FLIGHT RISK

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Vuyelwa Duma takes the job because it is the best contract cabin crew in this country can get: one aircraft, one client, a whole season in the air with Alexandra Comets. She reads the fraternisation clause before she signs. Touch a player and you are dismissed on the spot — no warning, no hearing. She can recite it in her sleep. Then she works her first away trip, and the man in the exit row assumes she wants his autograph. Nkosinathi Zondi is the most disliked footballer in South Africa and he wears it like cologne. He is insufferable on the aircraft and worse in the hotel bar. And then, at thirty-seven thousand feet, he tells her the thing nobody else knows: the villain is a product. Built for him. Sold by somebody else. He has never corrected the record because it pays too well. She is not going to be another woman waiting at the gate, and she tells him so to his face. He steps back, puts his hands in his pockets, and says that when she stops lying to herself she will have to be the one to ask. Johannesburg gets very small when you are hiding. Her twin's flat is two doors from the captain's. Zondi's penthouse looks straight down onto her front steps. And there are seven months of away trips still to fly. How long can a woman keep a rule she has already broken in her head?