City of Golden Shadow (11 page)

"Where is who?"

"God damn it, you know who! Where did Stephen go?"

"How should I know?" Long Joseph was rooting around in the cupboard, looking for the bottle of cheap wine he had finished two nights before. "He go off with his damn friend. That Eddie. What you do with my wine, girl?"

Renie turned and went into her room, slamming the door shut behind her. It was impossible to talk with him. Why did she even try?

The picture on her desk showed him over twenty years younger, tall and dark and handsome. Her mother stood beside him in a strapless dress, shielding her eyes from the Margate summer sun. And Renie herself, age three or four, was nestled in the crook of her father's arm, wearing a ridiculous bonnet that made her head look as big as her entire body. One small hand had wrapped itself in her father's tropical shirt as if seeking an anchor against the strong currents of life.

Renie scowled and blinked back tears. It did no good to look at that picture. Both of those people were dead, or as good as dead. It was a dreadful thought, but no less true for its horror.

She found a last spare battery in the back of her drawer, slotted it into the pad, and phoned Eddie's house.

Eddie answered. Renie was not surprised. Eddie's mother Mutsie spent more time out drinking with her friends than home with her children. That was one of the reasons Eddie got into trouble, and though he was a pretty good kid, it was one of the reasons Renie was not comfortable with Stephen staying there.

God, look at yourself, girl, she thought as she waited for Eddie to fetch her brother. You're turning into an old woman, disapproving of everyone.

"Renie?"

"Yes, Stephen, it's me. Are you okay? He didn't hit you or anything, did he?"

"No. The old drunk couldn't catch me."

Despite her own anger, she felt a moment of fright at hearing him talk about their father that way. "Listen, is it all right for you to stay there tonight, just till Papa calms down? Let me talk to Eddie's mother."

"She's not here, but she said it was okay."

Renie frowned. "Ask her to call me anyway. I want to talk to her about something. Stephen, don't hang up."

"I'm here." He was sullen.

"What about Soki? You never told me if he came back to school after-after you three got in that trouble."

Stephen hesitated. "He was sick."

"I know. But did he come back to school?"

"No. His mama and dad moved into Durban. I think they're living with Soki's aunt or something."

She tapped her fingers on the pad, then realized she had almost cut the connection. "Stephen, put the picture on, please."

"It's broken. Eddie's little sister knocked over the station."

Renie wondered if that was really true, or if Stephen and his friend were into some mischief they didn't want her to see. She sighed. It was forty minutes to Eddie's flatblock by bus and she was exhausted. There was nothing she could do.

"You phone me at work tomorrow when you get home from school. When's Eddie's mama coming back?"

"Soon."

"And what are the two of you going to do tonight until she gets back?"

"Nothing." There was definitely a defensive note in his voice. "Just do some net Football match, maybe."

"Stephen," she began, then stopped. She didn't like the interrogatory tone of her own voice. How could he learn to stand on his own two feet if she treated him like he was a baby? His own father had wrongfully accused him of something just hours earlier, then thrown him out of his home. "Stephen, I trust you. You call me tomorrow, hear?"

"Okay." The phone clicked and he was gone.

Renie plumped up her pillow and sat back on her bed, trying to find a comfortable position for her aching head and neck. She had planned to read an article in a specialist magazine tonight-the kind of thing she wanted to have under her belt when career review time came around-but she was too drained to do anything much. Wave some frozen food and then watch the news. Try not to lie awake for hours worrying.

Another evening shot to hell.

"You seem upset, Ms. Sulaweyo. Is there anything I can do to help you?"

She took an angry breath. "My name's Renie. I wish you'd start calling me that, !Xabbu-you make me feel like a grandmother."

"I am sorry. I meant no offense." His slender face was unusually solemn. He lifted his tie and scrutinized the pattern.

Renie wiped the screen, blotting out the schematic she had been laboring over for the last half hour. She took out a cigarette and pulled the tab. "No, I'm sorry. I had no right to take my . . . I apologize." She leaned forward, staring at the sky blue of the empty screen as the smoke drifted in front of it "You've never told me anything about your family. Well, not much."

