The Boy Next Door

by Irene Sabatini

Genres: Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Irene Sabatini makes her celebrated debut with this powerful novel set against the tumultuous backdrop of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Teenagers Lindiwe and Ian meet briefly after Ian is accused of a terrible crime. The friendship they begin endures many tests—and one devastating secret.
“… a beautifully written first novel that explores the complexities of post-independent Zimbabwe—ever-shifting affinities of race, family, and other affiliations—through the love story of a mixed-race couple.”—Booklist

Release date: August 20, 2009

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 416

Sample

Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight.


A week later the police came. I was reading Sue Barton, Senior Nurse on the veranda, and I was at the part when Dr. Bill Barry proposes to Sue Barton. Daddy was busy tinkering with the Cortina
under the jacaranda tree. Mummy was in the bedroom trying on her new Manyano outfit for the graduation ceremony that was going
to take place at church, which would turn fifteen young women into fully fledged members of the congregation. Rosanna was
helping her.


“Good afternoon, Mr. Bishop,” I heard. “Sorry to disturb. We have come about next door.”

The chief constable wiped his forehead with a tissue. “This heat is destroying us,” he said, and from the veranda, I could
see a wet dark patch on his shirt, which made it cling to his back.


It was midday and there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. Even though it was the end of January not one drop of rain had fallen
in Bulawayo.


“This problem of no transport. Only walking these days for us. Ten kilometers and I am not so young anymore, not like these
calves.” He pointed at the other two policemen who were standing near the Cortina at attention.


Daddy said something about bulls, which made the chief constable laugh while the calves remained very rigid and serious.

Most of the brand-new police cars donated by Britain were in scrap yards; the police force had been statistically shown to
have the most dangerous drivers in Zimbabwe. In fact, the chief constable, who had only recently been promoted after his white
superior had tendered his resignation, had been responsible for a recent smashup against an electricity pole; Daddy hinted
that he was most likely driving without a valid license.


“Are you finding petrol?” the chief constable asked, eyeing the two policemen who sprung forwards. It looked like he had jerked
them into motion with string.


“A little only,” Daddy replied as he gently put down the bonnet. “Enough to go to the office and back.”

I knew that he was exaggerating; he didn’t want the chief constable to feel free to ask him for transport.

The chief constable took out his tissue again and patted his forehead. “The South Africans are making it very difficult, Mr.
Bishop.”


The day’s headline in The Chronicle was about the RENAMO rebels in Mozambique who were funded by South Africa. They had sabotaged a big section of the pipeline,
which brought oil to Zimbabwe. South Africa was trying to destabilize our newly independent country.


“Let’s hope we can secure the Beira pipeline from further attacks,” Daddy said while wiping his hands on his orange overalls.

Daddy and the chief constable looked at the Cortina as if they were expecting some response from it. The Cortina was gleaming
proudly in the heat.


The chief constable coughed and cleared his throat. “Well, Mr. Bishop. This is a very sad business we have come about. We…”

Roxy, our Jack Russell terrier who had been sleeping in his kennel, came running out at full speed. He leapt and landed on
a police foot and began vigorously licking the boot. The policeman hopped and skipped and wagged his foot, but he couldn’t
shake Roxy off. Daddy finally managed to pull him away while trying hard not to laugh.


“We are looking for evidence,” the chief constable started again, once Roxy was safely in Daddy’s arms. “We have thoroughly
investigated the McKenzie property, and now we are checking all the neighboring land. We would like to take a look by the
perimeters.”


Daddy took them to the back of the house where the two juniors cupped their hands under the tap at the end of the vegetable
patch and drank as though they had not seen water for a very long time. The chief constable looked at them and shook his head.
He drank slowly from the glass that I had brought out to him. Then they all walked along the fence that separated our limestone
pink Spanish Colonial from the McKenzie’s whitewashed Cape Dutch.


