From the Bookshelf of Around the World in 80 Books…

When he had first seen the hairy girl spin in the Signora’s salon, he had felt his ribs stretch near to splintering. ... And when she stopped and her hair kept going, when it bound her so tight that it smothered her, when his brother cut her loose and raised her like Lazarus from his bindings, and when he himself wiped the blood from her back –then Federico Corsale knew faith again. It flooded him now, as he reached the top of a hill, and saw a thread of her hair vanish under the door of an old hunting cabin.

She spread the coat out and sat, waiting for Federico to stop talking. Finally, he looked at her.

She looked at him. Her hair trembled.

As is usual for the first time between a man and a woman, the woman was dissatisfied, the man satisfied too soon. Federico rolled onto his back. Sibilla’s hand was still on his wrist and his pulse ticked faintly, erratically, like cooling metal. They lay there for a while on her mother’s coat, in the seep of his semen and the creep of the gloaming, looking up at the trees above nuzzling their leafy heads.

‘Try again?’ she whispered, and he did.

Ronald wondered what Agnes would think if she could see these young boys threading around the dusty vehicles, forming a shifting tangle of humans and things. He looked out of his open window at the sights of almost-home: flame trees competing with jacarandas and bougainvillea for beauty. Flashes of brown skin that made him want to jump out and walk among the people, descend into that warm bath of personhood. And the sun! The sun in its constancy, hot and high in the sky, neither anticipated nor avoided. Just there, not even worth discussing.

A few weeks later, Matha was in a lean-to behind the Matero house, hunched over the book Ba Nkoloso had given her. The pages were polkadotted with mould and barely legible where his scrawled marginalia had spread like weeds over the text. On the floor before her were some basic household items: a glass bottle, a polishing cloth, a small plastic bottle. Matthias slunk around purring, trying to distract her. The sun was setting, making the lean-to glow red. Matha sat in that emerging emergency light, learning how to make a Molotov cocktail. The instructions were simple –something breakable plus something flammable plus something combustible…

She heard a honk. She covered the book and the items with a chitenge and stood up, brushing the dirt from the seat of her black skirt. She let herself out and locked up. Ba Nkoloso’s pickup truck was wheezing at the back gate, his scattertoothed grin hovering in the driver’s window. Matha climbed into the bed of the pickup, joining the other four UNIP Youth cadets there –Bambo Miti, Fortunate Nkoloso, Reuben Simwinga and Godfrey Mwango. They were wearing all black, too, and sipping Mosi from bottles, which they raised in greeting.