Almost always his prescription involved the need for more exercise. The episode would conclude with smiling, grateful dog owners whose lives had been turned around, and who now kept their animals in a “calm, submissive state”. A shot of Cesar walking in the wilderness, holding a shepherd’s staff, surrounded by his own happy, peaceful pack of dogs faded with the credits. The same format, week in, week out, and the Magistrate could not get enough of it.
The silver birches, bared of their leaves, stood like skeletons on parade by the pond on the Meadowbank side of the city. The giant struts of the stadium and sports centre loomed over the locale. The Magistrate saw a red kite, which he mistook for an eagle, soaring in the sky. He breathed faster from the exertion of the walk and felt better for it. His calves throbbed a little as he walked up the incline. The ruins of St Anthony’s stood below him and, when he looked down onto Holyrood, he could just make out the ruined abbey adjacent to the palace.
The Magistrate’s vision skimmed over the roofs of the city. Cranes in the west looked like brontosauri feeding off the rooftops. The houses were tiny, like dolls’ houses huddling together from the cold. The Restalrig high-rises brutally punctured the cityscape, and he swept over Leith to Granton, where flats fractured the skyline. In between the extremes, a hundred church spires stood out. From this point he could take in most of the city and, beyond, the Forth, calm and grey. On a day like this he could even see across to Fife. The Magistrate felt like a colossus striding over the narrow world. Everywhere he turned the view was breathtaking. Right then the saudade hit him pretty bad and, for a moment, he could see Bindura, the low prospect, the giant mine chimneys in the distance, but the memory was like a flicker from an old videotape that had been dubbed over. He could only hold the image in his mind for a brief second before it vanished into the mist hovering over the Forth.
The Mathematician
Farai opens his eyes, sits up and swings his legs off the bed. The red LCD on his radio clock tells him it’s 06:01:23, meaning he’s 1 minute and 23 seconds late. He doesn’t use an alarm, his body knows when to rise and right now it’s telling him he needs to pee. He rubs his eyes and yawns.
Eminem, Malcolm X, and Adam Smith (no relation to Ian) look down on him from the posters on the wall. He steps on layers of white printed paper with black ink lettering, numbers, symbols and words from his inkjet. Around the bed are various thick textbooks. The papers feel smooth under his bare feet as he walks across the room and opens the curtains. His bladder screams out. He ignores it. He’ll go in his own time.
He goes to the living room and says good morning to Mr Majeika, who is hopping around in his hutch. Mr Majeika is one of those unoriginal rabbits trying to imitate dairy cows. Farai opens the hutch and strokes his black and white fur. ‘Your bedding needs changing, Mr Majeika. Fancy a bit of lettuce, just to get you started today? It’s good for you, coz you’re getting fat, shasha.’
Mr Majeika wiggles his whiskers in reply and observes Farai lazily.
Farai gets himself a glass of water and a few leaves of lettuce for Mr Majeika. He turns on the TV, switches it, via remote, from the live reality TV feed of housemates in the Big Brother house to Bloomberg. The Nasdaq is ↑, the Dow’s ↑, FTSE’s ↑, so life is good. He fires up his Vaio FE550G. He thinks about how it’d have been great to buy defense shares before the war. Raytheon’s ↑, doing great with all those Tomahawks flying across the desert, lighting up Iraq.
He checks his uni email account, 43 unread messages, and it’s only Monday, before the start of the business day. Most of it is junk. He logs off and goes on zse.co.zw. The connection is slow. The screen blinks like he’s on dial-up. He taps his fingers on the keyboard, trying to absorb the news on TV, making sense of the red, silver and green data stream running at the bottom of the screen. The ZSE page is down.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ he says, leans back in the chair and picks up the landline. He dials out international – direct, spare no expense when it’s business. It’s the AIMs where the fun stuff happens.
‘Hello.’
‘Dad, it’s Farai, how’s Mwana doing?’
‘I’m fine, your mum’s fine too, so is the dog and your little sisters, thanks for asking, Comrade Fatso.’
‘Sorry, Dad, I haven’t had my coffee yet. I’m still booting up.’
‘Mwana’s dead, I told you to get out of nickel ages ago.’
‘Commodity prices keep going up, China’s insatiable, they can’t get enough of the stuff. How come Mwana’s underperforming?’
‘I’m in Zimplats, and we’re doing alright. Really positive policies on PGMs, so Hartley or whatever they call it now is looking great, but everyone else in the industry is struggling. Gono’s hording all their forex and swapping it with Mickey Mouse money so they can’t function. They’re gonna sink. Do you want me to get you out?’
‘No, I’m in this for the long haul. They’ve got good proven reserves and their PGMs will be coming online soon. They’ve got eggs in quite a few baskets.’
‘It’s your money, little bull, but I say quit while you’re slightly behind. No one ever quits while they’re ahead.’
‘I’ll talk to you later, Dad,’ he says, hangs up and sighs.
Mr Majeika chews his lettuce, barely making a crunching sound as he watches the news from his hutch. Farai takes a sip of water and flicks over to CNN. Recycled footage: green, night vision clips of videogame-like explosions. It looks beautiful on the Sony widescreen plasma TV. He can almost feel the heat from the blast and taste the chemical smoke pluming in the air. The commentary uses words like, ‘surgical strikes’, ‘collateral damage’, ‘weapons of mass destruction’, and when the footage changes to armor-plated Humvees and Abrams, he knows for sure he should have bought into defense.
He goes to the bathroom, takes a long piss, and showers. He comes back out, towel wrapped around his body and knocks on Brian’s bedroom door.
‘Wakey, wakey,’ he shouts.
Brian replies with a torrent of abuse about his mum’s genitalia and wholly unfounded assertions about her sex life.
‘I love you too,’ Farai says, and goes back to the living room.
Water streams down from his short Afro onto his back. He can’t be arsed to use a hair drier. He moisturizes, using L’Oréal for men, because he’s worth it. His stomach grumbles; he won’t eat till midday though. He wants to have full mastery of his body, of every thought and emotion that comes from it.
‘Why the fuck do you have to fucking wake me up so fucking early in the fucking morning when I’ve fucking told you before to fucking leave me the fuck alone?’ says Brian, voice slurring, breath reeking of last night’s bender.
‘Dude, you have a stiffy,’ Farai replies. ‘Don’t point it my way!’
Brian takes a look at the bulge in his boxers and raises his eyebrows.
‘It’s not aimed at you. It’s just a morning glory, perfectly natural, nothing suspicious there.’
‘Didn’t you get lucky last night?’
‘Would I have this affliction if I had?’
‘What happened? I set you up with that Filipino chick, and you looked like you knew what you were doing. Please tell me you at least got her number.’
Brian sits beside him and uses a cushion to cover his flagpole. Some Arabic women in black are running across the screen, wailing, raising their hands to the heavens and beating themselves on the head. The voice-over states that laser-guided missiles are accurate to within a few centimeters though the occasional ‘collateral damage’ is inevitable.
‘Listen,’ says Farai as images of charred Iraqis fill the screen, ‘you’re walking around with a loaded gun. It’s unhealthy for a young, healthy male such