IT SEEMS LIKE ANY OTHER Monday morning, Simphiwe. On a Monday like this, you’d normally wake up early to catch the 5:00 a.m. bus to work. You’d gaze at the corrugated-iron roof above your head when the alarm goes off, switch it off with slight annoyance before flipping your bed covers.
But this is not like any other Monday morning. This day is different, because you are dead. Simphiwe, you have been dead for two days and eleven hours.
Like every other weekday, when you finish preparing for work and putting on your work overalls, you switch on the small television next to your bed.
The news is the same, nothing particularly new: the president is still corrupt, another woman has been murdered by a lover, and the fourteen miners who went missing in an accident haven’t been found yet. This angers and scares you to the core, as you work underground.
It’s the first mining incident you know of in the eMalahleni area, but just one of so many in the country. You ask yourself, how come the damn government doesn’t do anything?
You switch the TV off, throw the remote on the bed and head for the door.
Outside, you find a thick mist covering the whole place; it engulfs you in its bitter whiteness. It feels like your nose is bleeding when the cold attacks your face. But when you touch it, it’s just mist droplets.
There are no dogs barking in the neighbourhood and no chickens clucking, like other mornings; the dogs are probably hiding from the cold, and the chickens could care less if people wake up or not. You reach for a pack of cigarettes in your backpack and light up the numbness in your body.
Your neighbour, Baba Dingane, an old man with a huge protruding belly, steps outside his shack, carrying a dish filled with brownish water. He’s wearing a white vest and reflective overall pants. He doesn’t acknowledge you standing there. If you were still alive, your blue-and-green overalls would be glowing, despite the mist.
He splashes the dirty water on the ground. He knows he’s not supposed to do that. The two of you have had arguments over this multiple times. Why can’t he discard the water in the loo like the other tenants? Old fool, you curse. Disgusting old fool! He knows you hate his fucking guts. Especially because every weekend he beds girls half his age. Why can’t he see how old he is? Jesus, the way he behaves, you’d think he looks in the mirror and sees a cheese-boy with pampered cheeks and a nice set of abs.
A week after you’d moved into your shack, right after landing a job at the new coal mine, he asked you, “So tonight re ja kae bra yaka?” Grinning at you with yellow teeth. His breath had a stench of urine.
You gaped at him, startled. “Excuse me?”
“I said, where are we boning girls tonight?” When you noticed the silver band on his finger, you were even more disgusted. You didn’t answer him.
“Baba,” you murmur now. White smoke comes out of your mouth.
He ignores you, just like the day before and the day before that. He hurries back into his shack as if the cold would knock him down dead. If things were different, you know damn well he wouldn’t have dared to pour the water right in front of your shack. You want to scream at him. Tell him that he’s stinking the place up like a sewer with his filthy bathwater. You glance at the watch on your wrist; it’s 4:54 a.m. Kgomotso, your girlfriend, gifted you that watch six months ago, on your two-year anniversary. You remember the smile on her face as she put it around your wrist and said in a teasing tone, “Ungayilahli, like you lost the other one.” This was because your old watch dropped into a toilet pit. You can recall how you mournfully stared at it, glittering in that stream of excretions.
You walk slowly and carefully to the gate, not wanting to land your safety boots on the chicken shit all over the yard. You hate your landlady’s fucking chickens. Why can’t she cook the bloody meat, since she doesn’t want to sell any of them? Who has chickens for pets, anyway? You once asked her why she won’t sell them for a good price. You said that in fact, you’d like to cook the nice fat one for dinner. She said, offended, “I love my chickens, Simphiwe.” You couldn’t read her tone: obsession, anguish or desperation over the damn chickens. She’s a lonely woman after all; she has no children or a man to bed on a drunken night.
Oh, she is a drunk. If you needed a strong drink after a shift, you knew where to go. You’d crack jokes with her in her lovely furnished living room, and she’d forget she was lonely, old, and dying ... well, soon enough.
A few months back, she tried flirting with you, saying, “You are such a good-looking boy with good manners. Your mother must be proud to have raised such a gallant young man.”
Right then, you wanted to say you didn’t have a mother. That you and your older brother, Bongani, had lost her when you were both too young to comprehend the world. That you didn’t even remember what she looked like or smelt like. But you changed your mind. It would have dampened the high drunken mood if you’d also told her that when you turned twelve, you lost Bongani to a hit-and-run.
