What did that mean, an African city? Why? Because Joburg was soundtracked by the maquamba beat? There was nothing un-African about Cape Town. He felt the old sentences begin to take shape, the old argument begin to coalesce. This city and all its fucked-up divisions and casual cruelties was the way it was because of slavery and colonialism and you don’t get more African than that.

Nothing was neutral, there was always something attached to it, clinging to it, triggering, pulling, insisting, asking her to look, telling her not to forget. She’d tried explaining this one to Adam, but he had shaken his head and insisted that she was going to exhaust herself, that it sounded like she was living several lives at once, all stacked up on her, weighing her down, bottoming her out. Waleed had understood, a little. He had told her it was the same for him, to walk through the city was to walk with ghosts.

She knew that what she had wanted back then, when it felt like they would live there forever, was the option to leave. That she’d found the noise and the filth and the constant nosiness of the neighbours unbearable, that she’d wanted to be able to visit for the Carnival. She’d wanted windless seasons of trees and land and space, the Kirstenbosch home of her girlhood, before they’d been moved from there too. But she kept the longing a secret, knowing its impossibility, knowing the law’s indifference to her preference.

It is still night in Cape Town. The kind when one cannot imagine its terrible winds, its past pains, when everything feels new, just-born, a history made up of stories, gentle and good.

III: River Westbourne, London, 1951

“What was the city to me? It was rain, narrow streets with lovers hiding in dark bedrooms opening their clothes to each other for the first time, the warmth, the shock, the gratitude. It was snow on the black roofs, the blush of light as it fades, lamps coming on across the square. The chairs carried out to the garden, the table too small for dinner, plates balanced on laps and left in the grass.