foot was sticking out of the sand.
A foot with all five toes and a sole with sand stuck to it. A real Chinese foot!
‘We’re there!’ he shouted. ‘Look!’
The slave driver jumped down into the hole to check. Good God! They really had dug so far down that they’d come to a Chinaman’s feet.
‘Well dug!’ he said.
The only questionable thing — which seemed to challenge the theory that the earth was round — was that the foot hadn’t appeared at the bottom of the hole. It was sticking out from the side instead; and the leg to which the foot was attached also seemed to be sticking out sideways instead of from the bottom up.
But that was a bagatelle.
‘Let’s dig the sand away and take a look at the rest of it,’ said Henning, who had now given up his job as slave driver and was prepared to dig out that leg — and indeed all the rest of the body, which didn’t seem to be a Chinaman after all, but the corpse of an ordinary mortal.
Which didn’t necessarily make matters any worse — although he would never admit to his cousin that he had never seen a corpse before.
But just as he dug in his blue spade and made another chunk of sand fall down into the hole, his auntie Doris appeared at the top of the hole, glowering down at them.
His auntie, Fingal’s mum.
At first she glowered.
Then she screamed.
Then his own mum appeared and she screamed as well. Both he and Fingal were lifted out of the Chinese hole and people came swarming up from all directions — bare-breasted women and women with their breasts hidden away, men with and without sunglasses, some of them with big, flashy swimming trunks, others with tiny ones that more or less disappeared up their backsides. . But all of them pointing and singing from the same hymn sheet:
‘Don’t touch anything! Don’t touch anything!’ shouted a large, fat bloke, louder than anybody else, ‘There’s a body buried down there in the sand! Don’t touch anything until the police get here!’
Henning’s mum lifted her son up, and Fingal’s did the same with hers: but there was a red and a blue spade left lying in the hole, and nobody seemed to have the slightest interest in them.
But those feet — they’d exposed another one when Henning made his final thrust with his spade: everybody seemed to be extremely interested in them.
So, Fingal thought: it really was one of those Chinese we dug up.
‘The earth is round!’ he shouted, waving to everybody while his mum did her best to whisk him away to where their picnic hampers were waiting, filled with apples and buns and sandwiches and juice that was both red and yellow. Oh yes, the earth is round!
THREE
23
22 July 1983
She didn’t register what the girl said at first. The red digits on the clock radio said 01.09; her irritation that somebody had had the cheek to ring at that time of night was mixed with worry that something must have happened. An accident? Her parents? Her brother? Arnold or Mikaela — no, that wasn’t possible, they were both asleep in the same room as she was.
‘I’m sorry — what did you say?’
‘I want to speak to my teacher, magister Maager.’
A pupil. She stopped worrying. A fifteen- or sixteen-year-old chit of a girl telephoning at ten past one in the morning. .
Some nights more than once. And without any help from the telephone. Her anger burst forth in full bloom.
‘How dare you telephone us in the middle of the night? We have a little child, and we’ve got better things to do than. .’
She lost the thread. No response. For a moment she thought the girl must have hung up, but then she heard the sound of slightly asthmatic breathing at the other end of the line. Arnold switched the light on and sat up. She gestured to him, telling him to see to Mikaela, and he got out of bed.
‘What do you want?’ she asked sternly.
‘I want to speak to Maager.’
‘What about?’
No reply. Mikaela started howling, and Arnold picked her up. Why the hell did he have to pick her up? she wondered. It would have been enough to stick the dummy in her mouth. Now she wouldn’t go back to sleep for at least half an hour.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked. ‘Surely you realize that you simply can’t just ring people up at this time of night?’
‘I need to speak to him. Can you tell him to be at the viaduct a quarter of an hour from now?’
‘At the viaduct? Are you out of your mind? What are you on about, you little. . You little. .’
She couldn’t think of a suitable name to call her. Not without swearing, and she didn’t want to lose control altogether. Mikaela’s first shrill shriek echoed through the room. Hell’s bells! she thought. What’s all this about?
‘Can I speak to him?’
‘No.’
‘It’s. . It’s important.’
‘What’s it about?’
Silence again. Both from the receiver and from Mikaela, who was evidently tired and didn’t have the strength to run through her whole repertoire. She seemed to be happy enough to hang over her father’s shoulder and whimper, thank goodness.
‘Tell him to come to the viaduct.’
‘Certainly not! Tell me who you are, and explain why you’re ringing in the middle of the night.’
Arnold came to sit on the edge of the bed, and looked enquiringly. She met his gaze, and as she did so the girl at the other end of the line decided to lay her cards on the table.
‘My name’s Winnie, I’ve had sex with him and I’m pregnant.’
It was strange that Arnold and Mikaela should be so close to her just as these words drilled their way into her consciousness. That thought struck her now, and recurred later. The fact that they were all sitting next to each other in her half of the double bed at that very moment. The inseparable family. Extremely damned strange, in view of the fact that the chasm that had suddenly opened up between them was so deep and so wide that she knew immediately they would never be able to bridge it. That they would never even try. No chance. She knew that immediately.
What was also strange was that she was able to think such thoughts in a mere fraction of a second. She handed him the receiver and relieved him of his daughter.
‘It’s for you.’
But she didn’t remain calm for long. Once Arnold had replaced the receiver and collapsed in a pathetic heap on the floor beside the bed, she lay Mikaela down between the pillows and began hitting him. As hard as she could, with clenched fists. On his head and shoulders.
He didn’t react. Made no attempt to defend himself, just bowed his head slightly; and soon her arms began to ache. Mikaela woke up again but didn’t start crying. She sat up and watched instead. With eyes open wide, and her dummy in her mouth.
