Afrika by Colleen Craig Read Free Book Online Page B

successfully from one teammate to another – was almost as intense as scoring a goal. Yet when Kim tried to scroll down the faces ofthe girls on the team, she could barely recall them. No doubt whatsoever – in the time she had been gone they would have forgotten her.
    Outside, the wind snapped the bare branches against the glass. She shivered. The cottage was a freezer. It was amazing how quickly it got dark. “You keep me a prisoner in here,” she had told her mom more than once.
    Kim saw the light on in Lettie's room at the end of the garden. Nobody, not even Riana, could stop Kim from roaming around her own garden! Kim stuffed her feet into her rain boots and ran through the wet shrubs to Lettie's room. Why bother to leave a note? Let her mother put two and two together.
    Lettie stood beside a hotplate. Despite the rain, she had the top half of her wooden, two-piece door propped open.
    “Hello, Kim,” she said.“Is your mom at home?”
    Kim nodded and shrugged off the question.
    “Come right in,” said Lettie, moving a pile of clothes off the end of her bed. Lettie wore an apron and two sweaters over her uniform. On her head was her navy woolen beret.
    Kim sat on the bed and watched as Lettie emptied her tea bag into the garbage and wiped out the cup with a dishrag. Kim's stomach growled. Her stomach said precisely how she felt – empty and drained.
    “Biscuit?” Lettie asked, pulling a canister down from a shelf.
    Kim eagerly helped herself to a cookie. She leaned back against the wall and munched it. By now she knew Lettie's room by heart. There was a bed, a stool, an enamel hotplate, a cupboard, and a fold down cot that Themba used when he slept here. A worn woven rug covered most of the concrete floor. Outside the small room stood an outhouse and a tap for washing. Lettie kept saying she aimed to whitewash the place, but she never got around to it. Instead, she'd plastered magazine pictures on the walls.
    Kim took a second cookie. “Themba told me that the roof is leaking,” she said as she brushed the crumbs from her mouth. “I'll tell my uncle.”
    Lettie lifted her eyebrows to indicate a tin bucket that was catching the leak. “Don't bother your uncle,” she said, as she sat down heavily on her stool. “Themba is good at school, but it is an expensive school. He has only been there for one year and he must work very hard to keep up. We are very lucky that your uncle pays the fees.”
    “Oom Piet pays Themba's school fees?” This was the first time she had heard this information. She remembered how angry Themba was when he spit out her uncle's name.
    Lettie nodded. “Those students need two of everything. Two school blazers, two shorts, twoshirts, two long pants.” Lettie clicked her tongue against the side of her cheek and added. “Then there are the books.”
    Kim tried to concentrate on Lettie's words, but the skeleton trees clawed against the side of the tin roof, distracting her. Suddenly she had an idea.
Why didn't I think of this before?
she wondered. “You knew my mother and uncle in the old days, didn't you?” Kim asked, louder than necessary.
    “Eh?” Lettie's eyes fastened on Kim's as if she saw a ghost. Then she composed herself and looked away. She said, “I grew up on the farm that belongs to their father. My ma, my sisi and her children still live there.”
    Kim stopped chewing and sat very still on the bed. “What year did you come to Cape Town?” She held her breath and waited. If only Lettie had come before 1983, the year Riana left for Canada, she might have known Kim's father!
    “Let's see,” Lettie sat in such a way that her apron stretched like an old elastic across her bare thighs. “It was early in 1984,” she said. “I know the date, because I met Sandile soon after, and Themba was born at the very end of the year.”
    Kim's heart sank. Lettie had come to Cape Town just after Riana left for Canada. And since Riana had left the farm years earlier, there was