Diamond Is Forever

“Byron?” came the disembodied voice, carrying an interrogative inflection.

“Er… who is this?” I asked, with a note of anxiety in my voice. The alarm clock, whose fluorescent digital display gave the dressing table a scarlet hue, flashed 2:33am. At that hour, it couldn’t have been good news.

“Evelyn”.

Silence. The silence of one anticipating recognition. I searched the reservoir of my sleep-fuddled mind for an Evelyn; blank.

“Eve from Bulawayo. Bayleaf’s—”

“Eve! How are you?” Recollection, finally.

“Sorry to wake you…” flatness of voice. “Bayleaf is dead”. No euphemisms.

Throwing aside the duvet, I sat bolt upright, my empty coffee mug, a memento from school, fell from the bed and crashed to the floor. An imprecation escaped my lips.

“What was that?” she asked.

“I dropped a coffee mug. Bayleaf is what!”

“Sorry about the mug”. She seemed more moved by the breakage of crockery than by Bayleaf’s death.

“What happened? When? How?” My mind was a whirlwind of questions.

“The long arm of the law finally caught up with him. Shootout with the police in Dzivarasekwa. Cops won.” Her voice was north-polar cold in transmitting the details of the death of a man I knew she loved.

“What was he doing in Dzivarasekwa? How?”

“Cops have more guns I suppose. Sorry I woke you. I’ll call again with funeral details.”

The telephone’s dial tone, buzzing in my ear, held more sentiment.



The Sunday Observer, in billboard size lettering, callously alliterated the death of my best friend:

‘GANGSTER GUMEDE GUNNED DOWN’

A triumphant police commissioner – probably absent at the moment when bullets crisscrossed the Dzivarasekwa night air – seized the PR opportunity and stood frozen in the colour photograph, rifle in hand, while the bloodied and bullet-riddled body of my friend Bayleaf Gumede, lay at the cop’s booted feet, like a hunter posing for a photo next to his kill. The background held the out-of-focus corpses of two other men, where the bulletproof-vested figures of lower ranked officers were caught in various poses. In his statement to the press, the commissioner, in emotionless cop phraseology – working in partnership with the South African police and immigration officials, we received a tip-off notifying us of the entry of the suspect, a known criminal… engaged a special assault unit whereupon my officers returned fire, neutralizing the suspect together with two associates, without causalities to the police. Suspect was pronounced dead on the scene – spoke as if no life had been lost, no mother was weeping and no best friend had died.

I wondered how Diamond, Bayleaf, had gone from the boy I shared tinned beans with at boarding school to the infamous njiva, the country’s criminal export, the rumoured mastermind of bank heists in Botswana and car thief nonpareil.

I threw the paper aside in disgust and fell back onto my bed, a lump creeping steadily up my throat. I remembered his laughter, an inimitable laugh, which echoed in my head as if he was still alive and right there with me. He laughed when he was happy and he laughed moments before launching an enraged attack on someone. Standing 5 foot tall, broad shouldered, muscle-bound and curiously named ‘Bayleaf’ by his late father – a chef, whose fetish for spices and culinary herbs had gone unchecked – his name and diminutive stature invited derision, keeping him at the centre of many fistfights.

True to his Gemini star sign, there was more than one facet to him. A Diamond has many faces, he used to say. In our time at school, there was Diamond the pugnacious lad, whose bruised knuckles barely ever had time to heal. Then there was Bayleaf, the loyal, kind-hearted friend. I was afflicted with enuresis, into my mid teens. Wetting the bed at 15 was embarrassing. I felt that calling it "enuresis" lightened the shame. The hostel wash line, at St Josephs Boys High, constantly held the urine-blotched white sheets from my bed. Jeered by a swarm of mocking school boys, when I was discovered surreptitiously hanging stained bed linen, early one morning, he told everybody that the soiled sheets were his. By then, he had acquired the reputation for causing eyes to blacken and noses to bleed. “Keep laughing and I’ll pee all over your beds” he growled. The boo-boys fell silent and slunk away, fearful of him. And then, to avoid the need for hanging my sheets on the wash line, he purloined a hairdryer from his aunt. So whenever I’d had another of my nocturnal accidents, I blow-dried the bed and never again needed to hang my sheets outside.

