After being so awe-inspiring from the outside, the house proved to be anti-climactic on the inside. Expectedly, the interior was beautifully furnished in opulence. There were many things within the house, most of them elegant. If one were prone to envy, one would envy the man who had such possessions. But there was an … emptiness to it all that one could not envy and it was this emptiness – this lack of a something – and not the material possessions of the house, or how it had been furnished, that one found disappointing. Such a house deserved to be filled to the brim with the very things that made a life: love, laughter and long Sunday afternoons spent together. And you could tell just by looking at it that although the house may once have had those things, it no longer had them. Spokes stood in the living room and looked out at the rose garden. Entire lives had been lived here, and together they had managed to leave behind only emptiness. That was a sadness in itself.

So lost was Spokes in his thoughts that he was not aware of her presence until he breathed in something overwhelmingly sweet. He turned from the rose garden, and there she was standing self-assuredly in the doorway.

‘I’m Saskia Hargrave,’ she said marching over to him without being prompted. ‘You’re with the BSAP. Saw the bakkie outside.’ She offered him her hand to shake and flashed a smile that had a discoloured tooth in it.

She casually wore an army-green jacket over a white dress. The dress was so sheer that you could see her undergarments through it. Perhaps because of the army-green jacket, she felt the need to wear rugged hiking boots. To Spokes’s eyes, the whole of her seemed to be confusion. She wanted men to look at her and appreciate her for what she thought was her beauty, hence the sheer dress; but she also wanted men to take her seriously for what she thought was her toughness, hence the jacket and boots.

Saskia Hargrave did not understand men, and the evidence in front of Spokes strongly suggested that she did not understand herself either. She seemed to be … searching. They did that, didn’t they, white women? Lost a part of themselves somewhere along the way, and then went in search of it – sometimes at another person’s expense. Spokes found himself wondering when exactly Saskia Hargrave had lost the part of herself that she was now in search of.

‘I’m Spokes Moloi,’ he said, shaking her hand.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked him.