I realize that I am leaned across Lottie with my breasts pressed close to her face. We’re not touching, but you know what it looks like. Lottie stares out of the window at the native women cutting grass in the fields and ignores Matthew. She doesn’t even blush at his words. It’s like there’s a wall around her that cannot be breached by bad words or rough hands.

3

The Road to Keziah

The journey is slow, and I am bored. Slow because the dirt road is eaten away by potholes and washboard gullies that make the wheels of the Ocean Current shudder and bump at twenty miles an hour. Plus, cows have the right of way, so the bus stops and starts and chugs behind lazy herds of long-horned native cattle walking from one grass patch to another.

Boring because the scenery is the same as the last trip: Mud huts sprout from fields, distant mountains loom on the horizon, and rivers scattered with stones snake through the valleys. Stray dogs and stubborn goats dot the side of the road. Barefoot black children run to a tin-shack school somewhere. Out there. We travel in heat and dust, but I can smell rain coming too.

The trip is doubly boring because I get motion sickness, so reading Jane Eyre is out and I have no one to talk to. I’ve always nodded hello to Lottie whenever we crossed paths at school, because Mother hates snobs and remembers hiding in doorways when the children with nice clothing but mean hearts came her way. Now I’m one of the nice children whose father has money for fees, and Lottie is the poor girl with worn shoes and a faded school uniform. I can see that her hem has been let down many times and the side seams let out so she can squash into the fabric for one more year.

Lottie ignores me. I don’t want to talk to her either, but her silence is aggravating. If she had sense, she’d try to win me over. This is her chance to make a first-class friend who might, with luck, one day buy her a bread roll or a licorice stick from the school shop. She doesn’t even try. That’s the Zulu in her: too full of pride to bend with the wind and too quick to fight. Her loss.

The bus slows on a sharp bend, and the engine whines as we begin our slow crawl down the side of a mountain. A car pulls up behind us and blasts its horn. The bus conductor sticks his arm out of the window and holds up his hand to make a stop signal. He can see the road ahead while the car driver is blind to what might be waiting. When the way is clear, the conductor will wave the car through. Simple.