Chapter 12 - The Show

The house was a stage and I was the ghost in the wings. I was standing in the deep shadow of the passage that leads to our lounge, my heart a frantic trapped bird against my ribs. I moved quietly into the hall cupboard. We'd made space in there for me and even shifted some furniture to give me a better view of anything that might happen. There was no guarantee Wandile would make a move, or let Sindiswa make one. We hoped so, but you never know.

I'd known Wandile was coming tonight. Sindiswa had told me a week ago, her voice carefully casual.

"He's only in Joburg for the night," she said. "If you say I can, I'll invite him to the house. You know. Just to catch up over a drink."

She'd looked at me then, her eyes holding a question she wouldn't say out loud. I had to be the one to say okay.

"Okay," I said.

She knew what that meant. She knew the permission sitting inside that one simple word.

Something else happened that week that I have not told her about. I walked down to the postboxes on the Saturday morning and a woman from two houses up was out with her dog, a woman whose name I have never learned in four years of living on the same street. She said good morning. Then she held it half a second too long, and her eyes went over me the way you look at a house that has been sold.

I said good morning back, and that was all of it. Nothing has happened since. I have decided that nothing will, and that if I turn out to be wrong about that, then I was wrong inside a life I no longer want.