girl pitched up in the aisle next to her and blithely asked if she could sit there. Thandi looked around. The coach was already nearly full.
‘Ya, no, I guess it’s available,’ Thandi said sullenly. She slid over into the window seat, lifting her kiondo onto her lap. The girl smiled and slung her rucksack on the floor in front of her seat, her shoulder wrung red where its strap had bitten the skin. She sat down, her foot propped on it, her other leg bent under her like a half-collapsed chair. Thandi looked at the girl’s shoe on her rucksack, each wearing its layer of grime patiently, in the way of martyred objects. The girl combed her fingers through her hair, filling the air with a candysweat smell as she pulled it into a ponytail that looked heavy in its lightness. Thandi reached in her bag for her bottle of ice water. Just looking at that hair the colour of unripe maize made her feel thirsty.
The coach driver strolled down the aisle, counting heads. The girl pulled a paperback from her rucksack – Out of Africa, of all things – and fanned herself with it but the pages released only a weak sugary must. She puffed her lips at Thandi to commiserate. She didn’t seem to recognise her. Thandi nodded and sipped at her water bottle, the plastic crackling unhappily as the vacuum released. The chill crept down her throat, delicate and sharp, but as soon as the water hit her stomach, nausea rose like a demon. She swallowed and shut her eyes to fight it but it was slippery and coiling. She needed to eat something. She pulled her food warmer out of her kiondo and notched it open, hoping the shortbread biscuits the JollyBoys cook had baked for her this morning hadn’t yet cooled. The girl looked over.
‘Would you like one?’ Thandi held out the container reluctantly.
‘A cookie? Hell yes!’ the girl said, taking one with her closebitten fingers. What was her name again? All Thandi could remember was that it had a cat-like snap and purr to it. Scholie would know, of course. But Thandi would never see Scholie again. And she would never ask him. Even if she did see him. Which she wouldn’t. The girl bit into the biscuit and grinned.
‘It’s just like the ones on safari!’ she said. There was a galaxy of crumbs over her lips.
‘And what did you see on your safari?’ Thandi asked with the exact rhythm and tone that she had been using at the front desk at JollyBoys for the past six months.
‘Eland, rhino. Hippo. Monkeys, of course…’
The girl responded at length, crunching through Thandi’s biscuits along the way. This was how all the tourists had spoken after a game drive, naming the animals one by one like children. Her forearms on the desk, Thandi had nodded and smiled, watching their wind-brightened eyes dim a bit more with each animal. Sometimes the wonders of the world are better left unsaid.
The coach gave a hitch and its bowels began to grumble. Thandi’s bowels responded in kind. The air conditioning gushed down with the smell of scrubbed dust. Something was crawling up her throat. Saliva brimmed in her gullet. Biscuits or no, Thandi was going to be sick at some point on this coach ride. The girl had finished her nursery-room incantation.
Thandi swallowed. ‘And how was your guide?’
‘Ah. Mazing. I met him at this bonfire and he took me for a morning drive the next day, just us.’
‘And did he teach you anything interesting?’
‘Well, he told me about, um, the musting? You know how the bulls – the male elephants – go into heat? It kind of made me think of my period, you know – how it runs down their leg?’ She grinned. ‘He told me a joke about periods, too. Okay, so: what’s an elephant’s tampon?’
Thandi raised an eyebrow.
‘A sheep!’
Thandi sneered with distaste. The girl rocked into her grandfather laugh. When she had sorted through it, thoroughly explored every cranny of her amusement, she put her hand on Thandi’s shoulder.
‘Come on, it’s hilarious.’
Thandi glanced at the girl’s hand on her skin just as the coach descended into a giant pothole in the road. The vomit rose, and Thandi turned away, her long plaits strumming the back of the seats in front of them. She had no choice – she opened the food warmer in her lap and puked over the remainder of the biscuits. Barely anything came up: a