The Grass Mat

Chapter 1: The Grass Mat

Before the yard, there was sunlight.

Zeth remembered it in pieces, never as a whole thing.

His mother's laugh first. Warm, sudden, filling rooms before she entered them. Then his father's hand over his, guiding a small screwdriver into the back of a toy radio Zeth had already broken twice. A house with polished floors. A swimming pool he was not allowed to run around. The smell of his father's shirts when Menzi Mnguni lifted him from the couch and carried him half-asleep past adult voices.

In those memories, everyone still had time.

Then the light changed.

Camera flashes. A gate closing. His father on television, but not the way fathers were supposed to be on television. Menzi's face looked too still under the headline. Diego Duma's voice came from somewhere behind glass, smooth one moment and sharp the next. Zeth remembered his father's hand striking a desk, not hard enough to break it, but hard enough to make the little boy in the hallway stop breathing.

Then his mother crying without sound.

Then men at the house.

Then a woman's hand pulling him back from a doorway.

Then nothing kind.

The nothing became whistles.

Academy mornings. Grey tracksuits. Cold water on his face before sunrise. Beds folded tight enough for inspection. Shoes in a line. Boys who learned not to cry because crying made the instructors patient, and patient instructors were worse than angry ones. A bell at five. Running before breakfast. Coding after homework. Fighting drills in a hall that smelled of floor polish and old sweat.

"Again, Mnguni."

He remembered falling.

"Again."

He remembered getting up.

"Again."

Zeth opened his eyes.

The sky above him was white-blue and too wide. A fly worried the air near his ear. Somewhere beyond the wall a taxi hooted twice, a sharp township complaint that needed no translation. He was lying on a grass mat in KB's front yard with his phone held above his face, the appointment email glowing like it had personally come to collect him.

Apex Sentinel Systems Internship Appointment

He had read the subject line so many times it had stopped looking like English.

The yard around him looked like three lives had crashed into one another and decided to stay. The house was one of the older Soweto houses, the bigger apartheid-era kind with thick walls, a low front fence, and rooms added over time by people who did not wait for permission to need space. It was not pretty, but it stood with a stubborn chest-out dignity, like an old woman at a funeral refusing to sit.

The front yard was half home, half workshop. A strip of tired grass survived near the washing line. The rest was hard-packed earth, oil stains, bricks, a cracked basin full of bolts, and two tyres leaning against the wall like they were also waiting for work. Delivery bikes crouched near the side gate. One had its seat off. Another wore a taped-up mirror. A spanner lay in the dust beside a child's plastic sandal.

And behind all of it, clean enough to look rude, sat the white Polo Vivo.

Freshly washed. Bonnet still not perfectly aligned. New wipers. Polished headlights. Tyres blacked. The car looked like it had been pulled from a better neighbourhood and forced to learn humility overnight.

Zeth lowered the phone.

KB came around the Polo with an open quart in one hand and a rag in the other. His T-shirt was dark with sweat down the chest. Grease lived under his nails. He had the walk of a man who had been busy since morning and had already decided to call that a personality.

He pushed the bottle toward Zeth's face.

"My man, they'll rescind their offer if you keep staring at that email like it owes you damages."

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

"That is why I'm not saying drink. I'm saying smell success."

"Success smells like warm beer?"

"In Soweto? Sometimes." KB wiped his hands on the rag, then reached into his pocket and threw the keys at him. "Ayi, isilungile, ntwana."

Zeth caught them against his chest.

For a second he did not move.

KB dropped onto the grass beside him, not lying on the mat but close enough to claim it. He stretched out with a groan, bottle resting on his stomach, eyes closed like a man who had just completed open-heart surgery instead of arguing with a starter motor.

"Don't make that face," KB said.

"What face?"

"That face you make when somebody loves you and you start calculating tax."

Zeth sat up. The Polo keys were warm in his palm. The plastic tag was still on them, a cheap blue thing with ZETH written in black marker. Behind the car, one of KB's drivers was rinsing mud off a silver Corolla. A delivery rider sat on an upside-down crate, eating kota with both hands and watching them like this was better than television.

