The murmurs of approval after Chief Cele Mkhize’s proclamation were loud, and Dikeledi knew better than to challenge him directly. So, as the headman worked to create the paid position of postman, Dikeledi wrote a letter to the magnificent Molois and told them of her situation. Before the village knew what had befallen it, the Molois descended upon it and proclaimed, in no uncertain terms, that Dikeledi was the perfect candidate for the postman job. To cement what they had said, the Molois visited the schoolmaster and gave Dikeledi a glowing reference. The village cowered under the collective wisdom and fury of the Molois, and it was only after they had left, weeks after, when, just to be completely sure, Dikeledi was already donning the uniform of a postman and delivering the post by bicycle, that a whisper began that Chief Cele Mkhize had been wrong to have someone else prosper from an idea that had been Dikeledi’s brainchild.

It had taken some doing, but Dikeledi had finally realised her dream and become that even rarer thing, a woman who gets exactly what she wants in life. Dikeledi lived her life exactly the way she wanted, and did with it exactly what she wanted. Here, in this village, in one of the many almost-forgotten corners of the world, she had managed to carve for herself an element of freedom.

With her first pay cheque, she bought a full-length mirror and placed it in her hut. There was nothing that delighted her more than standing naked in the temperamental light of a paraffin lamp and watching as her postman’s uniform gradually covered all her soft places … places she would never lean.

And so it had been for almost twelve years, but now here was this letter addressed to her and signed ‘Your Husband, Immanuel’. At a rare loss as to what to do, Dikeledi carefully opened the other envelope, the one from the magnificent Molois, and was happy to find that, as always, they had a ready solution to her problem. The letter, written in Loveness’s graceful hand on yellow-and-pink writing paper, was neatly folded into four equal squares and contained a secret about a man named Livingstone Stanley Tikiti. The letter suggested that Dikeledi come to Mpopoma because Loveness and Spokes needed her to maintain the secret.