TRINITY LUHABE’S E-MAIL INBOX

To: trinityluhabe@jozitalks.co.za
From: admin@leclub.co.za
Subject: Fat Ass

Dear Fatass Luhabe,

I suppose you think you’re really clever with your little story on the radio this morning. Well, here’s a newsflash. We’ve survived worse, and we’ll survive this.

It hurts, doesn’t it, knowing that you could never do what our girls do? Knowing that you could never be the one up on the stage, dancing around that pole. That big butt of yours would practically hang on the floor.

So have a nice life, Fatty. Marry some boring accountant, and one day when your butt gets really wide, we’ll still be here to welcome him to one of our clubs to watch some really beautiful girls.

To: trinityluhabe@jozitalks.co.za
From: peterhiggins@weeklyguardian.co.za
Subject: Lunch

Dear Trinity,

Nice work on your story this morning. We’ve got egg on our faces, and we’re not ashamed to admit it. You did a first-class job in exposing the RCRA for what it was.

I see from my records that you applied for a job at The Weekly Guardian at the beginning of this year. If you’re still interested in making a career in the prestigious world of print journalism (on favourable terms) please give me a call. My secretary would be happy to set up a lunch appointment for us.

Hope to hear from you soon.

All the best,

Peter

I LEAVE the studio just as the eleven o’clock news is starting. I’ve only been in for an hour, but it feels much longer.

Barbara is waiting outside to meet me. A huge grin splits her face apart, and she gives me a hug as I emerge into the newsroom.

“That was great, Trinity. Another excellent interview. I’ve just been speaking to Daryl Witbooi’s producers. They’re also very keen to have you on the show tonight. Do you think you could you come in at about half past nine?”

“Sure. No problem.”

“So, how does it feel to hear your voice on air at last?”

“Great!” I beam back at her.

I know she’s not talking about the talk show I’ve just done. Anyone can phone in and hear their voice on a talk show. She’s talking about the 35-second recorded segment that’s been played on every news bulletin since six o’clock this morning. I recorded and edited it myself, and I have to say it sounds really professional.

“Great job on sticking it to The Weekly Guardian too,” Barbara continues. “It was a pleasure to listen to.”

“That reminds me,” I say suddenly. “What’s the name of that editor? The one you were at varsity with?”

“Peter Higgins,” she says, a little wary. “Why? What about him?”
“I got an email from him early this morning. I think he’s trying to head-hunt me.”

Barbara gasps. “What? Are you serious?”

“Absolutely,” I say innocently. “He’s invited me to lunch and everything. He says he can offer me very favourable terms.”

God, I’m enjoying this.

Barbara goes ballistic. “That bastard! How dare he? So now he’s trying to poach my staff, is he? I’ll show him. I’ll bloody well kill him if I have to.”

She looks at me narrowly. “I take it you said no?”

“Well, you know …” I look down at my nails. “You did kind of fire me on Friday, remember?”

“Fire you? Of course I didn’t fire you. And anyway, you should never listen to me when I lose my temper. As of six o’clock this morning, you’re off the traffic desk and onto hard news. I want you to stay on this Le Club story for as long as it lasts. And tomorrow morning I’ll give you some new assignments.”

I pull a face as though I’m still considering it, so she hurries on.

“But listen, why don’t you take the rest of the day off? You’ve earned it. And you don’t have to be back for Daryl’s show until half past nine.”

She looks at me expectantly.

Tempting as it is to keep torturing her, I can’t bring myself to carry on.

“That sounds great, thanks. I’ll be back this evening.”

She punches the air. “Yes! That’ll teach him to keep his grubby paws off my staff.”

I shake my head. “Barbara … you’re a married woman. You have two beautiful children. You need to get over this guy already.”

“It’s not me,” she says sulkily. “It’s him. He’s the one who’s keeping the feud alive.”

“Um, okay … if you say so.”

I’m not about to argue with her, because I’ve suddenly realised something. I’ve got the afternoon off. What am I still doing here?

***

What is the perfect way to spend your afternoon off?

I’m thinking exotic cocktails, towel-lined sun loungers, and sunlight sparkling on the turquoise waters of a huge rim-flow pool.

Some call it paradise.

I just call it home.

My mom is the only one in when I get to the house, which is what I was expecting. Aaron and my dad are at work, and Caleb is at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital.

My mom has had the radio switched on the entire morning and has been following every minute of the action. I phoned her from the car earlier to fill her in on my conversation with Barbara, so she’s pretty much up to date. I also called Steph.

