The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

Author:Namwali Serpell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2019-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

Isabella Corsale, pallid, skittish and tense, strode through the house in a wedding dress. She had found it in the back of her mother’s closet, behind the rainbow of boubous that Sibilla always wore to cover her hair. Isa had tried the dress on immediately, batting at the layers of frangible lace, holding her breath to zip it over her ribcage, plucking at the loose shoulders and rotating the twisted sleeves. It was perfect. She was rustling down the corridor to examine it in the full-length mirror in her room when a cleared throat stopped her in her tracks. She turned towards the open door of the study.

‘The dress itself is good,’ said her father, crossing his arms over his round belly so that his shoulders were level with his earlobes. ‘Whether it suits you is another question altogether.’

It looked suspiciously like her father had been lying in wait for her. He was sitting in his study, but his chair faced the open door to the corridor, his haunches spilling out on either side of his seat, a fat ankle resting on his knee. Isa looked past him into the room. No books, no shelves, no desk for the chair. The only other piece of furniture in there was the sunken, rumpled bed where he lay from morning to night, sipping from his stein, swallowing his daily river of gin only to piss it out again in the loo next door.

Sometimes, that river would return more abruptly, in a spastic waterfall from his mouth that Simon would have to mop up. This was technically an inside-the-house job and should have fallen to Enela. But, ‘Awe. Nakana. I’ve refused,’ the old maid would protest like a spoiled child, unwilling to touch any part of a muzungu who no longer bothered with bathing and reeked of fermented sugars. That smell lingered in the threshold now, hanging in the air with his pronouncements.

‘This dress looks too bright,’ he mused. ‘Is white even a suitable colour for you?’

‘Why are you so full of poison?’ Isa cried, then turned and swept off down the corridor.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.