He was leaning against the back wall of the class room, hands in pockets, body arched forward a little, right leg bent, heel resting on top of the skirting and head cocked slightly to one side like his childhood photos; hiding a sulk, a shyness. A 'little camp' was the description offered by one student. She, herself, so debilitated by her family she had succeeded at nothing, was getting through the course because he was writing virtually half of her work for her.

Her brother, who had abused her as a child, had burnt himself to death in his car by throwing petrol over the inside and igniting it. She, too, had attempted suicide, driving her car at speed into a lamppost. The vehicle had split almost in two, she had stepped out with a grazed face. Her sibling she'd seen as selfish, there being nothing left for her to remember him by.

Mature students, generally, had many problems, especially women. The majority on this course were females and half of them were starting the long road to economic independence and, for some, hoped-for single parenthood. Their male partners were largely unsupportive, insecure and suspicious of those who were helping their women stretch to new vistas; a colleague had recently seen one of them standing in the car park looking grimly up at the staff room windows. Fresh bruises seemed a weekly occurrence. The younger girls, minimum age twenty, were not exceptions.

For six months he had been lecturing this group in both the sociology of deviance and of medicine. Most would go on to a nursing or social work degree. Two hundred students were split into groups called 'cohorts' by management. He'd told the latter that as a cohort referred to a tenth of a Roman Legion and he hadn't seen a toga or a sandal since he'd been there, the term was inappropriate.

He disliked management and their sycophants; their eager grabbing of Edu-biz buzz words and throwing them into the air like linguistic status symbols at staff meetings, at the end of which, having remained silent throughout, he would quietly place a scribbled list of code words in front of the frowning Chair.

The students he saw as 'his,' as he did the subject he taught, and was aware that this proprietorial urge was a vestige of a working class background; his father, a caretaker, owning nothing, would claim psychological ownership of 'his' building, his mother, a cleaner, 'her' bank.

He was doing role-plays with them and had suggested a scenario or two; the Jehovah's Witness parents of a young injured child who were refusing to allow a life-saving blood transfusion - what would, could, the medical team do? A similar question was posed by an extremely sick menstruating woman being treated by Orthodox Jewish doctors. It was a delight to watch two Yoruba Nigerian women and a Kenyan man play the doctors.

With encouragement they'd create their own situations and act out one or two a lesson. They particularly liked making up narratives that enabled them to dress up - tongue in cheek he'd suggest nurses uniforms with fishnet stockings and stiletto heels would be appreciated - and, if they justified it in the context of a genuine ethical dilemma, to use music. The head of school would look through the door and frown perplexedly at them. Once, she had marched into the classroom and demanded they changed rooms, this one having been overbooked. He'd told the class not to leave.

'You can't treat them like this.' he'd said to her.

'And I hate the way you behave towards me in front of students,' she'd hissed angrily, and using her authority had had her way. He wondered if she'd have acted thus if most of the students had been white.

Thandi Mnede was delivering a baby - a large black doll - from a fair-haired Spanish student, slightly shorter than the doll, lying on his desk surrounded by other 'medical staff' who were laughing and screaming with delight. He liked the innocence, the ingenuous nature of African women, except when it came to religion.

He told them of European oppression and control through Christianity, that god was a construct, all predictably met with surprise, anger and, sometimes, pity. God was involved with the things that they wrote, their essays and research projects - particularly the latter where, in their acknowledgements, they would thank various organisations and individuals who had helped them, often including god. He'd suggest they put him higher on the list than god. Some took him seriously.

Pulling a chair across he sat down, watching them. Maria was holding her new- born tightly and miming breast-feeding while Charity, the youngest in the class and wearing a stars and stripes headscarf, was jumping up and down with glee. It was she who, after he'd told them that sepia photos of ringed female necks a foot long and 'savages' with bones through their noses had been part of his early upbringing, had insisted to the group that the bones were fashion statements. On her mobile he knew that it permanently said, 'I love Jesus and Jesus loves me.'

Thandi was enjoying herself, grinning at him. She was tall, slim, with short frizzy hair, almond-shaped eyes and that slightly jutting curve at the top of her buttocks. He was seeing her that evening.

Recently she'd been passing the staff room and he'd beckoned her in and asked what work she did. Most of the women had caring jobs outside college; she was looking after adolescent boys. He offered to help her with her project questionnaire and handed her a sheet of paper which asked if she fancied a drink one evening, under which he'd drawn a large square with a 'yes' under it and a small one with a tiny 'no. 'Please tick appropriate box.' it said.

