At sunset Farai sits ensconced between Fatima and Enesi drinking and watching zvigure. Enesi is a lean dark girl with a good laugh. The place, an old tobacco barn, is full of cheering men, women and children. A dozen or so smart cars are parked outside and Farai waves at a well-dressed woman he thinks he was at university with, one who was in Veronica’s class. He is surprised to see her here. The dancers are all male with grass skirts, brightly coloured blouses, hideously painted masks and wild wigs of imitation Caucasian hair. They are mounted on incredibly tall stilts and take turns to twist, gyrate and incite the crowd with a blur of suggestive motions. The drums thump to a bewildering rhythm, the watchers clap and sing. The observers keep to the edge of the clearing, at a respectful distance. Every now and then a dancer charges into the crowd, and the audience scrambles back in fear. The braver ones stop to throw money at the mask’s feet before they flee. Farai sees the university woman rise to answer the challenge of one of the masks. She leaps at him so that the top of her head is level with his feet. She tears off the band holding together her dreadlocks and yanks up her skirt, digs her shoeless feet into the dust before him, throws her head back and shudders while he rocks at her, above her and showers himself all over her for just a minute before she ducks back to the safety of the crowd.
Applause.
The dancer pauses, then struts around searching for the next victim. His beady eyes meet Farai’s and he seems to scowl through the mask. Farai feels chosen, trapped and has a weird foreboding of things to come. And now the dancer charges straight at Farai and Fatima and Enesi!
‘Run!’ Enesi pants, and the two girls leap back over abandoned bottles. Farai’s quart tips over into the dusty, thirsty earth like an offering to unknown spirits and he freezes, cowering in the space between the two stilts. He sees the dancer sway above him and the mask staring angrily at him. The dancer leans down as if to grab him.
‘Get up and run!’ Fatima yells from the darkness behind. Too late, he feels the swash of the dancer’s fly whisk on his back. He plunges into the crowd, ploughing up a hurried exit with his arms. Outside in the gathering dusk silhouettes scatter and he scrambles for his car, leaps in and starts the engine.
Fatima and Enesi bang on the bonnet and the windows, ‘Don’t leave us here! Don’t leave us here.’
Deaf to their pleas, he swings across the grass towards the road.
‘You’re leaving us here,’ Fatima cries, ‘OK, go. You’ll see.’
He bumps across the veldt. He is not very sure of his way out of the maze of dirt tracks, but a haze of city lights beckons in the east. Tree branches snap at the car windows, a wheel groans over the stump of a dead tree, a stray cow crashes away from the headlights into the bushes. Miraculously, he finds the tarred road. A military truck roars past, horn blaring. Yellow lights flicker and vanish ahead of him.
God, he must go home and sleep.
God, he must get to warm safe home and say sorry to Veronica and find something to eat and hold her and kiss her and find some sleep.
The car radio switches itself on. Brenda Fassie screams:
You don’t come around
To see me in the week
I’m your weekend
Weekend special
He slaps the button shut. No time for music now. Empty bottles chatter and clink on the back seat. He reaches down under his seat and fishes out a warm, fat, quart. He snaps it open with his teeth and takes a swig. For a Saturday evening, the road is fairly empty. He skirts the city centre and runs into a police road-block. He quickly slows down, squeezes the bottle between the edge of the passenger’s seat and the car door and approaches the flashing lights. An officer with reflective arm-bands beckons him to stop and steps to the side door.
‘Licence please,’ she says through the open window.
‘I left it at home.’
‘Do you have your ID?’
He extricates the ID from his purse and holds it up to her.
‘Why are you driving drunk, Mr Chari?’
‘I’m not drunk, Officer.’
‘Now don’t argue. You don’t even have your seat belt on. How much have you taken?’
‘Just a few pints.’
‘Your car is reeking of alcohol from metres away. Do you want to kill yourself?’
Another officer, a man, armed with a gun, comes over, takes the ID from the woman officer and flashes a torch over it.
‘Do you have to get drunk to write your books, Mr Chari?’
‘Is it him?’ The woman officer asks. ‘I thought there was something familiar about his face.’
‘Haven’t you seen him in the papers and on TV, Sarge?’
‘Well, the law makes no exception of the famous. He could lose his licence for this.’
‘What are you writing now, Mr Chari?’
‘Well, about …’
‘I see, you won’t say. You think police officers don’t read, eh? For your information, I studied one of your books for my O-Levels. What have you got in your car?’
He flashes the torch inside the car. ‘Mhaiwe! What a lot of empties, Sarge. Now, Mr Chari, give us anything you’ve got open.’ Farai pulls out the concealed quart and hands it to the officer. She holds it gingerly as if it were an exhibit.
‘Why are you drinking so much?’ she asks, as if she genuinely wants to know.
‘Stress,’ he chances, ‘I’ve buried a mother and father and brother in four years and I’m having serious problems with my wife.’
‘Look, brother,’ intervenes her colleague, ‘I’m a man like you and even if I’d lost my whole family and my wife had divorced me, it doesn’t mean that I can drink and drive.’
‘Why don’t you go to a family counsellor?’
‘We’ve already tried that. I’m sorry, Officer.’
‘Sorry doesn’t protect all the people you might injure or kill. Sorry doesn’t protect you from yourself, or from car-jackers.’
‘Where are you going, Farai?’ asks the woman.
‘Home.’
‘You’re not going to drink any more?’
‘No.’
‘How far away is home?
‘About ten k’s. Look, officers. I’m drunk and I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.’
‘Don’t you think we should take him for a breath test, Sarge?’
‘He’ll fail without even opening his mouth. If he’s really sorry he’ll know what to do. This is Harare, man. He can’t just say sorry with nothing to show for it. Give him back his ID, officer. He knows what to do.’
Farai pockets his ID. There’s a pause, the three of them not knowing what to do next. Some alternatives are tricky. Then, to his disbelief, he hears himself start the car and ease off. Miraculously the officers step out of his headlights, and he’s off, slipping away from the scene. He lowers his head to the dashboard, expecting to hear a burst of gunfire from behind. Nobody fires. Nobody follows him. He accelerates.