Blue Light

On Saturday night, when the rest of our clan leave their homes to hunt down the yellow and red lights of a young city on a weekend night, the four of us, Kaijenga, Awana, Rom and myself turned down another direction. Wa had said that he knew where we should find another light. A pale blue light. And we followed him. There are people like that: when you put people like us next to people like that, we slip from ranks adjacent to them into files behind them.  We spilled out of a taxi on the edge of the fine blacktop and let the van curve back towards the towers of the city, and we dove after him into the narrow, crooked, cracked mudroads into the slums. Ragged walls and rusty tin and rotting planks, deeper and deeper into the slums.

It was darker here at this hour than it would be uptown, and the flashes that were caught in the slimy puddles beneath our sneakers were fugitive; they darted away from our eyes as we approached. We padded through with our puffy sneakers firmer than the ground and Kai laughed. Tuli mu ghetto! he proclaimed.

I felt no mirth. I felt the smokiness of the darkness and smelt something wild that was loose and free that should not be. I treaded hard but felt I should not because I felt that we must be walking over graves, if not of men, then of things men had held dear before they laid them down here and turned away from them.

We turned out of the black alleys and found ourselves in a street, patches of tarmac. Painted walls blazing white and yellow, blasted by crisscrossing beams of lamplight from two shopfronts on either side of the street. I asked Wa if this was where we were going.

He said no. This light was dull green if it was not this cruel white. The walls broke into cracks and pockmarks and urine stains darkened their bases. A child ran out of one doorway and vanished into a shard of shadow on the other side of the street. He was so small. He was followed by another child.

Who is this who lets a child be awake at this time, sneered Rom.

Rom was tall and his shoulders were always hunched. His head stuck out of his collar like a spaceship finding escape velocity. We did not sneer back at the vanity of this statement, the idea that Rom could make such a statement only because he had no children of his own and therefore could so freely scoff at others for making mistakes he did not have the capacity to make himself.

Wa walked to the shop the child had emerged from to get some cigarettes. I asked the burly woman within for a juicebox of Splash. She looked at us with nothing in her eyes until she saw Kai and Rom and then she resented us. I should tell you that Kai and Rom wore glasses. Maybe I was just seeing things– the slums were bearing on me in a way– but I always fear this about poor people, that they are angry at me for not being as poor, that they hate the things I have because they hate the things they don’t have and that is the only way they can feel about me.

Glasses are expensive. If she was short sighted, she would never see us the way we see her.

Kai sniggered at my juicebox.  He had wanted me to buy liqour. Wa said we would find plenty once we found the right light. We walked on.

Until we landed at the end of the street and there was a low hovel. We crouched through the doorway and into the light from a single bulb burning morosely from a low ceiling. We walked through the small room and out again from the other side into a tiny courtyard that was hemmed on all four sides with wooden benches. We sat down, and were followed by a tiny woman in a leso and a headscarf. She laid four glasses in front of us and laid two coca cola bottles of clear liquid next to them.

The silver angel. I had heard of her. The silver angel who said Dance With Me.

Wa, grinning, spilt a drop onto the wood on the bench next to him and then lit a matchstick. He dropped it onto the bench and a blue flame sprung upwards. He grinned again, this time right at us.

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