"I get your insistence in paying my rent as the MD," Zeth said, turning the keys over, "but I haven't contributed much since that thirty grand I gave you four years ago. Now this car as well. I feel like I'm taking too much from the business."

KB opened one eye.

"The MD?"

"That's what you call yourself."

"Because I am."

"Of a business whose office is your gogo's yard."

"Apple started in a garage."

"You don't own a garage."

"That's why we are better. We started outside."

Zeth tried not to smile and failed.

KB sat up, serious now, or at least serious enough for KB. "Listen here. There is no this business without you."

"There is."

"There isn't."

"You built it."

"With what? Hopes? Prayer? My good looks?" KB pointed the quart at him. "That skorokoro came because you saved your bursary money like a madman. Everybody else at res was buying sneakers and dating girls with expensive hair. You came here December with thirty thousand rand and a face like you were committing fraud."

"It was not thirty. It was twenty-eight and change."

"You see? Witchcraft. Who remembers change from four years ago?"

"People who don't have money."

KB laughed once, then shook his head. "You gave me a start, Z. When I had nothing. You believed before there was something to believe in. So don't come here with this thing of 'I haven't contributed'. Awukho uChristmas ngaphandle kwe-Ultra Mel. You understand?"

Zeth stared at him.

"Did you just compare me to custard?"

"The important custard. The one that makes poor December look middle class."

The delivery rider on the crate choked on his kota.

Zeth looked away before the smile became something softer. KB saw too much when he wanted to. He had always seen too much. In high school, when the academy locked boys into silence and called it discipline, KB had been the first person outside those gates who looked at Zeth and said, "You're hungry," instead of "You're strong."

Gogo had fed him before asking his surname.

That had been the beginning of family.

A voice floated over the fence from the street.

"Awu, Zeth. Wena ngeke uhambe ungavalelisanga?"

Zeth closed his eyes.

KB's grin arrived before Zeth opened them.

Thobile Mathonsi stood on the pavement beyond the short fence, one hand on her hip, the other holding a plastic bag from the spaza. Everybody called her Thobi when they wanted sweetness and Mathobi when they wanted to start nonsense. She was three years older than Zeth and had the calm danger of a woman who knew exactly when men were lying, especially when the man was Zeth.

Her hair was tied up in a scarf. Gold hoops caught the sun when she tilted her head. She was not dressed for anyone, which somehow made it worse.

Zeth lifted himself onto one elbow.

"Lutho, sthandwa sami. Ngisendleleni nje. Ungibona ngilinde lesi dakwa silale so he won't cry when I leave."

KB stood so quickly beer sloshed over his fingers.

"Mathobi, Thoby, iyahamba lenyoni yakho," he called, stepping over Zeth's legs. "Uzosala nami."

Zeth grabbed for the bottle before it spilled on the mat. KB slapped his hand away, then used the same hand to push Zeth's shoulder.

"Don't listen to this one," KB told her. "He has been emotional the whole day. Even the car started crying."

Thobile leaned her forearms on the fence. "The car is too clean for him."

"Thank you," KB said. "I told him."

Zeth stood and dusted grass from the back of his jeans. "You both done?"

"Never," Thobile said.

There had been a time when he would have walked straight to the fence and tried to turn her teasing into a promise. Eighteen, still in matric, already too serious for his own face. Thobile had been the first woman to make him feel seen as a man and young as a boy in the same breath. He had mistaken that for forever with the confidence only a wounded teenager could have.

He had once bought a toy ring from a street vendor and presented it to her behind the spaza after two ciders.

She had laughed so hard she cried, then kissed his forehead and told him to go pass mathematics.

At the time, it had felt like cruelty.

Later he understood it was mercy. Thobile had a child already. A life already. Wounds already. She had told him once, drunk and honest in the back seat of the first skorokoro, that she was not going to be the woman who took a boy with a future and made him small.

Zeth had argued.

Zeth had argued for years.

Eventually he stopped arguing and accepted the smaller thing she allowed: friendship, heat when both of them were lonely, laughter over walls, and the strange tenderness of people who never became what they almost were.

