Esther didn’t mind the other occupiers. They gave the hillside a feeling of community, like it had been in the yards. There were some she didn’t recognise, but most were older people she knew from the queue. She wondered if they would be left alone by the authorities. It would be good to merge into each other’s lives, know who your neighbours were.
One afternoon, after they had occupied for two weeks, the women from the Eastern Cape came. Esther had seen them before, in town. Then people had said they were squatting in the bush near the dump. From nowhere, they suddenly appeared in the occupied area, balancing plastic buckets with their things on their heads, their babies tightly strapped to their backs. Under their arms were blankets and pieces of plastic sheeting. They wore flowing skirts and white doeke, and their shiny faces were very different from what Esther was used to.
“What do they want?” said Katjie, who was standing on her doorstep.
The Eastern Cape women had unknotted their babies and were putting down their loads on the foundations of a house.
“It’s a funny click-click, the way they talk, nè?” Katjie said.
“What are they laughing at?” Esther said.
“Nee, Jitte, I don’t know,” Katjie said.
The women worked quickly. They put up a structure on the foundations, using the plastic sheets, poles and rocks they found lying around the building site. At sunset they made a fire and the smell of doringhout and pap hung over the area.
“My Jinne, Katjie,” Esther said. “They are occupying our foundations. They also want houses.”
“But these houses are for our people and how are the builders going to finish if they are living in the way?” said Katjie.
“They must go back to their own place,” said Esther. “You don’t see us going to the Eastern Cape making houses on their foundations. They would chase us if we did that.”
The next morning the incomers walked in a line through the occupied houses, over to Titty’s side. They came back later, each one with a bucket of water on her head. An hour later their white clothes were spread across the Karoo bushes drying in the sun. Apie followed them and was soon playing with their children. Later Esther saw him sitting on a pile of builders’ sand with the other little children, eating a lump of stiff pap with his hands.
“They can’t stay here,” she said to Liedjie, who was working on her night-school homework at the table. “We must tell them they must go.”
Liedjie looked up and shrugged. “Leave them, Ma. At least they feed Apie.”
On the second evening the women made a circle and clapped along to the beating of a drum. Then they sang and their deep rich voices carried across the veld and floated into the star-filled African sky.
It was beautiful singing, Liedjie thought, and in her heart she wished she could walk over to them and join their clapping and slow stamping. “Do you think it’s their church music, Mammie?” she asked.
“I don’t understand the words,” Esther said.
“But it’s mooi, nè?”
Liedjie’s mother, father and brother all turned and looked at her, their faces blank.
“They can’t stay here,” Neville said.
When it was time for bed the singing stopped and Liedjie looked out and saw their fire was burning low and they had crawled into the shelters. The snow on the Swartberg made the night very cold and she was glad she was in a house now and not shivering outside under a piece of plastic like the women and their babies.
In the early hours an engine woke Esther and she sat up on the bed and listened. She checked the time on her cellphone and, when she saw it was very early, she lay down again. The vehicle strained up the hill and she wondered who was coming at that hour. Eventually it stopped, and it sounded like it was idling. Someone must have taken the wrong road, she thought, as she drifted back to sleep. She never heard the engine switch off.
The whispering of the men was too far from the occupied houses for anyone to hear and they worked quickly, offloading in the dark. The driver climbed on the back of the bakkie and threw old tyres over the side while the other two, an older man and a youth, stacked them neatly. When everything was off, the driver jumped down and counted them.
“How many?” whispered the man.
“Twelve. If we each carry four it will be fine,” said the driver.
“Kom, let’s go.”
They made their way through the veld to the construction site, struggling to carry all of the tyres on their arms. A dog on the end of a chain stood up and barked, but when they didn’t come closer it lay down again. They skirted the veld and crept up on the foundations.
The plastic sheeting that covered the new shelters reflected the moonlight. The women had taken over three foundations and the embers of their fire still glowed.
“Put them all around, it doesn’t matter where,” whispered the man. “Hurry! They mustn’t wake up and make a noise.”
They placed the tyres in a circle and the youth ran back to the bakkie and fetched a two-litre cooldrink bottle filled with petrol. The man took it from him and carefully poured a little over each tyre.
“These things burn like hell. Make yourselves scarce when they go up,” he said.
“I’m going back to the bakkie,” said the driver. “When you two come we’ll get out fast.”
“Don’t blerrie drive off without us or else I will come looking for you and you will be very blerrie sorry.”
“Deddie, you think this will work?” the youth said.
The man laughed.
He twisted a newspaper into a torch and struck a match to light the tip. When it made a good flame, he walked from one tyre to the next until there was a leaping ring of flame. As he lit the last one, he shouted: “Voetsek! Go home! We don’t want you here!”
“Next time we are going to put the tyres on top of you!” shouted the boy.
Then they ran, jumping on the back of the bakkie and almost falling as the engine screamed and the vehicle swerved to get back on the track. They held on, shouting and swearing and, when they were on the main road again, laughing.
Esther woke again when she heard the noise and this time she got out of bed and pushed her feet into her old pink slippers and pulled on her gown. The air was smoky and she coughed.
