them. She had never thought of it as a gift. She didn’t know what to say.
‘I can plait your hair for you if you want,’ she offered finally. She touched the hair wisping at the girl’s temple. ‘Your hair is too thin – it will fall out. But I can try.’
The girl smiled toothily and then they were like schoolgirls. The girl sat with her feet in the aisle and her back to Thandi. Thandi sat sideways with a knee hitched and her back to the window. She pulled out the scrunchie and the hair swept down, static lifting a blonde mist. She smoothed it and parted it. She threaded her fingers in it and rotated her wrists, twisting the rising mayhem into order. She was halfway done when the girl murmured, ‘Just let me know how much you charge.’
Thandi’s jaw tightened, but her hands kept on twiddling. The girl nestled sideways into the seatback beside her. Outside, the sky blushed then dimmed. The smell of woodsmoke seeped into the coach. By the time they had circled the roundabout under the Findeco House skyscraper, gone over the bridge, and turned into the bus depot, it was night, and the girl was fast asleep. The plaits in her hair were already loosening.
Thandi crept over her and queued up in the aisle behind the other bleary, yawning passengers. Under the orange street lamp outside, family and friends milled around chatting while they waited for the driver to haul their luggage out of the low belly of the coach. Thandi was sniffing her fingers to see if the girl’s hair had left a scent when an older white woman with a cane stepped hesitantly towards the driver. Thandi felt pity rise, and relief. She went over and took the woman’s hand.
‘It’s Thandi,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’
Agnes smiled warmly and pulled her into her arms. ‘We are so glad you’re home, Tendeeway,’ she said, her lips vibrating against Thandi’s ear. ‘We have missed you so much.’
We. Thandi looked over Agnes’s shoulder and saw the pickup across the street, his face framed in the window. Lee didn’t wave or smile. He just looked at her, stern and beseeching and beautiful. His skin was in the shadows but she knew it was brown-brown-brown. Just like hers.
* * *
A year later, Thandi was balanced on stilettos, hovering over a toilet seat, the skirt of her voluminous dress gathered behind her and tilted up so that the wire hoop rested on the cistern. She was releasing a copious volume of liquid from her bladder, legs aching in her squat – a unique paranoia, this mistrust of the backs of other people’s thighs. She could already feel a knot in her forehead, harbinger of the hangover to come. But for now she was happy and tipsy – a four-glasses-in feeling – giddy enough to have brought a bottle of champagne into the toilet stall.
She picked it up and drank as she pissed, relishing the heft in her hand, the silky sting on her tongue, the amusement of concurrently filling up and emptying out. She swallowed the itchy sweetness, lowered the bottle, and then she saw it: a smudge of blood in the crotch of the panties stretched between her calves, a circle of red in the white, like the Japanese flag. She unrolled some toilet paper. She wiped and examined and confirmed. It was her period. On her wedding night. Settling hopelessly onto the dicey seat, Thandi wept. How had she timed things so badly?
After a few minutes, she pulled herself together. She shimmied off the panties – painstakingly chosen from a Victoria’s Secret catalogue and sent from London – and peeked out of the stall to make sure the bathrooms were empty. She hastened to a sink to wash the stain out, scrubbing fiercely at the damn spot, lace threads popping inside her wringing fists. Back in the stall, she hefted her skirt, threaded her stilettos through the holes, and tugged the panties, reluctant with damp, up her thighs again. She didn’t have a pad – she had left her bag in the ballroom – so she wrapped a long stretch of toilet paper around the crotch, where it settled into a papier-mâchéd lump.
Thandi tottered back to the wedding reception in the Ridgeway ballroom and sat next to Lee at the bridal table, shifting her hips to keep the wedge of toilet paper in place. He glanced at her, but kept his back turned as he continued to