and I, the ghost within it, will be my old self again. But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float toward his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.
There is a ring at the doorbell: two young policemen in spruce new uniforms, ready to begin their investigations. Lucy emerges from her room looking haggard, wearing the same clothes as yesterday. She refuses breakfast. With the police following behind in their van, Bev drives them out to the farm. The corpses of the dogs lie in the cage where they fell. The bulldog Katy is still around: they catch a glimpse of her skulking near the stable, keeping her distance. Of Petrus there is no sign. Indoors, the two policemen take off their caps, tuck them under their arms. He stands back, leaves it to Lucy to take them through the story she has elected to tell. They listen respectfully, taking down her every word, the pen darting nervously across the pages of the notebook. They are of her generation, but edgy of her nevertheless, as if she were a creature polluted and her pollution could leap across to them, soil them. There were three men, she recites, or two men and a boy. They tricked their way into the house, took (she lists the items) money, clothes, a television set, a CD player, a rifle with ammunition. When her father resisted, they assaulted him, poured spirits over him, tried to set him on fire. Then they shot the dogs and drove off in his car. She describes the men and what they were wearing; she describes the car. All the while she speaks, Lucy looks steadily at him, as though drawing strength from him, or else daring him to contradict her. When one of the officers asks, 'How long did the whole incident take?' she says,
'Twenty minutes, thirty minutes.' An untruth, as he knows, as she knows. It took much longer. How much longer?
As much longer as the men needed to finish off their business with the lady of the house. Nevertheless he does not interrupt. A matter of indifference: he barely listens as Lucy goes through her story. Words are beginning to take shape that have been hovering since last night at the edges of memory. Two old ladies locked in the lavatory / They were there from Monday to Saturday / Nobody knew they were there. Locked in the lavatory while his daughter was used. A chant from his childhood come back to point a jeering finger. Oh dear, what can the matter be? Lucy's secret; his disgrace. Cautiously the policemen move through the house, inspecting. No blood, no overturned furniture. The mess in the kitchen has been cleaned up (by Lucy? when?). Behind the lavatory door, two spent matchsticks, which they do not even notice.
In Lucy's room the double bed is stripped bare. The scene of the crime, he thinks to himself; and, as if reading the thought, the policemen avert their eyes, pass on.
A quiet house on a winter morning, no more, no less.
'A detective will come and take fingerprints,' they say as they leave. 'Try not to touch things. If you remember anything else they took, give us a call at the station.'
Barely have they departed when the telephone repairmen arrive, then old Ettinger. Of the absent Petrus, Ettinger remarks darkly, 'Not one of them you can trust.' He will send a boy, he says, to fix the kombi. In the past he has seen Lucy fly into a rage at the use of the word boy. Now she does not react. He walks Ettinger to the door.
'Poor Lucy,' remarks Ettinger. 'It must have been bad for her. Still, it could have been worse.'
'Indeed? How?'
'They could have taken her away with them.'
That brings him up short. No fool, Ettinger.
At last he and Lucy are alone. 'I will bury the dogs if you show me where,' he offers. 'What are you going to tell the owners?'
'I'll tell them the truth.'
'Will your insurance cover it?'
'I don't know. I don't know whether insurance policies cover massacres. I will have to find out.'
A pause. 'Why aren't you telling the whole story, Lucy?'
'I have told the whole story. The whole story is what I have told.'
He shakes his head dubiously. 'I am sure you have your reasons, but in a wider context are you sure this is the best course?'
She does not reply, and he does not press her, for the moment. But his thoughts go to the three intruders, the three invaders, men he will probably never lay eyes on again, yet forever part of his life now, and of his daughter's. The men will watch the newspapers, listen to the gossip. They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on them that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket. Too ashamed, they will say to each other, too ashamed to tell, and they will chuckle luxuriously, recollecting their exploit. Is Lucy prepared to concede them that victory?
He digs the hole where Lucy tells him, close to the boundary line. A grave for six full-grown dogs: even in the recently ploughed earth it takes him the best part of an hour, and by the time he has finished his back is sore, his arms are sore, his wrist aches again. He trundles the corpses over in a wheelbarrow. The dog with the hole in its throat still bares its bloody teeth. Like shooting fish in a barrel, he thinks. Contemptible, yet exhilarating, probably, in a country where dogs are bred to snarl at the mere smell of a black man. A satisfying afternoon's work, heady, like all revenge. One by one he tumbles the dogs into the hole, then fills it in.
He returns to find Lucy installing a camp-bed in the musty little pantry that she uses for storage. ‘Tor whom is this?' he asks.
‘Tor myself '
'What about the spare room?'
'The ceiling-boards have gone.'
'And the big room at the back?'
'The freezer makes too much noise.'
Not true. The freezer in the back room barely purrs. It is because of what the freezer holds that Lucy will not sleep there: offal, bones, butcher's meat for dogs that no longer have need of it.
