‘You must tell your new friend to have a nice time in our province and stay away from these Mozambican rubbish people. It’s not her business.’ He started winding the window up again but stopped when it was two-thirds of the way. ‘And, Father, you also must be careful. There are a lot of tsotsis around tonight.’

The bakkie pulled away.

‘If he was trying to frighten me, he succeeded,’ said Lindi. ‘That was sinister.’

‘Don’t mind them,’ Father Petro said. He put a hand on Lindi’s shoulder. ‘They can’t harm you. You have your British passport, the best insurance policy.’

‘And what about you, Petro? What do you have?’

‘Ah! That’s a good question, my sister. I have nothing that I can show you but I have my belief – my belief that everyone has some good in them. Even those bastards! Jesus, forgive me.’

He lit a cigarette, sucked deeply, and held his breath, savouring its gift of herbal relief.

‘Those guys hate because they don’t know love, not real love. And the Mozambicans, they think they have lost everything, but nobody is telling them they have kept the most important thing. Their dignity.’

He let the smoke drift out, now bereft of its potency. ‘You think I am stupid, yes?’

‘No, Father, I don’t. I think secretly I might even admire your faith.’ And Lindi wondered why she had just called him plain ‘Father’ for the first time. It struck her that Father Petro de Freitas’s faith was just about the most certain thing she had encountered in the last forty-eight hours of flux.

Her adult life had been built on those things you could measure, on goals and outcomes, on research and evidence, on argument and persuasion. They were tools good enough to describe what was happening, a prop to justify a decision, but none of it could help her give it any meaning. Lindi leaned over and kissed his cheek. ‘You’re a good man, Petro,’ she said.

‘And, you see, I get the girls too!’ He laughed.

‘Now don’t be cheeky or I’ll have to take it back. Petro, you ought to know something before we go any further. I think all that was meant for me. I’m pretty sure I’m being followed – they seem to have had their eyes on me from the moment I arrived in SA. Ever since I got here I’ve been warned about meddling. And today at the Nelspruit checkpoint I was given a hard time. It wasn’t random.’

Father Petro’s seemingly perpetual smile was gone. ‘Is there something you are not telling me, sister?’

‘I don’t want to make your life any more complicated than it already is.’