Esther went alone to the foreman’s office, picking her way through the muddy streets, to find out how G48 was to become hers. After the protests the builders had put up a fence around the office with three strands of barbed wire on top and, when she arrived, the gate was locked. There was a bakkie inside and she called and rattled the chain. The door of the hut opened and a man came out carrying a mug and a sandwich. He walked slowly, shuffling in heavy boots through the deep puddles that lay across the yard. When he reached the fence, she held up her identity book and the municipality’s letter. He stuffed the sandwich in his mouth and, with his free hand, indicated for her to push the documents through the wire.
“Wait,” he said, spitting crumbs as he spoke. He walked back to the office with her documents and, for a long time, she stood on the pavement. When he didn’t come back, she sat on the curb. The storm-water drain was blocked and two sparrows bathed and chattered in a puddle. Esther rubbed her hands over her face and stretched out her legs. Always, she was so tired.
“Hey,” the foreman shouted, and Esther struggled up and went back to the fence.
“When do I get the title deeds?” Esther said.
He pointed to where two youngsters were sleeping on the back of a bakkie parked beside a row of toilet bowls. “You must sign for everything when these two have finished everything. Then you get the papers,” he said.
He handed back the identity book through the locked gate, then turned and shouted, “G48, maak klaar!”
The two young men lifted their heads.
“G48!” the foreman shouted again, and they stood, wiping their eyes. Then, as Esther watched, they loaded one of the toilets, pipes, window frames, glass sheets wrapped in newspaper, doors and a stainless steel sink on to the bakkie. When they were done, the foreman gave them an envelope and unlocked the gate with a bunch of keys from his pocket. They drove out, bumping over the curb, into the road, through the sparrows’ puddle, accelerating up the hill. The foreman locked the gate and looked at Esther, who was still standing at the fence.
“It’s finished,” he said, and he went back to the hut.
Esther tried to walk quickly but she had to stop often to catch her breath.
O Jesus, has the time come?
The builders’ bakkie was parked next to G48 and Liedjie was outside, standing with her hands on her hips, talking to the two workers, who were fitting a pipe to the outside wall.
She winked at her mother.
“Jinne, but you guys are clever to do this. Ma, these good-looking chaps were so eager to finish our house they didn’t think to bring you with them. That’s how excited and speedy they are.”
As she spoke, they looked away to avoid catching Esther’s eye.
“Ja, julle ouens.” Liedjie enjoyed their discomfort.
“Sorry, Antie,” said one, who was wearing a T-shirt with ‘“Hands off” in fading silver on the chest. “The foreman doesn’t let us transport people.”
“Carry on,” said Esther. “I want a house, not a lift.”
When they were done, Liedjie made them hammer nails into the walls next to the windows so she could hang curtains. Then she thought they should put a nail in the lounge so they could hang their flower picture.
“Your girlfriends are so lucky to have such handy men around the place,” she said, rolling her eyes behind their backs, and Esther laughed.
“Mammie, look, the tap is on.” Liedjie’s face shone and Esther’s heart softened. Esther turned it and a blast of water sprayed into the stainless steel sink, so hard that she jumped back.
“My Jitte,” she said. “If we get a plug we can wash in the basin and not a bucket. It looks like our days of fetching water are finished.”
The youngsters grinned and said the electricity would be next, but they couldn’t give a day.
“Antie weet mos, nè, how it goes with Eskom,” said the T-shirt.
“Anyways, Antie must take time to decide where Antie wants the prepaid box so when the outjies come Antie is ready,” said the other. He smiled, and Esther saw he had only two teeth.
“If you want hot water, then you must apply and the municipality will put a sun geyser for you on the roof,” said the T-shirt.
Esther and Liedjie’s eyes met.
“Maybe we will do that,” Esther said. “One day.”
By lunchtime the work was finished and they all walked around the house for an inspection. The pipes were cemented in place, a shower head installed, the windows glinted, and the doors, including the front door and two bedroom doors, were hung. Esther couldn’t stop smiling.
“Antie, when the cement is dry we will come back and paint,” said Two Teeth. “Maybe it’s better if you people don’t shower straight away.”
They made a big deal of her signing off the papers. Then they handed over the front door key to Esther and she threw her arms around them and kissed their cheeks, which made everybody laugh.
Esther folded the papers carefully. Later, once they left, she would fetch the little tin box from its hiding place and tuck them under the children’s birth certificates. She walked down to the road and looked up at her little house on the hillside. Neville would have been so happy. So many years of waiting and in the end it had cost so much.
The oupa climbed through a hole in the fence to have a look at the house and the woman with the broom crossed the road and Esther hugged her too.
It was over. This life of nowhere and nothing and sadness was finished. After all the years of waiting, now, when Liedjie was old enough to marry and Neville was dead and Jaco was done with school, they had given her a matchbox. The workers drove off and she stood in the street with the title deeds in her hands and looked at the house. She sighed and the pain that had lived within her all her life relaxed its grip.
Dankie.
“Mammie, can you believe it? We have an inside toilet,” Liedjie shouted. She flushed, waited, then flushed again. “Come see this, Ma.”
Esther went inside and laughed when she saw her daughter on her knees looking in the toilet. She went to the sink and opened the tap again to watch the water swirl and disappear down the drain. She washed her hands and her face, then she leaned in and drank.
