Were they the first words I ever heard you utter or were they just the first words that stuck in my mind? I am not certain. But they are words that define you more than any others I can remember. What they did was to make me look at you for the first time; all this while I had only looked at your friend – you had that ability of a cryptic animal to blend into the background, as if you were saving the viewer from the full, shocking impact of your beauty. You were the Medusa. I turned into stone. When I smiled my smile was shaky, when I spoke my words were strangled.

‘I don’t bust my lectures,’ I said and left.

Alice was not a serious student. She attended lectures no more than three times in a week. Lomba was not to see her again for over a week. A car came to a stop before the lecture hall and she stepped out. Lomba was standing in front of the hall with a group of students, waiting for the lecturer.

‘Wow!’ somebody whispered. ‘She is coming this way.’

Without thinking, Lomba stepped forward and met her halfway.

‘My first day in school,’ she said, smiling, taking his hand. ‘I am nervous. Let us go and sit there. Is the lecturer here yet?’

They sat on white plastic seats outside a kiosk, in the weak morning sun, drinking Coke. The lecturer came and lectured and left.

‘What happened? I thought you had dropped out before you’d even started.’

‘I’ve been looking for a place. My Dad doesn’t want me to stay in the hostels. A flat close to school. And you, where do you stay?’

‘In the hostels.’

He noticed how boys turned to stare at her as they passed. She was in a trouser suit today, like an office worker. Her black leather shoes matched her handbag. She looked at her watch (gold, he noted) and said, ‘The driver will be back soon. Let us walk to the road and wait for him.’

When the car came, he noted that the driver was in army uniform. A General’s daughter, he told himself.

When she finally got the house, two weeks later, she told him and invited him over.

‘Come and have dinner. I’ll cook.’

‘I love her so much it makes me sick just to stand close to her,’ Lomba confessed to Bola on the day of the dinner. He was getting dressed.

‘Here, rub on some of this cologne. The trick is to make an impression. Don’t appear too eager. Don’t raise your voice when you speak to her. Cool, you know what I mean? Let her bend to you to hear you. Then the cologne will hit her, get it?’ Bola drilled him relentlessly. ‘T-shirt! Please, how can you wear a T-shirt to a first date? Take my blazer, there is more attitude to that.’