I’m dreaming about giving Lwazi a jewelled eyepatch I’ve designed and made, and for some strange reason he’s calling my name, over and over.

Then I wake, and it’s real: Lwazi is knocking at the window and calling me.

I’m disorientated with sleep, feeling for my phone as I get out of bed.

“What’s wrong? What are you doing here?” I open the window, using my phone’s light to see.

“Please let me in, Phindi.” He keeps his voice low. “I couldn’t sleep … couldn’t get back to sleep, I mean, after this hellish dream …”

“Wait. I’ll unlock for you.”

I don’t know if it’s right, but there’s so much need in his voice, I can’t do anything else. I creep out of my room, not putting on any lights. Snores come from Mama Ngwenya’s room, silence from Nosicelo’s and Jacqui’s.

“Please can I stay with you in your room, Phindi?” Lwazi asks when he’s inside. “There’s such … peace where you are.”

Peace? But what if he wants more? As in sex? Will he have protection?

But it turns out peace really is what he wants – lying beside me on my bed. I have to accept it; he doesn’t regard me the way he saw the others. I’m just a friend.

It’s not enough.

But if he needs me to be his friend, then that’s what I’ll have to be, and never show him my true feelings – never let him know I want more, never give myself away by dressing nicely and trying to make myself attractive for him.

“You’re so good to me,” he tells me a few hours later, when I wake him so he can be gone before the others are up. “So kind.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that.”

“But you are.” He smiles at me in the grey light of early morning, and my heart seems to flip. “I didn’t appreciate you before, didn’t value your special qualities. I’m sorry for that, Phindi. I was shallow, selfish. This … this thing has changed me.”

When he’s gone, I stroke the dent in the pillow where his head rested. We lay so close, those few hours – and nothing happened! I can’t believe it. Wait, I can. I’m just not attractive to him. He likes lively, outgoing girls, not quiet ones like me.

It’s the same every time I see him after that. He visits me in the evenings, or at the weekend. Sometimes we sit outside, or else we go for a walk. Twice more he knocks on my window in the middle of the night when bad dreams have woken him. We lie close, holding on to each other, and after a while he sleeps.

I don’t. I am too frustrated. And I can’t do anything about it. He needs me to be his friend.

We’re walking one evening, so quiet now that the birds have gone to their nests. Lwazi says, “I’m heading for Jozi tomorrow. Time for the doctors to see if they can pretty me up and fix my eye.”

“Your eye?” I falter, hating to think of it gone.

“They think I’ll still see out of it, only maybe not well.”

“But … they said you’d lost it!” I’m shocked, but starting to be happy.

He laughs. “I heard that story went around. I didn’t know you believed it, though. One of those stories that gets worse with every telling, I guess. Did you think I’d be wearing a patch for life? Or maybe getting one of those glass eyes?”

I laugh with him, but I’m thinking he’ll be almost back to the old Lwazi next time he comes to Umjindi.

He won’t need me anymore.

***

Tell us what you think: Is it likely that Lwazi only needed Phindi’s kindness while he was down, and now he’ll go back to the way he was?