“Hey, big boy.” Black gave him a slap on the shoulder as he sat down. The physical contact was strangely helpful, energising. He kind of wanted to ask Black to do it again.

“Late night, Hershie?” Black leered at him.

Hershel almost claimed that he’d had a threesome, two women fighting each other for possession of his bod; but he felt too low for that kind of banter.

The People’s Republic, a socialist coffee shop, was Maurice’s unlikely favourite meeting spot. The music consisted of low, Tibetan-sounding horns and the service was not service. You might order a coffee on arrival, as an opening gambit, and the waitress might write it down – again, just a first move; and then there was nothing. Only when you’d complained once or twice, bringing some real anger to your tone – revolutionary fervour was valued – might your beverage arrive. The cappuccinos were surprisingly good, though (made, presumably, by a bourgeois machine hidden in the back), and anyway it was worth it for the waitresses. They were always seething, oppressed not only by living in a country that subscribed to neo-liberal capitalist policy but perhaps also by being obliged to labour in an anti-capitalist coffee shop that could not pay much, given that there were so few patrons. Hershel found their rage appealing. If he’d been a more energetic person, he would’ve liked to be as emotionally expressive as the servers.

This afternoon, the coffees came fairly quickly – some mistake, maybe; they might have been intended for patrons who’d already left. Hershel smiled at the waitress and was rewarded with her choicest scowl. She had curly black hair, putting him in mind of Camille and making him feel sad and horny. He looked at the foam pattern on the surface of his coffee. “Is this a heart? I think she likes me.”

Black checked out Hershel’s mug. “Maybe, man. But check,” – he gestured at his own blurred foam – “a vagina.”

Hershel laughed, despite the trepidation he felt whenever he had to spend time with Black. The guy was sometimes amusing, you had to hand him that. Also, his affection for The People’s Republic was in his favour. No one who enjoyed an angry socialist coffee shop with Tibetan horn music had completely bought into a corporate ethos. Maybe Black still regarded himself as a boy from the Cape Flats, an outsider, and this place was his way of showing that he wasn’t completely at ease with the lifestyle he’d carved for himself.

“Thanks for meeting me on a Sunday – appreciate it,” Black said. “We can get this out the way before the week starts.”

Out the way?

“Hersh, we’ve always levelled with each other,” said Black. “Let’s forget the bullshit for one second...

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