Typical Jekyll and Hyde personality, he would go from the sensitive bloke who rescued me from the boo-boys, to the bipedal beast that put three Churchill boys into an ambulance. Fittingly, the game which launched Bayleaf into school icon status was on home turf, against our arch nemesis Churchill Boys High, whom we detested for their Scotch-skirted bagpipe band (to us ‘kilt’ and ‘skirt’ were interchangeable) their stuffed bulldog mascot and, more truthfully, their proximity to Roosevelt Girls High, whose pupils were largely regarded as the most desirable in our teen aged eyes. The rivalry between our school, St Josephs (‘the Eagles’) and Churchill (‘the Bulldogs’) dated back several years. It was the scholar’s equivalent of the Middle Eastern conflict. We had found the enmity there and it remained long after we departed. Throughout high school, Bayleaf permitted himself one act of vanity: the claim of possessing a forehead harder than a diamond. Etched on the battering ram that was also his head, were scars and gashes – boot studs, scabby welts made by the coming together of his head with stray elbows and even double-fanged craters from the loosened upper incisors of opponents – whose numbers increased each rugby season. It was Eagles versus Bulldogs and Bayleaf was surrounded by four opponents. Isolated and with no immediate support, the expected, prudent manoeuvre was to kick the ball out to safety. Instead, he lowered his head and charged like a buffalo, into the midriff of one opponent, leaving him winded, met the jaw of the second, who passed out upon impact, introduced his sledgehammer forehead to the temple of the third adversary, immobilizing him, before driving a firm open hand into the face of the fourth, who met the immovable winter-hardened ground, nose first. Moments after the shrill blast of the referee’s whistle signified “try scored”, the medic rushed onto the pitch, with first aid kit in hand, to face the awful dilemma of prioritizing between three very serious injuries. As the ambulance sped off with its cargo of mangled Bulldogs, a grinning Bayleaf , with arms aloft, was seen perched off-balance on the shoulders of euphoric teammates. From the bleachers, chants of “DIAMOND! DIAMOND! DIAMOND!” rang out. The ‘Diamond’ moniker stuck, saving Bayleaf from further herb-related ridicule from the boo-boys and, in point of fact, saving Bayleaf the inconvenience of beating them up.

In the final school term, Diamond filched, as a souvenir, a sword used in the stage production of ‘Dick Turpin.’ For reasons of safety, the swords used on the set were blunt on both edges and rubber tipped. Not content with his sword in its original state, Diamond unlawfully gained entry into the school metal-workshop, where he sharpened the rapier beneath the rotating wheel of a grinder and emerged with the once innocuous stage prop winking with menace, when its blade caught the sun.

Weeks later, surveying the hostel grounds, from upstairs, Diamond’s eye fell upon the superintendent’s pair of Dobermans, conjoined in canine coupling, back to back, behind the old Vauxhall, in the superintendent’s fenced-off garden. Opening his trunk, he retrieved the sword, bounded down the stairs, taking four steps at a time, sprinted up the driveway, flung open the superintendent’s gate and, beneath the loose-jawed gaze of schoolboys watching from windows, raised the sword and brought it whistling down onto the pink outgrowth, by which the animals were amorously linked, severing the appendage in one powerful stroke. The dog, Aphrodite, as any male – whether beast or human – can comprehend, let out a pained yawl and arrowed through the open gate and, wailing still, ran onto the main road, where two compassionless BF Goodrich tyres flattened it into a pancake of blood and fur. Meanwhile, more from the shock of being interrupted mid-rapture than from physical pain, the bitch, Hermes, still with severed appendage protruding from her posterior, took cover beneath the antiquated Vauxhall.