She'd folded it in quarters slowly and perfectly and in her slightly brittle Zulu accent had said, 'Why didn't you ask me before? I knew you wanted me as soon as you walked into the classroom.'

'It would have been too early then, I may have frightened you off.' he'd explained.

Disdainfully she'd lifted her head and walked away.

It had been rather different in the early days when she'd been with other students chattering eagerly around his table waiting for their marks and calling him, 'Mister Steve.'

They met in a pub near where she lived, he arriving before her as intended. It was a dismal place; flock wallpaper, match boarded dado, fifties lampshades and a tattered, miss spelt notice stating that there were rooms to let. When Thandi came in he gestured at it and said that the landlady would probably have told any potential guests that she couldn't shake their hands, she'd just finished putting lard on the cat's boil. She looked bemused.

Sitting down opposite him and with her Nefertiti head inquiringly angled she said,

'Well, are you bisexual?'

He asked if it was the earring - he wore a small gold one. Pints were pulled and a darts matched ended before she told him it was because he wore tight jeans. He jokingly sneered at her African stereotypes, until she reminded him that he'd told them that sociology was a generalising enterprise and not to apologise for it.

She couldn't stay long; she had a shift to do, and briefly told him about herself. Brought up outside Johannesburg in a large, extended family - he envied aspects of African culture; babies huddled in slings between their mother's breasts, having lots of 'mothers', what could create more security? - she'd managed a restaurant before coming to London and its gold-paved streets. She was single, had a son Nono -  pronounced with clicks after the consonants - and was thinking of adopting Tshepiso, her absent brother's teenage child who he had ill-treated from an early age.

'I want to show her and teach her love.' she said.

Two evenings later he was quickly shaking hands with other household members, an aunt, uncle, two cousins, a half-sister and a sister who she shared a room and a bed with. She gave him a glimpse of the room; a few African carvings, bright traditional dresses inside an opened wardrobe door, a photo of herself in a Diana Ross wig taken on the sea front at Clacton when she'd first come to Britain four years before.

In the train on their way to see 'Umoja' she wore a black velvet hat and, picking up a newspaper from a seat, started reading. He asked her if her not talking to him was an African thing.

'We don't show love or hold hands.' she said, and enquired if his son was well. He was divorced, as he told his classes in response to their questioning, and his young son stayed with him some weekends. Later he was to find that she revelled in disinterest; not asking who he'd seen a film with, but where, not who had accompanied him to a gallery, but merely a polite raising of an eyebrow.

He asked her why she had worn her hat in the theatre and hadn't clapped and sung as many in the audience had.

'We wear our hats inside. And I didn't want to make a noise because I could see the way you looked at people when they were unwrapping sweets. But I told the people behind you are my teacher and to take no notice.'

There was a smile in her eyes, but he felt frustrated that she hadn't expressed herself, had misunderstood.

In class she acted as if they hadn't been out together. Occasionally he rang her at her work place, she always seemed to be working and could rarely talk for long. She called him 'darling' on the phone and he noticed she greeted her student friends in the same manner. Childishly, he felt annoyed.

One Sunday she rang to ask him to help her with a communications essay, the title of which she'd been allowed to choose herself. Despite precise instructions she got hopelessly lost. He drove to where she was parked and led her back to his flat.

Standing by his side while he looked at her work and wearing salwar kameez trousers around her head, braided extensions pluming above them, she looked utterly African.

Without looking up he asked her quietly when she was going to sleep with him. She pushed him playfully to the floor and stood astride him, eyes black and still. But it was church day and she had to leave and, holding her folder, walked to the gate while he returned to the screen where her essay title still read, ''Thou shalt lie only with whom thou love.' Discuss.' He wondered if she recognised the irony.

They went to the Passion play, 'The Mysteries.' Knowing his views on organised religion she was surprised at his choice. How many times had he told them of social inequality being legitimised by hymnal lines such as, 'The rich man at his castle, the poor man at his gate, all creatures high and lowly, god ordered their estate.'

The director had encouraged members of the South African cast to act in their own languages. She casually said she could speak five of them. On the way back he mentioned that the lead black singer, the best voice on stage, should have played Eve. She made no comment, just shrugged. He tried to get her interested in the songs, the humour, the scant, but effective scenery; like the stockade made of Peter Stuyvesant cartons in which a near naked group had sung, 'You Are My Sunshine.' and received a standing ovation. She shrugged again, then said,

'I will stay with you tonight, then.'

