Chapter 5 - Tell Me To Stop

The lightning came in low and hard from the west, the kind of Highveld storm that breaks a heatwave with a bang. The first strike was over the school. The second was somewhere closer — close enough to feel in my chest — and then the lights went out, the fridge clicked off, and the whole neighbourhood went into the quiet that follows the bang.

Then car alarms. Raised voices. Dogs. Candles being lit in every window of every yard.

I lit my own at the kitchen counter — the squat white ones I keep for power cuts, the kind that drip — and I was setting the second one in a saucer when his keys hit the gate.

He came in with rain in his fade and a brown paper bag from the BP Express on Old Potch — a generator-fed petrol station an hour's taxi from here. I wasn't sure if you'd eaten, he said.

He'd brought enough for two.

We ate by candlelight at the kitchen table. Roast chicken and chips and a Coke each. I'd let my hair down — long box braids loose past my shoulder blades. He looked at me once and looked away. Then again. I kept eating like I hadn't noticed.

Then the stoep. The Amarula. The secret splash.

Something to make it better, he said, the way he had four weeks ago.

I drank. We sat. The storm rolled and grumbled over the city. Two streets over a transformer was buzzing and giving up. The candles on the small wooden table flickered with every gust of wind.

I told him about the spare room.