“Mavis!” a voice called from the garden. It was Mavis’ boss, Caroline. Mavis panicked. The laundry was only half-done. Dirty sneakers and socks were spread out across the floor around the washing machine. Caroline would think she hadn’t even started the washing yet.

Caroline pushed the laundry door open and looked down at the floor strewn with dirty clothes. Mavis started pressing the knobs on the washing machine, trying to look as busy as she could. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking and her body craved another drink.

“Mavis, it’s three-thirty. What’s going on? You haven’t started on the laundry.”

Mavis looked up at Caroline; her lips were trembling as she tried to hold back her tears. “Nothing, madam. The machine didn’t want to start earlier so I looked for a screwdriver to check the plug just like madam showed me.”

“I’m not talking about the machine, Mavis. I can see you’ve been crying. What’s going on?”

“It’s my family, madam. I messed up.” Mavis wanted to explain but it was too difficult and she didn’t know if Caroline would understand why she had started drinking again.

Caroline took a step closer to Mavis. “You can be straight with me, Mavis. Have you started drinking again?”

Mavis looked out of the window at the garden outside. It was sunny out there. She could hear the kids playing next door. Their lives were so simple, she thought. How had her life become such a mess?

“Mavis, if you can’t stop drinking you’ll lose everything. You’ll wake up one of these days and it’ll all be gone – your family, your job, all of it!”

“I’m sorry, madam, I’ll try to fight this …” Mavis felt the hot tears streaking down her cheeks.

“Why don’t you go home now. I’ll finish up here.”

“Thank you, madam. I’ll see madam next week.”

Mavis walked to the train station in a daze. Usually she stopped to chat to the other cleaning ladies, but today things were different. She couldn’t focus on anything. She just wanted to get home.

“Awunqabe, Mavis! You’re so scarce, Mavis!” greeted Sizeka, one of the cleaning ladies Mavis took the train with. But Mavis didn’t respond. The world around her seemed to be moving at a different pace. Climbing aboard the train was difficult and she stumbled as she was caught in a stampede of passengers all pushing to get in before the doors closed.

As the train sped from Muizenberg to Cape Town, Mavis stared out of the window, unseeing. Everything outside was a blur. All she could think of was fixing the mess at home. It had started when the father of her children left her for some woman he met at Bra Mike’s Tavern. Mzwandile was only eight years old at the time, and Siphosethu only four – too young to even remember their father. The bastard had left before they could get to know him.

That’s when she started drinking. The drink had filled the void he left behind. It replaced the hours they used to spend chatting about the most unimportant stuff in the world. That was before the children and the tiredness and the fighting, and the other women. Sometimes she missed those conversations with him, and the only thing that numbed the pain was the drink. She had managed to stop once, to try to hold her family together, but when things got really tough, she had started again. Now trying to stop felt like climbing the highest mountain – so high you couldn’t even see the top.

Zuziwe, her older sister, had already lost faith in her ever coming right. And now the same thing was happening with her younger sister, Noluvuyo. No, she had to prove to herself, to her sisters and to her children that she had the strength to quit. That she could be the person she once was.

*****

When she got home she went straight to Noluvuyo’s room. Her sister had saved up money from her part-time job as a shop assistant to extend the house. Noluvuyo worked so hard at school. She was in matric and had such ambitions. She was the family’s hope.

Mavis grabbed a pen on Noluvuyo’s desk and opened her desk drawer. There were all her sister’s neatly written school notes along with her exam scripts. Excellent! was written on the top one.

Mavis found a clean sheet of paper, sat down on the bed, and started to write a letter to her eldest sister, Zuziwe. The room was silent, but in her mind a war was raging. She hadn’t been brave enough to write this letter before, but now was the time to confess everything.

All sorts of questions plagued her. Did she even deserve to be a mother to her two kids? What was Zuziwe going to do once she got the letter? Was she going to come all the way from George and take the kids back with her and make them hers? That would break Mavis’ heart. What would Noluvuyo say about all this?

The questions were overwhelming. She had no answers for any of them. But one thing she knew was that it was time to admit her mistakes.