Your landlady asked you, “Konje uneminyaka emingaki? Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-eight.”
She tripped over her words: “Handsome, tall, pretty, handsome twenty-eight-year-old boy. Why won’t you fuck me right here, on this couch?”
You laughed at her drunkenness.
At work, when you told your best friend Ndolombo about it, he said, “O a baiza man. You are stupid just like her chickens. You should’ve given it to her good!” He laughed, humping the dry air, showing you how.
You have limits, you told him. She was old enough to be your grandmother, for Chrissake. Besides, Kgomotso would murder you in your sleep.
Ndolombo shrugged. “She’s too uptight, that one,” he said. “Ugogo wouldn’t mind you doing anything dirty to her because she misses sex. How long has it been since she had a real man inside her?”
You didn’t like where the conversation was headed, so you redirected it and told him that you saw a future with Kgomotso. The beautiful, sweet, intelligent Kgomotso, who was studying to become a nurse. Her skin so soft and caramel that when you met her, you wanted to lick her entire face. You didn’t think she would agree to go out with you. You had no money and no fancy education. But when you first saw her, you wanted her with every fibre in your body.
Standing there underneath the ground, surrounded by nothing but walls of rock, dump-trucks and huge drilling machines, you said to Ndolombo, “I am going to marry that uptight girl soon, and you’ll have to be the best man.”
Waiting for the bus at the gate, you realise that you can only remember bits and pieces of Kgomotso. The memories are vague fragments that come and go as they please, like ghosts of past lovers. You don’t remember much about those moments, when butterflies fluttered all over your body when you were together. You wonder where they are now, the butterflies. Are they sleeping? Are they dead?
This terrifies you: the thought of forgetting something that once meant a lot to you. You want to hold on to everything. You want her perfume on your skin.
You try hard to cling to the good moments in your life. Like when you were six and Bongani taught you how to make a wire car with your bare hands. Or the time in high school when your principal bought you a school uniform after you’d won the long-jump competition. Your first kiss with a girl, at fifteen. What about the time you found your name in the matric-results newspaper? You celebrated that whole week; you couldn’t believe that you’d passed, considering you had no expensive textbooks or help. You just had you.
You ask yourself, standing there: is the life you’ve lived just a scrapyard of things you once held dear?
The bus creaks to a stop in front of you. You drop your smouldering cigarette, crushing it under your boot. The bus driver is new – a short, heavily bearded man wearing a reflective vest and a hard-hat. You believe you know him, but you’re uncertain, and you don’t ask. When you greet him, he smiles at you. You say casually, as you do every morning, “uBaba Dingane is running late as usual; he said we can leave him behind.” This isn’t true of course, but you enjoy the thought of Baba hitch-hiking in this piercing weather.
You walk down the aisle. You nod at the passengers – you know most of them, as you all work at the same mine.
The bus is unusually full, with only two empty seats. You quickly notice that your friend Ndolombo is not there. You’d normally find him sitting by the window at the back, with an empty seat next to him, reserved for you. Isn’t he going to work? Is he sick? Did the new driver forget to fetch him?
You sit instead between a petite woman and a strange, tall man at the back.
The bus doesn’t move. It is still. You look at the misty windows, but you can’t see outside. You glance at the passengers beside you to see if they are anxious too, but they are silent as shadows. Agitated, you eye your watch.
It’s not on your wrist. You roll up your sleeves, shift on your seat, search all your pockets. You can’t find it. No, no, no ... Did you leave it behind?
You open your backpack. You shake it and scour through it. Nothing.
But how is this possible? You checked the time just minutes ago. Did you drop it?
The man sitting in Ndolombo’s seat looks at you. He’s not a miner; he’s wearing an ugly white coat and black sneakers. You do not recognise him. Well, not immediately. But when you look at him carefully, you think, wait …
He notices your stare. “What are you looking for?”
“Oh, my watch. Ngicabanga ukuthi ngilahle iwatch lame.”
“You didn’t lose it. You just won’t need it anymore,” he says, and then looks out the steamy window. His voice ... you know this voice!
The woman sitting on your left, wearing grey from head to toe, starts humming a tune. She has a nice, soothing voice. It reminds you of someone. Your mother, who used to sing to you when you were a child. “Lala. Lala, Simphiwe wam,” she’d sing, rocking and calming you in her arms.
