The Grass Mat

Chapter 1: The Grass Mat

The radio was broken because Zeth had wanted to see where the voices lived.

He was four, maybe five, still young enough to believe that anything with a screw could be opened and understood. His father found him on the lounge carpet with the small red radio in pieces around his knees. The battery cover was under the couch. Two screws had disappeared completely. Zeth had expected shouting, or at least the disappointed silence adults used when they wanted children to manufacture their own punishment.

Menzi Mnguni only sat down beside him and held out his hand.

"Show me what you found."

Zeth remembered that more clearly than most things from before. His father's shirts always smelled faintly of solder and aftershave. His hands were large, patient hands, good at machines and gentle with children. Menzi put the radio's cracked plastic shell on his thigh and asked Zeth where each piece belonged. When Zeth guessed wrong, Menzi did not correct him immediately. He asked another question until the mistake showed itself.

Ayanda laughed from the doorway when the radio made a burst of static and then found a gospel station by accident.

"You see?" she said. "This is why I don't leave you two alone."

There was another man in the memory too, younger than he looked on television later, sleeves rolled to the elbow, one foot bare because he had kicked off his shoes in the house without asking. Diego Duma was laughing with Menzi about something Zeth did not understand. He had a glass in one hand and the easy confidence of a visitor who did not need permission to open the fridge.

In the memory, Diego was Uncle Diego. His father's friend. His mother's headache. A man who lifted Zeth once, declared him too serious for a child, and put him down when Zeth refused to smile on command.

That was before names became headlines.

The memories after that came with cuts in them. Menzi's voice behind a closed study door. Ayanda standing barefoot in the passage, one hand pressed against her mouth. Diego on television, older now because television made everyone official, saying the words "tragic" and "legacy" with his face arranged for a country. Menzi's photograph beside a headline Zeth could not read yet, though he knew from the adults' voices that the words were not kind.

The house changed before Zeth left it. People arrived with files. Someone took boxes from the study. A woman in a brown suit kept saying his mother's name as if Ayanda was a problem to be solved before lunch. Zeth remembered the smell of rain on paving, his own socks wet inside his shoes, and his mother bending down to hold his face between both hands.

"Don't let them tell you who he was," she whispered.

Then someone pulled him back from the doorway.

After that, childhood became bells.

The Duma Foundation Academy woke boys before sunrise and called it structure. Beds had to be folded tight enough to shame a coin. Shoes faced the same direction. Breakfast came after running, not before. The instructors liked the word resilience because it sounded cleaner than hunger. Zeth learned to code in a computer lab that smelled of dust and hot plastic, then learned to fall on a mat in the sports hall without putting his wrist down badly enough to break it.

"Again, Mnguni."

He got up.

"Again."

He got up.

By fifteen, he could take apart a cheap desktop and put it back together before lunch. By sixteen, he knew how to breathe through pain without giving adults the satisfaction of seeing it. By seventeen, he had learned that questions were safest when written down after everyone else was asleep.

By twenty-one, he could lie still in a Soweto yard with a phone above his face and make himself read one email for the thirty-seventh time as if it might change if he looked away.

Apex Sentinel Systems Internship Appointment

The subject line had stopped looking like English.

Zeth lowered the phone onto his chest and stared through the slats of the washing line at the white sky. It was 2 January 2011, Sunday afternoon, the kind of heat that made tin roofs click to themselves and turned every argument in the street into a public service announcement. A taxi hooted twice beyond the wall. Somewhere nearby, a woman shouted at a child to stop running with a glass bottle. A generator coughed, failed, and was insulted by three different men.

He was lying on a grass mat in KB Motsepe's front yard because the house was full, the shade was decent, and Gogo had chased him out of her room after deciding he was pretending to help.

The appointment email glowed on his phone:

Apex Sentinel Systems, Secure Development Internship
Division: Duma Genesis Technologies
Start date: Monday, 3 January 2011
Arrival time: 07:30

The Duma name did not shock him. It had been attached to his life for so long that it had become part of the wallpaper: the foundation, the academy, the scholarship paperwork, the public speeches about giving brilliant children a future. Zeth had learned not to react every time he saw it. The body got tired of flinching.