He drove her home. In his bedroom she began undressing quickly, a sudden dark shape slipping under the duvet. After telling him that it was too early for them to make love, she added disinterestedly that she would still satisfy him. He delivered a short lecture on the myth of joyless servicing, but gave in to her plea that she never slept naked by letting her wear him for most of the night.

In the morning she made herself breakfast with food she'd brought with her, picking up pieces of cornmeal to soak up her thin stew, lips making soft smacking sounds and occasionally smiling. Unravelling her cornrows into a tightly curled wedge and rubbing in sulphur cream, 'Because this is what they do back home.' she transformed his kitchen by putting dishes away as if she had lived there forever instead of staying a night. Looking briefly around his minimalist home she announced she'd be late for college and that when he took her class he mustn't anger the women again by jeering that infibulation was about male control and that they didn't have to lie back and think of Africa.

As she started the engine of her car, barefoot on the pavement he anguished his frustration through the car window.

'But I made you cum.' she frowned and drove away.

During the summer he saw her only once. She had passed the course and was beginning a nursing degree at university and was working nearly all of the time, mostly with the boys. On most days he rang her and if there was more than a three-day gap between calls she would ring to remind him of 'the contract,' referring to a promise he'd made to phone her regularly.

One evening she asked him to meet her at the street where he'd picked her up when she'd got lost. When he crossed the road to her, she wound down the side window and gently took his hands and pulled them inside the car and pressed them to her breasts. He felt awkward, like a teenager, and wanted to take her home. Grinning at him she said she had to go back, and drove off. Always she seemed to be driving away.

She'd been at university a month before he saw her again; for the first and only time she'd arranged for someone to stand in for her at work. She walked in with a parcel of fish heads and yams began washing up while they warmed and noisily sucked one of the eyes while he opened the wine, though she rarely touched alcohol. He found it pleasurable to watch her eat with her fingers.

She hadn't spoken since coming in, then, with eyes darker than her lashes and blacker than her fountained braids, looked up at him and said, in long, continuous sentences and barely pausing for breath,

'When you mimic me your accent is too strong, I am Zulu not Afrikaans, and when you come home with me at Christmas it will be very hot, but you must wear a suit to show respect for my mother and you cannot sleep with me.' She carried on eating for a while. 'I am beautiful inside as well as out, and if I were a virgin you would pay a thousand pounds for me, and when I go back I even give them my panties because we are poor and when I was a child my uncle said I was spoilt because I didn't sweep the yard and cook tomatoes in the big pot like the other children and I walked like an old woman, but I hold my shoulders back for you because I am glad you took me out, though I don't think you will come home with me at Christmas.'

She looked down at her plate again. He didn't know what to say.

She stood up and began swaying with the music he'd put on, a languorous wisdom inhabiting every glance, then, moving nothing except her wrists, bending them rhythmically downwards, she was nonchalantly clutching all the sex in the world.

There was a familiarity about the bedroom struggle to remove her clothes, until she clamped his wrist and he noticed the rag tied around her waist, which she'd said she wore for fasting. This meant that nothing was to enter her body except sips of water.

She laid down with her back to him, braided hair now in a loose knot on her shoulder before flowing down almost to her hip.

'I am a wounded soldier making love on the battlefield.' she whispered, and went to sleep.

When he woke she was parading naked around his bedroom, buttocks clenching Zulu style and intently mirror-gazing. She murmured repetitive 'mmms?' to his thick-throated questions about when he would see her again, and her bumping into a stool, hair extensions loosening, did not interrupt her delighted solipsism. After she had gone he could still hear her sharp vowels telling him she was leaving, and lay still on the bed as he scrawled on the calendar an imaginary cross for some day next month.

She started work-placement at a local hospital, after which she came to tell him that as her family had moved to Nottingham, and she had flown back to her childhood home to bring Nono back with her as well as adopting Tshepiso, she now had nowhere to live.

'I have now been seeing a man for some while.' she added, with that slight irregularity of English use he usually found endearing, 'He is not African, but he will provide a home for us.' Her eyes were sad, and also asking him to offer her his home.

This news hurt and confused him. The flat was not large enough, his son still stayed with him, though less often, and he wasn't sure he could cope with her two children. He felt weakened, told her he couldn't have her, was sorry

Then, at the end of her first year at university, instead of the dutiful relationship she had with god being little more than a socialized response, she really did find Him.

She asked him to come to church with her and listen to her testimony. He hadn't been to a church since a child. It was a Victorian building whose builders would never have envisaged the nature of this congregation. There were many people present, mostly ethnics, the majority Africans. The pastor, white, tanned, grey hair, tailored sports jacket, briefly shook his hand.

