At eight months, he crawled. At twelve months, he walked. At thirteen months, he started to talk. Mama. Mama. There was no one for him to call Dada. Which one of them had fathered him? I had no way of knowing. Sometimes it felt as though they all had. As though their sperm had fused inside me to create this child that was an amalgam of them all. He had been born out of that terrible night. We had created him together.

His skin was brown, and his hair was curly and soft. Strangers on the street came up to tell me how beautiful he was. A modelling agency tried to scout him. He could read before he started nursery school. The teachers told me he was a prodigy, that he belonged in a programme for gifted children. Their eyes lit up when he arrived for school each morning. He brought joy wherever he went.

Today, he is the light of my life. He is the reason I wake up in the morning. The reason I have the strength to go on. He has coalesced all the meaning in my life into one focal point.

More than that, he represents the future of South Africa. Born out of violent conflict, he represents peace and reconciliation. Black anger and resentment collided with smug white neocolonialism, and he was the result. The best of both cultures. A blending of everything that is good and hopeful in this country.

* * *

That didn’t happen.

I took the morning-after pill. I took it so fast my hand was a blur of motion as I swallowed the tablets. The police were trying to take a statement and the doctor was trying to do a rape kit, but all I was interested in was how fast I could get my hands on Plan B. I didn’t know I had up to seventy-two hours to take it. I thought it literally had to be taken the morning after.

I think even if I had known, I would still have wanted to take those pills straight away. The thought of anything taking root inside my body was an abomination to me. It would have felt like a cancer, not a baby. It was a demon and I was one of the Gadarene swine. I would have done anything, anything at all, to cast it from my body.

The pills did not agree with me, especially in combination with the antiretrovirals I had to take as well. Within two hours, I was vomiting violently. The doctor told me there was every chance I had vomited up the pills. She made me take them again to ensure their effectiveness. Then she thought I’d probably had a double dose as I ran the full gamut of side-effects, from the common to the virtually unheard of. Vomiting, diarrhoea, exhaustion, migraine and stomach cramps, spotting, severe abdominal pain, and vertigo: I had them all.