Free When Hoopoes Go to Heaven by Gaile Parkin

the funeral people had come to say that Baba was late! Imagine! And here he was in the bedroom, weeping like a baby! Eh!
    He sat up and wiped his eyes with the edge of his T-shirt, taking a few deep breaths to calm himself. Then he went into the bathroom to splash water on his face, recognising as he did so that
his tears had been selfish. Mama had thought that Baba was late! Eh! What a fright she must have had!
    And it was all his fault.
    In the lounge, Jabulani was tucking in to a large slice of chocolate cake iced in the same pink that Mama had used for the udder, while Zodwa was looking through the album of photographs of
Mama’s cakes and sipping from a mug of tea made the Tanzanian way with boiled milk and plenty of sugar and cardamom.
    ‘I’m sorry, Mama.’
    Mama opened her arms wide, and he went to her on the couch, squashing up against her large, soft body and burying his face in the clean, cocoa-butter smell of her neck. He stayed there only a
few seconds, knowing that he was a bit too big now for her to feel comfortable with him on her lap. Slipping down next to her on the couch, her right arm still holding him, he apologised again.
    She pulled him closer and planted a kiss on his forehead.
    ‘We’re sorry too, nè?’ Zodwa leaned forward, putting her mug of tea down on the coffee table and patting his leg. ‘ Eish! We felt so bad!’
    ‘Sorry, nè?’ said Jabulani.
    ‘Your mother’s right, though. A cup tea and a slice of cake can make everything better. Have you had?’
    Mama sent him into the kitchen, where Titi was scrubbing the milk saucepan in the sink.
    ‘Are you okay?’ she asked him, leaving the saucepan and drying her hands on a cloth.
    He knew she had seen his tears when he had woken her. He said he was fine, but she hugged him anyway, and then she insisted that he have the cup of tea that was waiting for her on the draining
board with a saucer on top of it to keep it warm.
    ‘Don’t keep them waiting,’ she whispered, cutting him a thick slice of cake. ‘They have something for you.’
    ‘For me?’ Benedict remembered the small box. ‘ Eh! ’
    But when he went back into the lounge with his tea and cake, the box wasn’t where it had been on the dining table, and it wasn’t on the coffee table or either of the couches. He ate
and drank quietly while the grown-ups talked.
    ‘My husband Ubuntu,’ Zodwa was saying between mouthfuls of cake, ‘he’s the one who started the business. Then when Ubuntu himself was late in an accident, eish , I
don’t know how it is in your country, my dear, but here a woman can’t inherit a business, she’s a child in the eyes of the law. Some things may be beginning to change now,
slow-slow, but at the time of Ubuntu’s accident there was no way.’
    ‘I’ve heard of such things.’
    ‘The business went to his younger brother. Thanks God he’s an academic, doesn’t want to be dealing with the late. So he lets me do what I want with the business and he takes a
percentage.’
    ‘That is very good,’ said Mama, finishing her cake before the others. Benedict knew that her slice had been smaller on account of her watching her hips.
    ‘It’s a good business to be in,’ said Jabulani. ‘Second only to security.’
    Benedict knew about the security business: Sifiso’s father worked in it. Every morning, Sifiso’s father dropped him at school in the Buffalo Soldiers van after he’d been out
early collecting Buffalo Soldiers from their night shifts and dropping others off for day shift. He had started as a guard protecting people’s homes at night, and then he had got a promotion
to supervisor, which made Sifiso’s mother happier because she didn’t have to worry about him getting shot any more. Getting shot was something that Benedict didn’t like to think
about, so he hadn’t told Sifiso that his own first baba had got shot even without being a security guard; he had simply been somebody coming home and finding robbers in his