Later, around the fire, when we have told Fetta everything that has happened since he has been gone, Fetta turns to me and says, “It’s time you told us about the father of your child …”

I feel the tension as Fetta, Simon, Luntu and Bonga wait for my story. Outside the rain is pouring down and we are stuck in here together. It is time to tell them about Mr Hlomla and me …

It was raining that day at school too. The windows in Mr Hlomla’s classroom were misted up. It was break. He was perched on top of his desk, his feet barely touching the ground as they dangled loosely above the floor. He smiled at me when I walked in. He was waiting. We had been doing this for four months. It was our secret. He had even persuaded me to drop my friendship with Nozi because she wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut. We will take it slow, he had promised at the beginning. It was months before I found out anything about him. He had said he would let me in, one day at a time. It took weeks before he told me that he had problems with his family, but when he did we loved each other even more, I thought. He had grown up without a father too, something Nozi couldn’t relate to. But Mr Hlomla could.

Luntu moves closer, her hands hovering over mine above the fire that builds up and bites at the cold that threatens us. Fetta is smoking a joint in the corner, pausing momentarily to look at us over a whirling cloud of smoke, and I notice Bonga move a little closer but not close enough to stretch his hands as we do over the inviting fire.

“What happened?” Simon is impatient, as he snuggles closer to Luntu, his long legs drawn close to his chin as he wraps his long arms around himself.

“Mr Hlomla …” I start but most of what follows is just in my head, I can’t share the details. I tell them what is necessary, but I remember the rest vividly …

Mr Hlomla, with his brandy-coloured eyes and undeserved long lashes, slid off his desk and met me halfway across the classroom. He pulled me to him and I felt his reassuring arms around me.

“I’m so tired,” I admitted to him. He would listen and comfort me when I told him about how hard things were at home. Now he kept me pressed against him, but I felt something stirring in him. His lips found mine. His hands, two experienced crooks, moved along places I’d never let him go before. I’d always known he would want more. I’d never known if I was ready. But now he was unbuttoning my white short-sleeved shirt.

“You’re beautiful,” he breathed, his breath raising a sense of need in me. A dark feeling clenched the pit of my stomach as I became determined to please him. I needed to. He loved me. It was all the reassurance I needed as he ripped my already loose shirt off me, freeing me, his hands stealing uninvited touches in sacred parts of my body.

“I love you.”

I believed him as he took my remaining clothes off. The classroom door was locked. It was after school. Everyone had gone home. When I wrapped my arms around my body, he pried them away, his eyes darkening and for a second I thought I saw a different man. A man who wanted to take from me too, even though I felt like I had nothing else left to give.

“Tell me you guys went to his house, at least,” Luntu said when I told her that he had wanted to have sex.

I had suggested that. But he wasn’t listening. The usual gentleness he always regarded me with was gone. All I saw was the light bulb above us and then the floor beneath us.

“You want this?”

I nodded, hiding my tears. Wasn’t this what I had wanted, asked for? I wanted this, I convinced myself as the pain tore and splintered through me.

“I did this because I love you,” he said afterwards when he climbed off me. My body throbbed with the kinds of pain I didn’t think possible. I ached in places I couldn’t reach with my eyes. I didn’t think I’d be capable of walking home.”

“He forced himself on you?” Luntu is furious as her voice rises.

“I could have stopped him … I didn’t.”

“He took advantage – you were young!” Luntu still argues, her hand grasping mine as I shake my head.

“It’s called statutory rape,” Fetta says flatly, but I can hear the repressed anger in his voice.

He stubs the remains of his joint on the floor as he pulls his crate towards the fire, squeezing his way between Bonga and Simon. Simon moves, making enough space for him. Fetta pulls his woollen hat over his ears as he rubs his hands together for warmth and waits for me to go on.

“What happened the next day?” Simon asks. He looks confused.

But I am still on that floor – I haven’t reached the next day yet. I struggled to my feet. My skirt was bloody and I tried to smooth it down. I pulled my shirt back on. I shuffled to the door.

The ‘Go George’ bus had already left for the day and I had to walk home. It was already late. My watch read 19:20 as the night began to fall upon me. The quiet streets gave me time to think about what had happened and, although it hurt more than anything else I could imagine, I had known at some point that this was going to happen. That’s what people do when they are in a committed and loving relationship; they have sex. I hadn’t imagined it to be as painful though.

I knew it would be painful, from the stories Nozi would tell me, but she never mentioned that it felt like your whole body was set on fire. She didn’t mention the splintering pain. She made it seem like not that big a deal. Her encounter with her boyfriend Rodney had sounded more romantic, even though they did it hastily in the back of his car. It still sounded better than the horrible memory of the floor of the classroom. As I entered my neighbourhood and walked south into my street, I felt like I was disentangled from my body.

