I’m busy all afternoon, mostly setting tables again. The guests can have their evening meal in the restaurant, or get meat from the fires. They usually bring the meat up to the deck to eat. It fills up twice in the evenings, first with the braai people and then, when we’re clearing the tables, the restaurant people come out. They bring their coffee or want after-dinner drinks from the deck bar so they can sit out under the stars, trying to identify the night sounds, and complaining about mozzies.

I don’t get a break, carrying trays from the bar, lighting mosquito coils and avoiding answering mostly silly questions.

“What’s that sound?”

It’s the woman, Canadian or American, who had asked me what my name meant and if I’d ever been to school. That was last night. I don’t answer her. It’s not my job. I keep my face blank as I place an ice bucket on the table.

She starts opening her big handbag as I give them the drinks they’ve ordered. All right, if she gives me a fat American tip maybe I’ll hit her with a smile.

“It’s Bella, isn’t it? We’re leaving tomorrow.” She speaks very slowly and loudly. “Leaving Tan-dazza. You understand? I’m giving these to you. For you!”

I look and see that she’s giving me the little free plastic bottles of shower gel, body lotion and shampoo that it’s my job to put in the luxury bathrooms. Made from marula and something.

I’m not sure what I feel. Humiliation maybe, and anger, but there’s also a rush of giggles rising up inside me like the bubbles in madam’s champagne. I pull the insides of my cheeks in between my teeth.

“Thank you,” I say, that’s all, slipping the bottles into my pockets.

It’s my job.

“Sullen, isn’t she?” the woman’s husband says, as I turn to go back to the bar.

“A raw country girl is all,” the woman excuses me. “Not much English, most likely.”

And deaf too, right, lady? I think.

Theo has come out on to the deck. He’s wearing his own clothes: chinos with a nice shirt in pale blue and white stripes hanging out over them.

“No sexy younger women tonight, so no Dean,” I mutter to Jaha.

The rangers are supposed to take turns socialising with the guests in the evenings, but Dean manages it so he never gets the older tourists.

“Always blondes with that one,” Jaha says.

“Probably because they remind him of himself.”

A bushbaby starts up with its crying somewhere in the distance and Theo has to answer questions about it. He’s not smooth and superior like Dean, but there’s no uncertainty. He knows the bush.

“This new boy, he’s good,” Jaha says.

I lift a shoulder, let it fall. I don’t want to say anything good about Theo.

With early starts for drives and walking safaris, people don’t stay up late. The deck empties. I clear and wipe tables. Now off-duty, Theo gets a beer from Jaha and sits down at one of the tables I haven’t cleared yet.

“This one’s clean,” I say, forgetting that I wasn’t going to talk to him.

“I don’t want to make extra work for you.” He gives me a toned-down version of his usual smile, and I think he looks wary. “Hey Lubela, can I get you a drink? I want to. Listen, I’m truly sorry about this morning, whatever it was. I wasn’t trying to insult your village. I didn’t mean whatever it was the way you obviously thought I did. Sorry, OK?”

I look at him and I think he really looks sorry, anxious to be friends again. Not that we were friends in the first place.

I push out a little puff of laughter. “I suppose what you said isn’t so bad. I just got called ‘a raw country girl’.”

He appears shocked. “One of the guests?”

“Of course.” I fish two of the little toiletry bottles out of my pocket. “She gave me these.”

This makes him look seriously worried. Then the giggles I bit back earlier come fizzing up again, and he relaxes.

“Some of these guests!” He shakes his head, laughing. “Sit down, and what d’you want to drink?”

“No, nothing, I’m fine.” No way I’m letting him buy me a drink, and there’s no money to pay for one myself, but I do sit down.

Theo smiles at me, but doesn’t say anything, and I don’t know what to say either. He has always seemed comfortable with me before, even if that hasn’t been mutual. I suppose it’s because of what happened this morning. I don’t want to feel sorry about it … but all right, there’s something a bit like regret tugging at me, like I’ve spoiled something.

Crazy. We weren’t really friends.

Jaha is tidying up behind the bar. The darkness outside the deck’s circle of yellow torches rings with sound. A closer noise is the tink-tink and quaark of different kinds of frogs under the deck.

And closer, always, the whine of mosquitoes, but the silent ones are more troubling than the whining ones. They float around and land on your skin. Next thing, there’s a little bump rising, unbearably itchy. The mosquito coils under the tables and the giant citronella flame-torches only do so much good.

I slap at one that arrives on my upper arm, just below the short sleeve of my uniform.

“Sies!” I wipe the blood off my arm and fingers with a damp paper coaster lying among the litter of glasses, bottles and cans on the table, and feel a horrible little thrill of revulsion. “Whose blood, do you think?”

“Your own, most likely,” Theo says, as I feel a bite starting to itch on my other arm.

“I suppose you’re taking anti-malaria medication, ne?” I prompt. “A new boy like you.”

“I’m taking.” He sighs. “And I’m not likely to forget, with my mother phoning or texting every day to remind me.”

“Like she’s one of those over-protective mothers?”

“Like my father died of malaria.” He speaks so low I only just hear.

“Hey, sorry for that.”

His face is serious and shadowy.

“We got sent to a malaria area because of my father’s job; it was a teaching post, in this really wild, rural place.”

I’m not going to tell him my father also died. I can see he’s still locked inside his remembering.

“Maybe your mother married again?”

“She’s still mourning my father.” Heaviness in his voice.

“Aren’t you being cruel to her? Wanting to make your life in the bush, most likely in malaria areas?”

I don’t say it to get at him. It’s just what’s in my head.

So now we’re even, because I’ve upset him this time. I must have, because he just looks at me, and the little dents are there between his eyebrows.

Then he stands up and walks away.

***

Tell us what you think: First Theo upset Lubela, now she has upset him. Is such awkwardness normal when people don’t know each other well, and how can they overcome it?