Their black boots kept getting sucked in and stuck in the mud as they trudged about looking for the evidence, because Maphosa
had just watered the vegetables even though Daddy was constantly telling him that watering at the hottest time of the day
was a treacherous waste of a precious natural resource and that even the borehole could run out of water.


After one walk through, the evidence was still missing. The chief constable said, that was quite all right; they had obtained
a confession.


He took out his notepad, like Columbo, and he asked Daddy if he had heard or seen anything strange at the neighbors on that
night or before. Daddy quickly said no, not at all. And then he invited the chief constable, who was one of his best customers,
for some tea.


Daddy worked for the Telecommunications branch of the post office, making sure that the phone system worked throughout Bulawayo
and the rest of Matabeleland. Sometimes he got calls in the middle of the night, and he had to take off to the exchange to
fix something. But he was also good with other things like radios and TVs. He had passed the City and Guilds of London Institute
exam in electrical repairs. He did up the boy’s kaya with electricity so that Rosanna, who lives in that small room, is much
better off than the real maids and gardeners who have to stay in them: they have to use candlesticks and paraffin stoves and
sometimes, they don’t even have proper toilet facilities.


Last year, with the help of some apostolics, he built his own workshop between the boy’s kaya and the chicken pen using asbestos
roof sheeting and bricks that were made by the apostolics in their yard.


The chief constable dismissed his juniors with instructions that they should type out a report, ready for him when he got
back to the station.


He stood with Daddy by the fence. “Our white people are losing direction, left, right, and center, Mr. Bishop. Independence
has confused them.”


Mummy, Daddy, Rosanna, and I had watched the independence ceremony on TV over two years ago now. Prince Charles looked rather
sad when they gave him the British flag; his mouth was set very firmly as if to make sure that he would not cry and disgrace
the queen. All the previous week The Herald had had a list of white Zimbabwean beauties who would make a perfect bride for him.


Mr. Robert Gabriel Mugabe took his oath, his hand firmly on the Bible… and so help me God… and Zimbabwe was born.


Daddy and the chief constable washed their hands under the tap.

“He was smelling heavily of smoke, Mr. Bishop, shaking nonstop, you could think he was suffering from heavy-duty malaria.
We have never had any problems from that place before. It seems the boy has only just come from South Africa for his father’s
funeral.”


They went to sit under the gum tree. I started making the tea in the kitchen, leaving the window wide open. They were sitting
only a couple of meters away and the chief constable had a loud voice.


“It was very bad, very bad over there,” he went on, settling into his chair with a very loud “humph.” “The youngster, only
seventeen, came to the station, gave himself up. And you are quite sure you have never seen this boy before?”


I bit my lip and held tightly to my breath, but I didn’t hear Daddy’s reply because the kettle started whistling.

I brought the tray outside, and the chief constable closed his notebook and put it on the table beside the tray.

They were quiet until I was back inside.

“We found the remains at the back of the house by the boy’s kaya. Eighty or so percent of the body burnt, just bone left in
some parts.”


I saw Daddy turn, and I quickly bent my head by the kitchen sink and pretended to be busy washing the dishes.

“But, madoda, this is a strange case. There is another woman also; the young man brought her first to the hospital before
he came to us.”


He started scratching his arm and then reached out for a slice of bread that I had spread with butter and strawberry jam.

“It is not at all sure she will survive,” the chief constable went on, shaking his head while he chewed with his mouth open.
“And we do not know the precise identity of this woman. We are not sure of her age, if she is even local. We have contacted
Beitbridge Border Police for the entry documents to see if we can learn anything; the car he was driving has South African
number plates.”


He was eyeing the second slice, and Daddy told him to please help himself. “He will not talk about her, nothing. Tsh, he will
have enough time to think about all this in the stocks.”


The chief constable scratched his head and drank some more tea. Some spilled on the saucer, and he poured this back in the
cup.


I stood there in the kitchen the chief constable’s words creeping inside me.

“Lindiwe…”

The glass dropped from my hands.

