As a middle-aged, career-minded singleton, Lola isnât looking for a love connection, but will it find her anyway in her hunt for carefree fun?
Feeling restless and lonely, despite working in an exciting post in South Africa, American expat Lola Wagner starts to question whether she still has what it takes to attract the single men of Johannesburg. After seven years, the novelty of her relocation and new job has worn off, and Lola is certain that time is running out to get back into the dating pool before her looks start to fade.
Uncertain what the future holds, Lola never knows when her job may take her back to the US and so a no-strings-attached relationship seems like the best choice-or so she thinks. But when her quest for companionship leads her to meet two cousins, Lola is faced with a choice she never expected to make.
Will it be safe and reliable Mark, or dashing player Justin? And is Lola really seeking a ânot loveâ connection, or is her heart longing for something more?
As a middle-aged, career-minded singleton, Lola isnât looking for a love connection, but will it find her anyway in her hunt for carefree fun?
Feeling restless and lonely, despite working in an exciting post in South Africa, American expat Lola Wagner starts to question whether she still has what it takes to attract the single men of Johannesburg. After seven years, the novelty of her relocation and new job has worn off, and Lola is certain that time is running out to get back into the dating pool before her looks start to fade.
Uncertain what the future holds, Lola never knows when her job may take her back to the US and so a no-strings-attached relationship seems like the best choice-or so she thinks. But when her quest for companionship leads her to meet two cousins, Lola is faced with a choice she never expected to make.
Will it be safe and reliable Mark, or dashing player Justin? And is Lola really seeking a ânot loveâ connection, or is her heart longing for something more?
âChapter 1: A Johannesburg Summer, 2003
Lola Wagner jumped out of bed in the middle of the night as though someone had just rung a cowbell right beside her ear. Disoriented, she listened for the sound that had woken her. It came again. A long, shrill high-pitched sound that she realised was the gate bell coming through the intercom. Panicking, Lola switched on the bedside light and looked at her clock, 3:48 am.
Who could it be at this hour? she thought wildly. This was Johannesburg where crime could come knocking anytime, anywhere. Lola rushed to the intercom and looked at the security camera image of a man standing at her gate.
âYes?â she asked, trying to sound both authoritative and indignant at being woken at this hour of the night.
âItâs Dinoâs twenty-four-hour pizza,â the man said.
âDinoâs?â asked Lola incredulously. âYouâre a pizza delivery man?â
âYeah, can you open the gate, please?â
âYou have the wrong address,â Lola said crossly.
âIs this number thirty-six?â
âNo, just look at the address painted on the wall above the intercom. Where you are right now. What do you see?â
âOh, youâre thirty-seven. Sorry, maâam.â
âSorry,â repeated Lola. âDo you know what time it is?â
âYes, well we operate all day and night, so it doesnât seem weird to me, but I guess I can see that it would to you,â Edward said. Lola could read his name on his uniform through the security camera.
Edward went off to find the right address, and Lola went back to bed. Sleep eluded her, so she switched on the light and read a detective novel by Mark Dawson. Luckily it was Sunday tomorrow, so she didnât mind not getting much sleep too much. The experience had been scary though and reminded Lola how precarious her security in this city seemed to her sometimes.
Lola slept in late the next morning and had her coffee and croissant on her patio. The sun illuminated the green of the trees, making the leaves and flowers seem translucent. Lolaâs garden was a wild, untamed mix of flowering shrubs, exotic grasses, and palm, fig, magnolia, and lemon trees. She never tired of gazing at it. It made her feel she was right in the middle of the African bush.
To while away Sunday afternoon, Lola went to the movies. She didnât mind going to movies alone as she could sit where she wanted and eat popcorn noisily, something she was reluctant to do when she was sitting beside a friend. Getting home midday, Lola puttered about the garden and swam a few laps in the pool. The rest of the day passed peacefully, and soon it was time for Lola to prepare her dinner.
Obeying the rumbling of her stomach, Lola headed for the kitchen and took a package of ravioli and meat sauce out of the fridge, ripped off the plastic covering, and placed it in the microwave. While she waited, she took out the ice cream so that it would be soft by the time she finished her pasta. She was getting a bit worried about the roll developing on her middle and thought idly that she must go on a diet soon.
Lola was a forty-eight-year-old single woman who had been living in South Africa for seven years. She came from a senior government job in Lansing, Michigan, the stateâs capital. The state had an overseas aid program that focused on building administration capacity in select African countries.