I know Mom’s a bit disappointed that I won’t be switching jobs to work for The Weekly Guardian. She still has a huge soft spot for them because of their old Struggle credentials. But she knows I’ll be happier in radio.

I arrive to find her sorting through an enormous pile of donated clothes for her Alexandra-based housing charity.

She jumps up and gives me a hug as soon as I walk through the door.

“Well done, darling! You were absolutely brilliant today. I told all my friends to tune in and they were so impressed. I bet Barbara’s pleased she hired you now.”

“I bet she is,” I say with a grin.

Second-hand clothes give me the shivers, but I drop to my knees and help her go through the pile.

“Is this a wetsuit?” I ask incredulously, pulling out a floppy black rubber thing from the bottom of the pile.

Mom looks up at me and we both start to laugh. “Let’s just say that some of our friends don’t exactly have a firm grasp on the clothing needs of the homeless.”

“Maybe you could sell it.” Then I hold it up dubiously – there’s a great big tear down one side.

“Someone will find a use for it.” Mom folds it up and shoves it onto the miscellaneous pile. “It’ll be used to patch up a wall or keep out draughts or something like that.”

When we’re done with the clothes, Mom goes to check on the rusks she has baking in the oven, while I make myself a sandwich. Then I go looking for Sabelo.

Sabelo’s official title is Entertainment Manager. He’s been in charge of every function my parents have hosted here since I was a little girl. From children’s parties, to dinners for twelve, to cocktail parties for three hundred – Sabelo organises it all. He is a man of many talents, one of which just happens to be mixing the best cocktails in the whole of the southern hemisphere.

I find him in his office, mulling over the guest list for a charity luncheon my mom is holding next week. It’s not easy to pull him away from his duties, but I manage to sweet-talk him over to the bar where he mixes me one of his famous Mai Tai cocktails.

I change into a white bikini, slather myself in sunblock, and choose a plump novel from my mom’s study. Then I settle myself down on one of the sun loungers next to the pool.

Heaven.

I’ve arranged myself carefully so that my head is in the shade of one of the big wooden umbrellas, while my body is in the sun. It’s hardly surprising then that I barely manage to read ten pages before the novel slips onto my chest and I’m snoozing away peacefully.

I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep this weekend, especially not last night. And I’ve been at the office since five o’clock this morning.

I wake up suddenly when a shadow falls across my legs. There are no snuffling or slobbering noises, so it’s definitely not one of the dogs. I open my eyes and squint into the bright light. Then I sit up quickly with a squeak of surprise.

It’s Farouk.

“What are you doing here?” I say, clutching a towel to my chest. “Who let you in?”

His mouth twists into a familiar wry expression. “It was your mom, actually. Did you give orders for the doors to be barred against me? I can’t say I would have blamed you.”

I wrap the towel carefully around my body. Then I glare up at him.

“No, I wouldn’t have blamed me either. The only reason they didn’t set the dogs on you is because I didn’t for one second expect you to show up here. You know where I live. You had the whole weekend to get hold of me.”

“I don’t think you have any idea what my weekend has been like.” He pulls up a chair and sits down opposite me. “I’ve been in non-stop crisis meetings ever since I read those papers you gave me. Which, by the way, was approximately ten minutes after you walked out. I haven’t had a moment to breathe. You threw us into total turmoil with that bombshell of yours.”

“Really?” I can’t help feeling quite pleased.
“Are you kidding me? First I had to pull the entire legal team away from their weekend plans to look at the documents. Then we had to call in the clients to ask them to explain themselves. Then the fur really started to fly when they wanted us to carry on lying on their behalf. It took most of Saturday night to convince them that this was completely improper and would get us all struck. Then we wasted most of Sunday trying to formulate an alternative legal strategy that we could use to shut down Glitter …”

“What?” I say, outraged. “Even after you knew that Ajala was the good guy and your clients were the baddies?”

Farouk shrugs. “That’s how the law works. Your clients are your clients. You have to represent their interests as long as everything is legal and ethical. But this was neither.”

“Okay, so you were really busy. I get that. But couldn’t you have spared thirty seconds just to drop me a quick SMS to let me know what was going on?”

I stare down at my hands, not wanting him to see how hurt I feel.

“But I did let you know!” He sounds genuinely surprised. “I got one of the secretaries to give you a call. She wasn’t very pleased at being called away from her Sunday lunch, but she told me she’d definitely left a message for you.” He rakes his fingers through his hair. “Are you saying you didn’t get it?”

