one year on

"Miss - " The girl comes running towards me in the deepening dusk. For a moment I think it is H., the girl across the road who's studying in England but back for the holidays. Trucks come to her family's house and unload things at night, never in the daytime.

When the girl gets closer, I see it's not H. This one is younger, 19 or 20 maybe, with straightened hair (which costs money).

"We are selling clothes," she says. "Shorts, tops. Come and see."

How do I explain that though I'm white, we're struggling like so many others here in the middle-class, wondering where to get school fees from, whether the 'phone will be cut off over unpaid bills, hitching a lift to Mozambique with family, eating spinach-from-the-garden-stuffed pancakes from mix sent from the UK, making tea from 'leaves' in the garden?

As we near the house -- it's the big tiled house on the corner, a double-storey building that looks as if it's been transplanted from Coventry rather than built for the tropics -- another girl emerges. She's wearing hipsters, a strapless top. I can make out the plastic -- they're supposed to be invisible -- straps holding up her Chinese underwear. Zhing-zhong bras, we all wear them.

The clothes are in a sports bag. The girls pull them out: shorts (favoured by masalads but certainly not traditional Zimbabwean wear: Girls La Musica dance group causes a furore each time they don skimpy shorts), tops ("8 dollars each," the girl says. "But we can negotiate"). Some still have the Top Shop price tags. Others are clearly second-hand. Has someone left a bag behind and the girls are disposing of the contents? Or has one of them just come out from England and she's selling off her stuff to raise some cash?

"I don't have cash at the moment," I say (which is true). "I'll have to ask my husband."

In Zimbabwe, that's a perfectly good get-out clause.

....

"My mother's sister has gone," she says. "Last week. They tried to 'phone but there was no-one there." She looks at me reproachfully. There was no-one in the house last week. I imagine the 'phone ringing unanswered.

"Was she old?"

"Not so old," she says. "She had problems - there." She points to her chest.

"Heart problems?" "No, BP. Her younger daughter was working in Harare so they took her to that hospital there. Sakubva Hospital. No, Mabvuku." She names a township to the north of the city.

"If I had money, I would go to Nyanga." The aunt must be buried by now, but I know the ritual: the sitting with the bereaved family through the night, the food gifts that will be expected. "All my money is gone."

"Gone?"

"I send money to Nyanga for my father," she says (her English is a thousand times better than my Shona). "40 dollars. Then my brother's wife wants money for thatching grass, 1 dollar for a bundle. I buy them 25. Then there is no money for my sister's child to buy school books. So I buy books for Khumbulani, 1 dollar 70 a book."

"They are all taking money from you," I observe.

"They say I am their mother, now that our mother has died," she says with a sniff. I am not sure if she is cross with me -- a not-wealthy employer she has the misfortune of working for, a Madam who does not even have enough money to get her hair done each week (or month, or six months) or buy a DVD player or a plasma TV or drive a car that doesn't belong to her in-laws -- or with her desperately-poor family who have fastened onto her as the only one with an above-average income in US dollars. Both, I guess.

.......

"How is school?" I ask A, a teacher.

There was a teachers' strike before we left, 10 days ago. Something has shifted though, because yesterday pupils were streaming out of St Dominics, a government secondary school.

"Some of them are back," she says. "At the junior school, they held a meeting. The parents must pay 50 dollars a term. With the 'incentives' -- localspeak for parent topups -- the teachers will get 330 USA." She uses the local slang: you-sah.

Happy told me about the junior school arrangement. She has a daughter there. "Honestly, we're so fed up," she says. "We want to put M in private school next year. Some of the parents were complaining, they say they can't afford 50 US." Happy can afford it. But many of the parents are civil servants, earning less than 150 a month. They can't.

"At the teachers' college, they are having a sit-in," A says.

It's one year exactly since the unity deal was signed. Some things haven't changed.