Free The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini

you what, how about Grey’s Inn, six o’clock. Check out the chicks. New stock just arrived
     from England, come to save the natives.”
    Ian turns a bit. I sit in the car very still.
    “What’s that?” says his buddy looking over the gate to the car.
    “Nothing. Just giving a lift.”
    “So Grey’s Inn, right?”
    “Right.”
    They stand there until Ian says, “Okay, see you then,” and turns round.
    In the car, on the road, he says, “The look on his face. To think we were mates. All the way through primary and now,
that
look. Didn’t want me anywhere near his property. Jeez. What did he think I was going to do?”
    Later, while we are waiting for some cows to pass, he says, “Can’t blame him though, can I?”
    The cows are moving slowly and they keep knocking into each other. There is no sign of the herd boy, who should be waving
     his stick about, directing them to safety.
    We sit in the car for a while. Ian taps the steering wheel with his fingers. I look at the last cow that has stopped at the
     edge of the road and is looking back at us with very sad eyes. It looks as though his legs are about to buckle, and he will
     collapse right there in the heat.
    “Herd boy probably rolling off in the grass, suffering from Class One babbelas. Just take a look at the skinny things, can
     hardly walk. It’s going to be a bloody scrappy year, that’s for sure. Bobs had better have his act together, get the GMB guys
     in order; they’re exporting so much maize to Mozambique when the shit hits the fan here, ‘sorry, no stocks, hapana food’—man,
     lots of hungry fuckers equals lots of angry fuckers. You should check out the mess in Khami.”
    White people had started calling Mr. Mugabe, Bob. And sometimes they put “comrade” in front. Daddy says it’s a way for them
     to belittle him, turn him into a boy, someone manageable like their workers. In truth they are frightened of him.
    I had thought of how when I was at the telephone exchange with Daddy, sometimes the whites (some of them apprentices straight
     out of school) whom he was training would call him Danny or Danny Boy and he would just laugh. I had also noticed that, since
     independence, he didn’t tolerate that anymore.
    I want to tell him that I’m not nervous anymore, even though I jumped a little bit before. I want to say that I don’t think
     he is a bad person; that I like his name, Ian; that I’m not afraid of him.
    But instead I say, “It’s hot.”
    He turns to me and says, “Hey, madoda, kuyatshisa,” and laughs.
    I laugh back.
    And I can hear Maphosa. “Bastard!” “Settler!” “Sellout!”
    We stop over at the old mineshaft. I want to say to him that we had better hurry; Mummy should be almost finished with her
     group.
    He gets out of the car, looks down at the quarry.
    “Man, once when he was all boozed up, he started mouthing off about how many gondies they’d kicked into abandoned shafts,
     makeshift graves. Said they cut off their tongues, threw those in first, and then the poor buggers.”
    He looks back at me. “Shit, sometimes I forget you’re just a lightie.”
    “I’m not a lightie.”
    “Touchy, touchy.”
    He puts his hand on my head and then steps away. “Shit, we should be going back. Your mother is going to throw a right old
     kadenze.”
    Before he starts the car, I say, “They’ve captured some dissidents, over at Nkayi.”
    “They’ll be lucky if they get off with any balls left. Word is Commies from North Korea are drilling the Shonas with new and
     improved torture techniques up in Inyanga.”
    I tell him to stop at Alton Heights. I’ll catch an Emergency Taxi home. Just to be safe.
    “Thank you,” I say. I turn to open the door and suddenly I feel his hand on my shoulder.
    “So, Lindiwe, it’s good to have someone to joll with, someone who doesn’t think I’m bad news.”
    I wait for him to say that now it is enough. To say something like thank you, good-bye, it’s time to move on.
    He