Fade to Back

London Bridge, Southwark Tavern

Zombe looks gaunt. His cheek bones appear sharp and his lips dry until they sip the beer. He tells me he is doing construction work. I shudder. It has come to that. How can it be? My old school mate, working with his hands and knees when we went to the best school in the country for the use of our brain. But what is wrong with construction work, I ask myself as I listen to Zombe’s tales. He is still the chatter box he was at school, his bright mouth of teeth and tongue, chomping away at words. Your laughter roared through the dorms halls every term. Zombe tells me of his work mates who are English. They are have common names like John Smith or some such to avoid the authorities. They steal what they can get away with. Cell phones, scrap metal. Their salary spent on drug debts. Zombe splits his salary between paying off his sisters loan and his tuition fees. The loan was for earlier tuition. For the work he does not attend class. He has schemes for the internet business he means to hatch. It is raining outside and the trains thunder above us.

In his town they call him Zola instead. This shakes off the banal zombi jokes. It is his town, Eastgrinstead. A little stop over on a highway outside Gatwick airport. It has two high streets. Zola lives on one of them above a pub. It is his town. Everyone knows him. I was there and saw it for my self. Every second car pulls over to greet him. He raps in a band. We got drunk after his performance. It rained when I was there. We partied in his flat. Loud music, beer cans and two 19 year old girls. Two of his groupies. They were dreadfully unattractive. One fat, one thin. One dumb, the other ceaselessly talkative.

Peckham, my back yard.

A wild place. Not large enough for boys cricket but large enough to have live game. Long grass and wild cats in pursuit of furry and agile herbivores, the squirrels. Patrolled by foxes in the night. Slugs as large as small anacondas. Spiders big enough to be seen from in doors. I must battle cob webs to get to the shed. The spiders have invaded the house. They net the windows and every corner with their webs. The front door is now a tunnel. Eric is squeamish about slugs. The hair on my back stands up at the sight of a spider. The bigger they are the louder I scream. They have tiger stripes. They get bigger and bigger. What do they eat? There isn’t anything but other spiders in the house. I cycle to the shops for groceries. At top speed ahead of a bus I notice a cob web about my handle bars, complete with an eight legged predator. It takes me a while to realize that I can stop the bike and get off. I have such fears!

Peckham Rye Common

For exercise I run around the common. It is big. No sound is heard from one end to the other. Open fields. Rugby goal posts yet all the men practice soccer. Most of them are from west Africa. The ones with big bellies play too. In the common are the gardens. It has a wrought iron fence. Flower beds, picket fences, roses, more fields (with soccer goal posts) and a Japanese garden. Families leisure here. Successful old women bond with their wise educated daughters. Young couples push perambulators by the duck pond. Toddlers try in vain to kill birds. Single people read the Guardian newspaper on the benches. A stone bridge crosses a stream in dense foliage. It was here that you cried. So many tears. I tried to catch them all but I made use of none.

London Bridge, Southwark Tavern…again

Fortune orders a coke. I feel shy and order a beer anyway. I did say lets have a drink. Fortune is buying the dinner. He offered. I only ever say no once. He works for a bank. It has been ten years since I saw him last. Most likely at our last school exam. He has been to the university at home and then to South East Asia with the bank. He still has a gap between his teeth. He still attends church regularly. The mole on his nose has grown. I had forgotten about the mole. Now I can’t stop looking at it. We shared a desk at school. It took effort to have a desk at school. You had to find it. Fight for it. Carry it. Keep it. The usual questions. What did you study? Where did you work? Are you not married? Where do you live? The answers leave something missing. Conversation dries up. It is raining outside. The trains roar overhead. The buses splash water. We got back to the station and make false promises.

On Prophanities

I remember a hot afternoon at boarding school in my final year. It was a surreal time for final year pupils, as we were beyond the rules and bearers of all the schools expectations in the national examinations. Indeed, our every class lesson, test and exam up until then was only preparation for this final challenge. There was no continuous assessment or accumulative grading, it all came down to one month of examinations that numbered over a dozen. Prefects no longer hounded us, teachers stopped berating us and refrained from dreaming up punishments for invented offenses. We got the top soup in the dinning halls and larger portions of food. Missing class was ignored and drinking sprees overlooked. In truth, by the final term we had all paid our examination fees and dismissal would not stop us from writing our final exam. Our school was only a holding pen and a selection mechanism for possible university students. The brightest expected, and mostly did go on to the University of Zambia. We were the chosen ones and beyond reproach.

