Emile du Toit

The exhibition had no business being in the Hiddingh Hall annex. The space was a repurposed seminar room with fluorescent tubes that buzzed at a frequency Stefan van den Berg could identify, if pressed, as approximately sixty hertz. Someone had draped muslin over three of the four tube housings, which softened the light from clinical to merely unflattering. The fourth they had left bare, perhaps out of rebellion, perhaps because they had run out of muslin.

Stefan stood in the doorway and considered leaving.

He had come because Piet du Toit, who shared his Advanced Algorithms tutorial, had said the words "free wine" with the confidence of a man who had verified the claim through multiple sources. Piet was already inside somewhere, probably near the wine. Stefan could hear his laugh, a honking sound like a hadeda ibis, cutting through the murmur of forty people who apparently had nowhere better to be on a Thursday evening in February.

February in Cape Town was not a month that invited you indoors. Outside, the air was still warm at half past six, and Table Mountain held the last of the day's light like a cupped hand, collecting the gold and releasing it slowly so that the city remained lit even after the sun dropped behind Signal Hill.