“No, I did get it, but …”

“So you knew I was in meetings all weekend?”

“Yes, but …”

“And Ellis Tucker phoned you on Sunday afternoon to tell you that we were all up to speed, and that you could go ahead with the story?”

“Yes. But,” I say firmly, this time. “Getting some secretary I don’t know from a bar of soap to leave me a message is just not good enough. When I left your place on Saturday, I didn’t even know if you were going to read the documents. You thought I was a deluded idiot, remember? Farouk, I really needed to hear you admit that I was right.”

“I’m admitting it now. This is the first free moment I’ve had in days.”

I stare at him in frustration. He sounds so reasonable and logical. He just doesn’t understand that what I needed this weekend was a bit of comfort and reassurance, not just a one-line message.

But he’s always been like that. For him, a cellphone is a simple tool of communication. It’s not a way of letting people know you care about them. I remember when we were at varsity together, I used to text him all day long.

Love you …

Miss you …

C u later …

And then I’d add strings of kisses and smiley-face emoticons. I finally stopped doing that when I realised that he never sent any back. And that they weren’t brightening up his day at all – just distracting him from work.

I notice Farouk looking at something over my shoulder, and I turn around to see my mother walking down the garden carrying a pair of black swimming trunks in one hand and a biscuit tin in the other.

“Here you go!” she says cheerfully. “Now please don’t argue any more, Farouk. A swim will do you the world of good. Don’t you agree, Trinity?”

I glance at him and notice for the first time how exhausted he looks. He has dark circles under his eyes and his skin seems stretched and transparent. His hair is all rumpled and his clothes look as if he’s slept in them.

“I also brought you some of my rusks, fresh from the oven. Precious will bring a tea tray down in a moment.” She puts the biscuit tin and the swimming costume down on a nearby table, her eyes flicking from my face to Farouk’s and back again. I know exactly what she’s thinking. This is it – the big reconciliation she’s been waiting for all year.

“Thanks, Sunet.” Smiling at my mom, Farouk picks up the swimming trunks. “You won’t hear any more arguments from me. A swim is just what I need to make me feel human again.”

My mother goes back up to the house and Farouk heads for one of the change rooms in the gazebo.

He reappears a few minutes later, wearing the trunks and carrying a white towel.

“I see it’s all been redone,” he smiles, indicating the gazebo. “Nice.”

“That’s right.” I keep my eyes fixed carefully on his face. “My folks had it fixed up last year while I was in London. It is nice, isn’t it? The summer kitchen is great for entertaining and they can now seat thirty people around the … around the … um … pool …”

I’m stuttering a bit because Farouk in a black swimming costume is even more delicious than Farouk in boxer shorts. He should be declared a weapon of mass destruction and made illegal by the Geneva Convention. For the safety of women everywhere.

He gives me a slightly quizzical look. “Well, it’s very smart, anyway.”
Then he turns and dives cleanly into the pool, swimming up and down with his fast freestyle.

I go back to my book. If he thinks I’m going to sit here and watch him, he’s very much mistaken.

I am absolutely not looking at him.

I’m not noticing the way the muscles ripple in his arms as he lifts them out of the water in a graceful arc. Or the way the droplets sparkle in his hair when he stops to catch his breath. And I’m definitely not looking at the wet swimming costume moulding itself to his thighs.

Oh, dear. I seem to be holding my book upside down.

I turn it the right way round and manage to read almost a whole paragraph before I start sneaking glances at him again.

After a while, he stops ploughing up and down the pool and comes to stand in the shallow end with his elbows resting on the side, right in front of my sun lounger.

“The part I still don’t understand,” he says, as if we were in the middle of a conversation. “Is how you copped onto Wessels and Kumar so quickly. We all thought they were the good guys – the big-hearted family men who were trying to make the suburb a safer place for their wives and children. They seemed so sincere.”

“It’s hard to say, exactly.” I put down my book. “I told you about Wessels shouting at the waitress, but it wasn’t only that. It just seemed very clear to me. Ajala was nice and they weren’t.”

“Mm, yes. Well, you always were pretty insightful about people.”

“The moment I started doubting them enough to check the facts behind what they’d said, I found that none of it was true. The Exit programme was not investigating Ajala for human trafficking. The local schools had not complained about him handing out comps to their kids. The police were not looking into drug activity at Glitter. And when I moved onto Wessels and Kumar themselves, things got even more interesting. Especially when I started probing their sources of income. All it took was for me to make the connection between them and Le Club, which happened when I realised that one of Le Club’s strippers seemed to be in the habit of visiting Wessels at his house.”

