THE SECOND TAKE
By Zakes Mdluli
Chandré Cupido makes other people camera-ready for a living. She is thirty, she is very good at it, and she has not felt a single thing on a date in years. Then a last-minute job at a Cape Town fashion show puts her face-first into the chest of Nazareth Ramoshaba — the quiet boy off the school team in Kimberley, the one she spent a single unforgettable night with on her parents' roof the evening before everything went wrong. He is a footballer now. He plays in England, he has more money than anyone she knows, and he has been watching her career from nine thousand kilometres away for twelve years without once picking up the phone. She has spent every one of those twelve years holding her family together. Standing in the middle of it. Loving all of them, asking for nothing, and quietly filing her own life under later. Now there is a boat in the Zanzibar channel, a fortnight with no consequences attached, and a man who has waited long enough and does not intend to waste an hour of it. Two weeks. That was the arrangement. Neither of them meant a word of it.
26 chapters · 3 hr 39 min
