For instance, she was certain that, had she not been living with the magnificent Molois, she would not have bought the girl’s uniform – the uniform, with its alternating teal, azure and white vertical stripes and silver zip that ran down its front – the uniform that the cashier informed her, before she paid for it, was the uniform for Eveline High School, and therefore not a proper dress at all. The cashier had told her this so as to prevent the embarrassment that would surely be visited upon Dikeledi were she, a woman of thirty-two, to be seen walking around the city in a girl’s uniform.

But something about the colours, the texture, the feel, the smell of the fabric reminded Dikeledi of her mother, Daisy. It was the sort of thing she would have chosen to make into a dress for her daughter. Dikeledi touched the fabric and almost wept. She found it difficult to return the uniform to the clothes rack and the ignominy of not having been purchased, the mortification of almost having been bought. And so she purchased it and went even one better: she looked forward to the day she would wear it.

It just so happened that Dikeledi chose to wear the uniform on an ordinary and rather mundane Friday afternoon, which, coincidentally, was the very Friday afternoon that had long been fated to be the one that changed her life.

There was a knock on the door, and even though Dikeledi’s thoughts had, only minutes before, been extremely cautious and suspicious about love, she felt absolutely no apprehension when she went to open the door because she did not know that standing on the other side of it was the man towards whom she would someday very soon find herself leaning.

Lukha

LUKHA

In the beginning, none of her made sense. He was sure she was a woman, she certainly looked like a woman in her thirties, and yet she was wearing a school uniform. And where had she come from? She had not been here when he had come before; why was she here now? Why was she suddenly before him, seemingly so immovable with her arms crossed at the waist? Lukha decided there and then that she was an inconvenience, something standing between him and his desire to talk to Chief Inspector Spokes Moloi.

‘You are wearing a school girl’s uniform,’ Lukha said because that was the only thing he could think to say.

‘And you are wearing a faded T-shirt that says “Build a better tomorrow,’’’ she said without missing a beat. He got the impression that she could have said so much more and had had to hold back.