Oom Hekkie pulled up in his clapped-out bakkie, with Jaco on the back, holding the mattresses.
“Is this the last time I have to move all this old furniture?” he said when he saw Esther.
“Ja, dankie, Oom.”
“Taking houses like you people did was nonsense,” he said.
“O Jirre, now this oom is going to start with us again,” Liedjie said.
Esther stopped and stared at him, and when he saw her face he climbed back in the bakkie without a word. With his hands ready on the steering wheel and his eyes ahead he waited for them to finish.
They offloaded fence poles, boxes, blankets, the furniture and the corrugated-iron sheets that had once been the walls of their shack and that Neville had used to make the outside toilet.
“Ma, I am going to make a duifiehok,” Jaco told her, as he dumped the corrugated-iron sheets alongside the house.
“Since when are you interested in birds?” Esther laughed.
“Oom Krisjan wouldn’t let me and we were never going to stay at the other house for long. This place is home. This is forever. Duifies need a place that’s forever.”
Liedjie unpacked the cups and shook out their blankets to spread them on the mattresses for later while Esther hung the kitchen curtains. The house smelled of cement and the walls were unpainted, but it was theirs and they all laughed and joked and sang as they worked. In the afternoon, when sun streamed in through the open door, the kitten from across the road walked in, its tail up and, sensing no threat, it jumped up and curled into a matted ball on one of the beds Liedjie had made.
“Kom, kitty,” Liedjie said. “Kom, kietsiekat.”
“Katjie,” Esther said.
Liedjie stopped sweeping. “Where’s she?”
“I don’t know,” said Esther. “When did we last see her?”
“I don’t know, Ma.”
The two women stared at each other. With the move, they hadn’t thought about Katjie and the little girls.
Esther pulled on her tekkies. Her heart was pounding.
“Come,” she said to Liedjie. “Something is not lekker.”
They left Jaco and ran along the newly made street to the abattoir. Esther was panting, but Liedjie took her hand and pulled her along and they cut past the rows of new houses, until they came to the veld where they followed a footpath to the river.
Swirling and foaming, the brown water pushed through the bowed reeds. And even though the river was dropping now, Esther knew the shacks were gone. In a panic she searched for the familiar bent figure of her friend. There were people on the bank picking through clothes and household items in the mud.
Higher up on the bank, others with mud-streaked legs and arms sat on rocks, swatting at the mosquitoes that had come with the rain. Their faces were blank and Esther saw in their eyes defeat and its twin, hopelessness.
The sun set behind the red hills as the two women moved from group to group, looking into people’s faces. They sank in the mud and stumbled over reeds and rocks.
“Have you seen Katjie?” Esther asked them.
They shook their heads and children stared as they passed. Three church people arrived and began unfolding tables and the people made a queue to wait for soup and bread.
“They are not here,” she said to Liedjie.
“Don’t give up, Mammie. We will find them still.”
“Are people dead?” Esther asked a policeman who was leaning against his van.
“Calm down, Antie,” he said. “Maybe there are some who died but there are no bodies yet. It’s only shacks that are lost. These people know if they build here this is going to happen.”
“But it was the municipality who allocated the people this ground,” Esther said. “There was a man, with a clipboard and things. He was from the municipality. My friend said.”
The policeman laughed. “You mean there was a shacklord,” he said. “Our people must stop falling for these stories of quick houses. They think if there is a flood and they lose their shack the government will feel sorry for them and give them a house. That’s what is going on. The municipality would not build houses here. There is only one way to get a house. Put your name on the list and wait for your turn. No such thing as getting on to a special emergency list.” He laughed unkindly. “If there was, we would have emergencies every day.”
“And the people who lie to them and steal their money and build up their hopes? What happens to them?” Liedjie asked. “Are they made to pay for all this?” She pointed to where an old woman was dragging a black bin bag through the mud. Her voice was raw and sad and Esther reached for her hand.
The policeman laughed again. “Those scam artists? Too quick for us. Slippery bliksems. Here today, gone tomorrow. Feeding off people who are too stupid or too desperate to know any better. The only time those outjies will pay is when they face our Maker. Then it will be straight down with no return ticket.”
Liedjie looked at him and was about to speak again, but then stopped herself and shook her head. “Ma, Katjie will be looking for us,” she said. “She doesn’t know we have moved. She doesn’t know our number is G48.”
Tears were streaming over Esther’s cheeks and, as the giant yellow moon lit up the rain-sodden veld, Liedjie sang, not a church song, but the lullaby Esther had sung when she and her brother were small. They walked back through the mud and up the faraway hill to the veld.
A voice on a loud-hailer floated up the hillside: “We are victims, we demand houses, we will not wait!” but Liedjie ignored it and kept singing.
At the top of the hill, Esther looked back at the river. Really, this had not been a good place to build a shack.
“Katjie and the girls must come and live with us,” she said. “When we find them, we must tell them enough is enough.”
Liedjie smiled, and those who heard her voice stopped and looked up the hill to the mountains beyond and felt stirring within them something they couldn’t explain.
Esther marched on. If they had lost everything in the flood they would need clothes. That was okay, she thought. The neighbours would help and there were the kerksusters and Pastor Joseph. Together, they would make a plan.