The coach filled quickly. The woman and her two children were the last to get on. The mother had bundled some of her possessions into a cloth. She looked down the bus for spaces. She saw that the one next to Lindi was free but motioned to the children to keep walking. Lindi looked down the aisle. The woman had found the last two seats and had one of the children on her lap. Lindi leaned forward and asked the driver to tell the woman there was a seat free next to her.

‘Ah. No, it’s okay, ma’am. They are fine like that.’

‘But it’s going to be hours.’

‘These people are used to it.’

Lindi got up and started walking down the aisle.

‘One of your children can come and sit next to me,’ she said.

The mother looked ahead and caught the driver’s disapproving expression. Just a few moments earlier he had abused her for not packing properly and wasting his time.

‘I will keep them here, madam,’ she said.

Lindi felt marooned halfway down the bus. To walk back to her seat on her own would be to hand victory to the driver. She looked at the elder child, the boy sitting next to his mother. ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something for you in my bag. You can have some and bring some to your sister.’

The boy looked up at his mother. She stared at Lindi, a trace of fear in her eyes. There had been so many decisions to make in the last few days, matters of life and death, and now this one, the simplest of them all, seemed beyond her. Lindi held out her hand to the boy. He took it gingerly, as if he might come to some harm. Together they walked back to Lindi’s seat. She sat down by the window, rummaged through her rucksack and found one of the energy bars she always carried on long journeys.

‘Now, what’s your name?’

‘Paulo Simbini.’

‘That’s a lovely name. And how old are you, Paulo?’

‘I’m eight years.’

‘And what is your sister’s name?’

‘She has a South African name because she was born here.’

‘And what is her South African name?’

‘It’s Britney.’

What were they thinking of, the parents, when they chose a name with its antecedents in American pop culture? Britney was only the latest in a long line of children saddled with names that owed nothing to their family’s culture but carried the migrant’s hope that what you called a child might somehow ease its journey in a foreign land. Lindi revisited her old hang-up about her parents’ decision to give her a Zulu name. Perhaps they, too, were like travellers hoping their child would grow up in a new and different country, one that had put racial separation behind it. She unwrapped the snack and broke it in half.