She hears the door being unlocked and turns around. It’s Harriet, she has a plate and a can of Coke in her hand.
“What are you doing? Close that window,” she says.
Aphiwe feels like she is being snapped at but the plate of food makes her excited. She’s been hungry. Her last meal was breakfast. Back at home she could eat any time she wanted.
“Why can’t I go to the party, Aunty Harriet?”
Harriet takes a deep sigh before she speaks.
“Don’t worry about that party, it’s very boring. Now eat your food, as soon as I’m done working I will plait your hair. You can’t go to school tomorrow with it like that.” With that, she leaves, but she doesn’t lock Aphiwe inside.
The party is loud now with the DJ playing gqom and amapiano.
Harriet comes back to the bedroom with a bowl of ice cream and a slice of the birthday cake. She takes out a comb and a jar of hair food from her pockets while instructing Aphiwe to sit on the floor between her legs.
“Your hair is thick and beautiful. Have you ever relaxed it?” she says.
Aphiwe shakes her head. He mother never allowed it.
“It’s very long, I can plait it in six lines, that will be quick.”
For the first time since she arrived to live at Bankenveld Golfing Estate, she feels like crying. It must be because this moment with Harriet reminds her of Sunday afternoons with her mother, before that man came and took her away from her.
“Do you have a daughter, Aunty Harriet?”
“No, just Morena.”
She almost asks why Morena was also not at the party but she remembered that he is not family, and he never once came to the children’s playroom to play with them.
“At home I live with my grandmother and my mom, just the three of us, and I can make my own food and eat whenever I want. And I play outside with my friends and…”
“My girl, this is your home now. And you can eat whenever you want, you just have to tell me when you are hungry. Madam doesn’t want kids in the kitchen, she wants is to stay clean all the time.”
“But I know how to wash the dishes, I wash them all the time at home.”
“This home is different, my girl.”
Aphiwe has many more questions but Harriet is clearly not going to be upfront with her. She realises that and decide to shut up until Harriet is finished with her hair.
“It’s beautiful, Aunty Harriet, I love it,” she says standing in front of the mirror with a big smile on her face.
“And so are you, my beautiful girl,” Harriet says.
She thinks from here she can go and look for her father, to wish him a happy birthday.
“No, you can’t do that. Stay here. And don’t speak to Madam unless she speaks to you,” Harriet tells her.
Tell us: What do you make of Harriet’s position in all this?