Please God let me finish my studies. I don’t want to have to learn how to stick on fake nails. I hurry to my room, plunge straight into twenty more pages of Steve Biko’s book, I Write What I Like.

Inspired again, I feel calm enough to clean the house and watch TV. I switch it off when it gets to the face cream ad, the beautiful black girl going on and on about how this cream has saved her. Saved her? Like there are not more urgent things happening in the country? Like the fact that the government is stealing all the tax money and then saying they can’t afford to provide free university for the poor?

As I turn away from the TV I can’t help noticing Lulama through the window, hanging up wet clothes. A yellow shirt slips from his fingers and drops into the sand. Lulama stares dismally at it. His father comes up behind him, laughing.

“It’s only a shirt, Lulama. What’s wrong with you today?”

He hands Lulama more clothes, his arms wet to the elbows. He picks up the dusty yellow shirt and shakes it out.

“Nkosi, Tata,” Lulama says.

I have never noticed that Lulama’s home is very balanced, the way they all do the work. Did my own father help with the house work? I must remember to ask my mother when she wakes up.

I make her some salad with Lulama’s funny carrots chopped up with cabbage. I shake her gently awake in the late afternoon.

“Thank you, my girl.” She yawns. “Everything OK?”

I can’t burden my mother. She looks like she is still in dream land and she has to get on a taxi in forty-five minutes and go and mop up emergency blood. Save lives. Can you imagine anything more nerve wracking? I’m not going to say something that will make her stomach lurch and her heart ache through the long, hard night. I will not even talk of my father. I will try to be as sensible as Lulama next door, who is playing soft, sweet afternoon jazz now. My mother smiles as if I have spoken about him.

“He’s got a good taste in music that boy.”

I try not to think of his defiant, lovely kiss.

As I wave my mother goodbye I hear my phone buzzing on the table. It is Phaka, sending me an SMS.

Any sign?

I write:

No. U finished the shoot?

No reply.

I refuse to keep asking. I refuse to be clingy. But an hour later I can’t help going onto the internet, typing his name and the date. I find a gushing mention from Nomsa, the girl he shot today.

This man is talented and kind. He made me feel so relaxed. Really. Thank you Phaka!

And Phaka’s right. This girl is amazing. She has legs all the way up to the window of a soaped-up truck. A good photo, too. She’s not pouting and bending over, showing off her body parts. She’s just leaning against the truck with the keys in her hand, looking like she is barely suppressing her girl power. Like she might jump in and drive at 200 kays an hour.

It looks to me like all my lectures to Phaka are getting through to him. He has made her look like she has courage and intellect, not just glossy skin. But today I hate the spirit that shines from this woman. I hate those long legs. Eurocentric if you ask me. Neo-colonial standards of beauty. In our tradition, curvy is beautiful. Plump is womanly. A sign of fertility.

Which is not what Phaka wants.

***

Tell us: Is it sensible to judge and compare your body shape against those of models in the media?