Sitshengisiwe knew that the conductor was only having his fun, but she also knew she was not something to be toyed and trifled with. She sat there with her back straight, her eyes looking out of the window, her lips unsmiling and pressed together, the ring all the while going around and around and around on her finger. She may have fallen far from grace, but she was still the proud daughter of Cosmos Nyathi, one of the country’s richest black men, the owner of the MacKenzie group of businesses. She was also a deacon – the only female one – at the Baptist Church that she attended.

When Sitshengisiwe alighted from the bus as soon as it had reached Founders High School, she made her way to the headmaster’s office, stopping several times to ask for directions. Once there, she enrolled herself and Philemon in the adult literacy classes that her new next-door neighbour, Mrs Bodecia Mthimkhulu, had told her about. The application and enrolment process did not take long because Sitshengisiwe had had something of an education. She was in and out of Founders High School in less than twenty minutes, and so the bus that came to pick her up and take her to town was the very bus that had brought her there.

After receiving her ticket, she ignored the conductor and went to sit at the long bench-seat at the back of the bus. There was a discarded copy of The Chronicle on the bench, and Sitshengisiwe opened it and looked for Saskia Hargrave’s ‘Where’s Emil Coetzee?’ article. According to this latest report, Emil Coetzee had been cryogenically frozen by the Secret Intelligence Unit and would be unfrozen in fifty years so that he could become Prime Minister when majority rule failed. White people never ceased to amaze, Sitshengisiwe thought as she folded the page with the ‘Where’s Emil Coetzee’ article and put it in her handbag. Philemon worked for a man high up in the SIU, and Sitshengisiwe knew better than to put such craziness past them.

She was relieved to see that the conductor had found a more receptive audience for his advances in a group of female factory workers from Dunlop who, exhausted from their shift, were happy to shrug off the conductor’s overtures as nonsense and laugh the hardships of the day away.