – “thank you” – we watched Diamond, with gymnastic display of chivalry, leap onto a steel rubbish bin and worm his way through the open kitchen window, before opening the door from inside. A chorus of wolf whistles ensued, as Diamond was seen, framed in the doorway, standing on tiptoe, to accept the grateful embrace of Mrs Isaacs.
Diamond, the afternoon’s hero, turned villain, when Mr Isaacs, enlightened by the anonymous handwritten testimony slipped beneath his office door, charged into the dormitory, wielding a metre-long cane, his neck lined with tendons and sleeves rolled up to reveal angry arms webbed with pulsing veins.
It was absolute bedlam, as Diamond – discovered naked, ironically enough, while changing into his pyjamas – inspired by the superintendent’s thrashing cane, leapt from bed to bed, ruffling hospital corners and tripping over open school trunks. Such was Tyrone Isaacs’ fury that he abandoned the cultured diction acquired in the halls of Wits University, reverting to the Arcadia dialect of his discarded past and spitting a torrent of obscenities, as three colleagues restrained him.
The following morning, Mr Isaacs, through clenched teeth, demanded “the immediate expulsion of this psychopath”, pointing in the direction of Diamond, who stood with his arms and legs zebra-striped with whip marks and his head bowed penitently before the headmaster. However, the headmaster, an unflappable man, advised caution. He pointed out to Mr Isaacs that his punishment of Bayleaf had been excessive and that the school risked legal action and bad publicity, if the matter was handled rashly. Therefore, he approved expulsion only from the hostel.
Separated by geography, I saw little of Bayleaf, who remained in his hometown of Bulawayo, while I stayed in Banket, until my appointment to trainee copywriter, at Fuller and Associates, and his recruitment as clerk, at Dr Matheson’s surgery in Harare, set up our reunion. In a tale pregnant with irony, the greying veterinary surgeon, sworn lifesaver of sick dogs, had taken his chances on Diamond, torturer of copulating canines.
I saw plenty of Bayleaf, until he was dismissed for secretly operating a dog breeding business, supplying bullterrier studs from the veterinarian’s kennels for rescued pets, to the underground dog-fighting rings of the gritty districts of Sunningdale and St Martins. We watched movies, on the VCR, into the early hours of the morning, at my Baines Avenue bed-sitter.
On nights when his inner demons vanquished him, he sought solutions to his many problems at the bottom of a beer bottle and would often come beating down my door, at the most ungodly hour, accompanied by different women of debatable virtue, whose synthetic screams of pleasure, kept me awake till sunrise. After managing only a few winks of sleep, I would awake to the horror of a harlot, dressed in my shirt, with her feet – blackened by years of pounding the dusty avenues of the red-light zone – firmly planted in my slippers, cheerily frying eggs and shielding her face from bacon-grease spatter with the sleeves of my shirt.
Bayleaf, drained from the night’s exertions, would be hunched over the table, noisily slurping at the rim of a coffee mug, with my work assignment – now bearing ringed coffee mug stains – employed as an improvised coaster. After haggling over the fee in the bathroom – Bayleaf in whispers and his hired consort in a loud alcohol-and-cigarette-roughened voice – they would leave me to wash the piles of dishes and battle with the makeup and bacon-grease stains on my shirt.
In the week of my preferment to the position of senior copywriter, I learned of Bayleaf’s burgeoning criminal reputation. Within three years, true to his ambitious nature, his operations had gone regional, keeping awake the Zimbabwean police commissioner and simultaneously causing premature greying of the heads of the Botswana and South Africa police chiefs, whose shared ambition was his capture.
Author blog
Jerá is a Zimbabwean born poet, short story writer and book critic whose reviews have appeared in The Zimbabwean and The Standard. He is working on his first novel.
Jerá’s favourite authors are Shimmer Chinodya and Salman Rushdie, both of whom have influenced his work.
He is married to Kiri and they have a 2 year old son.
Post published in: Arts