The Death of Rex Nhongo by C.B. George Read Free Book Online Page A

crying and self-medicating with a combination of alcohol and speed. It worked well enough.
    April and Jerry had met at an end-of-year party in student digs on Trumpington Street. The first moment she saw him, she knew he had nothing to do with the university. He was wearing a T-shirt, jeans and Converse, and his hair was cropped to the same length as his beard. But it wasn’t his appearance that gave the game away so much as the self-evident lack of artifice behind it. He laughed openly and often, and as she watched him in conversation with her friends and acquaintances, he appeared genuinely to be listening to what they said.
    Later, when she was one bottle of rosé and a gram to the good, she spotted him dancing in the living room. Again, everything about him spoke of a life outside the university. While the anthropology students danced wildly, indulging some shamanic ceremony of ritual abandon, Jerry moved in a rhythmical but conservative white-boy shuffle—the mark of someone who had been in environments (nightclubs, for example) with people who actually knew how to dance. Fueled by booze and amphet­amines, April shimmied towards him and they shuffled together, she shielding any embarrassment by occasionally mimicking the more outrageous moves of her peers. At one point, he caught her round the waist and asked her what she did. She told him she’d just finished her master’s, that she had a job to go to at Oxfam. He raised his eyebrows as if he’d misheard, then shouted in her ear, “You don’t look like a student.” He told her he was a nurse. “Just qualified,” he shouted.
    “That makes two of us,” she shouted back.
    They left together and went back to hers. She was more fucked than she’d realized and threw up on the way. She told him he should go home and she’d be fine, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He sat her up in bed and she watched the room spin while he made coffee. They talked into the small hours, a conversation neither of them remembered.
    She woke up early to find him sleeping next to her. They were both still fully dressed. Her throat was parched and she was too hot. She drank a glass of water, brushed her teeth and stripped to her underwear. She felt unbearably lonely and pushed herself against him until he woke up. They had sex. Afterwards, he made more coffee and they sat up in bed, sharing their way through his last three cigarettes.
    She said, “You don’t want to get involved with me. I’m a fuck-up.”
    “Do you want a second opinion?” he asked. “You know I’m a qualified medical professional, right?”
    She told him all about Professor St. John Vaughan, his most celebrated papers, his pioneering work and horrific experiences in Darfur. Jerry listened and nodded and said, “Sounds like an impressive guy.” Then, “But you knew he was married, right?”
    “Yeah,” April said. “I knew.”
    “So why did you keep doing it?”
    “I don’t know. I didn’t think about it,” April said. Then, “The sex. It was just…it just felt like ascension.”
    Jerry snorted with laughter and pulled on his cigarette. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “If you ever get another boyfriend, don’t tell him that!”
    April laughed, too, and took the cigarette. “No,” she said.
    As it turned out she never did get another boyfriend.

11
    A pril hurried out of the embassy into the car park. She was running late. She’d forgotten that Jerry had taken their car to the clinic again, so she hadn’t thought to book a driver, and she cursed her husband under her breath (since she wasn’t in front of the mirror). She sympathized with Jerry’s need to work, of course she did, and she was privately impressed with the get-up-and-go that had made him take on something so challenging for no recompense. Nonetheless, the fact was that she was the one with the salary and, therefore, surely the needs of her job had to come first. Had Jerry even considered the amount of petrol required to drive their