The walk to and from the aid agency in Windhoek West, where Stick worked as an intern, took him at least 90 minutes each day. During the winter months, the unlit streets on the outskirts of Okuryangava – where he shared an outside room with another Zimbabwean man – had been in darkness when he set off in the morning and also when he arrived back home. This was when Stick would feel most afraid and most adrift.
People in other, safer places took walks to relax and clear their heads, Stick knew this of course. He was completely unable to picture a time and a place in his future when he would be free to do so himself, though. Traversing Katutura at dawn and dusk, he forced himself to remain alert for suspicious-looking types who might rob him (indeed, who had robbed him back in July) and by the time Stick reached either destination, he had always worked himself up into a state of extreme annoyance – if not downright anger – by dint of replaying in his mind all the many affronts he’d had to withstand since coming to this dreadful place.
Stick was, in fact, given a small monthly allowance by his current employer towards taxi money but he preferred to spend this on priorities that he chose for himself – specifically, wiping out the debt he willingly incurred in getting a phone upgrade. Hence the tedious, anxiety-ridden trek at the start and end of each working day.
***
Relieved of his candy bar Nokia on the street a fortnight before he’d gone for his interview at the agency, Stick realised that he needed a replacement straight away. It would very much have hampered his chances of employment if he couldn’t furnish the office manager with an active cellphone number where he could be reached. It would look most unprofessional if he had to admit that contacting him was going to be very difficult, after all. He’d therefore negotiated with his roommate so that for a small payment each month, he could take immediate ownership of the battered iPhone he’d spotted in a drawer in the tiny kitchenette of their backyard flat.
How it came to be there was none of Stick’s business. The expert way in which Lovewell had wiped its memory and then perfunctorily instructed Stick in its various novel features – including those that were only semi-functional, owing to its age – gave him some confidence that it was simply an old model that Lovewell had bought in the past but was ashamed to use these days. In other words, not one that Lovewell had come by through more nefarious means.
“Gotta have a good phone, my bro. No phone, no life!” Lovewell had explained as he’d quickly run through how to find and download the apps most critical for a sociable young man’s existence. Stick had then largely managed to accomplish these tasks over a lunch break during his first week at work once he’d been given the log-in details for the office network.
Lovewell had some arrangement in place at home whereby he could access the main property’s wi-fi whenever he wished, but like a great many other aspects of their informal accommodation agreement, Stick was no longer privy to the exact details and he had a sense that it would not be in his best interests to enquire any further.
Whatever the extent of the funds that Stick’s Uncle Jerry transferred to Lovewell each month, Stick’s roommate had done the family a distinct favour by agreeing to have him come live with him back in 2018, which could not be denied. On a regular basis, Lovewell would good-naturedly complain that it certainly did inhibit his love life to have to organise alternative arrangements for Stick whenever he needed to have their place free for some fun − which was fairly often, Covid restrictions or no Covid restrictions.
Actually, when his Nokia had been stolen, Stick had been rather perplexed that his compatriot hadn’t produced a replacement phone for him that very same afternoon so that he could continue to receive a heads up whenever Lovewell needed him to vacate the premises for an hour of two. Maybe Lovewell was simply too busy with his hustle or perhaps he took just a little twisted pleasure in having Stick come to him and ask him for favours. This was exactly what Stick had felt compelled to do once Uncle Jerry had let him know that he’d secured an internship opportunity for his unemployed nephew.
Stick had never regretted his decision to prioritise purchasing the iPhone over the other things he might have spent his small stipend on. The office manager of the communications department where he laboured to produce a newsletter and keep the website updated had informed him, back in August on his first day at work, that he could log onto the office wi-fi to check his private messages and so forth. He just needed to make sure that this didn’t interfere with his duties so ideally, he should only do it during his lunch break. This manager was another Zimbabwean far, far from home and so she well understood that a homesick member of staff was not as productive as one who could keep in touch with distant family and friends – especially a morose young man like Stick, working for a pittance.
Rationing his data and free SMS allocation with care and accessing the office wi-fi when he had no work to occupy him (which was often), Stick could now immerse himself in a life he’d only dreamed of previously. He made an effort to touch base with his mother and brothers back home as regularly as he checked in with his local friends, although this resolution tended to slip a bit as the weekend approached and plans were made to meet up. His fellow countrymen − whom he had met in the course of his studies − were big on plans, although less so on finances. Oftentimes, making plans was about the limit of the weekend’s action, but this remained, nevertheless, an activity that Stick could not bear to miss out on. His conscience did trouble him when he bothered to check how long it had been since he’d last contacted his family, but this was just one of the many burdensome, guilt-inducing responsibilities that assailed him, day and night.
Of his girlfriend back home, by design Stick now heard very little from her these days. On striking out for greener pastures a few years back, he’d rather felt that Bernadette ought to have accepted that she’d been left in his wake, without him having to actually spell it out for her in so many words. He, therefore, found every excuse not to communicate with her while carefully avoiding discarding her entirely − something that had been easy to accomplish when they could only chat by occasional SMS or email. Following his phone upgrade though, Stick had been forced to ask Lovewell to assist him with switching his WhatsApp settings so that Bernadette could no longer see when he was online and bombard him with awkward questions. The catalyst for this had been a tricky moment when Stick had been engaged in a rare assignation of his own, getting intimate on the couch with a bouncy girl he’d met at the minimarket while simultaneously attempting to field messages from this other, half-forgotten female.
