Like after a prairie fire… It seems like the end of the world. The earth is scorched and black and everything green is gone. But after the burning, the soil is richer, and new things can grow… People are like that, too, you know. They start over. They find a way.
— Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere.

 

I shouldn’t tell you that the girl was still alive when they left her in that building thinking she was dead. I don’t want you to hate them before you get to hear the whole story. I don’t want you judging them before you’ve come to understand why I think they decided that leaving her there was the better option. It’s been so many years I doubt it would make much difference what you think. You’re probably not even going to hear the story until someone tells you about it. You’ll be asleep when it’s hot.

I wish I could have asked them if they knew. If they knew at the time that she was alive. I don’t think that it would have made any difference if they had known. The aim was to kill her after all. Why else would they start the fire, if not to cover their misdeeds? They felt they would return from this. They knew they would return from this. She would die and her memory would live on. They could live with that. Their fears and regrets would not matter in the grander scheme of things. They would grieve with everyone else, convincing themselves that they had to do what needed to be done until they believed it. Until what they did became but small details to flip around and argue about at reunions or when they bumped into each other at the supermarket.

No one would ask why they suddenly stopped hanging out. Why they couldn’t stand the sight of me. Why they never came around our house. Why as the years progressed, they took up positions of power none of them ever showed any interest in when they were younger. They were her friends, the townspeople would say. They are grieving. They are growing. When you grow up, your dreams change. Your goals shift. You become an adult making adult decisions.

They would never know how wrong they were. The only person who would know the truth would be dead. And dead girls cannot speak. And those who speak on their behalf are gagged and shipped off to live their lives in asylums where these truths blur with the medication stuffed into their system until even they believe they’ve lost their mind.

From Plaintiff’s Exhibit A3/7:
Miss F Phewa, Testimony: A Late Night Conversation
Transcript from Salem Hills Syndicated Studios

***

It is almost half past ten in the evening when Fikile arrives at the studio and closes the door to the booth like she isn’t already late. The debriefing and practice run of the show was meant to start at ten. Placing her flask gently on the table, she smiles at her producer behind the glass and collects her bearings. It has been a long time since she’s done this; and to be honest, she did not think she would ever return. This is not where she imagined she would be at this point in her life. It is almost sad that she would be back at a place she willingly chose to walk away from. It’s almost as if she never left. It is almost sad indeed, that her life has become something almost operatic—regret upon regret, drowned down by the bittersweet stench of nostalgia.

She opens her flask and pours the hot beverage into a separate cup and motions for the producer to cue her in. He knows better than to question her. The last time she was on radio was when she did her farewell show — it was one of those afternoon drive shows where people religiously tuned in and would call to talk about cumbersome things that bothered them, the basic and the mundane, or to let her know how things were going. Her lonely heart had been so embedded in the show that at times she forgot that she was at work. That was how the show maintained its longevity, cementing her in radio history as the most awarded journalist and presenter to ever grace the station. She made the listeners comfortable. They spoke to her the way they would a friend, and she believed that there could be a possibility that the person behind the phone would be a friend to her. God knew how much she needed those. All she had to do was open the phone lines and say the magic words: Friends, family, and folks at home, you’re live with Fikile. What’s on your mind? Talk to me. And the lines would explode with chatter, ratings skyrocketing.

Her producer this time around is a young thing fresh out of college, with big ideas and a great wave of optimism about him. I think his name is Allen, Earl, or something along those lines. She’s only met with him a couple of times and nothing about him inspired her to remember his name. As intelligent as he appears to be, he is unfortunately forgettable. It’s almost a funny story, how he landed this job. How he got to actually be a producer for a midnight show. But now is not the time for that. Perhaps as their relationship progresses from producer and presenter to something personal, he would share these events just as he had done when he fought to have her on his radio show.

He’d had to be very persuasive and cunning, a diva that he was, in order to get the Queen of Radio out of her retirement. She was a nice person who could see a vision come to life with very few words spoken. However, it took more from him to convince her this time around because she truly believed she was done with the industry. After all the years she’d dedicated to the station, it was shameful that she had nothing to show for it. Fame only did so much to a person, for a person — she had written this in the first pages of the manuscript for her memoir that would never be published.