Still, the line sat there.

Duma Genesis Technologies.

KB's yard refused to be solemn about it.

The house was one of the older Soweto houses, thick-walled and practical, with rooms added over years by people who had needs before they had plans. The front yard was home, workshop, dispatch office, storage room, and community argument venue. A strip of stubborn grass survived near the tap. The rest was packed earth, bricks, oil stains, plastic crates, a cracked basin full of bolts, and two tyres leaning against the wall like men waiting for a lift.

Three delivery bikes stood near the side gate. One had its seat off. One wore a taped mirror. The third was being washed by a boy who looked too young to be employed and too confident to be a visitor. A silver Corolla idled near the curb while its driver argued into a phone about a parcel, a cousin, or both. From the kitchen window came the smell of onions hitting hot oil.

And in the middle of that ordinary noise, clean enough to look embarrassed, sat the white Polo Vivo.

Freshly washed. Tyres blacked. Wipers new. Bonnet not perfectly aligned, but close enough if you loved it.

KB came around the car holding a rag and a quart bottle, wearing a vest darkened with sweat and grease on his forearms. He had been awake since six because success, according to KB, respected no calendar and had no January leave.

"My man," KB said, "if you keep looking at that email like that, Apex will send someone to fetch it back."

Zeth locked the screen. "I was reading."

"You were fighting."

"With an email?"

"You fight anything that doesn't explain itself properly."

KB dropped onto the grass beside him, careful not to sit on the mat because he was filthy and Gogo had eyes in the curtains. He stretched his legs out and rested the quart on his stomach.

"Smell this," he said, lifting the bottle.

Zeth turned his head away. "It's not even one."

"That is why I'm saying smell, not drink. This is a symbolic beverage."

"Of what?"

"Victory. Debt. Engine problems. Many things."

Zeth sat up. "If Gogo sees you drinking in the yard before lunch, you're finished."

"Gogo knows I am a businessman under pressure."

"Gogo knows you are a problem with a bank account."

KB grinned, then reached into the pocket of his shorts and threw something at him. Zeth caught it against his chest before he saw what it was.

The Polo keys.

A blue plastic tag hung from the ring with ZETH written on it in black marker.

For a moment the yard became too loud and then too quiet. Zeth turned the keys over in his palm. The metal was warm from KB's pocket.

"No," Zeth said.

"Hawu. You haven't even thanked me badly yet."

"KB."

"It starts. Whenever you say my name like a disappointed teacher, I know money is about to be discussed."

"I'm serious."

"I can see. Your eyebrows are filing a complaint."

Zeth looked at the Polo. It looked back at him with polished headlights, absurd and patient.

"You are already paying the Maboneng rent."

"The business is paying."

"Your business."

"Our business."

"I haven't put proper money into it since that first amount."

KB made a face. "That first amount. Listen to this tenderpreneur language."

"I gave you twenty-eight thousand and some change four years ago. You built the rest. You can't keep treating me like I'm still a shareholder because I once arrived with bursary money and bad maths."

"Your maths was fine. Your haircut was bad."

"I'm not joking."

"Neither am I. That haircut hurt the brand."

Zeth's mouth twitched despite himself. KB saw it and leaned in.

"There. Human being. I knew you were in there."

"I mean it."

"So do I." KB set the bottle down, all the humour moving aside without leaving the room. "When my gogo's pension was holding this place up with prayer and duct tape, you came here with money you could have used to breathe for once. You said buy the car. You said start with school runs, deliveries, whatever pays. You were seventeen and talking like an accountant with trauma."

"That skorokoro nearly killed you twice."

"It built character."

"It had no brakes."

"Character." KB tapped the Polo keys in Zeth's hand. "Now the business is not one skorokoro. It is bikes, two cars, maybe another bakkie if God and SARS can behave. You helped start it. I am helping you start this. That is all."

