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without fear. With nothing there was nothing to lose but life.
    After ten minutes a truck approached, and you edged out on to the pavement, thumb erect, hair vivid in the dark. The truck dipped its lights and slowed to an idle next to you, its gears clunking. The driver was a man, and beside him sat a dog and a young boy.
    This man, I imagine him always eating – the kind of brute whose appetite for food reflects his appetite for consumption in general, for consuming everything it might be possible to put into his mouth, an appetite out of all control, that regards moderation not just as a foreign idea, but as an enemy concept: to moderate is to limit his experience of the world. So when the truck pulls over to meet you, Laura, I imagine this man covered in the detritus of a meal, food staining his clothes, while the boy is left to starve.
    I see you at the truck, trying to play the role of whore to get a lift, knowing you would be capable of anything to get where you needed to go. It was a game you sometimes played with your brother: the little flirt, the sexually precocious younger child, teasing him, poking fun at his small adolescent prick in the pool, your premature development intimidating. You were before your time in all things. Don’t get stroppy with me, Laura! I would bark, watching as you waited until the last moment to pack, to shower for school, and then sulk when I pushed you. (How can I call you wilful, whom I miss most?) I can see you there now, at night, amongst those people, hiking up your skirt – no, not a skirt – opening the top button on your shirt or knotting it at the waist to expose your midriff, an ivory sash in the darkness, talking your way into that truck.
    ‘Where you heading?’ the man asked, leaning out through an opened window. He had leathery skin and wiry hair; his upper arms sagged where they emerged from his sleeveless shirt, and at the armholes his pale chest flashed.
    Perhaps you shook your head or came up with a plausible story. Or perhaps you simply told the truth.
    ‘To Ladybrand.’
    ‘I’m going to Port Elizabeth. I’ll take you that far. Hop in.’
    Climbing up into the cab, you flinched at the smell of urine and dog. The boy scooted closer to the dog and the driver, making room for you.
    ‘I’m Bernard,’ the man said, ‘and this is Sam.’
    In your last letter to me, and in the last of the notebooks you bequeathed me, you recount your time with Bernard and the boy, the boy called Sam. Would you have given your real name? I don’t think so. You would have given a name to suit the moment, a name under which to travel, to draw attention or not – to draw attention away, perhaps, from what really mattered.
    ‘I’m Lamia,’ you said.
    ‘Funny name for a girl,’ said Bernard. ‘This is Tiger.’
    ‘Funny name for a dog.’
    ‘He bites like a tiger.’ Bernard put the truck back into gear, accelerating through the intersection. ‘I’m driving through the night. Tomorrow morning I’ll stop at a picnic place, sleep all day, then get going again. That suit you?’
    ‘I might want to carry on.’
    ‘You sleep now if you want.’
    ‘Thank you for stopping.’
    ‘Pleasure. When I saw you standing alone back there, I said to Sam, Christ man, that girly looks like she needs a lift .’
    You were no girl, not by then, but that’s what a man like him would have seen, a girl alone and stranded, even a girl playing the whore.
    ‘Hell of a place to be hitchhiking. All kinds of men out this time of night,’ he said.
    All kinds of men, and some in trucks. You were not the kind to take rides with men, but perhaps the child, the boy, reassured you, because he was a child. Men with children are less likely to do things that might shame them in the eyes of a child . I wrote that once, naively. But no, the concern would have been secondary; you were prepared for anything, ready to meet any threat, to go out fighting.

1989
    The boy woke before Bernard that morning because