“Clever. Very clever. It was right there under our noses and we all missed it.” Farouk lifts himself out of the pool in one fluid movement. “I hope the tea hasn’t gone cold while I was swimming.”

I turn in surprise to find the tea tray at my elbow. I hadn’t even noticed Precious putting it down. I touch the teapot tentatively. “No, it’s still fine.”

I pour two cups for us, glad to have somewhere else to look while Farouk dries himself off briskly.

“I hope you don’t mind me hanging around a while,” he says, slinging the towel around his neck. “A cup of tea and some of your mom’s rusks will go down well. But there’s something I’d like to say to you, too.”

“That’s fine,” I gulp. “I’ve got the afternoon off anyway. I don’t need to be back at the studio until half past nine tonight.”

Farouk sits down on a chair next to me. He finishes his tea in about two swallows and turns to look at me. My heart starts to thump uncomfortably at the serious expression in his eyes.

“Trinity …”

“Yes?” My voice sounds strangled.

“When I first moved to Joburg at the beginning of this year, I found you already in a relationship with Ethan. I was disappointed, even though it was exactly what I’d been expecting. A girl like you wasn’t going to stay single for long, obviously.”

I glance at the gazebo before turning to him again.

“Have you been … keeping tabs on me?”

“Only every minute since we broke up. My oldest sister has been a mine of useful information.”

“Gemma? But … but she said you never asked about me.”

“I never had to. She told me everything you were doing without my having to ask. Especially every time you got a new boyfriend. I think she really enjoyed telling me about that. And if news of you ever dried up, all I had to do was drop your name into the conversation, really casually, and the flow would start up again.”

I don’t know what to say, so I fiddle with the cover of the book on my lap.

I honestly believed he hadn’t given me a thought in three years.

“Then I ran into Caleb one night,” he goes on. “And he told me enough about Ethan to make me hope that your relationship with him might fizzle out soon. That was when Caleb set us both up by inviting me to that Sunday lunch without telling me you were going to be there. I feel quite bad about that day, actually. We weren’t very nice to Ethan – your brothers and I. And he really didn’t deserve it. He’s a pretty decent guy. But when I saw him with you, I just lost perspective. We ganged up so he’d feel like an outsider. I’d like to apologise to him some time.”

“He blames you for our break-up.” I say. “So don’t hold your breath waiting to be forgiven.”
Farouk reaches out and takes my hand. We’re sitting so close together now that our knees are almost touching. His clasp feels warm and comforting and utterly right.
“And was he correct, Trinity?” he asks gently. “Did you break up with him because of me?”

I look him straight in the eyes. “No, I didn’t. I broke up with him because he was trying to rush me into a commitment. And I’d come to realise that he wasn’t the guy I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. We would probably have limped on for a few more months if he hadn’t tried to push it to a crisis.”

And that’s the truth.

Honestly.

It’s about … ninety-five percent true. Okay, maybe meeting up with Farouk again did help me realise that I was settling for second best with Ethan. But the question is – does Farouk really need to know that? And the answer, I believe, is no. He’s already got an ego the size of Table Mountain. There’s no need to feed it.

“Trinity …” he says softly. “The moment I saw you at lunch that day, I knew my feelings hadn’t changed at all. And the time we’ve spent together since then has just confirmed it. I’d really like us to try again – to pick up our relationship where we left off. Do you think … do you think you might also want that?”

He takes my hand, then begins tugging at it slightly, as though he’s trying to pull me towards him, into his arms. I close my eyes for a second and imagine myself tipping forward into his embrace. Then I open them again.

“No,” I say simply. “I’m sorry Farouk, but I don’t.”

His fingers fall away from my hand and he sits up stiffly. “Why not?”

Okay, here goes.

“We had a great relationship, remember? We had a perfect relationship. I thought I’d hit the jackpot. I was so in love with you I couldn’t imagine ever being happier than I was then. I used to think you felt the same way too. But, obviously not.”

“Trinity …”

“Because you threw it all away, remember? You walked away from it. You walked away from us. And you didn’t look back.”

We’ve pulled away from each other now. The intimacy of a moment ago is gone. My fingers are all twisted together and Farouk has his arms folded defensively across his chest.

He sighs impatiently. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Trinity. It was a dream come true for me. To study at Oxford. To be tutored by my idols – the leaders in their field. Would you really have wanted me not to go? To turn it down?”

