Instinctively Sharkey looked around. A light burned over a doorway in the building they’d just left, but it was too distant and feeble to illuminate them. The alley was clammy-cold, the fence smelling of urine.

They were alone, he saw, but he was anxious, suddenly in this dark stinking place, and he began stalling, saying he was tired, he’d been on a long flight, and he was still talking as the woman groaned.

“Ach, we could have been finished by now.”

The rental—a pickup truck the agent called a bakkie—came with warnings, some of them printed (Do not leave valuables in the boot) and some verbal. “No hitchhikers,” the agent said. “And I’d advise you to hire a driver—you’ll get there quicker. You’ll have more time for surfing. Safer as well.”

So Sharkey agreed and was introduced to Murad, a stocky man of about thirty, who volunteered that he was not Black. He was colored, he said—Malay and India, “and maybe a native, way back.” He had gray eyes and his skin was sallow. He wore a thick sweater and a skullcap.

“They say the wave is a great right. The surf there.”

“I know nothing about that,” Murad said.

He was mostly silent after that, concentrating on the road, which was empty and straight in a landscape of low hills and thick bush, no villages, few houses, but here and there a glimpse of movement.

“What is that bird?”

“We call it a volstruis,” Murad said. “You call it an ostrich.”

Around noon, at a crossroads near a beach, stopping for gas—Murad muttering to the pump attendant—Sharkey suggested eating at the small restaurant across the road. Murad sighed and looked displeased.

“I’m hungry,” Sharkey said.

“I will wait.”

“Why not join me?”

“Do you know where you are?” Murad said.

Sharkey saw a sign at the crossroads: MOSSEL BAY—2 KM. He said, “Mossel Bay.”

“South Africa,” Murad said through clamped teeth. “I am not allowed to eat in that restaurant. But go—ach, take your time, man.”

Sharkey ate alone—fish and chips, in a booth, in the almost empty restaurant. He bought a sandwich for Murad, but lifting the top slice of bread, Murad sighed and said with distaste, “I don’t take varkvleis—this meat.”

Sharkey slept off his jet lag the rest of the way, and when they arrived felt fresh enough to surf—or at least to test the water, to paddle out to the break. He directed Murad to a parking lot facing the beach, where head-high waves were beating against the sand—smaller waves than he’d been expecting, but good enough to relax him and cleanse him of the sweat of travel. His wetsuit was in his duffel bag, his surfboard in its sleeve in the back of the pickup.

“Give me a hand, okay?”

Murad folded his arms and said, “I don’t carry.”