She felt him looking at her. When she met it, his gaze was uncomfortably sharp, as though he had extrapolated from her question about his family to her own troubles. It never paid to underestimate !Xabbu. He had already moved past the basics of computing and was beginning to explore areas that gave her other adult students fits. He would be constructing programmer-level code soon. All this in a matter of a few months. If he was studying at night to make such a pace, he must be going without sleep altogether.

"My family?" he asked. "That means a different thing where I come from. My family is very large. But I assume you mean my mother and father."

"And sisters. And brothers."

"I have no brothers, although I have several male cousins. I have two younger sisters, both of whom are still living with my people. My mother is living there, too, although she has not been well." His expression, or the lack of it, suggested that his mother's illness was nothing small. "My father died many years ago."

"I'm sorry. What did he die of? If you don't mind talking about it."

"His heart stopped." He said it simply, but Renie wondered at the stiffness of his tone. !Xabbu was often formal, but seldom anything but open in his conversation. She put it down to pain he did not wish to share. She understood that.

"What was it like for you, growing up? It must have been very different from what I knew."

His smile came back, but only a small one. "I am not so certain of that, Renie. In the delta we lived mostly outdoors, and that is very different, of course, from living beneath a city roof-some nights since I came here I still have trouble sleeping, you know. I go outside and sleep in the garden just so I can feel the wind, see the stars. My landlady thinks I am very strange." He laughed; his eyes almost closed. "But other than that, it seems to me that all childhoods must be much alike. I played, I asked questions about the things around me, sometimes I did what I should not and was punished. I saw my parents go to work each day, and when I was old enough, I was put to school."

"School? In the Okavango Swamps?"

"Not the sort you know, Renie-not with an electronic wall and VR headsets. Indoor school was much later for me. I was taken by my mother and her relatives and taught the things I should know. I never said that our childhoods were identical, only much alike. When I was first punished for doing something I should not have, it was for straying too near the river. My mother was afraid that crocodiles might take me. I imagine that your first punishments were incurred for something different."

"You're right. But we didn't have any electronic walls in my school. When I was a little girl, all we had were a couple of obsolete microcomputers. If they were still around, they'd be in a museum now."

"My world has changed also since I was a young child. That is one of the things that brought me here."

"What do you mean?"

!Xabbu shook his head with slow regret, as though she were the student rather than he, and she had fastened onto some ultimately unworkable theory. When he spoke, it was to change the subject "Did you ask me about my family out of curiosity, Renie? Or is there some problem with yours that is making you sad? You do seem sad."

For a moment she was tempted to deny it or to push it aside. It didn't feel proper for a teacher to complain to a student about her home life, even though they were more or less the same age. But she had come to think of !Xabbu as a friend-an odd companion because of his background, but a friend nevertheless. The pressures of raising a little brother and looking after her troubled and troublesome father had meant that her friends from university days had drifted away, and she had not made many new ones.

"I . . . I do worry." She swallowed, disliking her own weakness, the messiness of her problems, but it was too late to stop. "My father threw my little brother out of the house, and he's only eleven years old. But my father's got it into his bloody mind to take a stand and he won't let him back until he apologizes. Stephen is stubborn, too-I hope that's the only way he's like Papa." She was a little surprised at her own vehemence. "So he won't give in. He's been staying with a friend for three weeks now-three weeks! I hardly get to see him or talk to him."

!Xabbu nodded. "I understand your worry. Sometimes when one of my folk has a dispute with his family, he goes to stay with other relatives. But we live very close together, and all see each other often."

"That's just it. Stephen's still going to school-I've been checking with the office-and Eddie's mother, this friend's mother, says he's okay. I don't know how much I trust her, though, that's part of the problem." She stood up, trailing smoke, and walked to the far wall, just needing to move. "Now I'm going on and on about it again. But I don't like it. Two stupid men, one big, one little, and neither one of them is going to say he's wrong."

"But you said your younger brother was not wrong," !Xabbu pointed out "If he were to apologize, it is true that he would be showing respect for his father-but if he accepts blame that is not his, then he would also be submitting to injustice to maintain the peace. I think you are worried that would not be a good lesson."

"Exactly. His people-our people-had to fight against that for decades." Renie shrugged angrily and stubbed the cigarette out "But it's more than politics. I don't want him to think that might makes right, that if you are pushed down yourself, it's acceptable then to turn around and find someone weaker you can push down. I don't want him to end up like . . . like his. . . ."

