Mabel took off the padlock, grabbed the door handle and pulled. The wooden double doors swung open with a creak. With one foot she moved the wedge into place.

Inside the shop, in eight neat rows, sat five hundred and sixty bags of packaged water that the distributor had delivered the night before. Eleven thousand two hundred sachets in total, all waiting to be moved outside and sold off within five days.

If only all the stock was hers. Unfortunately not. But her daughter Venya came to the shop everyday after school to hawk some sachets. Sometimes she was ale to hawk off four bags a day and that made a lot of difference. At least since her police husband had been transferred hundreds of kilometers away, from where there was no hope of receiving any message let alone money.

Now Mabel wished Venya was here. But Venya had to go to school and the holidays were still another eight weeks away.

She sighed as she brought out the first bag of packaged water, dropped it by the door, the looked out onto the road.

Yahaya was still there, stopping passing buses.

Across the road was … Venya. What could she be doing so far away from school?

Mabel wanted to call out, but Venya hurried away and disappeared into the chemist. She must have hurried the chemist attendant along, for she reappeared from the chemist, went across the road, got into a bus and was gone.

Male wanted to give her daughter some space to grow-if that was the only way to keep Venya from satisfied enough. Mabel feared Venya would one day refuse to hawk water just to punish her, and she’d be able to do nothing about it.

At the same time her curiosity boiled. She couldn’t wait to know whether her daughter was ill and didn’t tell her.

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At two in the afternoon, Venya came from school. Mabel watched her daughter closely. Venya seemed drawn, not her usual chatty self. She ate little lunch, then grabbed a big plastic bowl and filled it halfway with sachets of cold water. She bent to lift it to her head.

Mabel spoke up then.

‘Venya,’ she said in a calm voice, ‘you don’t look well. Why don’t you rest a while?’

Venya was surprised her mother had asked her not to hawk this afternoon.

‘If I don’t sell…’ she began to say but trailed off when her mother shook her head in disagreement.

‘My daughter is more important to me,’ Mabel said. Then she waited until Venya had reluctantly taken a seat before saying, ‘I saw you go into the chemist to buy medicine.’ She noticed that her daughter had come bolt upright. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were ill, eh, Venya?’

Venya was silent. It was almost customary not to answer such questions about her health right away. She looked everywhere but in her mother’s face.

Her mother prodded gently. ‘Can’t you say how you feel?’ She felt Venya’s neck with a hand. ‘You don’t seem that hot.’ Then drawing closer she said, ‘My child, tell me, what is it?’

When Venya looked at her mother tears had filled her eyes. Her mouth trembled, no words came out. Her mother urged her on until finally she said in almost a whisper.

‘I went to the chemist and told him that I needed some medicine. I thought it was a fever. He said…I was…pregnant.’ Her voice had dropped lower.

Mabel had to hold onto the edge of the seat, or she would have dropped to the floor in a dead faint. It seemed like her life had just turned over. As Venya spoke on in tears, it seemed her life had got worse.

She itched to drag Venya out onto the street and beat her silly. But then she told herself that wouldn’t change anything. So she calmed herself and finally asked who was responsible for it? It had to be one of the boys in Venya’s school and that boy’s parents would have Mabel to deal with.

‘Yahaya,’ Venya said in a tearful voice.

The name hit Mabel like a blow. ‘Yahaya?! That stupid soldier who can’t speak simple English? Venya, are you crazy? He’s your father’s age. How come?’

The questions poured out. Venya wept. Mabel was crying too. She looked out the shop. Outside, a few hundred metres away, stood Yahaya, a rifle across one shoulder. One hand rose to flag down a passing bus, then lowered until it touched the bus driver’s hand through the open bus window. Then the bus crawled on past. Yahaya dipped his hand into a thigh pocket on his camouflage uniform, and then he turned his attention to the next bus on the road.

Now Mabel knew that when he wasn’t extorting bus drivers he was getting young girls pregnant, girls who hawked water to make ends meet. She felt infuriated.

She dashed out the shop.

‘Mama,’ Venya called out to her, crying. ‘Mama please, don’t go there.’

‘Shut up,’ she yelled back at her daughter. &#8216o you know what you are asking? Should I let him get away with it, just sit in silence and fear and say nothing?’ Her voice trembled with rage.

Mabel darted into the road and almost got run down by a red-and-yellow taxi before it screeched to a stop. The driver leaned out of his window and yelled curses at Mabel.

In her confusion, Mabel hardly heard the man. She rushed across the road.

