Contract Groom

The ninth investor said no on a Thursday.

He said it nicely. They always did. He was a pale, earnest man in a boardroom in Sandton with a view of six other boardrooms. He leant across the table with his hands folded and told Marli Venter that her numbers were excellent, her technology was remarkable and her plan for a second Threadline plant in the Eastern Cape was "simply not a fit for our current thesis".

"What is your current thesis?" Marli asked.

He blinked. Nobody ever asked that. "Scalable platforms."

"A spinning line is a platform. You put fabric on it. It scales."

"I meant digital platforms."

"So you meant apps."

He smiled the smile of a man who would be telling this story at dinner. "We'd love to stay in touch."

Marli stood up, shook his hand, thanked him for his time and walked to the lift. She waited until the doors closed before she said, very quietly and in Afrikaans, exactly what she thought of his thesis, his view and his tie.

Then she flew home to Cape Town and went straight to the plant in Atlantis, because that was where she went when she wanted to break something and still be useful.

---

Her Majesty II was jammed.

Of course she was. Marli stood in front of the spinning line in her good blazer, the one she wore to tell men in Sandton that she was a safe pair of hands and watched a snarl of grey yarn wind itself tighter and tighter round the third roller.

"She's been sulking since lunch," said Sipho, who ran the night shift and was frightened of no one except Marli and his grandmother. "I think she missed you."

"She's a machine, Sipho."

"So you say." He handed her a torch. "She never jams when you're here."

Marli took off the blazer, hung it on a hook and climbed under the line on the creeper. The roller housing was hot. The yarn had melted slightly where it had bunched, which meant somebody had run the line too fast, which meant somebody was going to have an uncomfortable conversation tomorrow morning.

She worked for an hour. It was the best hour of her week. Under the line there were no theses and no thoughtful pauses, just a problem with edges and a set of tools and her own two hands.

When she slid back out, the line was running clean and Sipho was holding out a mug of tea.

"So?" he said. "Joburg?"

"No."

"Ninth no."

"Ninth no."

Sipho was quiet for a moment. "Isla would lend you the money. Or Mr Rhys. You know they would."

"I know." Marli wrapped her hands round the mug. "That's why I won't ask them."

She didn't explain. Sipho had known her for five years and didn't need it explained. Isla had saved Threadline once by marrying a stranger. Marli was not going to make her best friend carry the second plant too. The Eastern Cape plant was her idea, her drawings, her nights. If it got built, it would be because Marli Venter had built it.

She just had no idea how.

---

At midnight she was alone in the office above the floor, with nine rejection emails open on one screen and the plant drawings on the other. The building hummed beneath her. Outside, the wind off the Atlantic threw handfuls of sand at the windows.

She put her hand in the pocket of her work trousers, looking for a pen.

She found a card instead.

Plain white. Slightly bent. A name and a number. Nothing else.

Ruan Rhys.

She had put it in her pocket six weeks ago, on a wet night in October, after a tall, sun-browned man with amber-brown eyes and a scar through one eyebrow had stood on the other side of a glass door and asked her to marry him.

She had told him no. She had told herself no every day since. She had moved the card from her work trousers to her jeans to her coat and back again and never once thrown it away. She caught her reflection in the dark glass: fair hair scraped into a bun for work, grease on one cheekbone.

Marli looked at the nine emails. She looked at the drawings: two hundred hours of her life, a building that existed only on a screen.

She thought about Isla in the Harbour Room, saying I won't ask.

She thought about how that had ended.

"This is a terrible idea," she told the empty office.

The office didn't argue.

She dialled.

He answered on the second ring, which was annoying. At midnight. As though he'd been waiting.

"Marli Venter," said Ruan Rhys. His voice was warm and low and amused and she hated it on contact. "It took you six weeks. I had money on four."

"Who with?"

"Myself. I lost." A pause. "You've changed your mind."

"I haven't changed anything. I want to talk."

"Breakfast," he said at once. "Tomorrow. You choose where."

"Salt River. The Blue Kettle on Voortrekker Road. Seven o'clock."

"Seven," he repeated and she heard the smile. "You don't believe in lying in."

"I don't believe in wasting a morning."

"Then I'll be early," said Ruan Rhys and hung up before she could.

