Confluence

By Lauri Kubuitsile

Week 1

If you see her lying there you might think for a moment she’s sleeping; sleeping on the sandy bottom, her hair flowing in the water back and forth, back and forth, gently blowing in the watery breeze. She is still, locked in place by the stone tied at her waist which you don’t see from up above looking down on her. You’d look at her and think she was beautiful, her perfect lips, slightly parted; her trim waist and wide hips; her elegantly arched brows. A sleeping beauty lying at the bottom of the river waiting for a watery prince. 

Then a boat passes above. The wave turns her head. Then you see the truth.

Her head caved in, her eye mashed to a pulp.

 No longer beautiful. No longer calmly sleeping. 

Then you realise this story will not have a happy ending after all.

***

Petra took off the purple top and jeans and put the black dress on again. She combed her short hair back into place. Changed the carved sandalwood earrings for the gold hoops. Put on the shorter heels, the boots muddied from the day thrown to the corner. Dabbed at her bright red lipstick, replaced it with pink. She decided she’d be the other person tonight.

She drove out the tarred road to the end where it turned to dirt, looking carefully, knowing the sign to the lodge was hidden, easy to miss. She spotted it and turned down the road cut through the centre of a mass of trees. She was a desert girl; closed-in by trees didn’t work for her. It wouldn’t be long, though, she told herself, and checked the locks on the car’s doors before diving into their darkness. On the other side, a slight distance further, she saw the place.

Everything in the Delta tried to act like what it wasn’t. Wealth hiding poverty. Traditional covering modern exploitation. Nice people masks and casings pulled over sick, dead souls. It was all a trick for the eye, a way to make everything nice-nice for the tourists. Truth makes the tourists uncomfortable. This place thought it lived on a tropical island, not a landlocked, mostly poor, mostly desert country in Southern Africa: tall palm trees, reed walls, fake coconuts. A tropical island sitting at the edge of the Kgalagadi Desert. Petra continued paying none of it the attention it wanted.

“Can I help you?” a huge block of white man asked as he stood purposefully in her way.

Petra nearly laughed. Fucking asshole thought she was a prostitute out to take a few American dollars from a lonely tourist, him the big saviour there to stop her and, if she was lucky, he’d offer a bit of career guidance. In truth, the guests paid to be way out here for that very reason. He knew that so she wondered what game he was playing at. The stink of discordant morality sat in an uncomfortable fug around him.

Petra knew this guy, everyone did, knew that he liked little boys a bit too much. Another subterfuge. Another fake game. So tiresome, and Petra was not in the mood. She swallowed her anger. She didn’t want this shit tonight. She took out her police identification card and shoved it in his face, saying nothing. The fat man reddened. He stepped back.

“Sorry, Detective,” he mumbled, as she pushed past him without a word.

She saw him, Elijah, sitting at a candlelit table next to the river. She slowed down. She didn’t know this man, knew nothing about him. She met him in town, just a guy passing in the parking lot. Well-built, dark, handsome, and, even better, he knew nothing about her. Exactly her type.

He had come up to her earlier that day and said, “I need to get to know you. I’m not sure why. I just have this feeling.” 

Stupid approach. Nearly put her off. But he had those wide shoulders and those dark eyes, and it had been a while since she’d been with someone, so she said okay. Okay, I’ll play. And here she was. Out in the bush meeting a stranger. You’d think a cop would do better for herself. Petra liked strangers, though, especially on-the-move strangers. Was Elijah on his way somewhere? She hoped so.

“Hey, baby.”

 He stood up and pulled out her chair, unexpectedly gentlemanly. He leaned-in and kissed her neck, a brush of lips against her skin. Petra shook it off, surprised at how ready her body was.

“You look gorgeous.”

She sat down and he poured her some wine. She looked out over the calm river glistening in the moonlight. She wasn’t good at getting from where they were to where she wanted to be. Once in bed, she was fine. All of this—no, she didn’t get any of it. She’d let him carry it with his ‘baby’s’ and superfluous compliments. It was obvious he knew this particular place far better than her.

He spoke about her dress, her figure, how he’d spotted her the minute she appeared that day. Petra was bored and changed the subject.

“This river is special, do you know that? It brings all of Africa to this place, the spirit, the essence of the continent. Two rivers meeting in the Angolan highlands, rivers flowing from the north, converging. The confluence making the mighty Okavango. It flows down until it comes here and then it seeps into the ancient soil, the land where humanity was born. The birth and re-birth. The beginning and the end. The Alpha and the Omega, birth and death. This is an important place.”

“Is it?” His long fingers ran up and down the stem of the wine glass. “Are you spiritual?”

“Not really. I’m a cop.”

“They’re not mutually exclusive.”