***
This Friday, the hike back to his outside room had proved to be a much more uncomfortable slog than usual. It had been almost four years now since he had left home, his journey south and university fees sponsored by his Windhoek-based Uncle Jerry, a compassionate, surrogate father figure who loathed to see promise wasted. Since arriving, Stick’s ability to tolerate the few weeks of punishingly hot and humid weather that presaged the November rains had apparently dwindled. This evening he had sensed, rather than heard, a rattling vibration coming from his chest as he had laboured up the incline to his accommodation. Alarmingly, when he’d shut his eyes to wipe away the stinging sweat gathering at each corner, he’d observed red spots darting about like crimson comets behind his eyelids.
Stick was taking more care than pretty much anyone else at the agency to protect himself from the newest variant but contrarily, he had a fatalistic sense that if this Omicron was going to catch ahold of you, then all precautions would prove to be redundant. Although he obviously couldn’t express his opinion openly, there seemed to him to be a bit of subtle racism at work with regard to how some of his colleagues viewed the disease. The white managers – almost without exception – even now refused to get vaccinated for various spurious reasons, all of which seemed to be based on bad science liberally dosed with new-agey conjecture. Yet he’d been informed by Kusvika, his line manager, that when each of these smug naysayers had succumbed to the illness in turn during the worst of the pandemic (and one had actually died), this had come about only after they’d spent several days moping around the workplace, coughing and complaining that if their tell-tale symptoms did turn out to be Covid, then it would only be because “other people” were being cavalier about breaking curfews or attending outlawed social gatherings.
He hoped that his current symptoms would prove to be just tiredness and dehydration – he didn’t want to be dealing with all the drama (not to mention the expense) of taking a test and with the wearisome consequences if it turned out that he was basically fine, but nevertheless contagious. Although fuck it, he doubted that he would bother buying a test kit so long as he wasn’t visibly ill. Everyone else was so blasé about Covid nowadays that he was pretty sure it remained rampant at his workplace, as well as the few other places he went to. Why should he be the only holdout still refusing to play Russian roulette and being ridiculed for his Wakanda greeting?
Once he’d opened the security door and let himself into the tiny space he and Lovewell used as a kitchenette, Stick immediately detected that the pan of fried mince that Lovewell had left out from breakfast had turned bad during the course of the infernally hot day. The sweetish smell inside the enclosed space − which they would have to endure for days since their pitiful home had no air con or other means of ventilation − made Stick feel instantly very queasy. He pivoted straight back into the bare, sandy yard that separated their room from the bigger house of their landlady, Lovewell’s distant cousin, and slumped down on the row of old tyres under the pawpaw tree that they had arranged into a makeshift bench. His mouth filled with salty spit and he concentrated hard on a toffee wrapper by his right foot while he waited for the urge to vomit to pass. Even at a distance, he could make out the low whine of the fat flies circling the meat through the kitchen door that he’d left open to try and get rid of some of the stench.
The large, unnamed mastiff cross that patrolled the area surrounding the two buildings shambled up, looking for attention. Stick debated holding his breath, scooting back inside, and retrieving the tainted meat to feed the animal, but he suspected that it would have a disastrous effect on its digestion if it didn’t kill him outright. The wretched mongrel had already survived a recent attempt on its life, wolfing down a portion of biltong laced with poison that had been lobbed over the wall one evening by someone hoping to return to rob the premises later, once the guard dog had expired. The dose, meant to kill the massive dog, had been inadequate for the task, however, although his survival had been touch and go for 48 hours. It had howled in agony all night until their landlady had rushed it to the vet the following morning. There it had apparently languished, hooked up to a drip and retching continuously until the noxious chemical had worked its way out of its system and it was sent home.
Later, with astonishment in his voice, Lovewell had told Stick how many thousands of Nam dollars Mrs Nengomasha had paid in vet’s fees to save the animal. The enormous sum had led Stick to reassess the relationship between pet and owner, which up until then he’d believed to be rather similar to that of a disinterested business owner and an anonymous security guard.
I can smell your shit so I guess I don’t have Covid after all Stick thought, eyeing the many areas of the dirt dotted with yellow, bubbling pools of the creature’s diarrhoea. Though the dog seemed to be almost back to its old ways, there was ample stinking evidence that all was still not well with him internally.
Stick looked up at the sky above the high-security wall and the intelligent, inquisitive dog followed his gaze. The ripples and blooms of oppressive, onyx-shaded cloud might be followed in an hour by a gaudy but spellbinding display of violet and garnet slashes. Or the show might fail to materialise and darkness would fall in a matter of moments. His Namibian acquaintances would insist that the local sunsets were the most spectacular in the world but Stick tended to think that they only held this opinion because there was little else concerning the country that they could boast about.