"So you are really leaving us for town?" Thobile asked.

"Maboneng is not overseas."

"For people with rent, it is overseas."

KB nodded. "This one has parking underground now. Next week he'll speak through the nose."

"I already speak through the nose," Zeth said.

"No, you speak like a scholarship." KB pointed at him. "Different disease."

Thobile laughed. Zeth let the sound land where it wanted.

Across the street, a man in blue overalls shouted at a teenager for leaning on his gate. Somewhere a woman complained that KB's boys had left oil water running toward her side. KB turned his head and shouted back that the oil was older than her marriage and she must not start. The delivery rider abandoned his kota to move a bike before the argument became evidence.

Then a small boy kicked a ball under the Polo.

Everybody froze.

KB turned slowly.

"Whose child is this?"

The boy pointed down the road and prepared to deny his own name.

Zeth crouched, reached under the car, and rolled the ball back. "Next time aim for the Corolla."

"Why the Corolla?" the driver asked.

"It has suffered before."

"This is why we don't miss you," KB said, but he was smiling.

The neighbourhood rearranged itself around the moment. The woman at the gate kept complaining but softer. The boy ran. The rider moved the bike. Thobile checked something in her plastic bag and looked at Zeth again.

"Come say bye properly later," she said.

KB made a wounded noise. "Properly?"

"Not you."

"I am also leaving emotionally."

"You are going nowhere, Kabelo."

"Exactly. That is why I need comfort."

Thobile rolled her eyes and began walking. After three steps she looked back at Zeth. "Don't let them make you boring there."

The words caught him off guard.

"I'm already boring."

"No," she said. "You are just scared people will notice you're not."

Then she was gone, plastic bag swinging against her thigh.

KB watched Zeth watching her.

"Ayi," he said softly. "That one will make you write poetry and lose weight."

"Shut up."

"You see? Already defensive. Poetry loading."

Zeth threw the rag at him.

Inside the house, Gogo's room was dim and smelled of camphor cream, sunlight on blankets, and the tea she never finished while it was hot. The television played low in the corner with the volume nearly off. A newsreader moved her mouth above captions about politics, secrecy, and some minister denying something with the confidence of a person who had practised in a mirror.

Gogo lay propped against pillows, smaller than Zeth wanted her to be. Her eyes, though, were still sharp enough to search him.

"Udlile?" she asked.

Zeth smiled. "Yebo, Gogo."

"Liar."

KB, behind him, clicked his tongue. "Hayi, Zethi Selebi. 'My hands are clean,' stomach empty, face guilty. This is why you're a hacker, ntwana. In real life you can't lie."

Gogo ignored him. "Come here."

Zeth went to the side of the bed and bent down. Her hand came up slowly to his cheek. It was dry and warm. For a moment he was not twenty-one. He was fourteen, standing in this same room with academy bruises hidden under his shirt, pretending he had only come because KB was forcing him to watch a movie.

Gogo had looked at him once and known.

Not everything. Just enough.

"You will call," she said.

"I will."

"Not when you need something. Just call."

"I promise."

"And eat."

"I promise."

"And don't fight at work."

KB laughed. "Hawu, Gogo, it's an office."

She looked past Zeth. "A fool with a swivel chair is still a fool. He just hurts you with paperwork."

KB lifted both hands. "Yoh. HR is not ready for you."

Gogo's thumb moved once across Zeth's cheek. "Your mother would be proud."

The room went quiet in a way that had weight.

Zeth swallowed. "You think?"

Gogo's eyes softened, but not with pity. She had never given him pity. Pity was for strangers and funerals. Gogo gave instruction.

"I know."

He hugged her carefully because her bones felt too close to the surface now. She held him with surprising strength for three breaths, maybe four. Then she tapped his back.

"Go. Before this one cries outside and blames dust."

KB made a sound from the doorway. "My sinuses are private."

Outside, the sun had shifted. The Polo looked even whiter, the yard even dirtier around it. Zeth put his bags in the boot: laptop, clothes, two pairs of shoes, a small box of documents, and the few personal things he did not trust anyone else to move.

KB walked around the car again, checking things he had already checked.