Mrs Isaacs, the superintendent’s wife – the star in many schoolboys’ fantasies – evidently interrupted by the commotion from her shower, emerged through the kitchen door dripping wet in a shower cap and a bath towel wrapped around her. Seeing the blood spatter, she was gripped with fear and began to frantically call out the Hellenic names of both dogs – “Hermes! Aphrodite!” Hearing the whimpered response of Hermes, Mrs Isaacs went on all fours, peering into the semidarkness beneath the car. The frantic slapping of her ample, tennis player’s thigh and calling out – “here girl, here girl!” – failed to draw the obdurate mutt from its hiding place. Concluding that the situation required bolder and more decisive action, Mrs Isaacs dived beneath the car and seized a paw, at which point the needle-sharp fangs of the canine clamped round her wrist. Screaming, she released the dog, belly-crawled backwards; snagging her shower cap and bath towel on the chassis and rose, with her curly biracial hair resembling Albert Einstein’s coiffure. Clasping her lacerated hand, she froze, upon belatedly realizing she had the audience of fifteen-plus, unblinking, open-mouthed schoolboys. Bashfully, she smoothed down her wild hair and flashed a smile. A gasp and a horrified scream showed the sudden realisation of her state of undress and the dishevelment of her hair became a minor concern in comparison. Panic-stricken hands migrated at speed from Einstein hair to cup bare bosom and knees crossed, in a ridiculous attempt at reclaiming compromised modesty. Her eyes darted from car to kitchen door as she frenetically weighed the options available; dash inside the house, duck inside the car, or return to the underside of the automobile and negotiate with a foul-tempered canine.

Meanwhile, competition for viewing spaces escalated, among frenzied, hormonal boys wishing to see the object of their collective wet dreams, quite literally, in the flesh. Open palms could be seen urgently wiping away condensation, as teenaged exhalations steamed up the windows.

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 the advisability of attempting the doors on the other side of the car but abandoned the idea, most likely due to the proximity of the windows of the ground floor dormitory, where the pustule-dotted foreheads of boys were imprinted on steamed up glass 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. Women, at the all-boys school, were scarce and naked females an even more unusual spectacle. The grateful teenaged eyes watching from foggy windows would never have blinked even if, at that moment, a sandstorm had erupted. Then, from beneath the car, 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, adversarial 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 Isaacs’ dainty hand and swathed it in the improvised bandage. Reading the movement of her lips – “thank you” – we watched Bayleaf, with a 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 Bayleaf 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, that evening, Mr Isaacs charged into the dormitory, wielding a metre-long cane, breathing dementedly, his neck lined with tendons and shirt 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 and, for the remainder of the final term, Diamond lived with his aunt. It later emerged that Mr Isaacs had been enlightened by an anonymous note, most likely written by a recipient of a shiner from Diamond. Given the long line of Diamond’s victims, the snitch could have been anyone.

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 used to reminisce, in loud voices, about life at St Josephs and watch movies, on the VCR, into the early hours of the morning at my Baines Avenue bed-sitter. On nights when his many inner demons vanquished him – feelings of inadequacy and the pressures of being the man of the family since his father’s passing – 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, all of debatable virtue, whose synthetic screams of pleasure, counterpointed by Diamond’s bottled grunts of effort, 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 best shirt, with her feet – blackened by years of pounding the dusty streets 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. When she attempted to help him with his necktie, purring recycled pet names that were most likely used on all her regulars, Diamond, with the typical male, morning-after irritability, brought about by the sudden loss of desire, would slap her hands away. 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 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.



Bulawayo, on the day of Bayleaf’s internment, proved to be a city whose chilly air matched the frosty telephonic voice of Eve. At the chapel’s entrance, Diamond’s uncle, in a black suit stretched over broad Gumede shoulders, swatted away the cassette recorders and microphones thrust into the chin of his grieving mother by the scandal-sniffing paparazzi. A film crew, denied access, hovered at the chapel door, like bees at the opening of a hive. I sat next to Bayleaf’s youngest sister, Coriander, in the front row of the Church, from where I observed the arrival of six men, associates of Bayleaf no doubt, all clad in black leather trench coats. Dark glasses rested on the bridges of their scarred noses. The asymmetrical bulges in their coats suggested concealed hardware, necessary in their line of work. After the Church service, the same men arrived at Lalani Kuhle Cemetery, in a convoy of South African registered black BMWs, whose tinted windows matched the drivers’ sunglasses.

As the coffin was lowered into the grave, Diamond’s mother was inconsolable in self-flagellant grief, holding the back of her head with both hands and crying out words that seemed to have been torn from my private journal: “I failed him. I should have been there when he needed me”.

Coriander sniffed and sobbed quietly, restraining her mother, who appeared to want to fling herself into the grave after her only son.