Zeth looked down at the keys again.

He hated owing people. Owing made love feel like paperwork if you were not careful. He knew KB did not mean it that way, which somehow made it worse. Debt with interest was easy to understand. A friend putting a car in your hand because he believed you had somewhere to go was harder.

"I can take taxis," Zeth said.

"To Maboneng? To Apex? Dressed like human Wi-Fi? No." KB shook his head. "Also, this car needs someone gentle. My drivers drive like the road insulted their mothers."

"It makes that left-turn sound."

"Only when you turn left."

"That's not comforting."

"Then don't turn left too much. Johannesburg is full of options."

Zeth laughed, and the pressure behind his ribs loosened a little.

At the side gate, one of the delivery riders called, "KB, this mirror is loose again."

"Then tighten it again," KB shouted.

"With what?"

"Your hands, chief. Evolution gave you tools."

"Hayi, boss."

"Don't boss me when you are losing a fight with a mirror."

The rider muttered something and went looking for a screwdriver. KB watched him go, proud and irritated at the same time. That was how he looked at most things he loved.

"You packed?" KB asked.

"Mostly."

"Mostly means not packed."

"It means things are in bags."

"Things are always in things. That is not a system."

"Since when do you care about systems?"

"Since my MD is moving to town and must not arrive there with underwear in a Pick n Pay packet."

"I'm the MD now?"

"You have always been the MD. I am operations."

"You tell people you're managing director."

"Because customers don't respect operations. They want suits and lies. You are the invisible MD. Like a ghost with spreadsheets."

Zeth leaned back on one hand. "This company has serious governance issues."

"Wait until we can afford governance. For now we have vibes and Gogo."

At the mention of her name, the curtain in Gogo's window shifted. KB saw it and lowered his voice.

"Also, eat when you get there."

"She sent you?"

"She sent everybody. Even the boy washing the bike knows you must eat."

Zeth looked toward the window. "I ate."

"When?"

"Earlier."

"Earlier when?"

"Time is a colonial construct."

KB pointed at him. "See? Empty stomach. You only speak philosophy when you are hungry or hiding."

A woman's voice came over the low front wall.

"Kanti vele ubuzimisele ngokuhamba ungavalelisanga weh Zeth?"

KB's grin arrived first.

Zeth did not need to turn to know who it was. Thobile Mathonsi had a way of making a sentence sound like both accusation and invitation.

She stood on the pavement with a plastic bag from the spaza hooked around two fingers, one hip against the wall. Her hair was tied up in a scarf, her gold hoops catching the sun whenever she moved her head. She looked at the Polo, then at Zeth on the grass mat, then at KB with the quart.

"Mara Kabelo, awukagezi nokugeza I'm sure? hayi wena wathwala ngabo"

KB picked up the bottle. "Awu ma'Thoby Thoby Ngageza ngizalwa. Ngiphuphe idlozi lami lithi lomiwe mfazi kamfethu mina bengithi ngzoya esontweni namuhlanje "

"Your ancestors are tired of your lies."

"They told you?"

"They told everybody."

Zeth got to his feet and dusted grass from his jeans. "I'm not leaving without saying goodbye. I was preparing."

"For what? Exile?"

"Maboneng."

"Same thing, that place hasn't been South Africa since democracy I now regard it as Africa."

KB nodded, delighted. "Are you saying Zeth is going for M.K Guerrilla training in Mozambique."

"Ave ukhuluma kodwa KB," Thobile told him. "Ngathi wakahlelwa ihashi esfuben."

KB put a hand to his chest. "Mathobi, I have always respected your violence, mfazi kamfethu. Njengoba uwazi uZeth umzulu and meshona lapha emahlathini as he's only living brother komele ngikungene you will become my wife by default"

She ignored him and looked at Zeth. "You look thin."

"I am not thin."

