Mpho watched me through the windows of the sky-blue phone booth outside our school gate. She twirled the handle of an open bright red umbrella to the left, to the right, to the left again and leaned in. 

“Remember what I said,” she told me, in a low, slow voice, as if to a child.

My father picked up the phone.

“Papa,” I said.

“Heeeey, Mme,” my father said. Mpho rolled her eyes at my wide smile. I was named after my father’s mother, so he called me “Mother” in his good moods. I was fourteen and learning to take advantage of him. It was so hot that November, that a man had become a national hero after swimming in the fountain pools in front of parliament. Newspapers called him “The parliamentary swimmer”. Pictures of him, with water droplets glinting and fleeing from his head and from the white t-shirt stuck to his skin, were couched between stories about the Y2K bug and fears of the impending end of the world. On the phone, my father wouldn’t let me forget the swimmer.

“Mme,” my father said. “So, you Gaborone people, you swim at parliament?”

“Papa,” I said. “You know, everyone says that man is sick.”

“You city people,” my father said, laughing. 

“Papa, this is not why I called.” 

“That’s why it doesn’t rain there in Gaborone,” my father said. Mpho tapped at a non-existent watch on her left wrist.

“Papa,” I said. “Please, I need money … I need … I have no food.” Mpho rolled her eyes and shook her head at me. The side of the umbrella thump-thumped against the booth. 

“Ija, ija,” my father said. “Again no food? Don’t they feed you at that school? Look, Mme, where does all the money we pay to that school go? Wait, wait, here is your mother …”

“Papa, no,” I hissed. “No, no, no, no.”

“Your mother wants to talk to you…”

“…Hello,” my mother came on the line.

“Mama!” I said, “Hello, Mama.”

Mpho threw her hands into the air and walked off. I slipped another P1 into the coin-slot. It fell in with a deafening crack.

“Le teng?” I said to my mother. I was always trying to win her back.

“Oh, Sadi,” she said. “You ask an elder how she is? So now even your tongue has made its home there?”