The governor thought Lola would be a good person to send, and he offered Lola a temporary position in Johannesburg, South Africa. They hired her to improve the governmentâs administration, but this proved to be a lofty goal. There was widespread corruption and nepotism rooted in the country and its troubled past. Still, it had been an interesting time. Lolaâs term was three years, but they had extended her for another five more.
Her job required her to travel around the country a lot, visiting all the provincial capitals and trying to make them work more efficiently. The few friends she had were single ex-pat women, like her. Everyone was there to have adventures and live in another world, even if the adventures were mostly work-related, and the novelty of the new setting gradually wore off. As Lola leaned on a deep grey, granite-topped counter in her kitchen, she mused that at that moment she could be anywhere, doing anything. Not necessarily in this place halfway across the world from her home. You canât escape yourself, she thought. Not by changing anything about your life.
The downside of turning her safe and predictable life around in Michigan and moving to a brand new unknown country was that she was lonely. She had left her home state and the friends she had made while working in the capital. She still had her mother and stepfather in Ann Arbor, where she had grown up. And her two brothers were still around.
As she was waiting for her dinner to finish cooking, Lolaâs cell phone rang. She picked up on the second ring.
âHi, Lola.â It was her Dutch friend Eva. âWhat are you up to?â
âHi Eva,â said Lola. âNot much. Just creating a masterpiece for dinner.â
âReally?â asked Eva, her voice raising with surprise.
âNot,â said Lola, laughing. âItâs a microwave ravioli meal from Woolies.â
âOh, you had me going there for a minute,â said Eva. âListen, can we go for lunch tomorrow? I just heard something on the radio that I think youâll be interested in. Something that may get you out on the dating scene.â
Eva had been in the Dutch anti-apartheid movement. She had come to the southern part of Africa to work for the âstruggle,â the term describing the South African black majorityâs attempt to overthrow white rule that favoured a separate-but-equal policy. The policy had pitted white against black, black against black and had left coloured people, Indians, and people with mixed heritage isolated and against each other. It had resulted in deep divides across the nation.
Small and wiry with stringy, lank brown hair, Eva was straight talking in the blunt Dutch way. Whatever social niceties she had possessed had worn off during the dangerously chaotic years she had been working for the African National Congress. That was the major black opposition organisation to the white government.
During her thirties and early forties, Eva was an undercover operative for the ANC in neighbouring countries to South Africa that informally supported the rebellion. Housing fugitives on the run from the security police in safe houses rented under an assumed name, Eva had routinely changed her appearance with wigs and prosthetics. She bought them in Amsterdam before she flew back to South Africa. She then had boarded the plane to Johannesburg, transformed into a hobbling old white-haired woman with a cane.
âYeah, of course we can,â said Lola. âIâm up for any advice that will get me away from my TV.â
âOk, good,â said Eva. âI miss going out with you to clubs. Remember when we used to hit the TrebleClef almost every Saturday night?â
Lola sighed into the phone and said, âYeah, since they moved to that dodgy part of town, it just hasnât felt safe. I miss it, too.â
Lola and Eva went out a lot in the early days. When they had both been avid followers of African music, they sought concerts and clubs where they could hear African jazz, like Ringo, Jimmy Dudlu, and Hugh Masekela. They were often the only white girls there, but they never felt unsafe. In fact, they felt welcomed by the mostly black crowd. This was the great leveller, the mutual love of music and dance.
The club that hosted these concerts was in a decent part of the city, and crimeâalthough always a possibilityâseemed unlikely, especially when they were part of a group. They met no men at these events, though. Lola assumed it was because they were white and probably too much potential trouble. They were also not exactly spring chickens, both being in their early forties.They had the most fun when they went out with their colleague, Pieter.
Pieter was a brilliant youngish man in his late thirties. He was of mixed heritage with a bookish look partly achieved through his earnest stare and large-framed glasses. Pieter had got a chemical engineering degree from a university in Americaâs Deep South about five years before the end of apartheid in 1990. Lola asked him why on earth as a black person he had chosen a school in the most racist part of the U.S. But he said it didnât bother him, that it had offered the best scholarship and that he wanted to just do it, get the degree and get back to SA.
It wasnât until she and Pieter were sitting around a campfire with friends of his that she found out that he took chemical engineering so that he would know about explosivesâtheir chemical composition and methods for making them and setting them off. It turned out that he had put this knowledge to use in the âstruggle.â Although he never admitted hurting or killing anyone, she knew he had made them and set them off in populated white areas duringâthe height of the conflict when there was low-grade warfare in certain hotspots within the country.