“Rosanna, you gave me a fright,” I scolded, bending down to pick up the pieces.

She was standing by the door, holding an empty perfume bottle. She must have been in the main bedroom all this time.

“Daydreamers will miss the Lord’s Banquet,” she sang roughly to the tune of The Lord Is My Shepherd, with her eyes closed.
She put the bottle on the table and took the broom from the corner.


I couldn’t even smile at her impersonation of Mummy. The chief constable’s words had suddenly made what had happened next
door real. Until now I had been reading about the events in The Chronicle like everyone else in Bulawayo, trying to pretend that I didn’t know more. I could feel Mrs. McKenzie here, her eyes following
me, watching. I was sure her presence would soon bring in the chief constable, who would open his notebook and demand my statement.


“It’s good that she has gone to her meeting with Mrs. Ncube. What’s wrong, Sisi? Your hand is shaking; you will cut yourself.
Leave this, I’ll finish.”


I liked the way Rosanna called me Sisi; it irritated Mummy. When we were living in Thorngrove, one of Mummy’s brothers brought
her from Kamativi and said that she was the daughter of so-and-so in the village who had just died. Could Mummy please look
after her? Mummy had no choice but to help.


“What would have possessed that boy to do such a thing?” Mummy asked when we were having supper in the lounge.

“South Africa,” said Daddy. “Pure and simple. They pick up fast ways over there. Drugs. Mandrax and even worse.”

“But,” said Mummy, “to do something like that…?”

I was looking at where Daddy was sitting, thinking that not too long ago that boy had sat in the exact same place, cradling
a car radio on his lap, like a cat, waiting for Daddy to take a look at it.


Daddy caught me staring at him and said, “In life, anything can happen.”

He had rung the bell at the gate. Maphosa went to see who it was, and then he called Rosanna. Rosanna let him in because he was a white
boy. He’d just brought his radio from South Africa, and the thing was already playing up. “Those South Africans,” I heard
him say. “They’re a bunch of crooks, right skellums, not like us honest blokes down here, lights off.” He sat on Daddy’s chair.
I was sitting across the room from him, doing my homework on the dining-room table. Rosanna went to make his tea.


“Hey, lightie,” I heard, “what you’re doing?”

I’m not a lightie I wanted to tell him. I’m not tiny. And, I’m not a boy. But his voice didn’t sound as though he meant to be mean to me.


“Homework,” I answered in my best European voice.

“Homework,” he said, leaning forward to put the radio on the table. I thought of how annoyed Mummy would be to find it there,
possibly scratching the wood. It only needed to be moved a bit to go on top of the linen doily, but I couldn’t do it.


“Talking about skellums, you should have seen what we guys got up to, how we mucked about, did fuck all at school.”

Fuck all echoed inside me.


I couldn’t believe that this white youth was sitting on my father’s chair, his white tackies planted on the brown carpet.
I tried to concentrate on my math problem, but the numbers would not stay still.


His hair was cut in the same style as Craig Davies’s, the youth leader at church: very short at the sides with a little tail
at the back and the front looking like the bristles of a brush. When he reclined his head on Mummy’s lace sofa back, it made
me think of a porcupine.


Craig had announced on Friday that he was heeding God’s call and going to Pretoria to spread His word. Daddy said it was funny
how, of late, God was targeting whites and being very specific in his relocation directions. I had overheard Craig tell one
of the church deacons that there were way too many Affs now, the atmosphere had all changed….


For a long time we were the only nonwhite members of the church. On our very first Sunday at church, Mummy, Daddy, and I had
the whole row to ourselves and no one sat behind or in front of us. An old white lady gave Mummy a dirty look when their elbows
brushed.


“Mind my language. So homework, heh?”

Rosanna brought him the tea and a plate of Marie biscuits. She looked at me as though I had done something wrong.

He gulped down the tea and munched on the biscuit. He seemed very hungry.

“You look like a boffin,” he said. “What number you come in class, heh?”

