CHAPTER ELEVEN

The sosaties were fantastic. The kudu wasn’t cut in the usual cubes but in small thin pieces, seared over hot coals. There were sweet sosaties made with pineapple and dried apricots. And savoury sosaties made with mushrooms and baby marrow. They were served with a choice of honey-mustard sauce or tomato-chilli sauce. I had a savoury sosatie with honey sauce followed by the sweet one with chilli sauce.

The chilli sauce was in a red plastic squeeze-bottle, like a tomato-sauce bottle, and the honey-mustard in a yellow one. But they tasted nothing like the usual stuff you get with hotdogs. They were both delicious homemade sauces, full of flavour.

And the kudu was tender, with that smoky fire taste. Kudu meat is quite subtle, not full of kick like springbuck.

The sosaties weren’t very big, and I still felt hungry, and I got to wondering what the sweet one would taste like with the honey-mustard sauce and the savoury one with the chilli sauce. As a food writer, it was my duty to research this properly. I am glad I did, because it was the last sosatie I ate that had the best combination: The honey-mustard sauce with the sweet apricot sosatie.

I went up to the Kudu Stall and asked the young blonde girl who was serving if she would give me the recipe for the sauces.

‘Ag, sorry, Tannie,’ she said, brushing some hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘I already checked with my boss because another tannie also asked me, but he said, no, he won’t share them.’

I was sorry about that. Recipes were made to be shared. I cheered up when I saw Hattie walking towards me.

‘There you are,’ she said. ‘I do wish you’d carry a cell phone. The Pierneef talk was fabulous. There are some super little art galleries and second-hand bookstores. I can’t resist a good bookstore. How was your afternoon? What did you get up to?’

‘Research,’ I said. I wiped my mouth with a napkin, and threw it into a big green bin.

‘I could do with something to eat,’ said Hattie. ‘I forgot to have breakfast. And lunch.’

I shook my head. How could someone do that?

‘Come with me to the Ostrich Club dinner,’ I said.

‘Super,’ she said, and we walked together out of the beer tent.

The sun was setting, and the pale-blue sky was smudged with red. A little tractor drove past us, pulling small carriages filled with children. As we strolled along the walkway between the stalls, the sounds around us got louder. Music from the Ferris wheel. A band starting up in the beer tent.

‘I wonder who is playing tonight,’ said Hattie. She paused in the light of a buttermilk-pancake stall and looked at the programme. ‘It’s Kurt Darren. That should be lively.’

We walked on to the Ostrich Supper Club. The stall was now decorated with big pink ostrich feathers, and a stove and pots were laid out on the trestle table where a man and a woman were chopping vegetables. He was roundish with a rough beard, and she was a skinny tannie with tight grey curls and a blue apron. Behind them, inside the stall with its canvas walls, was a dining table with a white cloth and candles. There were about six others standing and sitting here. They were dressed quite smartly, and I felt a bit shy in my veldskoene.

The woman with the little curls looked up at me and smiled. ‘We’ll be having a cooking demonstration now-now,’ she said. ‘We’re making a sort of cottage pie with ostrich mince and sweet-potato topping. There are some ostrich recipe booklets here. They are free.’

Hattie and I each picked up one. It was a little black-and-white stapled booklet. On the back was a list of the sponsors, which included a few wine and ostrich farmers.

‘Look, here’s a recipe of yours, Maria,’ said Hattie, pointing to my name on the page. It was the cottage pie recipe.

‘Are you Tannie Maria?’ asked the woman.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and this is my friend Hattie.’

‘Ag, you came. That is so nice.’ She called over her shoulder: ‘Annemarie, our guest of honour is here.’

‘Guest of honour?’ said Hattie to me.

‘Ja, well, I sort of helped, with my letters, to introduce them to each other.’

‘Tannie Maria?’ said a woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a pink dress that matched the feathers.

