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jy maak lawaai.”
    â€œJa! Ek raas nie.”
    â€œVoetsek, jou gat, hier is die ander man se huis, respect. Ek weet die moegoe is lank dood, maar respect.”
    The message was clear. He knocked at my grandmother’s window while having some low little disagreements between him-selves.
    â€œNou wat soek ons hier so by die dooie man se huis?”
    Though my grandmother wanted him to go, she couldn’t get rid of him and so, eventually, she let him in. The whole night she kept trying to keep his voice down but it was too late; I knew my grandmother’s secret.
    When sober you would never know that he was there. He will come an hour after we are all in bed. A single loud knock at the window and the outside light at the back of the house will be turned off as she opens the door. As the door closes, the light will be back on again.
    I don’t know what time Klip Man leaves our home because my grandmother always has to wake me up in the morning, but what I do know is that he does not have the same effect that Uncle Mashego has on her because she is always the same granny in the morning.
    My grandmother likes to make comments while Khutso is around. Khutso doesn’t make his bed or even wash the bedding and she says the reason for this is because he doesn’t have a girlfriend, and boys who don’t have girlfriends hang around street corners in packs, searching for comfort in weed.
    â€œEvery day, every night, he is with boys and boys. Knock-knock . ‘Is Khutso here?’ It will be boys. There is never a day that there is a knock and a sweet young voice says, ‘Is Khutso here?’ It is always boys and lots of boys.”
    He will usually just pretend that he hasn’t heard her but one day he did respond:
    â€œGran, maybe you don’t know ’cos you are of another age, but in my age, women kill. In my age, any association with women is detrimental to your health.”
    â€œWhy didn’t we kill you long ago?”
    â€œI mean girlfriends.”
    â€œYou get yourself a girlfriend, she won’t kill you, but you have girlfriends and you will die.”
    Good point but this is the person who doesn’t even want to see me talking to a boy. She hates Mamafa with all her heart and refuses to greet him if they meet in the street, but she can tell a boy younger than I am to go and get himself a girlfriend.
    Aunt Shirley. Sometimes I do not know what to make of her. I cannot say that she loves me ... No, she definitely does not love me. If there is anything that I am to her it is a servant, a helping hand. She has two daughters – one is twenty and the other is seventeen – who are, like me, doing Grade Twelve. She bought her two daughters phones, but when my grandmother bought me a phone she complained about it, saying that the phone would make me naughty. She then developed a habit of searching through my phone and wanting to know everything about what she found there:
    â€œWhose number is this?”
    â€œMokgethi, what does this message mean?”
    â€œWhat is he to you, Mokgethi?”
    When her daughters are home, their boyfriends and male friends visit and she has no objection, but when I was staying with her, one of the rules was that no boys should come to her house. One day a boy came to the house uninvited, looking for me. He happened to be a friend of her daughters and he came because he was used to coming all the time during the school holidays. This time I was blamed for inviting boys to the house and for that reason she chased me away, telling her mother that I am a whore and she cannot live with whores. I was happy to leave.
    While I was living with Aunt Shirley I had to clean the house every weekend and cook and wash the dishes every day after school. Worst of all were the holidays, when her children would lounge around the house, playing host to their innumerable male and female friends. I would have to clean up after them and if the