He sits up, dazed. He starts to scan the room urgently. He leaps towards a flowery make-up bag half open on the bedside table. He drops a stick of lipstick into it, fumbles to shut the zip. He tosses it under the bed. He pulls his duvet back, searches for something. He snatches what looks like a wisp of black fabric. He flings it beneath the bed. I pull away from the window. No, please. I must be imagining it. Was it women’s underwear?
Phaka lets me in, pretends to be rubbing his eyes like he has just this second opened them. But his eyes just now were wide open, hiding clues. “Hey, babe,” he murmurs, all gruff and gentle, like he didn’t accuse me of trying to ruin him yesterday. His breath stinks of stale rum. He pulls my head to his chest.
“Ntandana yam. Happy Anniversary.” And his skin smells like someone else. A chemical sweetness that is not me. I sniff again. And it is not Phaka’s Casanova deodorant. I know that scent well. This is just sickly. And a bit glamorous. Nomsa, the girl who thanked him so profusely on Facebook after she slept with him in his bed.
“You slept with her.”
“Who?” Fake puzzlement doesn’t suit Phaka. He just looks ridiculous. Like some kind of bad TV actor.
The girl with the neo-colonialist long legs. “Do you think I’m blind?”
“Hey?”
“I saw you through the window.”
“You were spying?”
I stare straight at him. “Yes.”
His skin darkens with humiliation. “That is so low.”
“Yes.” My voice is shaking with emotion now. “It is. I don’t like myself for doing it. This is not how I want to live.”
Phaka thinks he has got me seeking forgiveness. “It’s OK, babe. Come and lie with me. Let’s talk about this.”
The man’s cheek actually makes my heart pound with outrage. “Are you mad, Phaka? Your bed is still warm from that poor girl who thinks you are ‘talented and kind and generous’.” I recite the words from her Facebook status.
Phaka knows he is bust. He wanders to his table, fiddles with a lens cap on his camera. Fits it onto a lens, pops it off again.
“Any sign?” he says.
I shake my head. “No.”
But I see one big warning sign written in red: ‘Stay away from Phaka’. It might as well be written in some strange girl’s lipstick.
I don’t trust myself to speak. I turn and march back the way that I came. I feel his eyes watching, perhaps regretful to see me walk away in my stunning white jeans. Because Phaka is moved by surface things, the way they look, the way they swing, the way they create a pleasing image within a square frame. One thing Phaka is not, is a thinker.
Nor is he the right man to share my life with.
***
Tell us: Now she knows Phaka is a cheater, should Bulelwa go ahead with the pregnancy?