I follow him down a dark passage whipping with eddies of wind coming through missing bricks in the far wall. We stop at one of the many dark doors. “Here we go.” The door has a strange, crunched wound in it, like someone punched it with their fist.

David opens the door, shuts it behind us. The city lights leak in through a window as he locks it, shoves the key deep in his loose, shabby pants. He switches on the light.

The room contains a double bed with a dirty white bedspread. It looks like someone has dragged it across dirty ground, shaken it off, draped it over the mattress. Or left it unwashed for weeks and weeks. The curtain is yellowish, stained from tobacco smoke, perhaps.

Through a gap, I see part of a huge billboard outside. A beautiful woman with white teeth holds up a bright, white sheet. A speech bubble blows from her lips. ‘Like new! Every time!’ it says. A little girl peeps over the kitchen counter, happy. I pull my eyes from the billboard mother and her white sheet. What the heck is actually happening?

Through the adjoining door is a laptop on a desk, an empty water jug, an ugly chair with thick, square legs. I go closer. On the screen is a collage of young girls like me, posing in bad light. Cellphone pics.

Is this their database? I step nearer. There I am in the centre, in my school skirt and my sister’s smart boots, smiling hopefully.

What did Liwa say? ‘Best price.’

I can’t smile now. This place is disgusting.

“Whose bedroom is this?” I ask.

David sweeps past me into the adjoining room. He slams the door in my face, locks it, saying, “Wait here.”

I bang on the door. “David?”

A door to the passage slams. I bang on the ‘office’ door again. Kick it hard. “Hey!”

I hear only an answering laugh. It is a girl’s voice, hoarse. Without amusement. It grips like a cruel fist around my heart.

Oh God.

Through the window the big, sweet mother smiles with sparkling teeth. I don’t remember the shape of my mother’s teeth.

Don’t panic Babalwa, I tell myself.

Perhaps David went downstairs to print the indemnity form. Perhaps he is just being insensitive, locking me in.

I keep my distance from the grimy looking bed. You don’t need a washing machine to maintain basic cleanliness. I try the window. It is bolted shut!

“Whyyyy?” I shout.

I hammer on the glass with my flat hand. We are too far from the street.

“Hey!”’ I shout, futilely.

I only hurt my own ears, frighten myself more with my desperate voice. Wait here,’ he said. Surely he didn’t mean to lock me in.

I ask the mother on the billboard: ‘Did he?

The door unlocks behind me.

I swing around, relieved, but it is not David. It is a fatter, taller man. He is well dressed but dishevelled, made scruffy by some drink or some drug. His eyes are glassy and wet. I have seen those men at the shebeen, staring after Nomsa and I like lost dogs. But this one is hungry, not lost.

His fat thighs make his green pants too tight. His stomach shows through the tight buttons of his mauve coloured shirt. Raspberry and peppermint is his innocent colour scheme, but his piggy eyes hold a predator’s violence.

He moves slowly towards me, his violence tightly coiled, waiting to strike. A hunter of human flesh, he comes closer, breathing heavily. Not clumsy. He says only one thing, his voice breaking with greed: “Girlie”.

This man is a rapist.

I am his sacrificial lamb.

I dart to the window, instinctively aiming for the only possible opening. He moves fast, practised at this. He grabs at my hair. I shriek, claw for the window but he drags me by my hair, crashes me to my knees. He lifts me up like I am made of light fabric, not bones and flesh. He uses his mountainous body to pin me to the bed. I scream, I fight, I kick uselessly. He roars above me, his rage rising with each terrified effort I make to wrest myself from under him. I bite him on the cheek, feel the skin puncture beneath my teeth. I get a mouthful of piggy flesh, spit out the taste of blood. He squeals, falls onto his hip to clutch at his cheek. I thrash from under him. I drive my elbow against the window. The pain blasts like white heat up my arm but I ram at it again. The glass shatters. The stars seem to fly in. Cool carbon air sweeps in from the traffic below us. I bellow, “Aaaarghhh!”’ through the broken window. I have forgotten language.

The big man rises up like a viper, yanks on my sister’s business skirt. I lift up as if on the Brixton wind, land again on the dirty bed. He becomes a hundred beasts, pulverising me, burning me inside and out, tearing me into tiny pieces. He kills me with his dark violence.

The fat man crushes every cell of my body. Shatters me.

When he lifts off me, I am not alive. I am only breathing.

There is blood.

I turn my head to the side. The mother through the broken window smiles; holds up her clean, white sheet.

I have lost my central nervous system. My hard drive has been torn out, tossed into the dirty street below me.

I know that whatever I am, I am changed. I will never be Babalwa again.

The beast pulls up his pants. “Come in,” he grunts but no-one has knocked.

The door to the adjoining room swings open slowly. The rapist digs deep into his pocket, pulls out a fat wallet. He turns to David, lurking in the doorway.

“Too much trouble this one.”

David glares at the broken window; the bite mark. “Shit.” He glares at me, still lying on the bed. He says to the beast, “Two hundred discount.”

I watch the new notes flick from the wallet. They look ironed and washed. Clean money.

“Good price for a virgin,” David says.

The beast shrugs, shoves the wallet into his pants. He does not look back.

As David sees him to the door, I slide to the floor, to my hands and knees.

***

Tell us what you think: Does rape change the essence of the victim, as Babalwa believes she is changed?