I didn’t want to tell him. Somehow I was embarrassed by it.

“Come on, cough up. Don’t be shy.”

“Number one,” I said in my best European voice.

“Number one, heh.”

He slapped his thigh and some tea spilt on the carpet.

“I told you so. I can spot a boffin from a mile away. Me, I was right off the scale, the other end of it.”

He coughed and choked on his biscuits and tea. He went red in his face, and I could see the schoolboy in him.

“I tell you what,” he said. “Since you’re so smart, I’ll give you a problem to solve. It’s something that’s bothering me a
lot.”


But before he could tell me the problem, Daddy came home and took a look at the car radio. They moved out to the workshop
and I finished my homework. For days I thought about the problem, his problem that was bothering him so much. I wondered if
it had had anything to do with Mrs. McKenzie and this made me feel guilty as if I could have done something to save her life.


Because, three days later, Mrs. McKenzie was dead.

The Friday after the chief constable’s visit I went to the public library. I didn’t go down straight to the Sue Barton series or to the Nancy
Drew shelf like I usually did; I went upstairs to the medical section. The librarian gave me a funny look but didn’t say anything.
She was busy chatting with a farmer, telling him all about the mobile library.


I wanted to find out how long you would have to burn to become just bone. I wanted to know if Mrs. McKenzie had burnt all
night while I had been sleeping. I tried to think what I had been dreaming of. I wanted to know if something had happened
in my dreams that should have made me wake up, draw back the curtain and see… what? Would I have seen her? Heard her? Smelt
her? I tried to remember when was the last time I had seen her alive, but I couldn’t see it, that exact moment. Sometimes
I would think I had spoken to her or she had said something to me, but when I thought harder, I couldn’t see the two of us
anywhere like that. Mrs. McKenzie didn’t like me. Even though I was a girl and too old, she still thought that I was one of
those kids who ran down the road ringing bells and scooting off. She would send old Mphiri, her gardener, after them. He couldn’t
match their long skinny legs, and Maphosa would get angry and start his muttering: That old man should be back home, but what
is he doing? Look at him—boy this, boy that—with their broken Mukhiwa Ndebele. Bastards, amabhunu.

Maphosa called any white person who personally outraged him a Boer, Bhunu. Daddy said that this was probably because he had
worked for a while in the mines in Johannesburg and had been thoroughly mistreated by the Afrikaners. I wondered if that’s
where he had lost his eye. But, would he have been accepted as a fighter in the bush without an eye?


Maphosa came to our house six months ago. He came with a small suitcase and a knobkerrie. He had been demobilized. He came
from Entumbane where there was heavy fighting between the two Liberation Armies housed there. School was closed for two whole
weeks, and from home we could hear loud bangs and blasts coming from that direction. Maphosa said that the Shonas were trying
to wipe out the Ndebele Fighters. But the Ndebeles had the blood of the great Ndebele warriors, kings: Mzilikazi and Lobengula,
flowing in them and could not be bothered by such little insects as Shonas.


Mummy had made him wait outside for Daddy from half past eleven to five o’clock. She only gave him a glass of water to drink
in all that time. When Daddy came home and saw Maphosa waiting like that he raised his voice at Mummy. I didn’t know if he
was upset with Mummy or Maphosa or with them both. Daddy said that Maphosa was a relative, and he should be accorded due respect.
Mummy mumbled how was she to know and keep count of every single member of Daddy’s family.


Daddy has many stepbrothers and sisters.

The new Zimbabwean Army did not want Maphosa and his like among its ranks; it only had room for Shonas. He had to live life
in Zimbabwe just like everybody else.


Early on Daddy tried to get Maphosa an apprenticeship with the post office. At the job interview, Maphosa said that he was
not willing under any circumstances to work for a white man.


Maphosa puts Ingram’s Camphor cream on his bald head, and you always smell him before he arrives. Sometimes he doesn’t rub
it in very well and his scalp is covered with patches of white. I heard Mummy remark to Daddy: “Does he think that the cream
is medicine that will grow back his hair?”


