How to Hide Inside a Three

Book excerpt: It's hard enough being an adult, let alone a functional one. Leigh-Anne feels like neither. A white woman from Cape Town's Southern Suburbs, she's gradually unravelling as wife, mother, sister, daughter and office manager. The story opens in winter with Leigh-Anne lost at midnight on Rondebosch Common. Three losses are preying on her. First, there's her relationship with her ageing dad, who seems to be hiding a secret. Secondly, Leigh-Anne's desire for Samuel, her thin and distracted psychiatrist husband, has run dry, and she can't help thinking about her colleague Omar at NGO Phambili - Omar with the hairy wrists and warm jacket. The third area of loss is through a perceived betrayal of her activist best friend, Gwendal, whose increasing battiness alienates her teenage daughter. Leigh-Anne's children, Tom and Jamie, pipe up from the sidelines. They are oblivious as their mother grows fatter and drunker, her clandestine bingeing a backdrop to their lives. She seeks refuge by ordering her world into threes and multiples of threes, which are presented as lists - quirky, funny and often poignant. Her lists corral her worries and failures but can't fix them. Looming large is the loss of a national dream, evident in the poverty all around them, and personified in Mr Hoody, who lives on the pavement outside Leigh-Anne's local Spar. Leigh-Anne and her siblings discover the sordid secret their parents have been hiding: her father had an affair with the teenage sister of a nurse who worked at his abortion clinic on the Cape Flats during the apartheid years. The girl became pregnant, and Leigh-Anne has a sister, whom she tracks down. Eventually, Leigh-Anne's husband moves out and she starts rebuilding her life - with the possibility that Omar (whose attempted reconciliation with his ex-wife has failed) might be a part of it.