At home, the phone sat on a pile of directories on top of the bookshelf beside my father’s chair. While he could reach for the phone from where he sat, I knew that my mother would have to be standing up to talk to me, her feet bare, perhaps, on the cool tiles; perhaps the voluminous skirts of her dress draped over my father’s arm. But every time I thought about my mother, I pictured her lying on the three-seater couch, on the verge of exhausted sleep, glasses slipping off her face, her Scheme Books and Lesson Plans on the coffee table.

“We now have twelve people,” my mother said.

My mother was a lifetime member of the Full Gospel of Christ Church and contributed annually to the church building fund. Every Easter, she joined members of the congregation in a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the church’s founding bishop. She attended church every Sunday but had long given up on dragging Papa and me there. I was unsure whether it was the possibility of the world ending, or the incident that took place in my last semester of primary school, but something had prompted my mother to make urgent plans for my baptism. 

“You are getting ready, aren’t you, Sadi?” my mother asked. “Reading your verses?”

“Yes, Mama,” I said. “Then we who are alive, who are …”

“…who are left…”

“who are left,” I said. “Then we who are alive, who are left…uh..eish…then we…”

“…shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,” my mother continued. “…and so we shall always be with the Lord. Amen. You only have a couple of weeks left, Sadi,” she said, and a feeling like foreboding settled in my stomach. The church was going to make a big ceremony of it: on the night of New Year’s Eve, dozens of young people would be taken to the Metsimasweu River and be dunked under—once, twice, three times—just as John the Baptist would have done, and then, be given new names to live up to. Already, I juggled a lot of names: those given to me at birth, those I had acquired in my childhood, names I had picked up the previous year, but my mother had made her decision. She needed me to be baptised. Whenever she spoke of it, I fell silent under the weight of all my names.

Mpho and Tshiamo were waiting for me on the bench in front of the guardhouse. Mpho lay propped up against the wall with her legs crossed, while Tshiamo sat on top of a newspaper on the far right of the bench, an umbrella open over her head. As usual, she had slotted a newspaper under her butt because she did not trust the cleanliness of the bench.