What is burning now? she thought, opening the door. Then she saw – it was the acrid smell of melting rubber.
The women were screaming as they crawled out the shelters, pulling sleeping children by their arms and legs into the light and heat around them.
Liedjie was awake too and she ran to see what was happening. The fires were leaping into the night sky and she grabbed her mother’s arm, her heart pounding. “What’s going on, Ma?”
People were running and shouting and sounded like they were in pain. All the occupiers were in their doorways and the legal house-owners too. They saw the tyres around the new encampment and they stood, silently, watching as the flames grew smaller.
“Somebody lit tyres there to chase them away,” Esther said.
“We must help them, Mammie.” Liedjie pulled on Esther’s arm, but she didn’t move.
“Come, Mammie. Their things are burning.”
“No,” Esther said. “Leave it.”
“But, Ma, they’ve got nothing. They are poor like us. You have always helped people like us.”
“Nee, Liedjie!” Esther shouted. “We got enough problems. They will make it harder for us. This is our place these houses, ja, even these foundations are for our people and not for them. They didn’t stand in that line like me and Katjie. You want them to stay? Then you go stand in that line for twenty years and you ask that la-de-da madam with her nails and her hair if they can also have houses. And see what she says. Nee, Liedjie. They must go home. They must bugger off back to their own people. This country is not about sharing. This country is about looking after yourself and fighting for your own children. There is nothing for them here.”
Esther was breathing hard and Liedjie was crying. She pulled Liedjie in and slammed the door. Then she lit the candle stub and scooped water from the bucket into a pot to make tea, which they took back to bed.
When the sun rose Esther poured water into a basin and washed and then picked up the broom and swept away the ash that had blown into the house. She tidied her bed and sorted the washing, for once leaving the girl to sleep.
Neville and Jaco arrived home when the sun was high, happy because they had sold the corrugated iron from Katjie’s hok for R350 which was enough to feed her and the little girls for a month.
“Where were you people last night?” Esther asked. “There was a lot of crying and screaming going on here.” Father and son looked at each other and laughed.
“And, Jaco, why didn’t you leave your father to do the selling and go to school? You are very late now and I don’t want the principal coming here to complain.”
“Mammie, I have a job,” he said.
Esther sat with a thud, knocking the table so that the little floral cup fell over in its saucer. Words like this were like a knife plunged into a mother’s heart and her hands went to her chest to stop the sudden and searing pain.
“No, Jaco, you do not. You do not have a job. You must go to school.”
“It’s security work. Night shift, Ma.”
Esther ignored him. She stood and went outside to hang up the washing.
Her mind had been on this house thing and she hadn’t watched him closely enough. Maybe she could go to the school and ask if he could come back and make up classes. He couldn’t have missed much. He could get Matric, she thought. My clever boy. She would have stood with him all the way.
He came outside and leaned against the back of the house, watching as she hung the washing.
“Take off your clothes. You stink of petrol and smoke. Maybe running around burning down shacks in the middle of the night is what you want to do with your life now, hey? Security work? Asseblief!”
“Ma, I stopped going to school last year.”
“Every day you dressed in your school clothes and I bought you shoes.”
“I wanted money, Ma. School was just full of things I didn’t want to know.”
“You would have been the first in the family to get Matric,” she said.
He looked down. “I am not going back. Let Liedjie get Matric. She likes going back to school. I am never going back.”
“I wanted you to go to the Matric dance.”
Liedjie came to help her mother and, when Jaco saw her, he sauntered down the road, his hands in his pockets and his head down.
“It’s hard at school, Mammie,” Liedjie said. “If you are a lokasie boy, the other pupils don’t leave you alone to learn. They want you to be in their gangs. Security at the court is a good job.”
“Did you know he wasn’t going to school?” Esther asked, but Liedjie shook her head.
“He knows I would have told you.”
For a long time Esther sat on the step, her head in her hands. Those Eastern Cape women came for a house and schools and jobs. She, Esther, was here for a house and she wanted her children to go to school and get good jobs. They were all just mothers wanting their children to have a chance in life.
Neville was irritable. “Jissus, the mood in this blerrie house is enough to make a person go mad. Cry, cry, cry. With the laaitie working we can at least have bread. Now we just have to get the other one a job and I can relax.”
“Neville, with Matric he could have got a job at the municipality or gone to Cape Town. Now he is a security guard standing on the street all night.”
Esther gave a half-hearted laugh. Now that Neville knew about his job, Jaco would see how quickly his money went to keeping his father happy and feeding them. Nice times didn’t come very often.
The women from the Eastern Cape were still there, salvaging what they could of their plastic sheets and blankets, their children sitting quietly on the builders’ sand, waiting. When they were done, they walked in a straight line back down the track, past Esther, with their buckets on their heads and the babies on their backs. They didn’t look at her and they didn’t sing.
They are going back to the dump, she thought, and then maybe back to the Eastern Cape, or on to Cape Town. The builders were working somewhere else and, except for the painter at the end of their row, there was no one around. The smell of burned rubber lingered on the chilly Karoo air until a breeze came up and then that too was gone.