His nostalgia for home was making him feel hateful towards Windhoek this evening and as a corrective, he reminded himself of his latest chat on WhatsApp with his brother back in Caledonia. Things were so much worse at home, where their mother was becoming obsessed with the piles of rubbish lining the pathways between the shacks and the proliferating packs of stray dogs they attracted. Her latest meltdown had concerned her terror that one of his brothers would get bitten and contract rabies. Stick was steeling himself to send a message to her over the weekend reassuring her that most of them would be loved (and therefore vaccinated) pets that people had been forced to abandon once coronavirus had started to cut a swathe through the community. He must remember to try and find a link to an article online supporting this contention as well, and send it to her …
When Stick left home in 2018, Mandida had been a vibrant and still-beautiful woman. He barely recognized her now from the occasional photographs one of his brothers might send him – it appeared as if she no longer cared to attend to her hair or her clothes and one of her front teeth was askew and rimmed with a brownish deposit that could only signal untreated decay. Her sewing machine had been sold to pay the bills that same year and thus deprived of the home industry that connected her with neighbours and customers, Mandida had sunk into a state of desolate lassitude well before the pandemic had begun.
Stick knew all this from the messages sent by Gondai or Tendeka. Texts on a phone were a frustratingly imprecise means by which to convey news from back home though and Stick vacillated between imagining that his brothers were exaggerating their mother’s condition to fuel his guilt or under-reporting the extent of her deterioration to save him from worry. Helplessness was the principal emotion that the boys’ disclosures generated in him, followed by an undifferentiated pity that encompassed everyone he cared about, be they trapped back in the city of his birth or forced into exile, like himself.
The dog-with-no-name was now sniffing at the kitchen door’s closed security grill and whimpering gently; clearly, the putrid odour coming from the rotting beef inside held some appeal. Stick felt sorry for this animal in the aftermath of the attempted poisoning but the dog’s ordeal had always reminded him too much of his own troubles for his solicitude not to be tinged with contempt. Here was another desperate, half-starving creature, so hungry that a mess of decomposing meat was making him salivate copiously. Back when Stick had arrived, Uncle Jerry had settled on a monthly amount that he would give to him for food and toiletries but the sum had not increased over the years and was now wholly inadequate. Being famished and less-than-presentable had become Stick’s default setting.
What’s more, the mongrel had also been rendered incapable of a satisfying love life by the vet and – well, this was maybe pushing the analogy a bit too far – Stick had often felt recently that his own manhood had been neutered, given the way that his attempts to sleep with girls were met with stubborn rejection far more often than not these days.
‘Stick’ wasn’t even his true name, but rather some clumsy, dismissive alternative that the local students had adopted within weeks of them commencing studies together. He’d no way of deciphering the doubtless unflattering connotations of his new moniker and if Lovewell knew how he’d come to be so labelled, he was saying nothing:
“Suck it up Stick. Just think of it as a sign of affection. Who knows where it’s coming from? Don’t be overthinking things.” Easy for someone called Lovewell to say.
But Stick had his suspicions about the origins of his hated new name. He’d only been attending classes for less than a month when, like his classmates, he’d arrived for a lecture to find that it had been cancelled due to some administrative cock-up and he’d then been compelled to traipse all the way back to his new accommodation in a fit of pique. Stick − or Shohiwa, as he was still called in those days − had sat at the minuscule folding table where he and Lovewell took their meals, screwed up his eyes, and flung his head back in livid exasperation. Already, so many of his plans were crashing headlong into these kinds of obstacles and draining him of any vestigial optimism, an emotion Stick battled to access at the best of times.
Back then, his uncle had been in almost daily contact, just checking in to see how his protégé was doing. Shohiwa was going to have to explain to Uncle Jerry yet again that the schedule of classes and seminars that they had printed out in the older man’s office before the first day of term was proving to bear only a tenuous link to reality. Stick clenched his fists in frustration and jabbed his two middle digits up at the ceiling viciously and repeatedly, cursing God extravagantly for his constitutional bad luck.
Lovewell had let himself in a few seconds later, a chuckling girl in tow, and Stick became certain that they’d spotted his infantile display. His roommate’s lectures for the day at a different university had also been cancelled and he’d taken the opportunity to bring his latest woman back home for a bit of horizontal recreation. Checking to see if the flat was unoccupied through the kitchen window, he and his squeeze had been treated to the sight of Stick sticking his fingers up at the world like some demented imbecile, he decided.
So all in all, Stick and the dog had far too much in common; the many comparisons were almost insupportable. Although − as he now recollected − during frigid winter nights, the landlady had been kind enough to allow the guard dog to sleep indoors under a pile of old quilts since she believed that the sub-zero temperatures would keep any robbers away. Stick, dressed in many layers of clothing and huddled under the only thin and inadequate blanket he could find, would awaken before sunrise on the pull-out couch in the tiny living area to find the cup of water by his mattress rimmed with ice. He very much envied and resented the hound for his snug bed just then.
And when Lovewell opened the door leading to his cosy bedroom on those freezing mornings, the escaping hot air from the 3-bar heater within would bring Stick a blissful, brief respite that also fuelled his jealousy. Lovewell used the shower at the MMA centre where he worked every morning so with the flat’s geyser timed to only heat water for a couple of hours in the evening, Stick had to improvise. He would boil a kettle of water, dab at his armpits and groin with a cake of cheap soap and a rag, then quickly dress before the warmth seeping out into his own sleeping nook dissipated. Since Stick was no longer permitted to access the main property’s wi-fi either, he wondered if his uncle’s monthly contribution towards the rent was over-generous, seeing that electricity was a utility Stick was now largely excluded from using.