You’d like to ask the woman where she’s headed so early in the morning, with nothing on but sandals and a thin dress in this freezing weather. But your mind is still on the man who looks just like your dead brother.
Now he says your name, slowly, almost cautiously: “Simphiwe …”
It’s really him. Your brother is sitting right next to you, just much taller and with stronger bones.
“Bongani?” you say, your eyes wide open.
He releases a thick laugh, just the way you remember it.
“Bongani?” you repeat.
“It’s okay, you’ll be fine. You’re not suffering any more. You’re going home.”
“What?”
Just then, the woman starts singing louder. And like a rehearsed stage choir, the rest of the bus joins in. The woman looks at you and says, “Lala, lala Simphiwe wam. Sleep, sleep my child ...”
Your chest hops up and down. This is not a dream. This is really happening. You find your brother’s eyes, watching you. They are so light, you feel safe in them.
The last time you spoke to your brother was sixteen years ago. He was lying in a hospital bed, dying, with no one but you at his side. It had always just been the two of you, ever since your mother died. His last words to you were, “I think it’s time, Simphiwe. I want to go. Let me die, please.” Tears were at the corners of his eyes.
But you wouldn’t let him go. How could you, when you felt responsible for his death?
If you’d crossed that road carefully, looking both ways like he’d trained you, would he have had to run to save you from that bakery truck?
It had come out of nowhere, you recounted in your nightmares. There’s no way you could have seen it, you said to yourself. You wished you could forget the sight of Bongani’s body at the side of the road after the truck knocked him over. The truck driver never bothered to stop, as if he’d just run over a bird.
So no, you couldn’t let him go. You held his hand until the doctors pulled you away from his cold body. Every day since, you’ve thought of him. How is he? Where is he?
Now he’s right here next to you. He holds your hand. His skin feels warm. With the cold hitting your cheeks and fingers to numbness, you wish his hot blood was running inside you.
The choir stops singing. Everyone is quiet with their heads facing forward like soldiers. A middle-aged man wearing a colourless suit enters the bus. You do not know him. There is something unusual about the way he moves – as if he’s floating on air. In the bus aisle, he vigorously stomps his feet, punches a fist in the air. The bus breaks into endless laughter. The man jumps and jumps and jumps in jubilation.
You look at Bongani, who says, “He’s free. Just like me … He wanted this. He’s no longer in any pain.” He touches your shoulder. “Unlike you, my dear little brother, that man is happy he’s dead.”
You look down at your boots. He adds, “Simphiwe, it is time. Kuzomele uhambe, this place is no longer home for you.”
You remove his hand from yours. “No.”
“Simphiwe …”
“I am not done. I am not finished.”
Your brother grasps your hand again. This time, tight enough that you can’t slip away. Like a whirlwind, the two of you float from your seats and swirl on air.
You are gusted to the ground. Your bones break and assemble again. There is dust everywhere. Your vision is blurry.
The two of you are kneeling, bruising your kneecaps. Your back twinges, as if you’ve fallen from a tall pawpaw tree.
You don’t know where you are until you see the mountain of rocks in front of you. The air tastes the same as you remember – stale and dry.
Bongani immediately begins throwing rocks aside, as if digging for something. And there, he finds it – your body.
He’s breathing heavily. “You were blasting …”
You look away and close your eyes, reliving that moment. “They came out of nowhere. Out of nowhere! All I remember is looking up and seeing these big rocks collapsing straight onto us.”
“You had a brain bleed. You couldn’t have survived this.”
“Kanjani, Bongani? How can something like this happen?”
“I don’t know … but your friend, Ndolombo, he survived the collapse. Now, he doesn’t have legs to walk with.”
You shake your head and look at your body again – eyes closed, sullied and lifeless.
“Simphiwe, you have to come with me. Your body, like the other thirteen bodies in that bus, will soon be found.”
When you keep staring, he clasps your face; you can feel his fingers digging into your cheeks. “Listen, lento e’lele lapha, it is not you – it’s just a frame,” he says. “They are still searching for it, and they will find it. We have to go, please.”
“Kgomotso,” you mumble.
Bongani takes your hand for the last time. “I hope she finds happiness somewhere else.”
You hope so too. That whatever she finds on earth without you will make her belly whimper with five times greater ecstasy. You hope someone will call her beautiful. That life makes her dance to every love song played on the radio. And when she goes cold someday, you hope she won’t stop loving, because you won’t.