I agree. It is a long time. Especially when it is quite likely that Eugene will have moved on. He will probably be in a relationship by then. I don’t want to take the chance.

“What are you doing after this?” I ask.

“I need to go back to work. I’m on a team that’s busy with a big design project, and our deadline is next week.”

This might be true, or it might not. Even if it were true, he would offer to blow off work if he really liked me. Or he would suggest meeting up later, or tomorrow. But I already know that he doesn’t really like me, so this revelation is no great, ego-damaging shock.

On balance, I believe I could get him to sleep with me, but the moment would have to be propitious. He would have to have absolutely nothing better to do. That moment is not now.

Instead of trying to steer him towards my place or his, I answer his questions about my father’s trial.

“Will you be testifying?” he asks.

“Testifying?” This hadn’t occurred to me. “For which side?”

“Either?”

“I don’t think so. No one has asked me to.”

He seems incredulous. “I don’t see how the trial can go ahead without your testimony.”

I don’t want to think about this. It kills my burgeoning libido, and makes me want to get as far away from him as possible.

* * *

A week passes.

It is enough time for me push the uncomfortable thoughts away. Then my father phones me.

A stranger’s voice asks if I am Lucy Lurie. When I concede that I am, she asks if I will accept a reverse-charges call from Mr. David Lurie in Table Bay Prison.

“Yes, okay.”

There is a long pause. I feel as though I am in a period film, set before the invention of mobile phones.

“Are you there, girl? Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you.”

“You must go to a meeting with the lawyers tomorrow. They will tell you what to do.”

“Must I go to the head office of Claasen, Nkabinde and Marriot?”

“No. You must go to see the advocate in Queen Victoria Street. His name is Imraan Deshen, and he works in Huguenot Chambers.”

“What time?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“Okay.”

It feels as though Eugene has conjured this into being by asking me about it. If he had just kept quiet, the lawyers might have forgotten about me. I battle cross-town traffic the next morning. At least my car is being used more often these days.

I announce myself to a receptionist. A clerk comes to take me upstairs to Advocate Deshen’s chambers. Abigail Nkabinde is waiting there for me. She introduces me to two colleagues from her firm, as well as the advocate, his pupil, and the clerk who brought me here.