“I’ve seen stuff. Kind of makes it impossible to believe in god and angels after seeing certain kinds of fucked-up shit.” Blame it on the job. She knew herself; she knew she wasn’t made right, never was, but the job made it easier, it hid her more unsociable flaws.

Elijah took her hand in his. His were warm and dry, safe. She looked at him and his eyes were closed. Was he praying? Petra looked out to the river awkwardly.

After what seemed like endless minutes he said, “You need love.”

They skipped dinner. The jump over polite chit-chat was welcome. Her case was too urgent, he decided. She needed her medicine. He led her down a brick path around the restaurant to a rondavel at the back. The four poster bed covered with a mosquito net was like a cosy warren. They made love until the morning. Petra woke up, with him still on her, nearly in her. She pushed him off, got dressed, and headed to work.

She knew she’d need more of that. She’d try her best not to need it too much, though.

Week 2

First it was the dead little boy fallen in a bucket of dirty water left over from washing clothes. A careless mother, a drowned boy. Then the 72-year-old woman out at her masimo, raped by a neighbour’s nephew. Retarded nephew. Crippled woman.  The world was fucked up, Petra thought. Seriously fucked up. Chaos and violence with no outs. Just push through it. Just push through.

She could barely cope when the cases went to court and the assholes got the punishment they deserved— but this kind of shit? Places where the innocent suffered and the guilty walked away free? No, this started the rage building again. No one to blame, everyone to blame. Nothing around to fix anything, you just needed to find a way to live with it. But sometimes you couldn’t.

She knocked off and went straight home. Her father lay sleeping on his bed. Sleeping was the optimistic way of looking at it. Passed out was the realistic way. It was just him and her and if he wanted to drink himself to death, who was she to say otherwise? People needed to get through however they needed to get through. If she knew anything, she knew that. She put on her running shoes and left.

She ran and ran and ran. Slamming her feet into the road hoping something would shift and give her some breathing space. She felt full and choking. Another drop and she would be dead. Something needed to move to make room. She ran and ran and then after an hour it started. The rage retreated. She turned and headed home. She was okay, for now.

He was sitting in his car in front of her house, but across the road. It was dark and she ran up to him.

“Where were you?” he said.

“Running.”

“Running to where?” Elijah looked ahead, out the windscreen, not at her. His face hard, his words harder. Spiritual medicine man was not anywhere on that face.

“Running. What’s this about?”

He was not on his way as she had originally thought. She was equally happy and not about that; ambivalent. A week gone already. Together each night, their meetings getting more and more intense. It was okay for now, but Petra knew it wouldn’t last, she couldn’t last. She wasn’t that person. And now he wanted to be an asshole.

He flipped his head to look her in the eyes. She learned he liked these dramatic gestures. She suppressed a laugh. 

“Evil and good live together. Don’t mix them up.”

“Listen, let me go and take a shower… You want to…”  He drove off before she could finish. A spin of gravel at his tyres, sand hitting her legs. Fuck you, she thought.

She didn’t need this shit.

***

A crocodile sniffs around. It takes a few nips at her legs, but then inexplicably it moves on leaving her, mostly, intact. She’s missing from people’s lives though they don’t know it just yet. They know her to be living in Maun. Grown-up and getting things going, a big girl now. That’s what they all know. Or think they know, but they have it wrong.

Her skin is discoloured by the water. First grey, then darker. She wouldn’t have liked that after all the teasing as a child, kids saying she was too black. Kago Rethabile called her Blue Girl. She’d hated that. As a teen she’d bought skin lighteners until her mother found out and beat her, asking her what she was so ashamed of. She didn’t answer that she was afraid of becoming her mother. That was not the right answer. Right answers were important. She was a girl, and then a woman, for a short time anyway, who liked to have the right answer.

But then how did you get yourself so deep inside of the wrong answer? Lying bloated and half crocodile-eaten on the river floor, your face beaten in?

Those were all the wrong answers for a young woman like you. So very, very wrong.

Week 3

“I love you.”

His face was so earnest. Did she love Elijah? No. But what did that matter? Why not lie? Everyone did, it was how this thing worked. Maybe this was how a relationship worked. She didn’t know from experience, only by observation.

She knew nothing about him except what was important, what she needed him for. Most everything else he said she knew was bullshit, lies and things he wished he was but would never be. But they had found each other. Two fatally flawed people had come together. Maybe that commonality was enough.

“I need to get to the station.”

“I’ll pick you up after work. I have a surprise.”

Kissing, he was good at that. His kisses wiped the slate clean nearly every time.

***

“Petra, I have this case,” Assistant Superintendent Molale, her boss, her occasional lover when he could get free of his wife, said when she got inside the station.

She followed him to his office.

