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shoe sinks into the rotten fruit.
    There’s a lot more to be done. Grummer wants a pond at the centre of the garden with beds of roses. Mr du Plooy raises the question of water. Ponds and roses need lots of it. Planting indigenous is the way to go in a place where summer rain is scarce. Grummer is firm; she wants a rose garden, not indigenous fynbos.
    Mr du Plooy shrugs and suggests an irrigation system. The house is entitled to
leiwater
twice a week. All the houses in the old part of the village get the overflow of water from the spring which is channelled in ditches along the sides of the roads.
    Grummer says she’ll look at the finances.
    Then there’s the herb garden around the back at the kitchen door. They agree. Grummer sighs with relief. They reach deadlock over a veggie garden. Grummer says she doesn’t want vegetables in her garden. Her late husband always said they looked untidy.
    Mr du Plooy says there’s nothing untidy about a fine cabbage and a head of lettuce. Grummer and Mr du Plooy sulk.
    Lastly, the falling-down garden shacks must get knocked down. Mr du Plooy gets a bit edgy. The two spitting porcupines that are nesting at the top of his eyes meet together in attack formation.
    â€œThey’re not garden shacks, Mrs Wellbeloved,” he says. “With all due respect, these were people’s homes.”
    I look at the old shacks. Homes — schmomes!
    Mr du Plooy tells Grummer a long (boring) story about how a coloured family used to live on the land where Mom’s holiday house is now standing. They grew fruit and vegetables on the plot until they were forced to move in the sixties because of apartheid. They were among numerous coloured families who were moved off their plots along the river by the government to make way for white people
    Grummer looks uncomfortable. “Oh dear, that wasn’t right, was it?” she says and Mr du Plooy shakes his head.
    I get cross. There are a couple of things Mr du Plooy doesn’t quite get. The first is that Grummer is the client. The second is that the client is never wrong. The third is that even when the client is wrong, the service provider doesn’t tell the client. I know these three golden rules from Mom.
    Before I can set Mr du Plooy straight on these principles, Grummer offers him some tea. He takes coffee (black) with three sugars (white).
    While they sit outside on the veranda and discuss things, I check out Grummer’s bedroom. On the bedside table next to the
Good News Bible
is a photo of the dead guy holding a cat.
    I come away with a list of the following characteristics: he’s tall — maybe one metre eighty-two, but it’s difficult to tell ’cos he’s sitting down. He’s adequately haired. He’s on the bony side and his mouth has the look of a turtle. Thin and stern. He’s a cat lover. His eyes (the dead guy’s, not the cat’s) are red. Bright-red holes. The snap was obviously taken by some genius who didn’t know how to fix red-eye.
    I never met my grandpa. Mom wouldn’t let him in the house. I think there was a bit of history between them. No loss, he doesn’t look like he was a lot of laughs.
    I get my laptop and update the physical characteristics of snapshot number two: The Target. He’s taking shape. Lucky Mr X is a tall, thin guy with red eyes and no sense of humour who loves cats. Lucky Grummer!
    I join Grummer and Mr du Plooy on the veranda. His fingers are clenching the coffee mug like hairy, overcooked boerewors - swollen, meaty sausage fingers. Grummer’s face is all pink and patchy. They’re still stuck on the guava tree issue. I don’t do conflict, so I leave them and go and check out the garden shacks — oh excuse me, Mr du Plooy, homes.
    One of the buildings was a bedroom-cum-living-room-cum-everything else. The other was a kitchen (there’s a place where a stove made a mark against the wall). The other is the