teenage mum

"I've got some depressing news," Shingie's mother says. She is shorter than me, half my size. I feel like a giant. "Shingie's pregnant."

She has to repeat it. "Shingie is pregnant." Not Shingie. I have a photograph of her in her school sports gear, navy-blue and white. She's standing with eight or nine team-mates, against a stunning red poinsettia bush. Shingie is the smiling girl, not a stunner, not plain either. She has two sisters. Chenge isn't married yet: J has two children, F and N. F showed me her 12 US dollar phone yesterday. Mummy sent it for her 9th birthday, she told me proudly (What about brain tumours? I wanted to say but stopped myself just in time).

How old is Shingie? 15, 16 maybe? Her mother took her out of boarding school only last year. Baring, near the Old Mutare Mission on the way to Africa University, where Ndabaningi Sithole was buried. Shamie hated it there. Her mother insisted she stay though. Was she trying to avoid this sort of thing happening? Then the money ran out and Shingie had to come home. Her father doesn't live with them. I met him once, downtown in Mutare. He had some kind of grain-selling place. Shingie's mother insists she is a Ms.

She looks up at me, her braids laced with grey. Mai Bruce always teases her about that grey. I wonder how she reacted to Shingie's news. Did she shout, scream, threaten to throw her out?

"I was shocked, mostly," she says.

We do not voice the unvoiceable, the 1,300 who die of AIDS here every week. But the question hovers.