shock of cold water splashed in her face. The glaze lifts and she looks at Loveday like she’s only just seen her. “I can wash m_m_myself.” She strips and uses her T-shirt as a washcloth. Loveday drops onto the bed and begins paging through the magazine again.
When Sindi’s done, she wrings out her T-shirt, then turns her jeans inside out and gives them a good shake. A few coins and the collected dregs of our life on the road fall from her pockets.
“Don’t do that, sista, you’ll spread fleas and lice,” Lovedays says, eyeing Sindi’s stuff. “Los your kak and get dressed, or we gonna miss last dish. I’ll sweep it up later.”
Loveday watches Sindi dress with a sly face. “You know Ma hates Believers.” She pauses like she’s waiting for this fact to sink in. “Ma hates them. Give her a box of etchies and a bottle of b-diesel and she’d burn the whole church to the ground with every Believer in it. If one of them come in here,” she swipes her fingers across her throat.
There’s spite in her voice. I put my face close to hers. She’s pretty but her lips are thin and lines have already formed around her mouth, like an old lady’s mouth, like Gogo Nkosi’s mouth. I know, looking at those bitter creases, that Loveday is brewing trouble.
“Why does she call you Loveday?”
Loveday frowns over the top of the magazine. “It’s my name, neh, everyone got a name, even you.”
Sindi wrings water from her shirt. “There’s a ss_astreet called Loveday.”
Loveday sighs. “Ja, there’s a street. Ma Wilma names all her girls after streets, sometimes the street where she pick them up, sometimes just sommer. Depends.”
Sindi stands in the washtub. Light from the naked bulb snags on every bump on her body, casting purple shadows. It makes dark hollows of her cheeks and the sunken spaces between her collarbone and neck, runs a line of light along her ribs and cheekbones. She looks like a negative, an X-ray, a shivering-shaking X-ray.
Loveday leans back. “They find you by the old golf course, huh? Maybe Ma’ll call you Reading.”
“M_m_my nn_name’s sss_asSindi.”
“Ja well, it’s not like you can say your name so maybe now it’s Reading. Ma don’t like anyone to be called by their real name. If nobody knows your real name, nobody can find you. No one come looking anyway. ’Cept one time this ou mlungu come looking to recruit us to his church. Fokken Believers. Ma went spare, she moered him stukkend, snapped his leg like a twig. Booysen and Oxford drag him out and leave him on the street. That was at the warehouse. Nobody ever find us here, but we can’t stay here in summer, just in case it rains. It don’t, but the Long Dry got to break some time. Better safe, neh.”
“Where are we?”
“This?” Loveday looks around like she’s not sure. “Ma says this a ou storm-water reservoir, part of the waterworks. We safe enough down here, the city got no use for this reservoir long as the dry hold.”
Dora Xplora blue and bloating.
“Out there, the big round room, that was where they stored the water before treating it, but we call it the dorm. Makes Ma jumpy to think of all the water that filled it once.”
Dora Xplora face-down in the vlei
Barefoot, no socks, her shoes got washed away
Her satchel strap still wrapped around her throat
Daai ding kon nie swim but vetkoek floats.
Loveday hands Sindi a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of jeans that are wide at the waist and too short, but they’re clean and Sindi looks grateful. I glance at my dusty New Tiyang Primary uniform and wish she’d give me something new too. When Sindi is dressed, Loveday bandages her hand, pulling the strips of rags tight. Then she collects Sindi’s old clothes and leads her back to the dorm. The air stinks of boiled cabbage and burnt pap.
“Just in time for last dish,” she says. She points out a mattress and leaves my sisi standing next to it, staring at the crowd gathered at the mouth of a lit-up pipe, holding plates.
By the time Loveday returns with food, Sindi’s curled up on the mattress, asleep.
“Wake up, girlie, you can’t sleep all day.”
I lift my head and look over the mound of my sisi’s shoulder at ankles, thick as diseased tree trunks, and driftwood feet with chipped yellow nails. I don’t need to see her face to know who they belong to.
On the road, you learn that it’s better to play dead than to give in to panic and bolt. Sindi’s quickening heartbeat tells me she’s awake, probably squinting at Ma Wilma’s feet through slit-eyes while sifting through her memories, trying to place us in time and space. But remembering’s hard. The world’s an ugly place and memories aren’t something to unwrap like birthday presents.
I can feel Sindi’s exhaustion in the heaviness of her limbs. After a few minutes of playing dead, she falls back into sleep. Ma Wilma clicks her tongue but she leaves us alone. I press my face into the back of Sindi’s neck. We curl together like two spoons in a drawer, but Ma Wilma’s visit has made me restless. I leave my sisi sleeping and climb the ladder strung with lights. I perch on a rung halfway to freedom and pretend to be an angel, watching.
Ma Wilma is the first of Sindi’s visitors, but she isn’t the last. Others come. Loveday leaves a plate of food. Later, she returns and takes it away, uneaten. Booysen stands over her, looking worried. He shakes his head, but I’m not fool enough to think he worries for her. Young girls come, giggling-giggling, and drip water into her mouth and ears.
Their tricks make me mad. I wrap my arms in wire and spark until everyone is asleep. Then I’m the only one awake and I feel cold and alone.
Dawn filters through the manholes and Ma Wilma’s kids begin to stir. The dorm fills with breakfast chatter that soon drops away as kids disappear up the ladders and into the pipes. By mid-morning, only Ma Wilma and a few little ones are left. I stay on my perch and watch the dull fade of the afternoon slide over Sindi. By the time twilight comes and the older kids pour back into their hole, I’m lumed up like a light bulb, but Sindi still sleeps.
That night, I slip into her mind and dream her dreams. I see myself, Thuli, strange and disconnected and the wrong way round, like I’m stuck in a mirror. We walk across the patch of veld to Saviour’s Pit Stop, our arms crooked at the elbows and linked together. The sky is silver-blue and the propeller on the Legend winks as it turns slow in the breeze, fanning our cheeks. The colour of her dreaming is sharp, as if our lives then were so much brighter, but rapid guilt oozes over the dream. Emptiness eats at happiness and the black blots us out.
Sunshine spotlights the floor. It’s the kind of sun that traps you in a lazy daze, unable to do anything but stare at dust motes. Everyone is drowsy, as if the sleeping sickness that has taken hold of my sisi is contagious. I almost expect them to drop, one by one, onto mattresses and curl into their dreams. The air is thick with unsatisfied expectations, a gift we brought. Someone new, and everyone waiting for the small changes in their lives that new things bring. But Sindi sleeps on, dragging them all into our limbo.
Ma Wilma shuffles across the floor, the tap of her knobkerrie soft, as if she doesn’t want to disturb anyone. She steps into a sun spot, blinking at the brightness, and stops. “Marlboro,” she calls, rapping her knobkerrie to make