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The screech had caused a knot in traffic now. The soldiers looked her way as she approached them.

Yahaya swore loudly. ‘Woman, are you drunk? You are lucky I know you, or what I would have done to you…?’

The words stung Mabel. ‘I really wonder what more you could possibly do to me. So it is not enough to get free sachets of water from my shop without paying for them. You also had to get my daughter pregnant. A girl your daughter’s age.’

As she spoke the scowl on Yahaya’s face hardened. She thought he was starting to look really guilty, like a child caught stealing from a pot, with soup up to his elbow and not a way to deny it.

‘You can’t deny it, can you?’ Mabel screamed.

One of the other soldiers who had come around them asked whether she had any idea who she was speaking to. For one fleeting second, she realised her dread of this moment had disappeared.

That Yahaya hadn’t yet denied the accusation did not surprise her. But his next words shocked her.

‘Which of them is your daughter?’ he said like it was nothing.

‘My God,’ Mabel swore, ‘you can’t even remember my daughter? How many of these little girls have you been forcing to see the colour of your boxers? Don’t you have any shame at your age? Is this why your brigade sent you out here, so you can impregnate every little girl selling chin-chin and pure water in the street?’

‘Woman, mind your mouth!’ Yahaya said at last, gravely.

Mabel looked at the man in uniform, then spat at his feet in disgust. ‘Shame on you. My husband serves this country as you do. God only knows where the force has sent him to, but I can swear on my daughter whom you have defiled that he doesn’t go about sleeping with girls his daughter’s age. You are a disgrace to the military. I hope you get knocked down by a speeding bus while you are reaping where you did not sow.’ She spat again and turned to leave.

Yahaya held her back by the arm, forcing her to face. ‘Woman, you spat on my boot,’ he said flatly. ‘You have to wipe it.’

‘Will you take your filthy hands off me?’ Mabel cursed loudly. She rushed on for the benefit of the crowd that had collected around them. ‘I will make sure this never happens to another girl in this area. I shall get all the other mothers and lodge a complaint with your commanding officer and have you stopped from getting out here.’

‘Go ahead, do your worst,’ Yahaya taunted. He even grinned. ‘But I will tell you one thing. I did not defile your daughter. Someone else did that before me. Maybe you should think about those other people before you stand here and make your daughter look like a pure virgin.’

Mabel had never felt this insulted in her life. Her hand lashed out, striking the soldier across the cheek with the resounding force of her fury.

Yahaya was a violent man. The drivers he had forced to roll in mud were lucky living witnesses. He wasted no time striking back at Mabel’s face. Only the boos from the crowd stopped him from lashing out further.

Mabel’s cheek burned from the slap.

‘You will not get away with this, you disgrace of a man,’ she swore. ‘If my husband were here…oh God…’ Her voice broke as she began sobbing.

Her husband wasn’t here to handle things anymore, and she would salvage what was left of her daughter’s pride. She stormed down the road, flagged down a taxi and took off.

Behind her the crowd had begun to rise to her cause. One of the soldiers lifted his gun and fired a bullet into the air. The crowd thinned away suddenly.

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For three days Mabel was consumed by a thirst to inflict as much harm as she could on Yahaya, even if she couldn’t match him muscle for muscle. She turned her attention to the brigade, ready to barge through doors if she had to. What more could they do to her? She was hardly in the shop.

In her absence Venya ran the shop perfectly.

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Four days after that revelation, Venya still avoided Yahaya like the plague. She made sure she never ran into him. This afternoon she didn’t have to.

Traffic was heavy, but there were no soldiers on the road. The quickest way to make fast sales in the sweltering heat was to weave through the narrow spaces between the unmoving vehicles. By the time she made it to the head of the long line of traffic, there were just two sachets in her bowl. Which meant she would need a refill.

But she saw the cause of the traffic jam. It wasn’t a crash. A bus had been fired at from behind. Accidental discharge, the newspapers liked to call it. She saw the holes made by what would probably be the bullets as they came in through the back glass. All the passengers that had been on the bus had now got down and joined the crowd in shock. Only two passengers remained in the bus, in the seats they had taken when they had got on the bus just minutes ago. There was blood all over the inside of the bus. But both unlucky passengers still sat in their fixed positions…dead.

Venya could already imagine how this picture would look on the front page of the papers the next day and the bold, black headlines that would run underneath the photograph.

Some voices in the crowd of sympathizers were saying something about the soldiers having disappeared.

Suddenly the bowl on Venya’s head crashed to the tarmac. One of the passengers was her mother.

THE END.