Stick was going to be forced to find a way to confront his roommate about this possible injustice he supposed, not to mention the more pressing issue of the squalid state of their shared living quarters (this is why he’d left the pan of meat out, rather than tipping the evidence into the rubbish bin outside). Bad hygiene was a bit of a touchy topic these days. How could Stick broach this latest example without Lovewell feeling that his well-established, nonchalant attitude towards Covid precautions was being challenged by implication? Or that Stick was insinuating that the waste of twenty Nam dollars’ worth of mince was the disparity in their circumstances writ large?
That discussion would need to be handled with discretion. Several times lately, Lovewell had allowed defensiveness to undermine his habitual good manners and just last week − when Stick had made some mild reference to the possibility of them sharing a taxi to the clinic to get their respective shots − Lovewell had rounded on him in such a caustic manner that Stick feared he would be kicked out of their accommodation altogether. That prospect filled him with existential anxiety. Not only because he’d be forced to throw himself on the mercy of other Zimbos who were themselves struggling to keep a roof over their heads but also because Lovewell’s weekend job as a floor manager at Club Headonik gave Stick access to the only form of entertainment available to him.
He rose to pull his phone out of his jeans pocket, thinking he would check through his photos until some of the stink inside his accommodation had dispersed a little. He also withdrew a squashed ham and cheese roll, soggy and disintegrating in its clingwrap, that Kusvika had handed to him at midday. She had bought too much food for her lunch, she’d whispered to him as she passed by his desk. Honestly, she needed to watch her weight. All she had done while working from home until recently was eat, eat, eat. Stick had half-expected her to turn around and pat her generous backside, seeking some kind of comment from him.
He was glad that she hadn’t done so; he’d never been able to work what women truly wanted when they made these sorts of remarks about their appearance − affirmation and compliments, or commiseration? Either way, he would have been certain to have supplied the wrong response and maybe Kusvika would have ceased giving him much-needed donations of food in retaliation.
He avoided lifting the top half of the brötchen to inspect the slimy pink square of processed pork within; it would just add to his filthy mood to be reminded of the delicious hot meals that would have been waiting for him when he came home from school only a few short years ago. When anyone bothered to enquire what he missed most from home, Stick’s reply had always been spontaneous and heartfelt. He missed his mother’s cooking so much that it was a physical ache and most of all he missed the way she prepared cow heels. There was nothing more to add, to anyone familiar with that very special dish.
Stick scoffed the snack down in four clean bites. Luckily, the yard dog had grown tired of waiting for a hand-out and had gone off around the corner to bark at some drunks arguing out on the street. Stick was grateful that he’d not been compelled by compassion to split the roll, unappetising though it was.
Scanning through the photos on his phone, he came across a recent shot of the yard at his family’s shack in Caledonia, the settlement they had moved to after Stick had travelled down to Namibia. An ordinary scene from an ordinary evening in any such slum across Africa one would think, with Gondai stooped over the open fire in the late afternoon as Tendeka held up a little girl to wave for the camera. Except that Stick understood the implications only too well. The child belonged to an aunt who had died last year, not from the coronavirus but from hitting her head during an epileptic seizure. For months she had not been able to secure a supply of her medication except sporadically, and then not at all.
And even more tellingly, it should have been Mandida tending to the cooking while Stick’s little brothers were busy with their homework. Except there was no light to study by any more, he’d been informed, and indeed no way for them to continue to attend school regularly since they had been obliged to move so far away from town. Two questions gnawed at Stick: when had Mandida quit making food for the family? And who had taken the photo and sent it? For it had come to him from a phone number he didn’t recognise and there had been no response when he’d enquired.
All of his endless troubles. How were they to be endured by a young man like him, just starting out on his path in life and already crushed by adversity? Those messages from home: sometimes fifty came in one day and then he would hear nothing for weeks. And what about his almost-daily battles defending himself as an unwelcome foreigner here and trying to ignore the mayhem taking place south of the border, where amakwerekwere were being killed for simply trying to make it through the working day? Not to mention his disorientating relationship with capricious Lovewell, who would invite him to the club one Friday and cheerfully pay for their ride, then berate him for being a hanger-on and a parasite the following weekend.
And the terror, always there in the back of his mind, that a casual, misplaced word would get him deported if (as he suspected) he was now residing here illegally. The way that Namibians seemed to judge him on sight, it was as if he carried around an aura of untrustworthiness wherever he went. This was why he had stopped wearing a mask at the club in fact. There was no more danger in drawing attention to himself by continuing to sport that rectangle of baby-blue papery fabric than from catching the disease itself, in his view.
If Stick had just one actual person in real life that he could legitimately blame for all the hardships he faced each day then he would not feel so unfairly wounded and beset with fears. But there was no one – his options were limited to condemning himself, or God. Accordingly, he pictured himself in God’s crosshairs more and more often these days, a helpless victim of a baleful power fixated on blighting his life.