"Yes. but its like you've gone from Van Damme to Bruce Lee"

"It's chilled mfethu. I was just stressed out about getting this internship, now that I got it I'm stressed about my first day tomorrow."

"Awu wena nah. Wunderkind, if there's anyone who can hack this its you."

KB made a noise of approval. "You see why I wanted her in HR?"

"You wanted me in HR because you thought I would fire people who annoy you," Thobile said.

"Exactly. Talent placement."

Zeth walked to the wall. He had to look slightly down to meet her eyes, but Thobile had never made anyone feel tall for free.

She was three years older than him, old enough to have found life first and young enough to still resent what it had taken. When Zeth was eighteen, he had mistaken her attention for rescue. She had let him be foolish for three weeks, then sat him behind the spaza with two ciders between them and told him she was not going to let him turn eighteen-year-old hunger into a whole life decision. She had a child already, a life already, and wounds she did not dress up for anyone. She wanted him, sometimes more than was wise, but she would not let him shrink his future to fit the corner of hers she could safely offer.

He had been furious.

He had also passed mathematics, which had been her instruction after she stopped laughing at the toy ring he had bought from a man outside the taxi rank.

Now their almost-romance lived in greetings, jokes, the charged quiet after too many ciders, and the occasional morning neither of them explained. It was not simple, but it was theirs, and it had not broken.

"So," she said, softer, "big office tomorrow."

"Internship."

"Manje internship yenziwa eBara rank yini?" She lifted her chin and cleared her throat until her voice became expensive. "Tomorrow you'll be there in your suit, walking through aircon and boardrooms like, 'Mr Mnguni, regarding the merger and Trevor Noah...'"

"I doubt anyone will even notice me."

"Trust me," Thobile said. "You will be difficult to miss."

"Corporate," Thobile said, tasting the word as if it had bones in it. "Then don't let them make you speak like an email."

"He already speaks like a scholarship," KB said.

"And you speak like a rank marshall with no queues."

"That is why I am loved."

Thobile smiled, but she kept her eyes on Zeth. "Come say bye properly before you go."

KB straightened. "Properly?"

"Not you."

"I am also leaving emotionally."

"You are going to the fridge."

"A journey."

She laughed and stepped back from the wall. After a few steps she stopped and looked at Zeth again.

"Don't let them make you boring there."

Zeth had a joke ready, then lost it.

"I'm already boring," he said.

"No." Thobile adjusted the plastic bag against her hip. "You are just afraid people will notice you're not."

She walked off before he could answer, which was how Thobile won most arguments.

KB waited exactly three seconds.

"Poetry loading."

"Don't."

"A novel. A sad one. With rain."

"KB."

"Chapter one: The Man Who Feared Mathobi's Plastic Bag."

Zeth threw the rag at him. KB caught it against his shoulder and laughed so loudly the boy with the loose mirror laughed too, though he could not possibly know why.

Inside, Gogo's room was dim and cooler than the passage. The television was on with the volume low. A newsreader moved her mouth above a caption about the State Records Protection Bill and public hearings that had become shouting matches. A minister's face appeared, calm and powdered, saying something about national security. Gogo was not watching him. She lay propped against pillows, her small frame wrapped in a cardigan despite the heat.

The room smelled of camphor cream, warm blankets, and tea gone cold.

"Udlile?" she asked as soon as Zeth entered.

"Yebo, Gogo."

From the doorway, KB said, "Shuthi udle umoya oyigcwele ngoba benginaye Gogo angikaze ngimbona ehlafuna. Kphela nje bevuza amathe ebona uThobile"

Gogo did not look away from Zeth. "Ewu yayilunge kabi leyongane kaMam'Mathonsi esaphila, anomtshela ukuthi akaze esontweni her mum will not be happy with her not comingto church. Zeth woza lah mntanami."

He went to the side of the bed and bent down. Her hand came up slowly, dry and warm against his cheek. She had done the same thing the first time KB brought him home from the academy. Zeth had been fourteen, pretending the bruise under his shirt was nothing. Gogo had fed him before asking his surname. She had asked his surname only after his second plate.