!Xabbu held her gaze. He seemed capable of finishing the sentence for her, but didn't.

After a long pause, Renie cleared her throat "This is a waste of your tutorial time. I apologize. Shall we try that flowchart again? I know it's boring, but it's the kind of thing you're going to have to know for exams, however well you're doing with everything else."

!Xabbu raised an inquiring eyebrow, but she ignored it.

!Xabbu was standing at the edge of a sharp spur of rock. The mountainside stretched away beneath him, a curving, glass-smooth free fall of shiny black. In his outstretched palm lay an old-fashioned pocket watch. As Renie stared, !Xabbu began to take it apart.

"Move away from the edge," she called. Couldn't he see the danger? "Don't stand so close!"

!Xabbu looked up at her, his eyes crinkled into slits, and smiled. "I must find out how it works. There is a ghost inside it."

Before she could warn him again, he jerked, then held up his hand wonderingly, like a child; a drop of blood, round as a gem, became liquid and flowed down his palm.

"It bit me," he said. He took a step backward, then toppled over the precipice.

Renie found herself staring down from the edge. !Xabbu had vanished. She searched the depths, but could see nothing but mists and long-winged white birds, who circled slowly and made mournful sounds, te-wheep, te-wheep, te-wheep. . . .

She surfaced from the dream, her heart still pounding. Her pad was beeping at her, quiet but insistent. She fumbled for it on the night table. The digital numbers read 2:27 a.m.

"Answer." She flicked the screen upright.

It took her a moment to recognize Stephen's friend Eddie. He was crying, his tears a silver track on his blue-lit face. Her heart went cold inside her chest,

"Renie. . . ?"

"Where's Stephen?"

"He's . . . he's sick, Renie. I don't know. . . ."

"What do you mean, 'sick'? Where's your mama? Let me talk to her."

"She's not here."

"For God's sake. . . ! How is he sick, Eddie? Answer me!"

"He won't wake up. I don't know, Renie. He's sick."

Her hands were shaking. "Are you sure? He's not just sleeping very deeply?"

Eddie shook his head, confused and frightened. "I got up. He's . . . he's just lying there on the floor."

"Cover him with something. A blanket. I'll be right there. Tell your mother when she . . . shit, never mind. I'll be right there."

She phoned for an ambulance, gave them Eddie's address, then called a cab. While she waited, fever-chilled with worry, she scrabbled in her desk drawers for coins to make sure she had enough cash. Long Joseph had burned out their credit with the cab company months ago.

Except for a few dimly lit windows, there was no sign of life outside Eddie's flatblock-no ambulance, no police. A sliver of anger pierced Renie's fear. Thirty-five minutes already and no response. That would teach them all to live in Pinetown. Things crunched under her feet as she hurried across the entranceway.

A handwritten sign said the electronic lock on the main door was out of service; someone had since removed the whole latching mechanism with a crowbar. The stairwell stank of all the usual things, but there was also a scorched smell, faint but sharp, as of some long-ago fire. Renie took the stairs two at a time, running; she was gasping for breath when she reached the door. Eddie opened it. Two of his younger sisters sheltered behind him, eyes wide. The apartment was dark except for the jittery light of the wallscreen's static. Eddie stood, mouth working, frightened and prepared for some kind of punishment. Renie didn't wait for him to think of something to say.

Stephen lay on his side on the living-room carpet, curled slightly, his arms drawn against his chest. She pulled the threadbare blanket away and shook him, gently at first, but then with increasing force as she called his name. She turned him onto his back, terrified by the slackness of his limbs. Her hands moved from his narrow chest to the artery beneath his jaw. He was breathing, but slowly, and his heartbeat also seemed strong but measured. She had been forced to take a first-aid course as part of her teaching certificate, but could remember little beyond keeping the victim warm and administering mouth-to-mouth. Stephen didn't need that, at least not as far as she could tell. She lifted him and held him tight, trying to give him something, anything, that might bring him back. He seemed small but heavy. It had been some time since he had let her clutch him this uninhibitedly. The strangeness of his weight in her arms made her suddenly feel cold all over.