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.

On insomnia-plagued nights, she told herself that she could have learned to live with and inside those stories, she would have found a way to meet them, offer to bandage him up, return him whole to himself. It was only much later when she realised that it wasn’t the stories, it was the constant fluctuation between being showered with attention and then abruptly ignored, being loved with a totalising force, and then treated with an arctic disregard. It was the knowledge that, at any moment, she could be made invisible: that terrible swing between being alive and dead.

thirty-five

“To escape the heat, I went to a diner on Bleecker Street. I was paying my respects, I suppose, to a city that did not look askance at a woman out and about alone. I sat down at a small table and ordered a glass of wine and a Caesar salad. I had grown to love the communal solitude of New York. I would miss this city where I learned to embrace ambition and to try things that felt beyond my reach, but much as I loved it, South Africa was the place where I felt there was unfinished business.

I wanted us to be normal. An impossible ask when the people who raised me were so shaped by an abnormal system. They carried survivors’ guilt and memories no one should ever have. Sometimes my mum talked to me about the children she had taught before she had left Soweto. The ones who marched on the streets on June 16. She told me about Hector and I knew that he was 12 years old like me. I had seen the photo of him dying. I knew, too, that my mum was on Vilakazi Street that day, along with the kids who called her ‘Teacher’ and ‘Ma’am’.

When they were deciding whose place to go back to, he said they could go to his, but she should know he lived with his parents. She was amused again, said “very unusual” and kissed him, lightly holding his face between cool, pale hands. At her flat, which was decorated like an adult’s, with paintings and wooden furniture, he felt like a mortal who’d climbed Mount Olympus and with one outstretched, trembling hand, touched the breast of a god. It became one of his favourite memories, making him smile whenever he thought of it. But it never occurred to him to ask her out again. In later years, he couldn’t understand why. He suspected that this was a chance of happiness blithely overlooked.