“A family in Mahalapye, they’re missing their daughter. Say she worked up here at Immigration, a clerk or something. They haven’t heard from her for three weeks. I thought you could look into it.”

He handed her the file. There was a photo. “How old is she?”

Twenty-eight.”

“Looks younger.”

Petra closed the file and went to her own office, closed the door. She sat down. There it was again. The rage bubbling up to the surface. She tried to pick through the layers, the strings and pieces to find the exact cause. She looked in all the places except where she knew it was.

Fuck this girl messing up her shit. Fuck her.

She opened the file. Mmoni Tsele. She was standing in front of pink bougainvillea, a standard photo, everyone had one. Her hair was long, to her shoulders, and relaxed, her smile confident, her face more than pretty, more than the nature of youth. She was beautiful. The whole world ahead of her. Why did she have to disappear? Seemed so unfair, but Petra knew fairness had nothing to do with it.

She closed the file. Out the window, she spotted her father staggering down the street, a spectacle as usual. She needed to take him home.

Mmoni could wait.

***

Elijah kissed her cheek when she got in the car. “I want to show you something.”

They drove to the other side of town to an empty BHC house, a bit old but serviceable.

“What is this?”

“I bought it for us.”

She sighed. He was confirming what she’d expected. Unfortunate, she thought. 

“Who is Mmoni Tsele?” she asked.

 He looked at her for a moment and then walked to the kitchen. “The kitchen is redone. I like it, come look.”

She followed. “Who is Mmoni Tsele?”

“Look.” He opened a door. “A walk-in pantry.”

“Who is Mmoni Tsele?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? What does that mean?”

“I meant I don’t know her.”

“You have a photo of her.”

“Do I? How do you know?”

“I saw it on your phone.”

He walked back to the sitting room, out the door, and to the car. She followed him. He turned to her, grabbing her wrists, pulling her near.

“Don’t go through my things. Never.”

He bent her arm; if he wanted he could have broken it. Why did that excite her? Why did she wish him to go that little bit further and do it, let the wildness take over and do it? But he didn’t. He released her and she was disappointed in him.

***

Fish nibble every day at the string holding the rock to her body. It isn’t really a string, it’s a strap of leather, thin and worn. In the water it softens back to the cow skin it was and the fish take advantage of the new food source. Bit by bit taken away until she breaks free, no longer tethered to the rock that smashed her head in. The river, that mighty river, the confluence of water emanating from all parts of the continent, from rain dropped on tropical leaves, running through rivulets on dark forest floors, to gashes in between houses made of mud, to the rivers, to finally disappear into the sand of the desert. To disappear as if it never was. To go to a place no one can find.

The river takes her in its watery bosom and carries her to the end. Finally the end. 

Week 4

She sat in the dark house rocking. She didn’t want this. She never went out looking for this.

Her father’s snoring in the bedroom annoyed her. Each snore built on top of the one before, adding, adding to what already oppressed her, building to some monumental mass until she couldn’t breathe. Sometimes she wished he would die. When she was small— small and vulnerable, at his mercy— she wished it more. Every day. Now that she was grown and strong enough to kill him, the wish to do so had lessened. His personal everyday hell was punishment enough for all he’d done to her. That’s what she’s told herself.

She went to Mmoni’s flat. Teddy bears on her bed, books about spirituality on the bedside table. A shelf full of statues of birds: porcelain ones, wire ones, some carved out of wood.  A photo of herself in a bikini on the wall, framed in cheap blue plastic from the Chinese shop.  A cat came through a thin opening in the window, crying, thinking Mmoni had returned.

“Nope. Only me.”  The cat looked at her and left. She was never enough.

He shouldn’t lie. If he had told her the truth, maybe, maybe she could help him. Molale would soon ask her about the case. She would not lie for him, this was her job, she needed her job. If he had caused this, he must be punished. That was justice, and Petra believed in justice.   That was the more important thing— if he had caused it all to happen, he was culpable. She knew that, that was true justice. She’d have to arrest him eventually. It was her job, arresting people. Those things, her work things, were easy. Simple. This was a case. The fact that she was growing used to Elijah complicated things. Petra never liked complications. It was good that everything could be sorted now in this tidy way now that Mmoni’s body had been found.

No evidence of anything happening in the flat though. It was tidy, everything in its place. Mmoni was a good housekeeper and that was a plus.

***

He’d slowly got her to this place, though she had not been some unwilling player. This place where her arms and legs were tied and he fucked her from behind, beating her with a leather whip. Of course if it had not been like that the first time. You can’t start with that. It was incremental. It was a hand he would not let free. A tied foot. A hand held firm against a mouth. It was exciting, dangerous, reckless. And then that thing wasn’t quite enough. He, she, needed just a little bit more. And a bit more again. Add the handcuffs. Do you have a whip? In increments everything is tolerable, eventually. When he was done, he let her loose, so it was all fine. Fun and games. Games were fun, right? Sure, games were fun.