“No!” I say crossly. “Of course I didn’t want you to turn it down. But it all happened so quickly, so completely out of the blue. One night we were lying in bed together picking out the names of our future children, and the next morning you were breaking up with me. I didn’t even know you were applying for scholarships. You just …” My voice wobbles. “You just made it look so easy.”

Farouk’s face is like stone. You could ship him straight to Easter Island, no questions asked.

“It wasn’t easy,” he says grittily.

“Then why did you make me feel like I was the only one who was suffering? It was like you were made of ice. You felt nothing, you said nothing, you just pulled away into a place where I couldn’t reach you. You didn’t even suggest that I should go with you, or come and visit you in Oxford, or even that we should try to keep the relationship going.”

“I was originally going away for two years, remember? That’s a very long time. Okay, I ended up converting to a one-year degree because I wanted to come back and study law at UCT, but the scholarship was originally for two full years.”

“That doesn’t matter! The point is, you wouldn’t even talk about it. When you first told me about Oxford, I thought the next step would be for us to discuss our options together. But the next time I saw you, you’d already made up your mind. The only option was goodbye. Game over. And now you want us to start all over again. But I’ll always be wondering whether it’s going to happen again. Because I can’t trust you, Farouk. And you can’t build a relationship where there’s no trust.”

There’s silence for a moment. One of those awful ringing silences that sounds louder in your ears than a shout.

Farouk stands up abruptly.

“That’s it,” he says. “I can’t do this any more.”

“Do what?” I ask, thrown off balance.

“Is your mother still in the house?”

“Yes. At least … I think she is.”

“Then go and ask her all about this. Tell her I sent you. And if they never want to speak to me again, I’ll understand. But I can’t carry on like this.”

He wheels around and strides off up the garden.

***

To say that I’m mystified would be a slight understatement.

As I go into the house through the French windows, calling for my mom, I feel as though I’ve entered a parallel universe. What does my mother have to do with anything? What can she possibly tell me? And where has Farouk disappeared to?

“I’m in here, Trinity.” I hear my mother calling. “In my study.”

I trot upstairs and find her sitting in an armchair, rather than behind her desk. This reminds me so much of when I used to get into trouble as a kid and she’d call me in for a “little chat”.

I must be getting paranoid because I have the strangest sense that she’s been waiting for me.
“Hey, Mom, have you seen Farouk anywhere?” I flop down on a sofa.

She shakes her head. “No, I haven’t seen him at all. I thought he was with you.”

“We were having a – well, a fight, I suppose – when he stormed off. But he said a funny thing before he left. He said I should come and talk to you. And he said that you and Dad might never want to speak to him again, but that he couldn’t carry on like this. Do you have any idea what he was talking about?”

Mom stands up and walks over to her desk, where she starts straightening some piles of paper. Her face is turned away from me.

“What were you fighting about?”

“About how he walked away from our relationship when he went up to Oxford. You see, he wants us to try again. But I’ve told him I can’t trust him any more. That was when he stormed off and said I should come and talk to you.”

I pause and look expectantly at mom. She says nothing for quite a long time. When she does finally look up at me, her face is so serious that I feel a thud of alarm deep in my chest.

“What is it? What happened?”

“Trinity … when you told us that Farouk had accepted a place at Oxford and that the two of you were looking at ways to keep your relationship going, your father and I flew down to Grahamstown to talk to him. We explained to him that if you interrupted your degree to go overseas you would probably never go back to it. He tried to convince us that it was your decision to make …”

I nod vigorously, but mom keeps going.

“But we all knew you were so much in love with him that you would have given up everything rather than lose him. So we asked him to make it easy for you. We asked him to give you no choice. And … and that’s what he did.”

I stare at her in silence, hardly able to believe my ears. When I try to speak, my mouth is so dry that I have to swallow a few times first.

“It was the best relationship I’ve ever had,” I say at last. “You threw away the best thing that ever happened to me … and … and you didn’t even consult me first.”

I can see that mom is feeling pretty devastated too, but I’m too angry to feel much sympathy.

“You were so young, Trinity. You were so very young. Relationships that start in your teens hardly ever last. I know I met your father when I was nineteen, but that was in a different time. He was in prison – on Robben Island. I was a social work student. It felt as though apartheid would last for ever. If we’d known how quickly it was all going to crumble, we might have taken it more slowly instead of secretly getting married and rushing into having our first child. And your degree was something real – something you could build a career on. We were so proud of you for having got through the first two years. We couldn’t bear to see you throw it all away. Not even for someone we also liked so much.”

