A Song Of Shadows

SIX

I got into the house at five minutes to six. I know this because my grandmother's old face clock was the first thing anyone saw when they walked in through the front door. It hung in the living room, almost directly opposite the front door and was about thirteen years old. It's hands had stopped moving at least four times; three of the times, a relative had simultaneously passed on. My grandmother kept it anyway, and she had begun treating it as a harbinger of death.

"MaNdlovu!" I called into the house, closing the front door.

The house was almost silent. The television and the lights were off, giving the place a semi-dark feel. For a second, I thought there was load shedding, or that there was problem with a transformer nearby. The thought disappeared when I flicked a switch next to the front door and the filament lamp flickered on.

"Isabel!" MaNdlovu's voice called back. "I'm in the kitchen!"

I walked through the living room to get to kitchen —through the dining area, actually. Our living room was divided into two areas. The lounge to the right, and the dining to the left, so to get to the kitchen, you would need to go through the dining area.

I found MaNdlovu standing at the kitchen counter and cutting strips of chomolia* into a big silver bowl. A reminder that I should have left school earlier, since I often had cooking duty.

"Good evening, MaNdlovu," I greeted her in Ndebele. "How are you this evening."

"Hello, Isabel," she said, not looking away from her bowl. "You came home late today, how was school?"

"It was fine," I fibbed.

Thought of telling her that someone had been found dead at school crossed my mind, but I didn't want to tell her the part about me being hesitant to walk past a tree at the gate. I wasn't afraid that she would laugh at me. As a matter of fact, she wouldn't laugh. Instead, My Grandmother would overreact and escort me to school tomorrow and scare the school staff into changing the entrance for a while. MaNdlovu was quite big, though not tall or short compared to school head and her deputy. But her size wasn't what would make them change the entrance, it her respectable personality. Even people people who never met my grandmother held her with deep regard. Nathan had met her several times, he said she was the wisest person he had met so far.

"What happened?" she asked.

She knew I wasn't being honest.

"Someone was found dead in the morning," I told her.

This time, she put the knife and the remainder of the leaves she was cutting down into the bowl, and turned to look at me, "Who? What happened to him?"

I sighed, "A boy called Michael Malaba. He may have hung himself, but it's not certain."

She shook her head pitifully. "Did he have problems at home?"

"I don't think so," I told her. "Michael was always cheerful at school. No one saw this coming. Especially not at school."

She shook her head again, pitiful, "That's very tragic. I can only imagine what his family is going through."

"Me too," I said.

"It'll be fine," she said. "At least now he's safe from the horrors of the earth."

"Yeah."

I left MaNdlovu in the kitchen and used a second door that connected the kitchen to the passage to get to my bedroom door. It was the second door to the right down the dimly lit passage, next to MaNlovu's bedroom, which was all the way to end. The first door to the right was the guest bedroom. On the opposite side were three more doors. One into the lavatory, the other into the bathroom, and the third, the one in the middle into the broom closet and storage closet.