'Hi, I'm David.' he drawled in an American accent, and moved into the hall.

'Hi, I'm a sceptic.' Steve said under his breath as he climbed to the back of the balcony. He stood watching the keyboard player hitting the chords with a gospel band and, pointing to the hymn-filled screen above the stage and telling them that this was their god for the morning, he led the congregation into their devotional karaoke. Matrons sang, clapped and swayed and towards the far side of the balcony he saw two students he'd taught the previous year looking across at him, eyes wide in surprise. He exaggeratedly raised his shoulders and gestured with open hands to them.

Thandi arrived late, African time, shook his hand - he fondled hers - and introduced him to her lover, a protestant chill momentarily freezing the music. He was a pleasant looking Afro-Caribbean who welcomed him warmly and asked him to sit with them. He stayed where he was. After a sermon and further hymns it was time for her testimony. Standing in front of the audience she told them how she had come to god.

She recited it very quickly and emotionally and he could understand little. After she had finished, with more clapping and singing from the now packed church, she came up to the balcony and gently squeezed his arm and asked him to take her back to the flat so she could tell him what had really happened. Her partner would take the children home.

Sitting at his table with him, she held his hands tightly together as if he were praying and, with her eyes closed, told him that when she was seventeen her ancestors had occupied her spirit and told her to remain chaste - a command manifested in the white rag appearing around her waist - and when it was time for her to work for them she would be told. She assumed that, like chosen others in her country, she would 'go away' for two years then return as a healer.

Two weeks ago the ancestral spirits had demanded that she walk into the sea and there would be a crocodile waiting for her with open mouth into which she would climb. There would be snakes, a festive party and great happiness inside the creature. There she was to stay until ready to heal the sick.

As she told him this she spoke rapidly, became excited; several times he gently slowed her down. She became more agitated, almost frantic, when she announced that she had, wearing the rag, white knickers and white dressing gown, set out to obey these wishes two weeks ago at Southend-on-Sea while her younger sister and her boy friend had watched from the beach.

Resisting explaining the phallic symbolism of the snakes, he imagined her, oblivious to the sounds of boy racers, the pier train, the fun fair, go-karts, the smell of vinegar and chips, moving deeper and deeper into the sea.

Part of him wanted to laugh, almost hysterically, at the sheer incongruity of the town she'd chosen, but he believed her; believed her when she told him that as her head was going under water, god had exploded inside of her and told her to renounce what she was doing and to do His work, and only His.

She had waded back to her sister and pleaded with her to find a priest. They'd driven back and found the church - the one she had been speaking in an hour before - and she'd told David what had happened. This had been her first visit since then.

She began to cry. Releasing his hands he gripped hers. She opened her eyes; they shone with excitement. This was a different reality for him, a spiritual universe he couldn't enter, and didn't wish to. He wanted to tell her that many frigid women who gave themselves to Jesus could do so in the knowledge that they didn't have to make love to him. She would, her humour and patience jettisoned, have cried out that it was profane, an insult. She wasn't in the classroom; he wasn't teaching her. He held her tightly for a long while before she left.

He went to church with her once more. It was the last time he saw her.

She picked him up at his home and drove northwards. In the car Tshepiso ate greens with her fingers while Beauty threw them around back streets telling him that the preachers used private jets, while he proselytised about ruling classes and god until they arrived.

In a hangar on Hackney wasteland gantry cameras arced over them like crows, people waved at screens, puzzled they were in profile, and envelopes for Jesus magically appeared. Outside, he'd noticed how permanent the fast-track buildings were, how organised it was. As well as hot food and drinks there were all the cogs of capitalism; stalls housing loan firms, insurance companies, mortgage and investment brokers, banks, estate agents, a funeral director, even an adoption agency. And inside, a bass voiced pastor was telling the congregation that all that they looked upon is all they may have.

Knowing those who had nothing, he stood up, squeezed past Thandi with a tight smile and walked towards an exit, remembering irrelevantly the gifts she'd brought him every time she came to see him; the lemons he never ate, the popcorn he never made, the t-shirt he never wore.

At the door he turned; saw her head with its short tufts of hair, Tshepiso and Nono grinning back at him, and under the starry night ceiling of the stage, standing in a lake of lilies, the wild hair of a singer hitting Whitney Houston notes. Turning sixties pop into gospel, Jackson Five look-alikes strutted to the front and a thousand believers raised their hands.