“You have no idea what it did to me,” I wail. “It shook my confidence in everything – in myself, in love, in relationships. I cried myself to sleep for weeks.”

“But don’t you see, darling?” she says eagerly. “Now you can have it all. You’ve got your degree, you’ve got a career, and now you’ve got Farouk – who still wants to be with you. It’s the best of both worlds.”

“The best of both …?”

I manage to stop myself before I say something I’ll really regret. I’ve just spotted Farouk down on the lawn playing with Naledi, our old beagle. He’s the one I really need to talk to.

“This conversation is not over!” I say, turning on my heel.

***

I march towards him. He’s throwing an old tennis ball for Naledi, who still manages to tear after every ball like a puppy.

As I come up behind Farouk, he reaches down to pick up the ball.

“How could you?” I scream at him.

He jumps, almost tipping forward onto his face.

“You treated me like a child!” I rage. “You and my parents messed with my life like I was some little girl who couldn’t make her own decisions. How could you let them do that to me?”

“Trinity …”

“Don’t Trinity me. You totally betrayed me!”

“Look around you,” he says, gesturing to the pool, the gazebo, and the garden stretching in all directions around us. “Look at all this. Normal people don’t live like this. It’s pretty intimidating, you must admit.”

I look around blankly at the familiar scene. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

He gives a short laugh. “When Abel Luhabe flies his private jet down to Grahamstown to warn you not to mess up his daughter’s life, you don’t just laugh it off. It’s pretty damn intimidating, believe me. And I did try to talk them out of it. I spent a whole afternoon trying to talk them out of it. But they wouldn’t budge.”

“You c-could have tried harder,” I stutter.

There’s a short silence.

“I could have,” he says after a while. “Except for one thing.” He reaches out and brushes my cheek with the back of his hand.

“What?” I ask reluctantly.

“They were right. Your parents were right … and I knew it. I did need to let you go. It was the right thing to do. I desperately wanted you to come with me. I tried to convince myself that you wouldn’t be wrecking your future – that you would go back and finish your degree eventually. But when? I knew I wouldn’t be going back to Rhodes, so when would you? You’d end up as the girl who almost got a degree. Walking away from you was the second hardest thing I’ve ever done, Trinity. Making it look easy was the hardest. The very hardest.”

I close my eyes and turn my face away. I feel my lips tremble.

“So, now that you know the whole story …” Farouk’s voice falters. “Do you think we could possibly … try again?”

I have to cough a few times to get my voice under control.

“Look …” I say shakily. “I understand why you did it. But that still doesn’t change anything. In the end, it all comes down to trust. You went behind my back, Farouk. You got together with my parents and decided what was best for me. I can’t let that happen again. And I can’t trust you not to do it again.”

I turn away and start walking up the garden.

“Goodbye, Farouk. One of the guards will let you out.”

***

I’m sitting in one of my favourite spots in the whole world.

It’s a little slope of grass that overlooks the kitchen garden. It’s tucked right away around the side of the house where hardly anyone goes. I love the soothing view of the neat rows of herbs and vegetables in their different stages of growth.

I’m reminded that life is a cycle. That nothing matters terribly much because it’s all happened before and it’ll all happen again.

But today, for some reason, the whole soothing thing doesn’t seem to be working. Tears are rolling silently down my cheeks and everything is blurred.

“You know …” a voice says conversationally.

I gasp as Farouk sits down next to me. Then I quickly wipe some tears off my cheeks.

“Girls really should come with a manual.”

“What do you mean?” I whisper.

“Well, being a guy and all, when I hear the words, ‘Goodbye Farouk – the guards will let you out,’ I tend to think that that’s it, you know? It’s all over.”

The tears start trickling down my cheeks again. I can’t help it.

“But then I got to thinking that in girl-talk that might just mean that I need to try a bit harder. That I need to work at convincing you I can be trusted. And you know what …?”
He hands me a tissue, giving my hair a tiny stroke as he does so.

“I’m hoping … I’m really, really hoping … that that is what it means. Because I’d like to spend a lot of time – say the next fifty to sixty years – convincing you to trust me. So, what do you say? Do I speak good girl-talk, or what?”

I giggle wetly into his tissue. Then I blow my nose and wipe my eyes carefully.

I turn to face him.

“Yes, you do,” I say, as his arms close round me. “You speak excellent girl-talk.”