Conspicuous by her absence was Bayleaf’s older sister, Pepper, at one time a problem child, led astray by the 1980s punk movement, now the wife of an esteemed Supreme Court judge, who, for obvious reasons – “public confidence in the judiciary… associating with known criminals” – barred her from attending. To identify with the pearl-necklaced and Estee Lauder scented wives of bank CEOs, police commissioners and mining moguls, she had, ahead of her nuptials, changed her name to ‘Phillipa’, abandoning ‘Pepper’, which, she estimated, would have been sneezed at, among high society.

Seeing Eve, a veiled black fashion hat obscuring her face and a maternity dress outlining the swell of her parabolic belly, I suddenly recalled the midnight phone call from Bayleaf:

“Promise me you’ll make sure my first born will carry on my name, if something should happen–” he slurred, in a voice that did not suggest sobriety.

“You’re drunk, go to sleep,” I interjected.

“Give me your word or I’ll keep calling all night!” he continued, urged on by Heinekin and Johnny Walker.

“I promise, now go to sleep.” I hung up.



The letter box said ‘Eden, 6 Adams Street.’ The insurmountable wrought iron gates, set in an eight foot perimeter wall, parted to admit us into the landscaped garden, dotted with rustling palm trees and lush ferns. A water feature kept the tranquil environs filled with the soothing tinkle of water falling. A rendezvous with two unfriendly bullterriers awaited any intruder who might manage to scale the high wall and somehow negotiate the razor wire and electric fence. As we entered the voluminous vestibule, minimally decorated with a rug in the centre of its shimmering marbled floor, an antique telephone on a ball-and-claw table and a scattering of paintings that hung on the wood panelled wall, I wondered, privately, how many motorists had been flung, at gun point, from their cars to fund this opulence.

Eve stood with her hand hovering over the lid of a crystal decanter, in a living room that appeared to have been cut out of the Home Owner magazine and turned around to address me, “can I pour you a whisky?”

Without waiting for my response, she proceeded to pour and, with a chiming clink, dropped ice cubes into the thick-based glass, which she held at the end of an extended arm. Midday seemed too early for whisky but habitual politeness restrained me from declining the offer.

“Boy, girl or triplets?” I joked.

“I’m old fashioned. I’ll wait for the surprise on the day of birth,” she stretched her lips into the simulacrum of a smile. The glacier, it seemed, had melted a little.

“He made me promise to let you pick a name, some vow made between two friends in the sandpit of their young adulthood”, she said, rolling her eyes in good-humoured condescension. “I’ll phone for a name, once she’s born.”

“She?” I asked.

“I’m kind of hoping for a girl”, her eyes dropped to the marble floor tile to avoid my gaze.

Though I had already intuited the answer, I asked, “Because you think a girl is less likely to emulate her father?”

She nodded.

Eve, who attended the girls’ school next door to ours, was three years Bayleaf’s junior and, in courting her, the romantic half of Diamond sent her an Old Spice scented note, together with a fig leaf, harvested serendipitously during a class trip to the Harare Botanical Gardens. Showing remarkable eloquence for a rugby player, he wrote in the letter:

“An Eve without Adam would be silly, an Adam and Eve without fig leaves, a reprehensible violation of history.”

To consummate their teen love affair, Diamond stole a moment in art class to screen-print, onto matching T-shirts, the words, “EVE & DIAMOND”, separated by a red heart. The Jacaranda trees dividing our two schools carried the penknife tattoos declaring “DIAMOND & EVE FOREVER”.

He had provided for her materially but, because of his need for anonymity, had kept her hidden behind a high wall. While most of her contemporaries boasted sleepovers at boyfriends and concealed the bruises of lovemaking beneath turtleneck sweaters, she settled for monthly trysts at nondescript motels, booked under an alias. With flashing blue lights constantly in his rear view mirror he could not risk capture. Rather than her dream of wedded bliss, a house full of babies and a veranda with a pair of matching rocking chairs for their twilight years, he had given her an echoing palatial prison bereft of love and family, haughtily calling it ‘Eden’. Understandably, she felt a sense of abandonment and red hot anger towards Bayleaf which, now finally vented, melted the glacier, whose waters dripped onto my shoulder in sobs. I hugged her, offering no words of comfort. To speak would have been to claim to know how she felt, and I didn’t.