***
And then there were the girls. Or there was the absence of girls, as he might better phrase it. Since Lovewell had never proposed that Stick accompany him to the martial arts training centre − and the barbell Stick had duly constructed from a piece of piping and some bags of sand had only served to increase his resentment at this − the physical contrast between them was yet another grievance that he nursed. It might be said that objectively, Lovewell possessed reassuringly average looks (as, indeed, did Stick). Nonetheless, carried on top of a physique of almost cartoonishly over-developed proportions, Lovewell’s face took on the kind of sombre dignity that only a man with nothing to prove could present to the world.
Stick once again asked himself whether Lovewell was, a priori, a natural-born alpha male and all the other stuff − the hours he spent videoing his achievements in the weights room and posting his latest box-fresh trainers; his effortless success with every type of woman under the sun − simply represented the outward manifestations of his genetic birthright.
For even setting aside their comparative financial positions − which Stick could well guess at − all evidence pointed to the fact that Lovewell led a charmed existence and Stick really, really did not. What breaks had Lovewell deserved that anointed him chief of all he surveyed? And what had Stick done to enrage fate and end up scrabbling for the figurative crumbs that fell from his roommate’s table?
“Show me a loser and I’ll show you a loser” Lovewell had mocked once, in reference to a classmate who seemed to have more than his fair share of misfortune. In bleaker moments, Stick tormented himself with the notion that Lovewell included him in this category as well.
Sitting out here now on the hot tyres, nausea finally subsiding, worrying if Lovewell would arrive home and bestow on him the benediction of an invitation to the club or not − well, this infuriating uncertainty was only half of Stick’s problems tonight.
If it came down to it, he would have to admit that Lovewell was not a person entirely lacking in sympathy. When he suggested to Stick that he might accompany him to Club Headonik on a particular night, he would then pick out some serviceable clothes for Stick to wear from the great many hanging in his wardrobe and draped carefully over a couple of chairs in his bedroom. Lovewell’s own t-shirts swamped Stick but the job at the club meant that he was the regular recipient of free merchandising from drinks companies and the like, so Stick could often find something new and not-too-garish to wear.
(Stick figured that an outdated iPhone wasn’t the only way to be embarrassed by obsolete fashion and Lovewell needed to ensure that his roommate was presentable at his place of work in order not to reflect badly on himself when they turned up together.)
That being the case, how did even perfect strangers at the club instinctively seem to know of Stick’s reduced circumstances, despite his disguise? What was it about him that automatically wrecked his chances? What indicated − to the finest young ladies especially − that he was second rate, a failure? There had to be an explanation for why people looked at him with such contempt – when they bothered to look at him at all. This little emoji on his iPhone right here – the bright green sphere covered with regular spikes that was shorthand for ‘Covid-19’ − after a few drinks, Stick imagined that the girls saw something similarly disgusting atop his neck as he patrolled the room.
The humiliations Stick submitted himself to on those evenings were almost unbearable yet he went back over and over, eventually spending less time sullenly circumnavigating the dance floor and nodding to people who rarely nodded back and more hours keeping the cheerful bouncers company outside. Lovewell had long ceased asking him in the taxi home if Stick had had an awesome time. His grudging replies had plainly irritated his roommate, who rightly felt that he was already doing far more than charity demanded to give Stick entry to his glamorous world. Or at least, this is how Stick interpreted his silence on the journey back to Okuryangava these days.
Stick was a young man much given to self-reflection, with plenty of hours free − alas − to examine the interwoven causes of his bone-deep dissatisfaction. He was even able to see how his illogical rationalising always led first to overdetermination and then, inevitably, to the stark conclusion that he was alone simply because he was alone.
***
Years ago, Stick had enjoyed some successes with girls. This was after he’d first arrived in Windhoek and Uncle Jerry had taken him shopping for new clothes and trainers and had given him a reconditioned laptop and that almost-new dumbphone that was stolen a few months back. (Stick had been so humbled by his uncle’s generosity at the time that he’d felt it would have been too churlish to have hinted that a smartphone would be preferable.)
It had helped, also, that initially, he was by some measure the best student in his classes and for a while, he was able to assist his peers with their assignments as well as fixing their IT issues for a handy, if necessarily small, fee. Not unnaturally, he was more amenable to assisting the prettier girls than the other supplicants and he did manage to persuade a few of them to sleep with him, although never the truly spectacular-looking ones. (Yes, all those ungrateful bitches liked him well enough when he was primed with self-confidence, didn’t they? Nowadays, he couldn’t even get a sympathy lay.)
It wasn’t so much that the girls he dated back then were lacking in some critical attribute, although none were really going to add massively to his social standing in terms of their looks. He was always rather shamed by the simplistic explanation he’d arrive at when he drunkenly examined his eventual lack of enthusiasm for each of them, well aware once he’d sobered up that it was contradictory, self-sabotaging nonsense.
He disliked the girls, he realised after a couple of shots because they were prepared to be seen with him – and look, that told him all he needed to know about their own standings in the hierarchy of desire, didn’t it? He wanted to flaunt the equivalent of a gold medal, not just get handed a grubby certificate as a consolation prize for participating. So essentially, these only semi-attractive types were of little use to him and he consequently found each of them rather repulsive within a short space of time. (But not quite as revolting as Kusvika. He was convinced that she would eagerly assume the role of sugar mummy if he acted on the sly hints she was sending his way. Whatever else he had been reduced to, Stick wasn’t going to be tempted to occupy that mortifying role.)