She was looking from me to Hattie. She had never seen a picture of me, and I had not seen her. Though I would have recognised her because she’d mentioned the scars. Her face was lined with white scars like the way mud cracks when there is a long drought.

Hattie pointed at me, and I offered her my hand, saying, ‘Annemarie.’

She did not shake my hand but took it in both of hers and pulled me to her and gave me a hug.

‘Thank you so much for coming,’ she said.

‘This is Hattie,’ I said, ‘the editor of the Gazette.’

She held Hattie’s hand.

‘Come inside, come inside,’ she said. ‘Let me introduce you.’

Ag, those people were so warm and friendly to me, they felt like the big family that I’d never had. What with no brothers and sisters, and my father gone so much, it was only when we visited with my cousins in the Free State that I really had a lekker nice big family like that. That little canvas stall was full of warm good food, delicious red wine, and talk and laughter. Annemarie was holding the hand of the round man with the beard, Stefaan, and sometimes I caught them looking at each other, and there was such happiness in their eyes.

There was just one man at the table who did not look happy. He sat very quietly, his hair and eyes shiny and dark, his face unshaven. He was long and thin, and his clothes were an olive-grey. He reminded me of a black mamba. He didn’t eat much of what was on his plate, even though the cottage pie was excellent. I couldn’t have made it better myself.

I got up to help Annemarie with the pudding. We stood at the table, dishing warm brandy tart into little bowls.

‘It’s so nice to see you happy,’ I said.

‘Ja,’ she said, ‘I am. And you helped me get here. When I first wrote to you, I was scared to go out of the house. And now I have this group of friends, and Stefaan. And it wouldn’t have happened if your letters hadn’t told us to go to the Agri to meet each other.’

She gave me the cream to spoon onto the plates. I swallowed a yawn. My sleepless night was catching up with me. We carried bowls to the table, two at a time.

The dark-eyed man turned down the brandy tart with cream. He looked at me with what seemed like anger, even hatred, when I offered it to him.

‘Is that guy okay?’ I asked Annemarie, as she and I came back to the trestle table to dish up pudding for ourselves.

‘Nick? Ag, shame,’ she said, covering the cream, so the little muggies didn’t fly in. ‘He was in my therapy group, but it moved to Ladismith before he had time to sort himself out. The group’s mainly for people with PTSD, but Nick, well, he’s got special problems of his own. It helped me so much, that group. Stefaan and I were dating, but I was still all messed up, and we couldn’t get . . . close, you know.’

‘Ja,’ I said, knowing too well.

I took a mouthful of tart, and I closed my eyes and let the sweet warm brandy and cream sing down my throat to my belly.

‘Jirre,’ I said. ‘This is delicious.’

‘It’s my mother’s recipe. I don’t think Nick will work out here in the Supper Club. He needs a proper therapy group. His bad vibes can bring an evening down. Ag, shame. I wish I could help him.’

‘What’s that therapy group you spoke about?’

‘Well, after my . . . accident . . . There’s this guy, Ricus, who runs the group. He’s actually a mechanic. They call him the satanic mechanic.’ She laughed. ‘I don’t know why. Maybe because he comes from Hotazel, up north.’ She pronounced it ‘hot-as-hell’. ‘I heard rumours about a woman there, a snake charmer. It’s probably rubbish; you know how people talk. Anyway, he’s not a satanist; he’s a real healer. I don’t know what I would have done without him, really.’

‘Can you give me the recipe for this brandy tart?’ I said, as I polished off the sticky pudding in my bowl. ‘And the mechanic’s details?’

‘Sure. Do you have people who write to you with post-traumatic stress disorder? You’ll like his approach. He thinks part of the healing process involves eating lekker food.’ Yummy food. ‘He’s got his group going again, just outside Ladismith. Too far for me to travel, but I wish Nick would go and stay there a while. I know Ricus’s number off by heart. Have you got a pen?’

So that’s where I first heard of the man who was to turn my life the right way up and upside down: the satanic mechanic.