He had originally pitched an idea for a late-night confessions show whereby people would anonymously call in and speak about their deepest desires, sexual fantasies, and secrets. It was something that could work, and she understood where he got this idea from. It hasn’t been done in the country and many people — the night shift workers burning the midnight oil, the insomniacs, in fact, all the people — are starving for something like this. But she had another story to tell. It had been gnawing at her for almost forty years. It had to be told. He’d almost laughed at her when she convinced him out of his initial idea.

“A melodrama?” he simply asked, unsure how he would return to the bosses with this. An ever-changing series of narratives, she told him. Stories about the discarded, the outcasts, and the forgotten. She told him that the people you rarely ever give yourself time to see are the ones with the best stories to tell.
“People are stories in motion, darling,” she’d said to him then. “With this kind of platform, we could allow them to give themselves fully to us, to open themselves and allow their stories to be told.”

Aloe, yes, that’s his name, knew that he’d lost this fight before it even began. The motivation behind her idea, she told him, had somehow been birthed after she read Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It reignited something inside her, this deep and somewhat forgotten need to see someone she had lost many years before and was hoping to see again. A yearning to revisit a memory of all those she’d lost at the hands of time and the unforgiving grasps of age, whose story she was hoping to get out there.

“An injustice was done, Allen, many years ago. It has gone unresolved for so long, it burdens me. And I am not long for this world.”

It was something that, when she finally thought about it, should not have actually gone unnoticed like that. It interrogated the justice system of not just the town she lived in, but the country as a whole. It put many people’s complicity to question, even her own family. It is appalling how things get buried and disappear when people do not want to notice them, when they do not want to talk about them. That was the story.
“You see, Allen—”
“Aloe.”
“Yes, sorry Aloe. This is way better than sex-deprived housewives confessing how they stepped out of their marriages and slept with the pool boy. Or sexual deviants talking to each other over me like I’m just some mouthpiece for their explicit and dark secrets. This is about telling people the truth about what happened in Greatleaf.”

He wasn’t truly convinced when she told him about her own convictions, at least before he did some research of his own. He did not understand or see how something like this would grab people and to be honest, the idea was somewhat underwhelming. It wasn’t something he saw bringing in any ratings or listenership. He was already at the mercy of people he did not know, beyond his own grasp with the show airing at midnight. The numbers were against him. This was supposed to be his first big gig. Before he was allowed to produce this show, he had been working as a junior content producer — a fancy title that allowed him to do very little content producing. He was a skivvy for the big guys who’d given him the job. Who, like Fikile, would call him by a different name every time, and shut down every idea or suggestion he proposed only for him to find out at later meetings that they’d taken it up and claimed it as their own. None of the people in the room saw or heard him unless it benefited them. How he even got to produce for this slot was truly a story.

Sitting here now he thinks about the coddling and grovelling he had to do to get the big guys to give him this chance, even more so after he told them that he would like to bring back a radio veteran to head up said late-night show. They’d given him just about enough rope for him to hang himself and rid themselves of him. He knows that this is his one and only chance. Aloe believed in the weight Fikile Phewa’s name carried. She’s the best thing to happen to this station.

A massive name in the South African entertainment industry. He had grown up with his mother listening to her, the two of them sitting together after he got back from school and listening in on her show, dancing to the tunes she had on her playlist. It was something like religion, how they lost themselves in her voice, in this world she created for them. It was like, despite knowing that they did not have much, they had each other, and they had her. It helped them so much that she acknowledged all her fans as people, and would instantly recognise the voices of her loyal callers and start conversations with them like she wasn’t pressed for time or ratings. This woman carried the station on her back and they did nothing to fight for her when she stopped.

Despite his own reservations, Aloe knew the amount of respect she commanded and believed that all it would take was just one show, one person listening in and sharing with their friends that she was back and this segment would pick up like no other late-night show has ever done. It was why it was easy for him to fight for her reinstatement. He believed in her. He was willing to put his own doubts aside and the security of his job and his career on the line for her. It would be some time and a couple of episodes later that this young man would realise that it was never just about justice. The research he’d done would lead him to some long-forgotten small town with its fortress of secrets and a huge wall of trust issues and technicality risen all the way to the sky so much that no one would answer his calls or even respond to his emails enquiring more about the source of this brilliant woman’s dedication to a story other people would rather leave where it was, dead, buried and forgotten.

