Prologue
I hadn’t worn my denim jacket in a long time. I hadn’t worn anything worthwhile in a long time.
Three months had passed since the miscarriage, and somewhere in those months I had quietly stopped caring about things like that - clothes, appearances, the small daily performances of a woman who has herself together. Work didn’t fix it. Nothing much did. I moved through the days like someone walking underwater, pressing against a resistance I couldn’t name and couldn’t see.
But the jacket had been in the back of my mind. A niggling, irrational thought that kept surfacing at odd moments - in the shower, at traffic lights, lying awake beside Owen at two in the morning. Try the jacket on. As if something about it mattered, though I couldn’t have said what.
It was buried at the back of the old closet - the one we’d agreed to repurpose for Liam’s clothes, even though he wasn’t sleeping in that room yet. His tiny outfits hung in a neat row, each one on its own small hanger, and every time I opened that door something in my chest pulled tight. My jacket was the only thing left in there that belonged to me. I was fairly sure it had been collecting dust.
The closet doors creaked. I reached past Liam’s things and touched the denim. It was soft with age, the fabric worn to the particular smoothness of something loved for a long time. Light blue. Boxy fit. My go-to, once.
I slipped it on. It still fitted.
I waited for the small familiar lift - that particular comfort of a thing that knows you. It didn’t come. I stood there in the quiet of the afternoon, Liam down for his nap, Owen out somewhere, the house entirely still, and felt nothing at all.
I shook my head and patted the pockets. Old habit. Sometimes there was a forgotten R10 or R20 hiding in the lining. Not much money stayed in our pockets these days.
My hand stopped.
There was a small bulge in the left breast pocket.
I opened the flap slowly. My fingers closed around something smooth and cold.
Glass.
I already knew what it was before I pulled it out. I think some part of me had known for weeks - the weight loss, the disappearances, the jaw that never stopped working, the eyes that had started looking at me from somewhere far away. I had been choosing not to know. It’s remarkable, really, how much you can choose not to know when the alternative is unbearable.
The pipe was small and smudged, the glass clouded at one end. A lolly. Tik. You grow up on the Cape Flats and you know what one looks like. You know what it costs. You know what it takes.
I had never expected to find one in my house.
In my jacket.
I looked over my shoulder, though I was alone. There was something about holding it that felt like trespassing - like I had reached into a secret I was never supposed to touch, and now that I had, I couldn’t put it back.
-----------------------------
I heard Owen before I saw him. He was singing under his breath, slightly off-key, the way he always did when he was in a good mood - or performing one. Liam heard him too. He scrambled off the couch and ran shrieking to the door, and Owen caught him and swung him up, and from where I stood in the kitchen doorway I watched the two of them together and felt the glass pipe burning against my hip through the fabric of my tracksuit pocket.
Owen put Liam down and turned to me. I scanned him the way I had started scanning him - face, eyes, jaw, hands - looking for the signs I had learned to read without meaning to. He seemed relaxed. Loose. His eyes found mine and crinkled at the corners.
“How’s my baby girl?” He pulled me into his arms before I could step back, kissing my neck, his mouth warm and a little too wet. “Did you miss me?”
He smelled of cigarettes and something underneath it I had only recently started recognising. I kept my arms at my sides.
“I was with Jussy,” he said, already moving away toward the fridge. “Few of his friends were there. What did you get up to?”
“Nothing much.” He wasn’t looking at me. “Are you hungry? There’s still sausage. I can warm it up.”
“Ha ah. Later.” He glanced down the passage. “I’ll check on Correy and Simmy. You feed them?”
“Yes.”
“Owen,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”
“Now now, Erry.”
I watched him walk past me toward Liam’s room - the one with the sliding doors opening onto the deck and the yard. I looked at my son, heavy-eyed in front of the TV, waiting for his father to come home the way he always waited, the way I always waited. I called his name. He smiled at me without quite waking up.
I swallowed the conversation back down with everything else I had been swallowing lately, and took my son to bed.
Owen was restless when he finally came inside. He sat across from me on the two-seater with the particular energy of someone whose body is running faster than the room - knee jumping, jaw working, his eyes moving over me without settling.
“What’s up with you?”
“I need to talk to you.” I leaned forward. “I just need you to be honest with me. That’s all I’m asking.”
“When have I ever lied to you?” His voice was soft. Reasonable. It was a voice I had once found reassuring.
I pulled the pipe from my pocket and set it in my open palm between us without a word.
The room went very quiet.
I didn’t look at him. I looked at the pipe and waited.
“Where’d you get that.” Not a question. His voice had dropped to a whisper that landed like a slap.
“My jacket pocket. The one in Liam’s cupboard.” I kept my voice even. “Whose is it, Owen?”
He shrugged - a slow, careful shrug, the movement of someone buying time. “It’s a friend’s. He asked me to hold it.”
“A friend.”
“You know I’d never-”
“Are you using tik, Owen?”
He was on his feet before I finished saying it, hands raking through his hair. “Yoh, can you stop? Can you just stop?”
“Then tell me the truth.”
“I told you the truth! It belongs to someone else. I’ll give it back, I’ll tell him-”
“It looks used,” I said.
He went still. Then he bent toward me, his voice dropping, his hand out. “Give it to me, Erin. I’ll sort it out.”
Something shifted in my chest - the thing that had been sitting there for weeks, compressed and pressurised and waiting for an exit. I stood up.
“I have a better idea,” I said.
I walked to the front door. I could hear him behind me - his footsteps, his voice climbing - but I kept moving, out onto the driveway, the cement cold and pale in the dark. I set the pipe down on the ground.
Then I stepped on it.
The glass cracked sharp and clean under my heel. A thin, chemical smell rose into the night air.
“What the fuck, Erin!”
I stood there on the driveway with glass and ash under my shoe and looked at him, and felt the last of something give way inside me - something I had been holding up for a very long time.
I just didn’t know yet what would come after.
