“You still like this radio job?” Gogo asked. “Three weeks you’ve been there, nê?”

“I love it, Gogo.” Londi was passionate. “The people especially. Like I’m the new girl, but they want to include me in everything … Not that I’ve got money for all the places they go.”

“I wish I could help you,” Gogo said, beating the mixture in her bowl.

“You’ve helped us all these years, now it’s my time to help you,” Londi said.

Through the open door she could see her brother and his friends, taking turns shooting a ball into a hoop they had made out of scrap wire fixed to an old pole. Her sister was somewhere around too. Sometimes Londi had bad dreams about what might have happened to the three of them without Gogo all those years ago when everything fell apart.

“That’s a bit bright,” Gogo said, seeing Londi pick up a tiny plastic jar of powdered food colouring.

“I mix it with the red to get a lovely purple. Or with yellow for green.”

Gogo preferred powdered colouring to the liquid kind for cakes, and it was one of Londi’s tricks to use it as make-up. Gogo’s iced cakes were famous in their Soweto neighbourhood, in demand for special occasions. Most of Londi’s time at home was spent helping meet that demand. The profit the cakes made were a real help because Gogo’s pension was so small. Gogo never turned down a job, not even the time some young men had ordered a cake in the shape of a pair of big boobs rising out of a bright pink icing bra for a friend’s bachelor party. Gogo had been so embarrassed she’d made Londi deliver it.

“You’re a clever girl with your make-up and your mother’s scarves,” Gogo said.

“My little tricks,” Londi laughed. “Like spraying myself with perfume testers in shops whenever I get the chance, so I’ll at least smell expensive.”

Expensive like YoYo, she thought, and of course that brought thoughts of Busani and how he seemed to be growing impatient and disappointed because Londi could hardly ever afford to join him and the rest of the Sounds crowd in the evenings. And impatient by her refusing all his offers to pay for her.

For a moment her mind went to what that photographer had said about paying well, but that was crazy thinking. He couldn’t have been serious.

“At least tomorrow I get to join in, because I can just stroll over from Sounds,” she told Gogo. “There’s this free concert in Mary Fitzgerald Square. I’ll sleep at Hetty’s.”

While choosing her most special scarves in the morning, Londi tried to pretend she wasn’t dressing for Busani.

“Hola girl, amashwang-shwang. Plus, I love that scarf,” Hetty greeted her when she got to work, admiring the dotted, bright pinky-red net she wore tied in a big bow at one side of her neck. “That colour, it sings. What do you call it?”

“Pomegranate, someone said.” Londi shrugged, laughed. “What do I know? I’ve never seen a pomegranate. That’s how deprived I am.”

“Celebrating your poverty again, Londi?” Busani had entered the office in time to hear her last sentence.

“Just mourning the absence of pomegranates in my life,” she said, trying to sound cool. But he was giving her his tilted smile and cool was the last thing she felt, so she was glad that a message coming through on her phone gave her a reason to look away and read it. “That’s weird. I was just thinking about this guy yesterday, and now here’s a message from him. That photographer, remember? Esaia.”

“What does he want?” Busani sounded hostile.

“To photograph me,” Londi laughed and deleted the message. “Crazy man.”

She looked at Busani again, and wished she hadn’t. Every time she saw him there was this fizzing excitement in her blood – and a churning confusion in her emotions. She’d gone from finding it hard to believe what he’d said about being attracted to her, to quite desperately wanting him to have been telling the truth.

Only, what good would that do her, or him, when he owed his loyalty to YoYo?

YoYo, who was so cute, and who could afford to dress herself in the most gorgeous and expensive clothes and shoes. Londi always felt angry when she caught herself thinking this way, like she was in competition with YoYo. Somehow that idea felt wack.

“Looking forward to tonight?” Busani asked her, moving across to take a quick look at the computer screen.

“Word!” Londi answered him.

“Me too,” he agreed, and the way he said it, looking into her eyes, it didn’t seem to be about the concert at all, and it made her feel like she was melting inside. “Catch you later.”

He strode out of the office, and Hetty looked at Londi.

“You and Busani? Something?”

“I don’t know.” Londi was self-conscious. “Not really.”

“Not yet, I’d say, the way the temperature was rising in here,” Hetty teased. “Damn girl, I’d love to see you take him off Lil’ YoYo.”

“That’s part of the problem.” Londi opened her hands in a helpless gesture. “I hate the idea of … competing for a man. Like Busani is sort of a prize.”

“He is,” Hetty said. “Man like that, all that drive and determination? Lose the idealism, sista, and go for it.”

Londi laughed and shook her head, but the idea of going for it had started to appeal to her. Definitely.

She didn’t see him again until he found her in the crowd at Mary Fitzgerald Square that night.

“It’s great to have you around for a change, after all the evenings you’ve refused to join us.” He bent his head, speaking into her ear so as to be heard over the music, and his warm breath tickled her skin.

“You know why I had to,” she reminded him, her heartbeat like thunder and her breath catching in her throat.

“Money problems,” he agreed. “Fine. You insist on paying your own way, so why don’t you moonlight? Get a second job? I used to do it, starting out.”

She gave him a straight look. “Because I haven’t got time. I need to help my grandmother baking and decorating cakes so we’ve got a bit more than just her pension and my pay to keep my kid brother and sister fed and clothed.”

Busani’s expression softened. “What happened to your parents, if it’s not an insensitive question?”

His unexpected gentleness made Londi swallow emotionally.

“My mother lay down on the railway line, because there was no-one to tell her depression is a real illness, only Papa ordering her to get her act together and not embarrass him by appearing mentally unstable. We were too little to understand anything. And then Papa took off, we don’t know where, and Gogo came and got us.”

“Rough for you.” There was compassion in Busani’s voice, and in the hand he laid on her shoulder, his fingers fitting themselves to its curve.

In that moment, Londi understood that what she felt for him was more, and deeper, than just physical attraction.

A moment of joy in the absoluteness of the emotion – and then despair, because here was YoYo, arriving to claim Busani’s attention.

YoYo, daughter of the man Busani owed.

***

Tell us what you think: What can Londi do about the problem of YoYo? Or is it up to Busani to do something?