She lay in his strong, muscled arms. “Mmoni was my girlfriend before you.”

Her breath is regular. “When did you break up?”

“That very day. You maybe even saw her in the parking lot. She told me it was over and I turned from her, and there you were. I knew it was the angels intervening, bringing you to me. Bringing us together. It was meant to be.”

“And then?”

“And then what? I never saw her again.”

He was lying. Was he lying? He had to be. Surely he knew she was dead.

“She’s missing. Gone nearly a month.”

“Yes… Well, I don’t know,” he said. “She wasn’t that stable. Maybe she went home.”

“Yes— maybe.”

***

She washes up onto the shore next to a large hippo. The hippo doesn’t like the smell after the sun falls on her body for the whole day, and it moves up river. In the end, it’s a safari guide who finds her, or a tourist if you want that story. Nobody wants that story.

“Look! There’s a crocodile!” the German tourist says.

The safari guide looks through his binoculars and sees what it really is, but he can’t disturb the German group’s holiday. Dead bodies ruin everything. He speeds the boat up. He’ll report it when they get to the lodge.

“No, just a log,” he tells the tourist.  “I think I know where we might see some elephants.”

The German group are happy. They like elephants. 

Week 5

The body was brought into the morgue. The pathologist did a cursory report. It was obvious she was killed by a large object; he suspected a rock, falling on her head. She had rope burns on her waist and a bit of a leather strap of some sort still caught in her jeans. It looked like a leather whip. He suspected she’d been dead for about five weeks. He could find no other forensic evidence except a note in her pocket. It was from someone called Elijah. He told her he’d never let her leave him.

“Funny the ink lasted so long.” He turned to Petra with the note held by some forceps. She held the open plastic bag out and he dropped it inside. “If you find the note writer, he’s probably the killer,” the pathologist said. “Crimes are not so complicated up here. It’s usually who you think it is.”

Petra didn’t like the pathologist, a know-it-all of the worst kind, doing his job and hers. She turned and left without saying anything.

The pathologist clicked his tongue in annoyance. Everyone knew she was a bitch.

***

“So?” Molale asked.

“Murdered. I think I know the guy.”

“Good. Best to get this over and done with.”

Yes, Petra thought, as she headed out to her car, her boss was right. She hadn’t meant for it to go so far, in any case. She’d just wanted some relief. Now she would tidy it up and get back to normal life. Best to get it over and done with.

***

That afternoon after seeing her in the parking lot, seeing him, she had sat across from her in the organised flat with the teddy bears and the bird statues, the cat rubbing against her leg.

“It’s crazy, you know I don’t even remember you. You say you’re a cousin? It’s wild that we’ve never met.” Mmoni spoke with unwarranted excitement.

“Yes. Wild.” Petra finished her tea and looked around the flat. “Do you like birds? There’s a place the other side of town, a bit down the river, where there are some beautiful ibis. Do you want me to show you? It’s only a short drive.”

“Yes, that would be nice. I love birds!”

They got out of the car and walked a distance. It was quiet, far from any people. Petra had expected the whole thing to be more effort than it really was. Mmoni’d fallen with a single blow. She’d slipped the note in her pocket as insurance and then fetched the leather whip from her car where she kept it. She’d hesitated for a moment, thinking it was better to take the red nylon rope. No, not red. Too bright. She’d closed the boot and looked down, annoyed by the mud; she didn’t want to get dirty since she had a date that night.

Later, she would regret having not used the nylon rope. It might have been a different story if she had.

---

Lauri Kubuitsile is a two time winner of The Golden Baobab Prize for children’s writing, the
winner of the Botswana Ministry of Youth, Sport and Culture’s Botswerere Prize for Creative
Writing, and a finalist for the 2011 Caine Prize, among others. She has more than thirty books
published both here and overseas with publishers such as Macmillan, Vivlia Publishers,
Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Penguin. Her books are used in
schools in South Africa and Botswana. She also has eight books in Cambridge University
Press UK’s Reading Adventures series, books that are read by children all over the world.
Most recently the series garnered a publishing deal in China.

Kubuitsile’s historical novel, The Scattering (Penguin 2016), won Best International Fiction
Book 2017 at the Sharjah International Book Fair in the United Arab Emirates, and was
recommended by the prestigious Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in the United
Kingdom in 2017. It has since been published in German by Interkontinental and republished
in English in Southern Africa by the Namibian Publisher Kuiseb Publishers. A new European
English edition will be coming out in October 2025 by DAS Editions UK. Her latest book is a
children’s picture book, Mr Fitchelstein’s Safari Company (Sunflower Books, an imprint of
Modjaji Books) which came out in July 2025.