It was still and dark when it happened. The moon was hanging in the sky, up above Sipho’s head, and the leaves on the oak trees, looming over him, were not moving.

The town, like the rest of South Africa, had been hit by a heat wave. The beaches were packed. The sand, that day, was covered with a canopy of brightly coloured, fluttering beach umbrellas. In the sea, the water was almost tepid and slimy around the crowds of bodies bobbing between the waves.

Sipho had only been to the sea once in all his eighteen years. The beach was only accessible by bus, and for that, you had to have money. Yet the place where he lived was on the crest of a hill and you could see the sea in the far distance.

‘Location, location, location’ is the chant amongst estate agents. In this town, the poor had the very best ‘location’ – the best views – but it was hardly noticed by the people sitting on old drums or plastic chairs, in the shade cast by their wooden shacks.

Sipho had found employment for the season and his mother was proud of him. Most of his friends had no work; most of them had no Matric and no skills either.

She spoke to him earnestly about his friends, and warned him about the dangers of boredom. His mother had never liked boredom.

“The devil makes work for idle hands,” was her warning to him.

Sipho supposed that she was probably right. He knew that most of his friends had seen plenty of ‘the devil’ before, in their young lives, and that they knew the evil one well. During the last two years he had seen less and less of them, but, as he sat alone in the shade of their house while his mother was away working, he had felt the friends drawing closer by the minute.

Sipho had never liked to be alone. In the place where he grew up, being alone had never been an option. Mihlali, Mpho and Kazadi were knocking on his door from the beginning. They were his gang, his crew.

But his mother had always wanted something better than that; believed strongly that he was meant for something better than that. Mihlali, Mpho and Kazadi knew her opinion, and so did their mothers. They had all never been impressed by Sipho’s mother.

“Just because you have a good education and a job, you mustn’t think you are better than us,” they said, loudly, so that she could hear.

“The thing is Sipho,” said his mother, in the privacy of the dim interior of their little house, “I do want better. I want you to be better. This can never be all that there is.”

Well, one thing had always been true, and that was that Sipho had always done well in school. He did not work all that hard, but school work had never seemed difficult to him.

“You are like your father,” said his mother, her eyes shifting to the window, as they always did when she spoke of his father. “Everything always came so easily to him. He never had to try.”

Sipho hardly remembered his father. The man had left when Sipho was a small boy. “He was always so easily bored,” his mother had told him, with a deep sigh. “Always changing jobs and changing towns. Eventually, he even got bored with me; with us.”

Sipho had looked down when she said that and blinked her eyes and began bustling about the room, touching Sipho lightly on the head as she did so.

“I am sorry my boy,” she had said, adding, “It doesn’t matter now. We are just fine on our own.”

None of his gang had fathers either, so Sipho had accepted it to be normal. Although, he had missed his father often enough – at the prize-giving. That was when he would be standing next to Pumela on the stage. She would lift a hand to acknowledge her proud father, sitting in the front row next to her mother, although they had been divorced for many years.

He had always been so stern. Pumela had whispered to Sipho over the years that it might be easier to have no father at all, rather than one like hers. Her parents were divorced, but her father always pitched up for school functions. Her mother was silent beside him, as they both examined whichever prize she had received, and her father muttered: “Next time you must do better. The maths prize – that is the one. That is the most important one.”

The problem was, Sipho always got the maths prize. Maths was simply easy to him. Pumela shook her head all through primary school, and into the high school that they had together progressed to.

“It’s just not fair Sipho. Not fair that you always get it with hardly any work. But you will see, one day I will get it. One day.”

Mihlali, Mpho and Kazadi went to a different school to Sipho and Pumela. They walked to the large school on the hill, with a view of the town and the distant sea. In high school, they were at home more than they were in class. By the time they were fifteen they had all failed Grade 9 at least once.

They laughed about it; threw back their heads and laughed. They still came round, and sat in the dust in the shade behind the house, and told Sipho all about their adventures. When he was sixteen, Sipho began to really listen to them. A deep anger had begun to grow in his belly at that time, and his mother could see it, and it worried her.

“Those boys will be nothing but trouble to you Sipho,” she had told him, a frown creasing her brow.

Sipho shrugged his shoulders and walked away. He knew she was right, but he had not cared then. At sixteen, he was a runaway train hurtling headlong who knew where, and nothing could stop him, not even Pumela.

***

Tell us: Do you think his mother is giving Sipho good advice? Is it best to abandon some friendships?