No one challenged them. The builders were unsure at first but they didn’t stop them. Most days they carried on working as if the occupiers weren’t there. The house, when they arrived, was a shell, with a flat roof and door, but no ceiling. The cement block walls were unpainted and there was a hole in a side wall for a toilet’s outlet pipe and drain, but there was no toilet or pipe.
The week after they moved in, a painter, who was working along the line of unfinished houses, asked Esther if he could come inside to do the undercoat. She was surprised.
“Are you people carrying on with these houses?” she asked him.
“Ja, Antie,” he said. “The baas says we don’t care who lives in the houses, we just want our money from the government, so we must finish. Finishing these houses is still our problem. Who they give it to or who takes it is not our business.”
In one day, the inside of the house went from grey to white. In a few days he would be back, he said, to finish. Esther was annoyed when he splashed paint on the bedding and she suspected he was careless because they were occupiers. But still, the white walls made the rooms feel larger and cleaner. More like a proper house. Esther had started to think of it as her house now and it felt good to feel proud. When it was all finished, maybe the kerksusters would visit.
With the money from the corrugated iron, she bought red checked plastic matting for the floor. On it she arranged the table, four chairs, the kitchen cupboard and the wooden box Neville made for their television and the car battery they used for power. Neville climbed on the roof and positioned the bunny ears for a good signal.
“When Liedjie gets a job, she can buy us a dish,” he shouted down. “If you have a dish your signal is very good.” That night they sat at the table and ate cabbage cooked in sheep fat while they watched Generations. The signal made the picture snowy, but they followed the story and the TV and food put everyone in a good mood.
Esther hung a picture of a big pink flower in a white frame on a nail in the wall. It was a chuck-out picture from one of her old employers but she liked looking at the petals on the flower and it was nice to hang it on a real wall. In the shack the nail kept coming loose and the picture was always falling down. It was different hanging a picture against a cement-block wall, she thought.
The floor was cold but the damp was gone and a person didn’t feel like there was always sand between your toes. When she walked past the small room where the toilet would go one day, she thought it would be a step up to have a real toilet in the house.
Every second morning Esther and Liedjie walked to Titty’s finished house, which was along a pathway through the veld, in the row behind a line of new foundations. There they filled eight two-litre Coke bottles with water from the tap in Titty’s kitchen. They paid her R5 and then they carried the bottles carefully back across the veld and lined them up against the wall in the front room. This water was their cooking, drinking and washing water and they stretched it for two days.
When they arrived Titty always let out a long sigh, like she was bored, and turned her back on them while they worked at her kitchen tap. Liedjie wanted to get water somewhere else, but there was no one they knew who they could ask. When they were done Esther left the R5 coin next to the sink. Liedjie wanted to say to Titty that it was their house that Titty was illegally occupying, but Esther said to smile and shuddup.
“Where will we get water if she stops us, hey, Liedjie?”
So they filled the bottles in silence and when they were done Liedjie said, “Dankie, Titty, dis gaaf van jou,” and they left.
Apie was always happy to see them and followed them across the veld to their occupied house where he played in the builders’ sand near the door.
It was very lucky Neville had piecework again, Esther thought. When he didn’t work he was underfoot and bedonderd. When he worked there was food and with Katjie and the girls and now Apie again too there were a lot of hungry mouths to feed. At night Esther boiled potatoes and cabbage. If she had stock or fat she mixed it in to give the food a meat flavour. Sometimes, for a change, she made rice and mixed in beans, or else rice and pilchards. When the weather warmed up she would plant pumpkins. That would be nice for everybody. Pumpkin with cinnamon and sugar always made a person feel satisfied. When Neville had work and things were going well, like they were now, Esther made sure she had enough money for a two-litre bottle of Coke or, her favourite, Schweppes Granadilla, and she poured everybody a cup. A person needs something sweet in life, she said to Katjie. It can’t always be black coffee with no milk or sugar.