I could tell that Mother was not home again, because her room was dark, as was mine. For the first time, I was relieved to find that she wasn’t home. I didn’t think I would have been able to face her, after the day I had.

I filled the bath filled. I disposed of my shirt, lowering myself into the scorching water. I’d poured some of my mother’s bath salts, which she said helped you relax, and the mere scent of it promised to wipe off the minty smell of Mr Hlomla’s breath.

He loved me – that was what I clung to as I sunk under the water.

Things were different the next day. Mr Hlomla wouldn’t talk to me and I couldn’t find him in his classroom during lunch. He was in the teachers’ staffroom, which wasn’t a place he usually preferred. He always spent lunch with me. Every day was like our special date and we would sometimes joke about it.

But his classroom was empty and even though I waited, he didn’t come back before the bell rang. It was like that the following days too.

I still tried to impress him in class, studying the work we would do in advance so that I could answer all the questions, but he was simply no longer impressed. His eyes wore a coldness like nothing had ever existed between us. I felt completely alone, all over again.

“But it could have gone worse,” Simon decides after a brief silence; he seems to be caught up in a tangled mess of thoughts as he brings his eyes back to us, regarding me with his own sympathy.

“How?” I dare to ask, trying to understand how much worse it could have gotten if I still ended up here, with nothing but them, lost in an entirely different city.

“I mean, you could’ve gotten pregnant,” he shrugs as Fetta slaps him upside his head. Luntu rolls her eyes.

“Don’t be so dumb, dude. Of course she’s pregnant!” Bonga shouts at Simon who still looks confused as to why we are reacting the way we do. He seems to recover as Bonga makes it obvious to him.

“Oh!” He nods slowly, as though instead of Fetta, he had been the one who was smoking the joint. “Right,” he agrees, retreating into a chuckle of his own as Bonga shakes his head at him.

“Did he care, when you told him you were pregnant?” Luntu wears the same concern, as though she’s already figured it out that things couldn’t have gotten any better – and, of course, they didn’t.

I laugh sadly at the last string of the memory as I remember confronting Mr Hlomla in his class one day. I caught him when he was still gathering his books. It was too late by the time he turned back hurriedly, to dodge me like he usually did. I had nothing left to lose at that point, not even his love, as I stared regrettably at the man I thought I could trust with my whole life, a man who assured me that he knew better than using a condom. He had claimed to be much older and more mature than the boys who would carelessly spill their seeds all over me, but that is no different to what he did, or I wouldn’t have been standing there, in front of him, terrified of the new reality that flew into existence. His brandy-brown eyes, once warm with kindness, stared acidly at me as though I were a contagious infection.

“I’m pregnant.”

I saw the room spin and eventually close into darkness. The silence that folded around us was enough to make me consider another bathroom trip even though I’d spent most of the day locked inside a toilet cubicle, spilling my insides into the empty toilet. I couldn’t stomach anything, not even the look of sheer disgust Mr Hlomla served me with as I stood there, feeling small. He had never made me feel as small as he did that day as he stared blankly into my eyes.

Eventually the cold sound of his laughter followed as though he had been pranked. Only, I wish that would have been the case, but the gush of nausea that rose from the bottom of my stomach proved otherwise.

“You can’t expect me to believe that I was the only one you were sleeping with. We only did it once. You couldn’t have fallen pregnant.”

For the first time since I’d known him I wondered what could have possibly drawn me to him. I struggled to understand how I could have let him in to that extent. It was too late, I realised, to grasp at Nozi’s advice to stay away from him.

“I was a virgin!” The tears were a sign of my weakness again as I sobbed a river in front of him. He didn’t seem too concerned. What if from the beginning he knew what he wanted from me? Those were pointless questions that I grilled myself with after the inevitable.

“It’s your baby – I only slept with you,” he laughed. “But listen here, and listen carefully.” As he towered above me, it was a tone he’d never used before, his voice threatening – as was his look. He stared down at me. “I am married, and I have two kids that depend on me. This job is the only means that I have and you will not ruin it for me. You better get rid of that thing or I will show you exactly why you’ve never known me.” I stopped breathing at both his threats and the new information he’d slapped me with. He’d never, not once, mentioned he had a family of his own and all this time, as it turned out, I was having an affair with a married man.

“That’s why you couldn’t stay,” Luntu concludes and I don’t have to confirm it as she wraps me in her arms. I rid myself of the memory as I bury my face in Luntu’s shirt. I realise then that I haven’t allowed myself to cry as much as I’ve needed to and, as Luntu holds me, I cry.