"Oil is fine. Water is fine. Tyres are fine. If it makes that sound when you turn left, ignore it."

"What sound?"

"Exactly."

"KB."

"It's character. All cars need character."

Zeth closed the boot. For a moment neither of them joked.

KB held out his hand. Zeth took it. The handshake became a pull, then a hug, hard and long. KB smelled of grease, beer, sun, and home.

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

"I'm going for an internship, not prison."

"Same thing if you let rich people talk too much."

Zeth laughed against him.

KB pulled back first and slapped his chest. "I'll come check you next Saturday. Bottle of gin. Not that expensive one you pretend to like. Real gin."

"There is no real gin in a plastic bottle."

"There is if real men are drinking it."

"You are going to embarrass me in my new building."

"That's the point. People must know you have relatives."

Zeth looked at the house, the yard, the bikes, the driver rinsing the Corolla again for no reason, the delivery rider licking sauce off his thumb, the window behind which Gogo was probably pretending not to watch him leave.

He had been taken from a house once.

This time he was leaving one by choice.

It felt worse in a way he did not know how to explain.

He got into the Polo. The seat was too clean. The steering wheel still had that second-hand shine from whatever KB had wiped it with. When he turned the key, the engine caught after one uncertain cough.

KB pointed at the bonnet. "Character."

Zeth shook his head and reversed slowly out of the yard.

At the gate he stopped.

KB lifted the quart in salute.

Zeth lifted the keys, realised that made no sense because he was driving, and lifted his hand instead.

Then he went.

Soweto moved around him in late-afternoon layers: boys with school-holiday dust on their legs, women carrying plastic chairs, men under car bonnets, music from somewhere unseen, smoke from meat, sunlight caught in satellite dishes. At a stop street, he saw a father balancing a toddler on his hip while arguing with a mechanic. The image struck too close to something old. For half a second the mechanic's blue overalls became his father's white shirt. The toddler's hand became his own.

Then a taxi hooted behind him and the memory broke.

"Sharp, sharp," Zeth muttered, and drove.

By the time he reached Maboneng, the city had changed its accent. Buildings stood closer together. Art on walls. People on pavements with bags, phones, cigarettes, plans. Security guards at entrances. Restaurants pretending not to be expensive. The kind of young people who looked like they had chosen themselves carefully before leaving the house.

His apartment building's basement smelled of concrete, damp, and car exhaust. The Polo's headlights slid over painted numbers until he found his parking bay. He sat there after switching off the engine, listening to it tick itself quiet.

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

His phone lit up.

KB: Don't scratch my car.

Another message followed.

KB: Your car.

Another.

KB: But don't scratch it.

Zeth smiled in the dark.

In the lift, a woman with red braids and a laundry basket looked at him, then at the bags by his feet, then back at him.

"Moving in?"

"Trying."

"This building tests people."

"I test well."

She smiled. "We'll see."

On the next floor, two women got in laughing, smelling of perfume and outside. One looked him up and down without shame. 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," Zeth said. "I still trust machines."

"Shame."

"Pray for me."

"We don't pray for handsome men in this building. It makes them worse."

That made them laugh. The red-braided woman hid her smile in the laundry basket. Zeth looked at the lift numbers and tried not to look as pleased as he felt.

His apartment was small enough that the door nearly introduced you to the whole place at once. Kitchenette to the left. Bathroom straight ahead. Living room with a two-seater couch that KB had called "executive" because one leg had been fixed with a brick. A mattress leaned against the wall, still wrapped in plastic. Boxes waited with the patience of unpaid accounts.

Zeth dropped his bags.

He meant to unpack.

He meant to shower.

He meant to iron his shirt for the morning, check the route to Apex again, charge his laptop, call Gogo like he had promised, and maybe message Thobile something clever enough to prove he was not thinking about her.

Instead he sat on the two-seater couch.

Then he leaned back.

Then the room shifted sideways and sleep took him without asking.

His phone slid from his hand onto his chest, screen still open to the appointment email.

Outside, Maboneng kept moving.

Inside, Zeth slept under the glow of the future, too tired to see the past moving toward him.