It was a disaster, the ruin of any girl’s hopes. Thandiwe’s cousin had jumped off a bridge for a dare, never dreaming of the consequences. She did some private damage to herself, Thandiwe told Joanne, but in the most public way. Trickles of blood had clouded the waters of the Kowie River and the back of her white swimsuit as she splashed, sobbing, to the shore. The other school kids who’d seen her jump spread the story around and that’s when the trouble began. Thandiwe’s cousin had endured months of taunts about being los and gagging for it, and now she’d been put on an antidepressant pill.

          “Listen, I feel so bad for her. Really, I do,¸ Thandiwe said. Her plump mouth opened wide to admit a glistening forkful of the roasted sheep’s head she was scooping from a newsprint wrap. The animal’s lips were shriveled and scorched, yet it looked like they were smiling – trapped, it seemed to Joanne, in the echo of some grisly joke.

          “And she’s only fourteen, same as us. But, you know, if you were a guy that was even halfway cool, would you want to hook up with a chick who’d popped her cherry in front of the entire world?¸

          Thandiwe had been talking for ages, all the time it had taken the girls to walk from the school gates in Rhodes Place down the hill to the bus station. You could hear the buses long before you saw them, snorting and roaring, Joanne thought, goaded beyond endurance by the flies and the dust, and the rich stink of offal and roasting mielie-cobs rising from smoky braziers, and the press of township commuters impatient to be home. It was a bright blue afternoon in November, with only a few days to go before the long summer break.

          “Who cares about a few dumb bitch gossips, eh?¸ Thandiwe was stabbing at the sheep’s lolling purple tongue with her plastic fork. “But the whole thing has given my dad these, eh, thoughts about me. Boys and me. The proper way to behave – all that. He’s so uptight. If he had his way, I wouldn’t go out with a guy for, like, fifty years. Know what I mean?¸

          Etienne was a stickler for proper behaviour, too. At first, Joanne had not found this strange: he was 38. He was a grown-up. Although that description wasn’t really quite right. Maybe a month ago she would have called him that, but now, caught off-balance as she was by the strange current swirling between them, the term no longer seemed to fit.

          “Twenty minutes,¸ he had said yesterday, looking sideways at her as he scooped up his shoulder-holster from the car’s footwell. “We said we’d meet here at eighteen hundred hours. We agreed on the time, but now here you come twenty minutes late. You trying to pick a fight with me, Joanne?¸

          When Joanne – aghast, tearful, and, she knew, unflatteringly brick-red from running all the way to their secret place behind the Botanical Gardens – had begun to tell him about the principal keeping the whole form back, he took his pistol out of its holster and tapped her playfully on the head.