“Memory,” Fikile says to no one.
Aloe looks up at her from where he’s sitting. The clock just a few minutes before quarter-past-eleven. They are set to start the show at exactly midnight and he can feel the lines buzzing with anticipation — midnight listeners can only take so much of non-stop tunes before the next show began.
“That word is important in many of the stories that will be told here. That should be told here. The testimony of the truths, ugly and bare.”
“Is this about Greatleaf?”
“Yes, and no,” Fikile says softly, unsure why she doesn’t sound convinced.
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I am an old woman who’s carried this with me for forty years. I may have been silent when it happened, but I will not be anymore.”
“Fikile, we’re not even sure that anyone in Greatleaf will be listening,” Aloe says, “What you hope to do not only questions one’s ability to return to a traumatic past, you’re forcing an entire town to confront their sins. These people are probably dead already.”

It’s true. Fikile may have not given Aloe that much to work with, but her passionate feelings about this place and how moved she was to unburden herself of something that happened sparked something in him — a journalistic curiosity that he felt was fleeting each and every day he spent in those board meetings being ignored and spoken over. He knew without a doubt that there was a story there that was bursting at the seams of this secretive town, and even though she appeared to have front row access to it, she would need help from him as her producer to back it up with some research and facts should she face possible threats of silencing and censorship from external factors.

There was something that people did not want known about what happened in Greatleaf, and she was willing to put her own life on the line for it. Overtime he realised that it wasn’t his begging and dedication to having her return to radio that made her agree to doing the show with him. She had a score to settle. She had stories to tell, and while he wasn’t at all convinced where this would lead them, he wanted to help.

Aloe does not know how wrong he is as he flips through his folders preparing for when the clock strikes twelve, and the magic begins. Greatleaf is a town well-named. It never sleeps. The townspeople know a thing or two about rebirths. About death. About hitting rock bottom. This, like many other things they will not tell you when you’re not native to the town, is a kind of defining quality that many of the folk there possess. It’s intrinsic, it defines them. They survive danger because they anticipate it, hence they know how to evade it when it arises and how to move on from it in the unfortunate exception that they need to succumb to it.

Founded on the notion of immortality as likened to the seasons’ changes, in Greatleaf the body is merely a vessel for a bigger picture, a tool for change, able to rise when it withers and falls, and rise again. And within it exists but a yielding soul that hungers for longevity, that lives on and on defying what little rules that having been of a world of Man attempts to infringe upon it. This is why Fikile always returns to that place no matter how long she’s been away. The leaf may fall, but never so far from the tree that it will not be reabsorbed.

Superintendent Tumisho Bogatshu sits in his office that smells of weeks-old sandwich and stale coffee at the police station, his radio tuned in on a frequency he’s never bothered to flip through before. This is it, he thinks. This is how it ends. A man who’s done quite a lot to gain very little, Bogatshu has always thirsted for the day when the bell would toll and his enemies would know how it feels to suffer like he has. He opens the top drawer under his desk and retrieves a bottle of brandy and takes a long swig. This is how it ends.

In another part of town, listening in on the same station from her laptop, is the Editor-in-Chief of the local newspaper. Next to a pile of article samples and proposals sits a folder she’s refused to look at since her friend brought it to her. Iris Green has always known that this day would come and after spending most of her adult life looking over her shoulder, she figured by the time it did come, she would long be dead. Never in her wildest thoughts did she expect that she, Tumi and Thami would all be alive when this monster reared its head again. That is why she had Thami draw up the lawsuit prematurely, and hoped that they need not use it. She gets up from her chair and paces the floor for stretched minutes, her heart refusing to subside until she stops. Finally resting, she stands by the window behind her desk and locks eyes with someone she didn’t think she would in the building across her own, and her resolve drops. This is really happening, she thinks, hoping they are still as telepathically linked as they were when they were teenagers. He smirks apologetically, as though answering her.

Mayor Thami Procter has done his part. He thinks this as he watches Iris pace about her office. Pathetic. Had he known the toll they would place on him, he would have chosen other people for the task. He knows that she’s doing the same thing Tumisho probably is, and is just as worried about the radio broadcast that’s set to air this evening. He needs to wrap this up. But for now, he’s done his part. He plays and replays this thought until he believes it.

Fikile moves the microphone towards her as Aloe cues her in, signalling her to get ready to do her thing. He sighs, a little excited to be where he is for the first time in this capacity. The lights dim and the ON AIR sign turns to red. You’ve got this, Aloe mouths to her. She knows, and she nods in agreement, almost disbelieving that she is truly doing this.

Fikile takes another swig of her lemongrass tea, sighs and whispers softly into the mic, “It all started with a fire…”

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Jacob Hodgson on Unsplash