Zuziwe, I’ve messed up. I don’t know where to start. I just know that I’ve messed up my kids’ lives and I’m messing up Noluvuyo’s life too. I don’t know what to do. I want to stop drinking but I can’t. Not alone, I need help …

It felt like she had been writing for just a few minutes, but when she looked down she saw she had written a full page and that it was already twilight outside. The sadness stuck in her throat. She wished someone had told her that making a confession about her mistakes was going to be so painful. In the last year and a half she’d only known one way of easing that pain and that was to drink.

“Mam’bhele!” shouted a man outside. Only one man called her by that name and that was Sakhumzi, her boyfriend.

“Owu yini Bawo! – Oh my God,” she whispered. Quickly she folded the letter and shoved it into her work bag before she went out to face him.

Sakhumzi stumbled into the shack and grabbed onto the chair nearest to the door for support. He was already drunk, but this was a sight Mavis was used to. He was, after all, her drinking buddy.

“Why are you making me come get you? Didn’t I tell you yesterday to meet me at Bra Mike’s Tavern? He’s going to pay for that paint job I did. We gonna have enough money for a half-jack.”

Part of Mavis wanted to tell Sakhumzi to piss off. But just one more drink, one last drink to give her the courage to quit.

“Let’s just go, Sakhumzi. I don’t wanna argue.”

“You’re disrespecting me, Mam’bhele, but I’ll let it go this time,” he warned her.

There were many times when he hadn’t just let it go, when she had come back with a black eye or bruises all over her body and had tried to hide them from her children.

As they made their way out onto the street Mavis grabbed Mzwandile’s old school bag by the door to put the bottle of booze in. If she knew that she wouldn’t be seeing her home again for a while she might have looked back at their shack. It was quite a sight; a three-metre-tall mixture of rusty iron sheets and shiny silver ones, which Noluvuyo had added when she built on her extra room.

As the two were crossing the muddy street on the way to the tavern they ran into Bra Mike. Sakhumzi jumped forward and stretched out his arm to stop him from walking past.

“We were just on our way to you, Bra Mike, to fetch the money for that job I did,” he said, trying his best to be polite. But Bra Mike wasn’t in any sort of mood to be polite.

“Who the hell you think you are, demanding money from me in the middle of the street? That money was to pay me back for all that booze you drank ‘on the house’.”

Sakhumzi went from zero to a hundred in a few seconds. “Hay’suka, man! I want my damn money, Mike. Stop telling me stories.”

“I’m not going to argue with a drunken fool,” responded Bra Mike as he pushed Sakhumzi to the side and tried to walk past.

Within seconds Sakhumzi had pulled out an Okapi knife. By the time Mavis and an onlooker in the street screamed, he had already planted the blade deeply between Bra Mike’s neck and right shoulder. Bra Mike, a bulky 40-year-old guy was brought to his knees. His wallet and phone fell to the ground. His hand was clamped over the wound trying to stop the blood, but it came squirting out, leaking through his fingers onto the ground.

Sakhumzi grabbed the wallet, folded the knife and shoved it into Mavis’ backpack. Then he ran off down the street, leaving her there. All Mavis could do was watch as Bra Mike, clutching his shoulder, stumbled back towards the tavern. “I’m calling the cops!” he shouted back at her. “You going to pay for this.”

Mavis hurried down the street and into a narrow, dark alley. The cops would come, she was sure of it. What kind of boyfriend was Sakhumzi, leaving her there? Where was the drink she craved – the drink Sakhumzi had promised? What had happened to his plan? She couldn’t move; she just stood there shaking, clutching the backpack tightly to her chest.

By the time she had found the strength to walk away from what had just happened, two police officers were walking towards her down the alley. There was no escape!

“Stop right there, Mama!” shouted the female officer. She yanked the backpack out of Mavis’ hands and turned it upside down, emptying its contents onto the ground. There was the wallet and the knife, still red from Bra Mike’s blood. “You are under arrest for the robbery of Michael Matshoba,” she said as she grabbed Mavis’ shoulder and pinned her right arm to her back.

Noluvuyo wasn’t there to save Mavis this time.

***

Tell us what you think: Were the police supposed to read Mavis her rights before they arrested her? What are these rights? Why do you think they didn’t?