And then also − this was pretty crucial − the girls who did agree to date him would patronisingly reassure him that they were not the type of shallow female who was impressed by material things. But who wants to waste time with a chick who doesn’t crave status symbols and the better things in life?
In the end, their own collective values disbarred these women from being acceptable to Stick and perversely, ended up confirming what deep down he knew all along – that it was he who was inferior, who wasn’t good enough in this world, in this life. He didn’t need to be inebriated to double down on his self-hatred and to loathe the girls afresh for making him feel so abject.
One lunchtime at work recently, searching for an explanation for this paradox, he’d Googled ‘How does my friend get all the best girls?’ Below the inane, predictable responses suggesting that he learn some tips on being a gentleman from his friend, he came across some more sinister posts from men whose inability to get laid had curdled into outright hatred of the very gender they coveted. In shock at what he glimpsed in these forums, Stick had hastened to close the browser before he chanced upon some diatribe that came uncomfortably close to reflecting his own corroding, spite-infected state of mind.
Maybe all this wouldn’t have mattered if he had been able to parlay his geekiness into professional attainment but even in this, he discovered, he was to be disappointed. It transpired that he wasn’t, in truth, any more of a computer fundi than the locals in his classes – he’d just benefitted from a better education back home, which had given him an academic head start that lasted only a couple of semesters. Stick soon discerned that he was an average student at best and any hopes he might have had of going to an institution abroad to join a prestigious post-graduate programme were swiftly dismantled as his more talented classmates caught up with him, and then left him standing. His overweening sense of superiority, which had previously carried all before it, collapsed and then shrank away to nothing.
***
Lovewell was late getting home and Stick checked his phone to see if he had missed an SMS from him. This was another ignominy he had to bear – constantly reminding people that, no, he couldn’t afford mobile data and had no Internet once he’d left work for the day.
For the best part of one glorious year, he had been granted use of the wi-fi at their flat so that he could continue his studies online when the university was closed for in-person classes due to the pandemic. Uncle Jerry had been on his case asking why he wasn’t completing his modules, thereby ramping up Stick’s persecution complex until his anxiety left him seething. He’d therefore begged, literally begged, Lovewell, to configure his laptop so that he could use the Internet at home and Lovewell had turned the screen away while he typed in the password that granted Stick access to Mrs Nengomasha’s network.
Once they both returned to school, however, Stick suddenly found himself offline again once he got home. Lovewell explained that his cousin had changed her login details since she didn’t want “random people” using her wi-fi unless they were prepared to subsidise her Telecom bills. With three other houses and their respective outside rooms clustered tightly around her own, she’d worked out that she could make some very welcome extra income this way. But Stick was in no position to contribute and so by early 2021, he was back to bouncing between the school library, other locations with free wi-fi, and the homes of better-off friends so that he could stay up to date with his studies and placate his uncle.
His time at the agency would come to an end not long after Christmas and he’d been given no reason to hope that he might be kept on full-time. It was cheaper just to hire another desperate, temporary techie than offer Stick a proper contract. During the worst months of 2020, some of his wealthier classmates had set up a successful website design company out of someone’s townhouse and having mysteriously caught wind of this, Uncle Jerry had intimated that Stick’s own lack of initiative was beginning to be worrisome, not to mention financially unsustainable. How was it that he hadn’t been invited to join this little cohort of entrepreneurs, he’d been asked pointedly back then. And just recently, Stick had been driven to confess to his uncle that there was probably not going to be a job offer at the end of his internship, so Jerry was now making even more noise about Stick’s lack of get-up-and-go:
“I have problems of my own these days, you do know that Shohiwa, don’t you? There’s my own boys to put through school and I can’t be supporting you forever. You need to get out there, man! Go knock on some doors and find yourself some properly paid work. I need to see some sign that you are trying to do that, don’t I? And for the sake of everyone back home, yes? Yes, Shohiwa?”
If he could just do some research online over the coming few days, Stick might find a marketing idea that he could exploit using his skills, or tutor himself in the basics of cryptocurrency so that he could put together a proposal to present to his annoying uncle. Stick located a tiny ember of happiness in the realisation that he could still feel enthusiasm for such an idea and might yet summon the energy to set wheels in motion, despite his almost-paralysing inertia.
In idle hours since he’d been banished from the home wi-fi network, Stick had tried to guess what the new password might be. On his laptop, he’d type in various permutations of their street name in Okuryangava, the landlady’s first name and surname, those of her grown-up children, and the generic phrases that she might have chosen. But always he drew a blank. He gave it another go now on his phone while he waited to hear from his roommate: zimgirl, bosslady, sexyzim …? The possibilities were endless − which was kind of the point he supposed − plus he had no way of guessing the numbers he could add to supply her year of birth, either.