Pieter could tell tall and fantastical tales without betraying the slightest hint of subterfuge in his expression. He was a con man who could pull you in and make you believe the most incredible things. His âbĂȘte noireâ was alcohol. Like so many coloured people, he was an entrenched alcoholic and probably had been since his teenage years, if not before. When he drank, he was a sloppy drunk. He ranted and raved about all the injustices done to him and his people during his life, and how white people hadnât paid and would never pay.
The entry into this other world enthralled the two women, and they felt safe in Pieterâs presence. They felt like they were gaining access to some other Johannesburg that was normally closed to them, the kind that they couldnât go to alone because of the colour of their skin.
One night, Lola met a friend of Pieterâs who worked at a large diamond mining company as their legal advisor. His name was Thabo, and he was tall and good-looking. When he asked Lola to danceâthey danced easily and unselfconsciously. She was extremely attracted to him. When the music slowed, they came together and danced with their bodies moving closely together. She felt herself growing hotter and felt a flare of desire that hadnât been there for a long time. Lola wondered if their slow dance might lead to something. But she was afraid, too.
Not wanting to be the subject of rumours, Lola kept her personal life to herself. She knew that Pieter would immediately know whatever she did with his friend Thabo and that Pieter was a gleeful and unrestrained gossip. That encounter just sparked Lolaâs desire for connections with men. But Lola knew that there would be knives out against her at work if there were rumours of her hooking up with a black friend of Pieterâs. There was already a begrudging feeling, especially with her white colleagues who, unlike the black staff, she thought she was equal to them; therefore, her salary should be the same, too.
When Thabo called, as Lola thought he might, she was almost in tears turning him down.
âNo,â she told him, her voice breaking uncomfortably, âI canât meet you for dinner on Friday nigh. She was busy, she said, and would be for the foreseeable future.
She heard the hurt in his voice as he said in a low voice, âOk. Sorry for bothering you. Goodbye, Lola.â
This all had the effect of making her sadder and more resolute to find a solution for her loneliness. She invited Eva over for dinner that Friday night, the night she could have been with Thabo.
âWhat am I going to do, Eva?â asked Lola. âI really want to have some kind of sex life before Iâm too old to have sex with anybody.â
âHm,â said Eva in her usual thoughtful way before she offered a response. âHm. Yeah.â Her head nodded up and down quickly in agreement with Lolaâs plight.
âWell, you could go online,â she said. âIâve heard that its quite easy to meet people that way, especially if you are not looking for perfection or something like a lifetime partner.â
âOnline!â exclaimed Lola. âIn Johannesburg. Where every other person is a criminal. That sounds unsafe to me.â
âIt doesnât have to be,â said Eva. âYou post an advert of yourself on a respectable dating site, along with a picture.â
Excerpt From: Lois Hooge. âNLFL_ebookâ. Apple Books.Â
Excerpt From: Lois Hooge. âNLFL_ebookâ. Apple Books.Â
Where can a single, forty-something career woman find no-strings-attached love in an African city? If youâre an American expat like Lola Wagner, then you follow your friendâs advice and go online or try speed dating. She settles for the organized social activity where you engage in brief chats with a bunch of strangers to find that special person.
Lola knows, as an overweight middle-aged woman, her chances of finding Mr. Right are slim. But sheâs surprised when she attracts the interest of two potential suitors. The two men are very different. Mark is a safe bet, while Justin makes her heart gallop faster. However, the two men are cousins, and that complicates the situation.
Lola soon discovers her road to lust is paved with good intentions. Sheâs out of practice in matters of the heart. All she can rely on is the blunt but well-intentioned advice from her Dutch friend Eva, and the pithy expressions of wisdom of her mother. Has she bitten off more than she can chew?
The author describes a city Iâm familiar with in this debut novel. She nails what makes Johannesburg a place you either love or hateâfrom its glorious weather, to the rich bird life, vibrant music, and the contrast between rich and poor who live under the constant fear of crime. The romance is a slow-burn. And the story gets bogged down in its description of Lolaâs somewhat monotonous life. But itâs an absorbing story of an ordinary woman who craves an exciting love life, and learns more about herself in the process.
However, there are a few typos; one place where Eva becomes Lola for a second, and mix-ups with US and British spelling, most notably in âelevatorâ and âliftâ and one usage of âpavementâ. And ubers were not in use in South Africa until 2013. The editing mistakes can be fixed for the final version, and donât detract from the story.
This is the first book in the series about Lola Wagner. The story ends with a âhappy for nowâ. If you enjoy reading about the love adventures of ordinary women, this story is for you.