Humans employ whatever means they can in dealing with grief. Mrs Gumede, foiled by her daughter’s restraining arm, had attempted a suicidal leap into Diamond’s grave. Eve had hidden in an igloo, to escape the heartache and I, rather than dealing with my loss, had receded down the corridor of memory, electing to hold onto my boyhood. When I emerged from my nostalgic reminiscence, I fled my pain, by observing the grief of the leading ladies of Bayleaf’s life; his mother, who drowned herself in self blame, Coriander, silent but crying an ocean and Eve, the iceberg.

Moments before my taxi cab arrived, Eve walked me around the yard. She didn’t seem to wear the usual pride of a homeowner – dispassionately pointing out things with a nonchalant chin – and the tour of her garden appeared to be more about filling the minutes of waiting for the taxi than a landowner proudly showing off her dominion. Perhaps it was fatigue but I theorised that she was prevented from feeling proud by the knowledge that, to facilitate the comforts she enjoyed, a string of bank managers had been ushered, with pistols trained at their backs, to the doors of cash vaults. A dented leather punching bag – no prize offered for guessing the owner – swung from a beam of the thatched gazebo. Two menservants knelt with gardening implements in their hands, wholly committed to the impossible task of beautifying an already flawless landscape. She stood with arm bent at the elbow and a swollen hand holding the base of her pregnancy-strained back, while we small-talked at the pond, where a fountain gurgled its white waters. The tail of a koi fish broke the surface and a dragon fly's helicopter-shaped form zipped over the crystal-clear water, drawing my eye to a verdigris-covered copper coin on the pebble-strewn bed. I wondered, privately, if the coin had fallen from the hand of Eve. I speculated, further, what she had wished for: perhaps a cat’s nine lives for her departed love or maybe a bout of amnesia, to wipe out the past week from her memory.

As our chat took on a valedictory mood, Eve delivered her parting shot, “and just so we’re clear, if it happens to be twins, the names ‘Cain’ and ‘Abel’ are out of the question!”



An independent web-based newspaper, conflicting the government-aligned Sunday Observer, reported that Diamond, in attempting to flee, head-butted past a rookie policeman, before being felled by a shotgun blast which shattering his knee. While lying on the ground, immobilized, he opened fire at the cops, killing two officers and wounding another but was eventually shot in the chest and died instantly.

“Way to go Diamond,” I whispered. “You went down fighting.”

I was raised to live on the straight-and-narrow, to return library books on time and to always stop at a red light, even on a traffic-less road at midnight. I found myself questioning my sense of right and wrong, immediately after the moment I felt a frisson of pleasure upon learning that Diamond had killed those two policemen. But grief, especially when tinged with guilt, clouds one's opinion.