In the yard next door, two cats were engaged in an escalating fight; it was a weekly event and the hellish hisses and yowls would only cease when the smaller of the two hurled itself over the wall dividing their two properties and then raced off under the front gate and across the road. He heard the neighbour’s back door open and a child yell the cats’ names a few times, imploring them to stop to no effect. This gave Stick an idea. What was the name of the landlady’s dog-with-no-name? Over the years she must have called out to it within earshot surely, but Stick found that he couldn’t recall it just now. He strode around the corner of the outside room in search of the animal and found it galloping excitedly back and forth, hoping to grab the littler cat as it made its escape into their erf.
Stick caught up with the dog and saw that, as he’d hoped, under the matted greyish fur at its neck it was wearing a collar. He’d not noticed this before; he rarely noticed anything about the mongrel at all, really. Yet just now, knowing how surprisingly compassionate Mrs Nengomasha was towards her pet, he’d wondered if it carried some form of identification in case it escaped. Sure enough, attached to the collar was a bent metal tag shaped like a bone and engraved on it he could make out her cellphone number and a name: Bromley.
Stick returned to the tyre seats and began typing passwords based on the dog’s name into his phone. It only took three goes before ‘bromley1234’ let him join the landlady’s wi-fi network. So habituated was he to disappointment that Stick could scarcely believe that something had gone unequivocally right for him for a change. This was the first small victory against fate (or Him, or karma, or whatever) that he’d enjoyed in longer than he could remember.
The Internet connection at the agency had been down for most of the past week; something to do with the road outside being dug up for infrastructure development, ironically enough. This was no great disaster since the senior staff members happily reverted to working from home, leaving the office almost deserted. Just Stick and a couple of other minions remained, tasked with doing an unnecessary stocktake of all the printed resources and stationery supplies and re-labelling all the ring binders on the many shelves. It had therefore been almost four days since he had been online and it took a while for all the updates, notifications, emails and text messages to load.
Stick waited patiently. He had nothing else to occupy him. The pressure of the foot that he often self-pityingly imagined had him pinned down at the neck seemed to be easing off a fraction. And he was hungry as all hell, suddenly.
Bromley, thwarted in his cat-killing efforts, sloped around the corner and sunk down at Stick’s feet. Happy to reward the dog’s unwitting contribution to his little epiphany just now, Stick scratched away at the animal’s dusty nape and acknowledged his soft snorts of contentment with a few endearments. At last, the heat of the day was letting up and Stick sensed his own spirits lifting a little more.
Lovewell’s expected SMS arrived: he was heading straight to the club that evening and his roommate was welcome to help himself to the leftover mince on the counter. Stick was in the middle of typing out a diplomatic response, ruefully remembering the more enticing food his friend had stashed in the fridge when Lovewell added, ‘And the KFC’.
Stick bounced up and dashed into the kitchen. He decided it would be plain stupid to place the nasty contents of the pan back into the fridge just to prove a point when Lovewell eventually did reappear, not to mention most unsanitary for himself in the meantime. I’ll find a more diplomatic way of addressing the issue when a suitable opportunity presents itself he thought, taking the pan across to the rubbish bin and sliding the mince onto the pile of vegetable peelings and food wrappers inside with a solid thud, raising a little cloud of indolent mosquitoes.
Stick found that the series of little triumphs of the last few minutes had made him feel far better disposed towards Lovewell and the rest of the world entirely. Maybe he’d even forgo the discussion about the meat altogether, just for the sake of keeping the peace. All things considered, he judged that an evening enjoying a free meal and surfing the Internet at his leisure in his new guise as a budding entrepreneur was now turning out to be a much better outcome than another disheartening night at the club. After all, he recollected, his time there had recently become even more intolerable, if such a thing were possible. The bartender who in the past would sneak a few free drinks to him − lurid, nasty cocktails or thimbles of tequila that a patron had ordered then declined after one sip − had found a better job and his replacement was proving to be far less obliging.
Stick went back inside and returned with a 1-litre bottle of Coke he had been saving for a special occasion and the paper bag containing Lovewell’s chicken, chips and coleslaw. Thanks to his flatmate’s enormous, workout-sustaining appetite there was ample food to share with Bromley now.
***
The dog followed Stick’s gaze as he looked upwards again, basking in a new feeling of deep satisfaction. High above the slate-and-rose slabs of cloud hugging the treetops, a few stars could already be made out in the rapidly darkening sky. Throughout that year when he’d had Internet at the flat − the time when Covid restrictions kept everyone mostly at home − Stick would position himself each night on this tyre bench, open up the stargazing app on his laptop, and roam around the universe as a remedy for his claustrophobia and homesickness. He’d not had an opportunity to do this in a long time and once again tonight, Stick felt something simple and joyful spark within him.
It had been on the very coldest, cloudless nights of 2020 that the Milky Way had shown itself best as a spangled, flickering veil stretching right across his field of view. The very insignificance of Windhoek as a city − the provincialism Stick derided daily − meant that out here, only a few kilometres from the centre of town, there was insufficient light pollution to spoil the spectacle. Indeed, in the block where he lived, the street lights had ceased to work almost as soon as they had been installed and it seemed as if repairing them, and the potholes, and the overflowing drains, was not going to happen now with any urgency.
