Where are you going in such a hurry?” Ace asks, reaching out for Zodwa’s leg and looping his arm around it. “Come back to bed, baby.”

“I can’t. I’m running late for an appointment.” She extracts herself from his grasp and walks to the table, where she opens her purse and counts out the taxi fare.

“Another appointment?” Ace groans, falling back onto the mattress. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were seeing another man behind my back.” He laughs to show he isn’t serious. What woman would need someone else when she’s already been serviced by Ace?

Certainly not Zodwa, who finds his attentions too much as it is. “You know there’s no one else.”

“Where are you going then? Who is this appointment with?” He reaches for his pants, which are lying in a heap on the floor, and extracts his cigarettes from a pocket.

Zodwa throws the box of matches to him before he can ask for them. “Someone my mother wanted to see about Dumisa.”

Leleti kept a detailed journal of everyone she spoke to over the years in her quest to discover exactly what had happened to her son. Zodwa only discovered its existence when Mama Beauty told her about it soon after Leleti’s death.

For some reason Leleti was never able to explain to Zodwa, she didn’t believe the account of Cyril Malema, the man who claimed to have been the last person to see Dumisa alive, and so Leleti had been interviewing all of Dumisa’s ex-comrades in the hope of shaking some kernel of truth loose from one of them. Each person Leleti saw was meticulously crossed off the list, and now only a few names remain.

Zodwa has made it her mission to track each of them down with Mama Beauty’s help.

“And yesterday morning?” Ace asks, blowing a ring of smoke up at the roof. “Where did you go then?”

Zodwa can’t tell him that she’d been to another orphanage where she’d handed a baby photo of Dumisa across to the social worker in case there was a chance her son looked like her brother at the same age.

“One boy here meets your description. He too has a birthmark but the file doesn’t say where it is or what it looks like,” the social worker had clucked in response. “I need to speak to them about being more fastidious in their record keeping.”