To make up for the lack of hair on his head, he has a tuft of beard which he pulls at when he is upset as if he is trying
to snatch off a disguise. Some days he ties a black cloth over his bad eye and he looks like a pirate.


He is the chapter president of the Baysview War Veteran’s Association, which has five active members. They meet at Maphosa’s
room when Mummy and Daddy are not around. Maphosa cooks a pot of sadza on a fire outside his room, and they sit around and
discuss the war and the failure of Independence to deliver the land. When the sadza is cooked, they eat it with some meat
that Jacob has brought with him. They nyosa the meat on the fire. Jacob is a butcher boy at the Baysview butchery. He doesn’t
hear very well and he doesn’t talk. Sometimes the association is still meeting when Mummy comes home, and the members have
to sneak out at night.


The twenty-fifth of each month Maphosa goes to town to collect his war veteran allowance and his disability benefit. When
he comes back, he is in a bad mood. He says that he is not at all interested in pieces of paper. This is how our people were
tricked in the first place. He wants the land. That is what they fought for.


One thing that he cannot tolerate is cruelty to birds. When he sees any boys tormenting birds and nests with their catapults,
he shouts and chases after them; sometimes he even throws stones at them. Then he will go and check that the birds are all
right, and once I saw him climb a tree in the bush opposite Baysview Superette and look inside a nest to see if the boys had
broken any eggs. He says that birds saved his life in the bush more than once. When I asked him how, he said that there were
some birds that would become very quiet when the enemy was close. Other birds would start singing in a certain way. Then you
knew. Once a bird had flown right onto his left shoulder and started tapping on it with its beak. He understood the bird’s
message: They must prepare. The enemy wanted to ambush them. When Maphosa tried to tell his commander the bird’s message,
the commander told him to shut up. If only the commander had listened. As the bird had warned, the enemy ambushed and the
commander and five other guerrillas lost their lives.


He was at Rufaro Stadium when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe on April 18, 1980.

Actually, we were Zimbabwe-Rhodesia for less than a year from June 1979 when Bishop Abel Muzorewa formed a Government of National
Unity with Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front. Everybody said that Muzorewa was a puppet and that he was put there to try and get
international sanctions lifted and to isolate the Nationalists. Daddy said that Bishop Abel Muzorewa was not very able at
all and that he was a laughing stock. And, “Where have you ever heard of a country with a surname?”


Bob Marley came to sing; he wrote a special song: “Zimbabwe.”

Maphosa says that he was right out in front, and as soon as “Zimbabwe” started, the crowd went wild and began misbehaving.
They were pushing and trying to climb over the barriers onto the stage to sing with Mr. Marley. He says the little man, which
is what he calls Mr. Mugabe, did not look amused at all. Everyone knows he wanted Cliff Richard, not Bob Marley, to be there.


The next day, after the news, the new prime minister gave his first Address to the Nation. Rosanna, as usual, was sitting
too close to the TV, but Daddy didn’t scold her this time; he was concentrating too hard.


“Well, he sounds quite reasonable and sincere,” Daddy said afterwards.

“Reconciliation is the best and only policy.”

Daddy sounded as though he was trying to convince himself with good arguments. “He’s a very educated man. Did you hear his
Engl—?”


“He’s a Shona,” Mummy interrupted him.

Ever since the elections when Mugabe and ZANU-PF had shocked them by winning fifty-seven of the eighty seats while Nkomo and
ZAPU had only won twenty, Mummy had been making daily predictions about what life under Shona Management would bring.


“This is their chance now. Everyone will be forced to speak Shona. Watch, he will even make his Address to the Nation in Shona.

“They will flood this place. Those jongwes of theirs will be crowing all over Matabeleland.”

Mummy was very scornful about the ZANU-PF symbol of a cockerel.