Though it was a time of relative freedom, it was not without stress. Exam stress no less. Pupils who had moderate averages, now studied nights and days to up their week spots. Other pupils who had always had near flawless grades went further to cement their mastery of the subjects and leave no room for a slip at the last moment, for even though you could be top of you class all year, there still remained the risk of not performing on the day and losing all the glory. Others, who had long given up on the approach of knowing every bit of the syllabus for each subject, instead studied the past examination papers to grasp patterns and conjecture questions likely to be repeated or imitated. Some worked in groups, while others opted to study in secrecy to give the impression that they were beyond stress and moderate expectations.

And yet still, the resentment for authority remained. We were no longer hounded out of our dorms in the morning by the head teacher Mr Hamwinger, with his whipping stick. We were no longer made to do the manual work of the school of slashing grass and shifting soil. We no longer ate the worst food. But still, most felt that the cat and mouse chase, between teacher and pupil, class and truancy, punishment and escape, that lasted near three years had been deliberate and malicious. It didn’t have to be that way.

This combination of exam stress and relative freedom beyond the school rules released often amusing behavior changes among the grade twelves. Some boys suddenly took to heavy drinking and regularly disappeared in the night over the weekend to the nearby townships to return in a drunken stupor. I grew an Afro and finally developed the ability to flirt with the younger girls of the school, the grade tens. New relationships and friendships sprung up, old foes became soul mates, some loathed teachers became back slapping buddies (and often accompanied to the shabeens of the township) while others were hounded by insults all the way to their homes. New passions for music were discovered, with soulful R&B love songs replaced by belligerent rap music.

The afternoon I am thinking of was on a Saturday I think. A hot afternoon, when the indoors and shade was a sanctuary. At the end of our dusty corridor, among our haphazard beds, was a bunch of pupils who were not of my crowd. They were boys not from the capital but from small towns I could not place on the map most times. Boys for whom English was an awkward object in their mouth and who kept a low profile and wanted no trouble, with prefect or teacher. Only on this afternoon they were huddled around a small cassette player, illegally connected to the mains by a naked wire, listening to their new discovery, Tupac Shakur.

Within a few short weeks, these boys were garrulous with the anger and insults that were spat out of Tupac’s music and regurgitated by them. The misogyny and the anger, the contempt for the law and the celebration survival under duress, expounded by Tupac, must have connected with them, given all our trials after two and a half years in boarding school. What I remember this afternoon was the bunch of them rapping along, on this hot and otherwise quiet desultory afternoon, to one of Tupac’s most pugnacious rap songs, hit’um up. Except they didn’t just sing along or rap along. They changed the lyrics to suit them. In this song, after Tupac and his fellow support rap artists make a detailed and insulting account of why they think they are better than their rival east coast competitors, Tupac quite simply says “Fuck you too” to a long list of people. As they rapped along, the boys replaced the names with their own characters. For example, some of the rap song explodes

fuck Mobb Deep,
fuck Biggie,
fuck Bad Boy as a staff, record label, and as a mother fuckin crew.
And if you want to be down with Bad Boy,
Then fuck you too.
Chino XL, fuck you too.
All you mother fuckers,
fuck you too.

Our school was called David Kaunda Secondary School, and our boarding house Mweru House. Their version of the song went something like

fuck Mweru,
fuck Hamwinga,
fuck David Kaunda as a staff, school, and as a mother fuckin crew.
And if you want to be down with Hamwinga,
Then fuck you too.
Chemistry, fuck you too.
All you mother fuckers,
fuck you too.

Now I knock about London, with a dreadfully dull job that leads me into avenues of memory I thought I had long forgotten. I run the city race by chasing after buses, trains and tubes. I have drinks with friends in a hurry, lest I miss my last train home. Some of the friends I meet are from David Kaunda as well, but never include the bunch from the back of the dorm who rapped to Tupac that afternoon. I am not sure we ever talked about what it would be like after David Kaunda, though we always looked forward to our last exam. I guess we all thought we would be at the university of Zambia, or at some hang out point in the middle of Lusaka after that. Instead we are scattered and our memories of school are like our hopes for a successful life in Zambia, just another fading dream.

fuck my job,
fuck London,
fuck Employment as an income, culture, and as a mother fuckin career.
And if you want to be down with London
Then fuck you too.
Dreams, fuck you too.
All you mother fuckers,
fuck you too.