6

SISTERS

‘WIN! WIN! THEY’RE AFTER ME!’ THE CRAZY OLD WOMAN fled in panic up her garden path, watched by a row of giggling shack kids with their fingers hooked through the rusting mesh fence.

‘Don’t tease the poor old missus, she’s magoela,’ their mothers chided, but of course they did.

The climax of the game came when the other one erupted from the house in an explosion of yowling cats and shook her fist at them, shouting, ‘Bugger off, you little pests!’ before shooing the crazy old woman inside. The cats would prowl for a long time with their fur on end while the kids hid behind the nearest shack for a reprise when she came out again.

Winifred and Dulcie Pybus lived next door to the Ingrams. Their old-age pensions covered only the rent, electricity and a monthly bag of cat food for their lodgers. The sisters would have starved had it not been for the grove of lemon trees in the garden. Their homemade lemon cordial was in big demand in the trading store, far cheaper than commercial cooldrinks because you needed only a teaspoonful to flavour a glass of water. Or gin. Or cane spirit.

Big, strong Winifred, gaunt as a mummy with her skin wizened against her bones, was in charge of watering the lemon trees and collecting and squeezing the fruit. She clumped about in gumboots and their late father’s jodhpurs, making earth dams round the roots and maintaining the furrows that channelled grey water from the kitchen and bathroom. The furrows were often dry, as the sisters were intermittent washers and the parched soil slurped moisture, but lemon trees are survivors and will produce astonishing crops on minimal water.

The kids never teased Winifred, who wielded a mean hoe, biding their time until Dulcie came out alone to dither down the path like a fretful dandelion trying to remember what she was supposed to be doing. In the beginning she had made and bottled the cordial, writing labels on the white borders of stamp sheets harvested from the waste-paper basket in the post office, but with her mind going, Winifred did everything now.

Every Monday, Khanya Tibane from the trading store came down the road with a wheelbarrow to fetch a crate of lemon cordial, bringing payment in kind: sugar, tea, bread, tinned beans and condensed milk as well as empty bottles. But Eddie Drinkwater, the store owner, drew the line at cat food. The sisters had to beseech scraps and bone meal off the woman who swabbed down the saws and floors at the butchery.

That Thursday it was Winifred’s turn to feed the lodgers. To her dismay, she counted over fifty cats and kittens, excluding the posse hunting rats in the ceiling and the sunbathers sprawled on the roof. ‘There are too many,’ she groused as she ladled the day’s ration of cat pellets out of the bag. ‘All they do is eat, sleep and fornicate. We need to cull some of the older ones.’

‘You mean kill?’ Dulcie gasped.

‘If necessary.’

‘But they’re sacred to Isis! Her daughter had the head of a cat,’ Dulcie whined. ‘It’s our bounden duty as vestal virgins to protect them.’ Her memory was a patchwork of eerie details.

‘Speak for yourself,’ Winifred snapped. It was a sore point. She had slept with a dashing Royal Air Force pilot as a patriotic gesture during the Second World War, and he had not returned, as promised. She grumbled on, ‘I’m sick and tired of these idle layabouts. It’s time to call in the SPCA.’

‘Over my dead body!’

‘It may have to be.’ Winifred shot her a murderous look.

‘What was that you said? Eh? Eh?’

‘Nothing.’

Winifred lowered her eyes to mask their rage. Joining forces to stretch their meagre pensions had seemed like a good idea when they retired, but after fifteen years of constant bickering and her sister’s decline into Alzheimer’s, she was at the end of her tether. The choice was clear: if Dulcie wouldn’t agree to get rid of the cats, she would have to get rid of Dulcie.

I’ll practise on one of the lodgers, she thought. Tonight, while she’s asleep. She won’t notice if one’s missing.

There were other sisters in the village: the Little Sisters of Extreme Destitution, an order devoted to alleviating the lives of the poorest of the poor.

Roman Catholics (the Roomse Gevaar) had been almost as feared by the apartheid government as communists (reds under the bed), and mission schools of all denominations were closed in the 1950s for fear of over-education. One or two years in school were considered quite sufficient for future hewers of wood and drawers of water. The churches had diverted their efforts in other directions, and the Little Sisters had bought the abandoned Crocodile Flats Garage as their local HQ from which to serve the shacks. After three weeks of scrubbing, disinfecting and whitewashing, ten intrepid nuns moved in with their shabby suitcases and iron bedsteads, accompanied by the priest assigned to the parish.

Father Liam was an ex-rugby international who had played No. 8 for Ireland. After three decades of ministering in slums, he was still ruggedly handsome despite the ravages of his only indulgence, vintage red wine. He chose the furthest of the outbuildings, moved in an old desk, a chair and a lengthened bed so his feet wouldn’t stick out, then added secure locks to the door. Real priests, he believed, avoided complications.

The nuns slept in two spartan dormitories. More bedrooms were created in the outbuildings to house visiting professionals lured to donate their services to the community. The volunteers, who came with willing intentions – doctors, builders, remedial teachers – left as fast as they could. The visitors’ bedrooms were ovens in summer and freezing in winter, the nuns’ cooking was abominable and the problems they faced in the shacks were diabolical.

‘That’s it for the next ten years,’ one medic was heard to mutter. ‘You mean twenty,’ her volunteer partner groaned, though all agreed that the nuns were a fine example of personal sacrifice and ingenious use of resources.

Sister Dineo with her first-aid training was a whizz at cleaning then suturing wounds with nylon thread, biting it off after a final neat knot. Sister Nokwe grew lush vegetables from seed in trenches fertilised with compost made from donkey dung mixed with shredded newspapers. Artistic Sister Hilary worked wonders with pots of cheap paint, a glue gun and a stapler. The garage workshop served as both dining room and chapel. To disguise the roll-up door’s corrugated ugliness, she painted it a celestial blue stencilled with a frieze of gold candles. The former mechanics’ workbench with its pegboard backing was draped in silver lamé snapped up by Sister Immaculata at the Beijing Bazaar’s Utterly Total Sale, and now displayed the nuns’ statue of the Madonna.

The pièce de résistance was the hydraulic car lift, transformed into a serving table by a donated plywood door, on which their meals were dished up. On Sunday mornings it became a unique altar that could be raised and lowered, swathed in more silver lamé adorned by candles in enamel holders and jam tins of wild flowers and grasses scavenged from road verges. When the workshop neon lights were turned off and the whole confection was raised for Father Liam to celebrate Mass, the glowing silver tableau never ceased to amaze and delight the congregation.

Sweetness Moloi, her mother, Philomena, and her fidgety brother, Tsietsi, were there every Sunday.