After Diamond was sacked from Dr Matheson’s practice he had no luck finding alternative employment. With no source of income, a game of hide-and-seek with his landlord and various other creditors began. After a month of sneaking in and out of his rented cottage in the late hours of the night and early morning, the landlord’s patience ran out and he carted Diamond’s belongings into the December fresh air and heavy rain, before informing his aunt, who was listed as next of kin, that Bayleaf Gumede was no longer welcome at the Westgate property. Diamond moved in with me, bringing with him the capriciousness which, at school, was his most endearing quality but, in the adult world, made him the world’s worst flat mate. We took turns with the chores but when it was Diamond's week to clean up, a mountain of dirty dishes would rise up in the kitchen sink until the cupboards were plateless. I was determined not to allow myself to be his skivvy so, when I needed to make a cup of coffee, rather than wash the dishes, I would rinse out just the one mug that I needed. Too lazy to wash up and without any clean crockery, Diamond would spread margarine over toast with a ruler and eat his cereal from the sawn-off base of a plastic Coke bottle, anything to avoid wetting his fingers with dishwater. Rather than wash and iron his shirts, I would see him wrinkling his nose and sniffing at dirty garments, each morning, assessing them for what he called ‘recyclability’. When the system of burying clothes under the bed and exhuming them to wear again a few weeks later ran its full course, he resorted to looting my side of the closet. It wasn't long before I reached the end of my tether. Seated around mounds of his reeking underpants and socks – hardened by repeat wearing – we had a man to man chat, during which he brushed off my request for him to assist with the housework as ‘wife-like nagging’. What began as a simple matter of neglected chores degenerated into a battle of egos. I took a famous saying from his Ndebele dialect – indoda iyazibonela (every man for himself) – fashioned it into a knobkerrie and bludgeoned him with it, before inviting him to pack and leave. Sulkily, Diamond stuffed crinkled shirts, socks and shoes into a pull-along suitcase and slammed the door behind him. As the grinding sound of the wheels of his bag receded down the hallway, though pride restrained me from running after him, I was overcome by a feeling of remorse for having kicked him out. Apart from the matter of friendship and loyalty, I felt indebted to Diamond for rescuing me all those years ago at St Josephs. Life in an all-boys school is a dogfight and reputation is everything. The slightest sign of weakness and the vultures begin to circle. Diamond had put his reputation on the line in order to save mine. However, I was relieved when, several months later, he visited my Milton Park office in good spirits and, by all appearances, having forgotten our tiff. When we walked out together, expecting to see him cross Prince Edward Road and stick a hitch-hiker’s thumb at city-bound pirate taxis, he stuffed a hand in his trouser pocket and the double chirp of a disengaged car alarm rang out. I turned to see Diamond’s stocky frame partially obscuring the BMW emblem on a gleaming red car, with his muscular arms spread out in what, during our school days, was known as the ‘how do you like me now’ gesture. He told me that he had a job that he vaguely described as ‘procurements’ and the car came as part of the perks. I felt comforted that he had landed on his feet and was doing well. It wasn't long before stories linking Diamond to a carjacking ring filtered through from Bulawayo. It then made sense to me that when I invited him to pop open the boot, so that I could see the radio speakers, whose thunderous noise shook the car, he declined, saying that the lock was jammed. It was hard to keep back the tidal wave of guilt that washed over me. I felt that, by evicting him, I had pushed him into a life of crime. If only I had endured the pong of unwashed socks a little longer and washed the dishes myself, maybe he would have eventually found a job which would have kept him on the right side of the law and, more importantly, alive. In the end, we are all responsible for our choices and Diamond had chosen the road that he walked. But as much as I told myself that I wasn’t to blame, I couldn’t help feeling that I had failed to save him. I should have held out a hand, at the moment that he began to slide down the slippery slope, from which few return. I was preoccupied with living my own life, rising up the corporate food chain at Fuller & Associates and too busy arguing, through my written copy and jingles, the merits of Sunbright soap and Zest Health Shake.

Seated in my study, I wheeled round in the swivel chair to answer the ringing telephone. A weary voice came through the ear piece, “Even in death, the bastard gets his way… it’s a boy.”

I remained silent, considering the implications. Finally, I spoke, “Mavambo.”

“Mavambo. New beginnings… I like it.” She hung up.

I reclined in the chair, surveying my handiwork. Through the magic of Henkel porcelain glue, the cracks were barely visible. By repairing the broken coffee mug, I had kept my promise. Inked onto the cup’s underside, were the words, “our friendship is unbreakable – like diamonds”.

At the end of our final examination, sixth formers banged jubilant fists on furniture. Others, seeking immortality, with tongues hanging at the corners of mouths in absolute concentration, etched their names and years of attendance – ‘Dube was here 1986-1991’ – on desks, doors, any surface that yielded to the sharp end of a Swiss army knife or geometry compass. There were no hugs. Embracing between males was frowned upon, in the testosterone-filled, macho world of an all-boys academy. The exchange of keepsakes and autographs, scribbled – much to the horror of our parents – on the shirts worn on school closing day was customary. When I took one final glance at the buildings of St Joseph’s, I held in my hand the coffee mug, signed by Diamond.

By naming his son ‘Mavambo’, I had broken my vow. But I felt I had, by my skewed reasoning, atoned for the un-kept promise and saved the life that he and Eve had created. Names, like the utterances of clairvoyants, can be self-fulfilling prophecies. I reasoned that, unencumbered with his father’s name, Mavambo could carve his own path in life.

I tapped on the coffee mug, with my knuckles, to test the strength of the bond… it seemed harder than diamond.