Marli stared at the phone.

"Typical," she said, to nobody and went back downstairs to check on Her Majesty.

The Blue Kettle had six tables, a broken jukebox and the best vetkoek on the Cape Flats. Marli had been eating there since she was a student with one pair of shoes. Nobody there had ever asked her a single question about scalable platforms.

Ruan was already in the corner booth when she arrived at ten to seven.

He looked wrong in it. Too large for the seat, too broad for the narrow booth, too much of everything. He'd rolled the sleeves of a grey jumper to the elbow. His sun-browned forearms on the Formica were marked with old burn scars, the kind you only got from welding. He was reading the menu as if it were a technical manual.

He looked up when she came in. Something moved across his face, quick and unguarded, before the half-smile arrived to cover it.

"You came," he said.

"I said I would."

"People say all sorts of things at midnight." He moved his coffee to make room. "I ordered for you."

"You don't know what I eat."

"Vetkoek with mince. Rooibos, no milk. The owner told me. She said you've had the same thing since 2014 and if I made you angry she'd put salt in my coffee." He lifted the cup. "I'm drinking it carefully."

Marli sat down across from him and decided not to smile. It took effort.

"Ma Dolly likes me," she said.

"Ma Dolly adores you. She showed me a photo of you at your graduation. You were wearing a hat shaped like a lampshade."

"It was a mortarboard."

"It was a lampshade, Marli."

The vetkoek arrived. Ma Dolly put it down in front of Marli with ceremony, gave Ruan a long look of deep suspicion and retreated to the counter, where she proceeded to dry the same glass for twenty minutes without once looking away from their table.

Marli pulled a paper napkin from the dispenser and uncapped her pen.

"Before you say anything," she said, "I want to make something clear. I am not Isla."

"I'd noticed."

"I'm not going to be swept off my feet. I'm not going to fall for a grand gesture. I'm not going to wake up one morning and discover that the arrogant man I married for money is secretly a sweetheart who reads to old ladies." She uncapped the pen. "This is a transaction. I'll write the terms. You can agree to them or you can go back to Johannesburg."

Ruan leant back in the booth and folded his arms. His eyes were bright with something that looked suspiciously like delight.

"Go on, then," he said.

She wrote. He watched her write. It was distracting in a way she refused to acknowledge.

When she'd finished, she pushed the napkin across the table.

1. One year. Then a quiet divorce. No fuss. 2. No lies. About anything. Ever. 3. Separate rooms. 4. You fund the Eastern Cape plant in full. My design. My decisions. 5. You work on the plant floor. With your hands. Every day. 6. You do not call me "darling", "sweetheart" or "babe". 7. Nobody gets hurt.

Ruan read it twice. His mouth twitched at number six. At number seven it went still.

"Number five," he said. "That's the will."

"I know. That's why it's there. Your grandfather wanted you to build something real with your own hands. Fine. You'll build mine." She folded her arms to match his. "I'm not having you sit in an office in Sandton signing cheques while I do all the work."

"And number seven?"

"Is a rule."

"It's a wish." He tapped the napkin. "You can't write it into a contract. Nobody can."

"Then we'll be careful."

Ruan looked at her for a long, thoughtful moment. Then he took the pen out of her hand, turned the napkin over and wrote on the back, in square engineer's capitals.

8. No pretending in private.

"In public," he said, "we'll have to be convincing. My grandfather's lawyers will be watching. So will a man called Victor Strand, but I'll explain him later. But when it's just us, I don't want an act. If you're angry, be angry. If you're tired, say so. If you hate me, tell me to my face." He slid the page back. "I grew up in a house full of people pretending. I'm not doing it again."

Marli looked down at number eight for a while.

It was not what she'd expected. She was beginning to suspect that nothing about Ruan Rhys would be.

"Fine," she said and signed at the bottom.

He signed beneath her. Then he held out his hand across the table.

She took it. His palm was rough and warm and completely swallowed hers.

"Mrs Rhys," he said gravely.

"Venter," said Marli. "I'm keeping my name."

"Of course you are," said Ruan and for the first time he smiled properly. It was not the half-smile. It was wide and crooked and entirely without armour and it went through her like a current through a bad earth.

At the counter, Ma Dolly put down the glass at last and crossed herself.