Leon wanted the blue to stop at the doorway. Thandi wanted it to come through into the passage, just a little, so that when they came home there would be something besides the shoe rack to greet them.
They settled on a diagonal. It ran from the kitchen's left doorpost to the corner of the cupboard opposite. Thandi sat on the kitchen tiles, holding the end of the masking tape under her thumb. Leon knelt in the passage and drew the roll towards him.
‘Straight?’
‘Your end needs to come this way.’
He moved it.
‘Now?’
She closed one eye. He was laughing at her, but quietly, keeping the tape lifted while she looked. They had spent Saturday scraping the old floor paint. Neither wanted to spend Sunday looking at a mistake.
‘That's it.’
They smoothed it down together.
Leon reached for the pencil beside her knee. His hand stopped above the tape.
‘Pass that?’ he said.
She picked it up and offered it, rubber first. The pencil struck something between them with the little hard sound of a chopstick against a glass.
For a moment she thought he had caught it. Then she saw that his fingers were still open.
She pressed harder. The rubber flattened. Nothing else happened.
Leon put his palm against the same place. His skin went pale in patches, as it did against a window. There was no window. She could see the small nick on his wrist from yesterday's scraper.
‘What is that?’
Thandi put down the pencil. She pressed her palm to his. Or almost to his. A coldness held them apart, too thin to see.
He snatched back his hand and stood. She stayed seated because standing would mean that this was happening to the whole of her, and not only to her hands.
‘Come round,’ she said.
He went left, towards the doorpost, and disappeared behind it. She heard the shoe rack scrape.
‘It's here too.’
He came back and tried the other end. The open cupboard door stopped with its handle pointing towards her. He pushed it once, twice. The hinges made a dry complaint.
Thandi pulled up the tape. It came away easily, with small flecks of the old cream paint attached. She wound it into a sticky ball and threw it towards him.
The ball struck the empty air and dropped on her side.
She crawled forward and ran a fingernail across the floor where the tape had been. There was a ridge she could feel but could not find by looking. Along that ridge, every grain of loosened paint stood in a neat row.
Leon was looking at the blue tin beside her.
‘Don't paint it.’
‘I wasn't going to.’
‘I'm just saying.’
His voice had become the one he used when she drove in heavy rain. It made her want to do something fast and obvious. She got up, took three steps back, then threw her shoulder forward.
He shouted before she hit.
The blow emptied her chest. She dropped to her knees with her cheek burning. Leon crouched in front of her, his arms reaching, his fingers spread uselessly against the air.
‘Don't,’ he kept saying, long after she had stopped.
He turned one hand sideways, trying to work his smallest finger through. The nick from the scraper opened again. She lifted her sleeve to wipe it and struck her knuckles.
They tried the garden.
Thandi went through the back door and round the side of the house. Leon came out through the front. Beyond the kitchen window, the lawn showed the pale patch where they had left the wheelbarrow all summer. She could see him coming along the paving. He was carrying the broom.
He stopped several steps short of her.
The broom handle, held out ahead of him, rested against nothing. He moved it left, then right. Thandi looked back at the house. Through the window she could see the bare diagonal between the doorpost and cupboard.
‘Further,’ she said.
They edged along it, Leon testing ahead with the broom, Thandi keeping pace on the grass. At the lemon tree he had to step off the paving. They continued together until her back brushed the branches.
At the garden wall Leon lifted the broom over his head. He lowered the handle until it struck.
Thandi looked at the strip of sky above it.
Neither of them suggested climbing.
The neighbour's radio was playing. Somewhere a lawnmower started and stopped. Leon set the broom against the wall and took out his phone.
Her phone rang in the kitchen.
They both laughed, one short breath each. Then he covered his mouth.
‘I'll fetch it,’ she said.
They went back by their separate doors.
It was nearly dark when they stopped trying. His brother was coming with a hammer and a bag of tools. On the phone Leon had said yes to everything he proposed, then given him the address of the house he visited every Christmas.
They moved chairs to the boundary and sat facing each other. Leon had the front door, the bathroom and the car keys. Thandi had the food, the kettle and both their chargers.
She made tea. When she came back he had taken off his shoes. He was rubbing the red mark across his palm with his thumb.
‘Milk?’ she asked.
He nodded, then shook his head.
She sat down with both mugs. He watched the steam rise from his.
After a while he moved his chair closer. She did the same. Their knees stopped at the place where the tape had been.
‘We got it straight,’ he said.
She wanted to tell him to shut up. Instead she put her hand up, and he put his against it. In the last light she could see the flattened whorls of his fingertips.
She kept hers there until her arm began to shake. Then she lowered it, picked up his tea, and drank before it got cold.
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