Rosanna shook her head. “There is just something about him,” she said. “He is too serious.”

It felt as though, sitting so close, she had seen much more of Mr. Mugabe than the rest of us.

I didn’t say anything. I was wondering whether, sitting in front of the cameras, Mr. Robert Mugabe had felt all those millions
of Zimbabwean eyes looking at him, whether he knew how much power he must have to have everyone waiting to hear what he had
to say.


When I went to see Dr. Esat at Galen House, the ladies at the reception were talking about the trial which was on the front page of The Chronicle. They were saying what a shame it was, such a good-looking boy.


There was a big picture of him; he was looking down at his feet. The headline was “Murder!”

One of the older ladies said her son had gone to school with him and there had been something going on in that house for sure;
he would come to school with welts all over his legs, even the Welfare Department had been called in, and now that he had
come for his father’s funeral who knows what that woman had schemed and let loose.


She was interrupted by some patients who had to fill in the Medical Aid forms. I had the Femina magazine open on my lap, and I was praying that Dr. Esat would be running late as usual.


And she had been talking to John, her son, she started again, how sometime near the end of Form One, close to four years now,
the boy had disappeared; word was that he’d taken off to South Africa to find his mother. And that was another story, how
that woman had abandoned the poor bugger, gone chasing after some sweet-talking salesman in Jo’burg, left the little mite
to the house girl not even a month old. He’d been back a couple of times, never stayed too long, though. You could tell just
by looking at the poor lad he’d been driven to it. And why had they put him in prison khakis; he hadn’t even been convicted;
yet another strategy to humiliate us whites….


One of the ladies nudged her and hissed, “Shush, June.”

June looked at me, and I pretended to be reading the poster on “Good Hygiene Habits” on the wall.

They started to talk about other things.

When Daddy finished reading The Chronicle that evening, I took it out from the basket where Mummy puts all the old newspapers so that she has an ever-ready supply
of papers to line the kitchen drawers and cupboards. Mummy is convinced that the newspaper contains something that repels
cockroaches. I took the front page out. My heart was beating very fast as if I was stealing. I folded the paper over and over
again, and when I was in my room, I put the paper in the pink handbag Aunty Gertrude gave me for Christmas last year.


I kept thinking that if only we had moved from Thorngrove to Baysview in 1978 instead of 1979 I might have seen him. I tried
to imagine how he might have looked like around about my age, what kind of boy he would have been.


Daddy said that even though Mrs. McKenzie was a racist, she was not such a bad person. No one deserved to die in that manner.

In the past year, added Mummy, Mrs. McKenzie had changed. She had even told Mphiri to give us any spare vegetables from their
patch, and she had stopped complaining about the chickens. Anyway, when the municipal police had come round, they had turned
a blind eye because Daddy kept them well supplied with eggs. Mrs. McKenzie had not even made a fuss about the workshop. She
was not the same person who had called us kaffirs when we had first moved in and who had kept calling the municipal police
and the RSPCA over.


The superintendent of the RSPCA, Mrs. Van der Klerk came on a Saturday morning, with two black inspectors. She was very tall
and looked down on everyone she was speaking to, even Daddy.


“I have come to inspect the dogs,” she barked. “We have received numerous complaints about mistreatment at this address. We
are entitled by law to carry out a spot check on any animal’s welfare in any premises within the territory of Rho… Zimbabwe.”


She said all this very fast as if she were firing bullets, and Daddy and Mummy just stood there looking up at her. Even Maphosa
who always had something to say about white people was quiet.


“Where are the dogs?” asked the RSPCA superintendent.

Daddy pointed to Roxy and Tiger who were rolling about at her feet. The superintendent looked down, down at them. She looked
very hard.


I knew what she was thinking. Black people don’t keep dogs like Jack Russells. They keep skinny crossbreeds, big dogs who
are kept hungry so that they are vicious, for guarding property. But Daddy had bought the dogs from a white couple in Montrose
after he had read an article i. . .