Stick would gaze up in wonderment until he could feel his fingers and toes no longer. Then he would rise stiffly, his breath in the gelid air joining the quivering drift of uncountable stars arrayed above him in the serene cosmos. It was then that he always thought of the incense smoke rising from the centre in the church back home, and the services that Tendeka told him his family had recently stopped attending.
Though he couldn’t recall any of the formulae now, Stick remembered that there were a number of different projections for the final number of galaxies stretched out into time and space and, back then, he would challenge himself to compute how many of these might contain a planet closely resembling Earth. And if there were billions of them, then logically many would be home to lifeforms rather like humans, wouldn’t they? It, therefore, followed that somewhere way beyond his own solar system would float a world (or perhaps even many worlds) so exactly like Earth that a man who was – to all intents and purposes – a perfect copy of himself could be out there, living a very different existence from the one he was currently struggling through.
This version would still be essentially him, Shohiwa, of course – with his plain looks, all his shortcomings, and his evidently circumscribed skill set. Yet his doppelganger’s natural talents (such as they were) and fundamental integrity would intersect with the good fortune to provide him with a life blessed with success, influence, money, travel and women. And then, at some point, just one peerless woman would come along at the perfect moment – once his double had sampled enough of them to want to settle down with the best that he could find.
There were nights when this thought had given Stick enormous comfort. He was happy – he really was terrifically happy – for that other Shohiwa, out there in space ‘living his best life’, to use a phrase that Stick hated, just as he hated all expressions of that ruthlessly upbeat nature. But there were also nights when Stick wished desperately to swap places with this other self if even only for one day, to savour all the gifts that had been so cruelly denied him. How could one day be enough, though? And how would he survive having to return to the indignities and debasements of his life here on Earth after 24 short, short hours?
***
Finally, the various sound alerts on his phone told him that everything was downloaded and up to date, including the app that he could begin to use over again to wander across the night skies. There were a great many messages waiting for him on WhatsApp – perhaps he’d rather underestimated how many people constituted his social circle and had therefore been making efforts to hang out with him this coming weekend. With a bit of a sinking heart, he decided he should begin with the messages from Kusvika though, and sensed that he was being tugged back to that old, familiar disillusionment as he read the first of them. It told him to dress presentably when he came in to work the following week.
“Screw that bitch. Screw her. I always dress nicely, unlike some people” Stick told Bromley. However, Kusvika’s next few messages informed him in confidence that he would be called into a meeting with the bosses to discuss his future role at the agency, probably that very Monday morning. It was promising! Holding thumbs!! Then came a row of brown flamenco dancers, popping Champagne corks. Stick threw Bromley a sheepish look.
Uncle Jerry had sent one row of question marks a few days ago, and then another this afternoon, along with a sad-face emoji. Stick, suddenly humbled by his relative’s continued concern for him, texted back that he was fine, just super busy with some business ideas he wanted to run by him soon, plus hoping to have some good news about work too. Holding thumbs and fingers crossed.
There was nothing from his brothers, no matter where he looked. Stick was guiltily relieved: his evening was going so well now that he didn’t want to have to confront the reality that back home things might be going from very bad to much, much worse. He would send them a long email tomorrow updating them on all his news and − without hexing things with a premature announcement − hinting that he might soon have a job that would allow him to send a bit of cash home to the family.
No new messages had come from Bernadette, either. Stick checked back and realised with surprise that she had not tried to make contact with him in several weeks. It wasn’t only his ego he detected smarting at this puzzling turn in their so-called relationship; he grasped that he really didn’t want her to stop communicating with him completely, especially not now that he had some proper news − positive news for once − to convey and share with her.
Stick started to compose a greeting to her and noticed that her new profile photograph showed her retroussé nose and cheeky freckles to their best advantage. She had a new, flattering hairstyle too. He sent a few brief words apologising for this and that and outlining the events of the last few weeks, not forgetting to mention Bromley’s near-death experience. He described his own brush with a few mild symptoms of Covid, which had turned out to be mercifully short-lived and therefore nothing to stress about. Then he wrote that he missed her terribly and once he’d typed that last word, Stick inhaled deeply as the truth of that simple declaration began to take effect.
He waited a while but no blue ticks appeared next to any of his messages to Bernadette and Stick found himself irrationally aggrieved. The screen on the phone was pitted and crackled all over and it was hard to see things clearly in the gathering dusk but eventually, he realised that only single ‘sent’ grey ticks were present next to all the time stamps, but not the additional ones that would show that the messages had been delivered at her end. Her ‘last seen’ indicated that she’d only been online yesterday too, so if he waited long enough, hopefully, she would come back to him with an explanation that very same evening. In the meantime, he changed his privacy settings so that she could see when he had last been online too, then sent a final message telling her to reply as soon as she could, no matter the time of the night. He would be up, prepping for an interview for a permanent position.
It suddenly felt very important to know the instant that his girl got in touch. Stick had accumulated a nice little collection of downloaded ringtones on his phone and as he fed Bromley the last of the tendons from the chicken drumsticks, he selected the Amapiano song called ‘Te Amo’ and assigned it to Bernadette’s contact.
Through a gap in the houses down the hill, the exhausted sun bulged briefly on the rim of the earth and then sunk away. Stick and Bromley waited on in the whisky-coloured twilight.