That was the day KB's house became a place he could arrive without explaining himself.

"You will call," she said.

"I will."

"Not a message."

"I will call."

"Not only when something is wrong."

Zeth glanced at KB. "Ave ukhuluma KB."

"I fear her. I don't brief her."

Gogo squeezed Zeth's chin gently until he looked back at her. "You hear me?"

"I hear you."

"And eat. Men who think too much forget the body. Then the body embarrasses them in public."

"I'll eat."

"And don't fight at work."

KB snorted. "It's computers, Gogo."

She turned her head just enough to include him. "A fool with a computer is still a fool."

"True," KB said immediately. "I know many."

"You are one."

"Also true."

Zeth smiled, but it thinned when Gogo's thumb moved once along his cheek.

"Your mother would be proud," she said.

The television filled the pause with applause from a parliamentary room. It sounded wrong in the small bedroom.

Zeth swallowed. "You think so?"

Gogo's eyes sharpened. Not angry, not soft. Certain.

"I know so."

No one in the room said Menzi's name. No one said Ayanda's. The names were present anyway, sitting with the cold tea and the muted news and the old academy photographs Gogo had kept in a biscuit tin because Zeth never asked for them and she never threw children away.

He hugged her carefully. She held him harder than he expected.

"Go," she said after a while, tapping his back. "Before this one starts crying outside and blames dust."

KB made an offended sound. "My sinuses have done nothing to this family."

Outside, the afternoon had begun to tilt. Heat lifted from the packed earth. The Polo looked too white for the yard, and for a second Zeth felt foolish for being afraid of a car, an email, a flat in town, a Monday morning.

Then KB opened the boot and the moment became work.

"Laptop?"

"Packed."

"Charger?"

"Packed."

"ID?"

"Packed."

"Toothbrush?"

"I'm not answering that."

"Then not packed."

They loaded the car with two bags of clothes, a laptop backpack, a box of documents, one pair of formal shoes Zeth hated, one pair of sneakers KB approved of, and a frying pan Gogo insisted a man needed even if he did not know what he was doing with oil.

KB walked around the Polo one last time, checking things he had checked three times already.

"Oil fine. Water fine. Tyres fine. If it coughs when you start, let it finish kusuke kukhuluma idlozi."

"That's your mechanical advice?"

"Don't interrupt machinery. It becomes personal."

"You know I can still take taxis."

"You can also walk barefoot to Cape Town. We are discussing wisdom, not possibility."

The driver with the Corolla came over to shake Zeth's hand. The delivery boy with the loose mirror saluted him with a screwdriver. A neighbour leaned over her gate and told him to remember people when he became rich. KB shouted that Zeth was already rich because he owned one formal belt. The neighbour said a belt was not wealth, it was pressure.

Thobile returned just before he got into the car.

She did not come close enough for drama. She stood by the gate and handed him a packet of NikNaks and a small bottle of water.

"For the road."

"It's thirty minutes."

"Then eat slowly."

KB put both hands on his head. "The romance. The carbohydrates."

Thobile did not look at him. "Drive safely."

Zeth took the packet. Their fingers touched, briefly. Nothing in the yard changed, which was the mercy of it.

"Ngiyabonga," he said.

"Call Gogo," she said.

"Everybody has instructions."

"You need many."

He wanted to say something clever and kind and final enough to carry what had almost been between them. Nothing arrived that was not too much. Thobile saw him searching and spared him.

"Go, Zeth."

So he did.

The Polo started after one uncertain cough. KB pointed at the bonnet.

"Character."

"It's your car."

KB leaned into the open window. "Your car."

"Then why do you look worried?"

"Because your car has my spirit in it."

"I'll be careful with your spirit."

"And the clutch."

Zeth laughed. KB reached through the window and gripped the back of his neck for one second, the way boys did when a hug in front of everyone might become too honest.

"Don't go there and become small," KB said.

