bad shape. There’s all this blood and a hole in his cheek where you can see through to the teeth. Matt says the guy’s drunk on the local drink, um, it smells like rotting fruit?’
‘Chibuku,’ Scholie murmured.
‘Yeah,’ the girl blinked, ‘he’s totally wasted on that stuff, definitely too drunk to stand up or walk. So we decide I should stay with him because Jess is too scared to stay alone and Matt doesn’t want to go for help alone. There’s this construction site, half a brick house type thing, so we use a tent to make a gurney and carry him in there. Matt and Jess start walking to a town we passed a half hour back. And I stay behind and wait with the man and the kid and some beer to keep me company.’
‘Now, that’s bloody brave,’ one of the British girls slurred.
The American girl described how the rest of the night went. How the boy fell asleep. How she cradled the man’s head on her lap, and the blood soaked through her jeans, drying there. How she got a bit drunk and lost the feeling in her thighs. How the sun was already rising when the ambulance finally came. Thandi could see it all. The boy curled in the corner like a snail’s shell, the waxy dawn sky, the man’s blood blackening. She even knew how the story would end: a patched tyre, a race to the nearest hospital, a triumphant recovery. Perhaps there would be a quasi-adoption of the boy: sponsored schooling, intermittent donations, his pot belly diminishing as his fortunes grew. But the American girl trailed off before all that.
‘The guy was fine in the end,’ she said. ‘But it was super intense. He had, like, a hole in his face. Not bungee-jump intense but, you know,’ the girl laughed.
After a beat, her audience did too. Except for Thandi. Didn’t it seem a little convenient that this girl had not caused the accident and had magically saved its victim?
‘To life!’ The American girl stood, raising a beer with a whoop. ‘Let’s fuckin dance!’
Someone pulled out a radio and soon an Ace of Base song was yelping out of it and everyone was up and dancing, as if on command. Thandi alone stayed seated by the bonfire, watching Scholie rock his hips in front of the American girl. Sex had arrived, with all of its tender collusion. The wind picked up, raising copper in the embers. The canvas tents applauded.
* * *
There had always been other girls around Scholie. That was why Thandi was so reticent. After finding Lee’s callous inventory in his bachelor pad, she wasn’t about to fall for another philanderer. But it was hard to resist Scholie – his dark, rich skin, his plump lips, even his slippy-slidey accent. He and Thandi had spent many nights partying after her shifts at JollyBoys, drinking at the hotel bars or dancing at the one nightclub in town, which had a full wall of mirrors. Thandi would back up against him and wind her hips as they stared in the glass, admiring themselves and each other under the roving blue lights. They never took it any further. Thandi knew that after he dropped her back at JollyBoys late at night, he often went out again and found another girl to take to bed.
But the bonfire at the bushcamp was the first time Scholie actually left Thandi to find her own ride home. She supposed it was his way of saying he would no longer besiege her dam wall. At dawn, just before he slipped into a tent with the American girl, he looked at Thandi and shrugged, his eyelid twitching at her. Teasing her? Mocking her? Hungover and sulking at her own passivity, Thandi climbed into Mainza’s Land Rover. She almost wept with dismay when the troop of British girls from the bonfire clambered in after her. Just a quick drive, Mainza promised. These girls wanted a tour of the game park.
Thandi leaned her head against a cold metal pole in the back, three itchy blankets over her, as the British girls – shockingly spry after all that drinking – oohed and aahed and leapt up to take pictures of impala until they eventually realised that impala were as common here as deer in England. Thandi had almost managed to fall asleep in the jouncing vehicle when Mainza swung it into a small grove and parked.
The British girls thudded out, pulling up the waists of their