Françoise smooths down her hair and her skirt as she waits for the manager of the Spar. Things are beginning to return to some sort of normality. She waits on a plastic chair outside his office. She watches him drink a Coke, make a phone call, chat to customers, scratch his balls, go to the toilet, come back. When he finally beckons her in an hour has passed. When he asks her why she left she hesitates.
“A family emergency,” she explains, looking at the clock above his head. Dudu will be getting home soon. The manager says nothing. “A death,” Françoise adds.
“It’s always a death, then you people need money for the funeral.” He is bored, impatient. “You can come back. You were a reliable girl before you left. Not as stupid as some of them.” He doesn’t even look at her. “But no more deaths. Understood?” Then, “Are you legal?” Then, “Never mind.”
By the time she is back out on the street, dusk is falling. Instead of heading down to the main road to go back to their room, Françoise turns left and walks up the road towards the mountain and Timothy’s block of flats. She is nervous. He might not want to see her. What will she say? What will he do? What if Dudu . . .?
She feels her mind racing, gathering speed, exploding through the sound barrier. Suddenly she is floating.
A lightness fills her. She closes her eyes and sways on the hot tar.
There are the pale blue walls of the Catholic church on Isabano Street in Gisenyi. There are the flamboyant trees filled with red blossom. It is late in the dry season. There are the nuns walking in a row, their faces black against the white rims of their habits. The church bell is ringing for Mass. She looks down at her shoes, so polished, so shiny; she can see her ten-year-old face in them. She smiles. Her friend runs across the road laughing to point at the nun in front of them. She has her habit hooked up in her large white underpants. They puff out like a cotton balloon.
Then she hears Dudu’s voice behind her. “Wait for me. Papa says you have to take care of me.”
Her eyes open. She takes a deep breath and enters the bookstore where Timothy works. It is nearly closing time. The student behind the counter tells her, “Timothy is away but you can leave a message.” She hesitates then shakes her head.
“No. I will come back.”
He’s gone. She’s too late. Dudu has ruined it for her again.
“Didn’t say where he went,” the student calls after her. “And I’m afraid I can’t give out personal numbers.”
When she is outside the store she keeps walking up the road towards his flat. By the time she gets to the gate to his complex Dudu has caught up with her. She is still in her netball clothes.
“You’re looking for him, aren’t you?” says Dudu.
“None of your business.” Françoise senses someone watching them from across the street. But when she turns there is no one.
“What is it?” asks Dudu.
“Nothing,” says Françoise. “Go home.” Dudu looks crestfallen. “Here,” says Françoise and fishes in her pocket for money, “buy a Coke.”
“He’s not worth it,” is Dudu’s parting shot. Inside she is jealous and scared that Françoise has found someone who will separate them at last.
Stella
On Tuesday afternoon, without knowing it, Stella passes Françoise in the street on her way from Verve magazine. Françoise is walking to work at the Spar. Stella is on her way to pick up her car from the garage so that she can drive to her mother’s house in Ashville – the house she still hasn’t put on the market two years after her mother’s death. The mechanics have fixed the alternator, and assure her that her Corsa won’t break down.
“You’ve got a cellphone?”
“Yes,” she calls back, nearly reversing into a lamppost.
Stella has taken the rest of the week off work to research her article. “I have lined up dates,” she told Winter.
“What? During work?”
“Some of them can only make it during business hours. There’s a married man.”
“Good, that’s good, for the article, I mean,” says Winter.
Stella had sat at home in Woodstock trying to will words on to a page. By day two she couldn’t bear it. She still hadn’t heard from Timothy, her housemate was away on business; she stayed up all night walking around the house, listening in case someone was trying to break in.
On the road to Ashville, Stella pushes the CD into the player. Calming music fills the car. “Still your neurotic mind.” The Indian guru repeats the mantras. His mesmerising voice floats in the thick heat. But Stella can’t relax. She switches the meditation CD off and checks her cellphone again. Still no word from Timothy.
For a crazy moment as she drives out of town she thinks she might find him sitting in the hammock waiting for her on the stoep in Ashville. In the past he would often arrive at her mother’s house unexpectedly on a weekend when life got too much. He would escape to home cooking and warmth. He had adopted her mother as his own. His mother was cold and aloof and disappointed in him. On many evenings they would all sit under the blankets in the hammocks on the stoep and chat. They would drink wine and make a fire and the world would be kept at a safe distance.
Her mom would not be there now to let him in. And anything could have happened to the house over the winter. The plants might have died. The roof might have blown off. The mice might have eaten through her mother’s paintings or scratched away the paint. The bees might have broken through from under the floor and swarmed the rooms. She is not sure what she will find.
The road turns a sharp corner and Stella catches her breath. She is in the mountain pass that descends to the scrubland. The ground falls away steeply to the left, down to a river. She turns the radio on and looks straight ahead at the road, refusing to look down into the gorge. She knows that there might still be pieces of her mother’s car down there where it landed finally after crashing and falling and bursting into flame. Sometimes at night she sits bolt upright in bed woken by a nightmare – the sound of metal on metal as her mother’s car swerves into the truck, then tumbles over the rocks and crumples on impact at the edge of the water.
Sometimes in her dream her mother isn’t inside the car; sometimes she is on the far bank of the river, watching.
Stella is past the gorge now and the road is flat and empty of cars. The light is golden. The air is clearer. The road twists and turns through the valley. The mountains fold into one another, formed millions of years ago out of volcanic rock on the edge of the Karoo. She passes a farm advertising a wine tasting.
On a straight stretch of road she closes her eyes for a few seconds and lets go of the steering wheel.
I am space. I am free.
A truck hoots. She swerves on to the dirt; slams on the brakes; is thrown back in her seat. The car stalls.
It’s quiet.
Breathe.
Ten kilometres from Ashville she pulls off the tar on to the dirt road just before the bridge that crosses the river. She gets out and walks under the gum trees down to the dry river bed. The leaves crackle underfoot as she picks her way. The river is just a trickle, dried up by the summer heat. The air is warm and she can see pinpricks of light from the houses in the village through the branches of the trees. One year it rained so much that she and her mother stripped naked and bobbed in the rock pools. Stella should have packed up the house by now and put it on the market. But she can’t bring herself to do it. It is a part of the process of loss, her therapist had said. She dislikes her intensely.
Ashville is small and dusty and surrounded by