‘Yes, he’s working hard for those people in the bush but his own mother is here.’

‘Listen, give me his number and I’m going to tell him he’s a naughty boy. I’ll bring him back to Jo’burg with me.’

‘Okay, my baby. I’m going to wait for you.’

Maude read out the number in a deliberate and hesitant way that told Lindi she was an older and less confident woman than the image of her she carried in her mind.

Lindi took a deep breath before she called Kagiso.

9

A couple of hours earlier, Kagiso Rapabane was wedged into the back of a Johannesburg taxi. The needle on the speedometer nudged 80 k.p.h. The minivans that most commuters used, not the metered cabs that ran from the airport or the city’s posh hotels, are notorious for their often deadly disregard for the rules of the road. But, for once, Kagiso was glad the driver was in a hurry. He was in Johannesburg for two meetings – one official, the other not.

Kagiso had hitched a lift with a colleague from Malelane in Mpumalanga Province. It had taken them the best part of five hours. Their meeting with an overseas funder, who was getting nervous about the recent violence, had been delayed, and by the time Kagiso had jumped into the taxi to head off for the second appointment, it was past six in the evening and he was running an hour late.

It was the tail end of the rush hour, but the driver had swerved into a stretch of Oxford Road that had just emptied its traffic onto the highway and put his foot down, swerving back into the southbound stream at the last second amid a blare of horns and shouting. Kagiso had been first on the taxi at the rank in Rosebank and he was on the back bench, next to the window. The seat seemed to be only loosely attached to the chassis. It rolled and bucked, like a flat-bottomed barge in a heaving sea. He grabbed the bench in front of him, trying to stop himself sliding on the shiny, transparent seat covering and into a woman of the most generous proportions, who had positioned herself in the middle of the back row. She sat there, her knees apart, a bag of groceries on one side and a cardboard box on the other. Her voluminous breasts rose and fell with each breath, straining at the buttons of her nylon housecoat.