Zeth's throat tightened. "I'm going for an internship."

"Rich people can make anything a prison if you let them design the doors."

That sounded too polished for KB, which meant he had been carrying it for a while. Zeth nodded because joking would have wasted it.

At the gate, he stopped and looked back.

Gogo's curtain moved. The delivery bikes leaned in their crooked row. KB stood with one hand on the wall and the other lifted in a salute he pretended was casual. Thobile was already walking away, plastic bag swinging against her thigh, but she looked over her shoulder once.

Zeth raised his hand.

Then he drove.

Soweto moved around him in late-afternoon layers: boys with holiday dust on their legs, women carrying plastic chairs, men under car bonnets, music from a yard he could not see, meat smoke hanging above a corner stand. At a stop street, a father balanced a toddler on his hip while arguing with a mechanic about an alternator. The toddler grabbed at the man's ear and laughed.

Zeth's hand tightened on the steering wheel before he understood why. For half a second, the mechanic's blue overalls became Menzi's white shirt. The toddler's hand became his own. The street around him blurred into polished floors and the red plastic back of a broken radio.

A taxi hooted behind him.

"Sharp," Zeth muttered, and drove on.

By the time he reached Maboneng, the city had changed its accent. Buildings stood closer together. Walls carried murals. Restaurants put small tables on pavements and charged confidence for coffee. Young people moved in clean sneakers and carefully chosen shirts, holding phones, cigarettes, camera bags, each other. Security guards watched doors with the bored suspicion of men who knew everyone was lying about something, even if only parking.

Zeth found the apartment building after missing the turn once and refusing to admit it to the GPS voice. The basement smelled of damp concrete and exhaust. The Polo's headlights slid over painted numbers until he found his parking bay. He switched off the engine and sat there while it ticked itself quiet.

For the first time all day, no one was talking to him.

His phone lit up.

KB: Don't scratch my car.

Another message followed before Zeth could answer.

KB: Your car.

Then:

KB: But don't scratch it.

Zeth smiled in the dark.

The lift was slow and had a mirror that made everyone look tired. A woman with red braids and a laundry basket got in on the ground floor, looked at his bags, then at him.

"Moving in?"

"Trying."

"This building tests people."

"I test well."

She smiled. "We'll see."

On the third floor, two women got in laughing, smelling of perfume and outside air. One looked him up and down without apology. The other looked at the Polo keys in his hand.

"New neighbour?"

"Depends who is asking."

"Someone who knows which washing machines steal coins."

"Then definitely new. I still trust machines."

Both women laughed. The one with the laundry basket hid her smile behind a towel.

"Shame, uZuma" the woman said. "He trusts machines."

"Pray for me," Zeth said.

"We don't pray for handsome men in this building. We prey on them."

The lift opened before he could decide whether to be embarrassed or pleased. He carried that small, foolish warmth down the corridor with his bags.

His apartment door stuck before it opened. Inside, the place introduced itself all at once: kitchenette to the left, bathroom ahead, living room with a two-seater couch against the wall, mattress still wrapped in plastic, boxes waiting in a row. KB had called the couch executive because one leg had been fixed with a brick. Zeth had called it evidence. They had carried it anyway.

He dropped the bags and stood in the middle of the room.

It was not much. It was rent, keys, a parking bay, a start date, and a future that had not yet asked him for anything.

He meant to unpack.

He meant to shower, iron his shirt, check the route to Apex again, call Gogo, and message Thobile something normal enough not to become a confession. He meant to plug in the laptop and read through the appointment email one last time like a responsible person.

Instead, he sat on the couch.

The room was quiet except for traffic somewhere below and a neighbour's television through the wall. Zeth took out his phone to call Gogo and saw the appointment email still open.

Arrival time: 07:30

The Duma Genesis Technologies logo sat above the line, clean and blue.

He meant to call Gogo before he closed his eyes. He woke much later with the phone on the floor, one shoe off, and the email still open.

Outside, Maboneng kept moving.