Recipes for Love and Murder Read Online Free PDF

Swartberge, wasn’t shy of the sun, sticking its bald, split head high up into the sky. The sides of the mountain looked fuzzy and wobbly.
    When I got to my house, before I even poured myself that lemonade, I took the letter to the kitchen shelf. To the big recipe book my mother had given me. I opened the pages of Kook en Geniet . I folded the duck lady’s letter between the pages, and closed the book around her words. Like it was holding her, sending her everything she needed.
    I spent the afternoon with my potato salad, preparing it and eating it at my stoep table, and then I sat beside the leftovers with my last two letters and my pen and paper.
    One letter was from a young girl with no friends and a school cooking project. The other from an old man living alone on a farm, with too much mince in his freezer. I could feel the unhappiness of the writers, and I sat with it for a while, trying to work out what I could give them. They were asking me for recipes, but it’s obvious that they were lonely and wanted love. I did not have a recipe for love.
    But if I could give them really good recipes, easy ones they could make themselves, they could invite someone to eat with them. I knew the recipe for a perfect macaroni cheese that I could give to the girl. And for the old man, the best spaghetti bolognaise. And even if they ending up eating them on their own . . .
    ‘If you are honest with yourself,’ I said to the potato salad, ‘is the feeling of love really any better than the satisfaction you get from a good meal?’
    Food is good company, but it doesn’t answer back, not in words anyway. Maybe that is one of the reasons why it is good company. But it did communicate with me somehow, because next thing I knew I was polishing off the leftovers of that cream and mint potato salad.
    My mouth was full of delicious flavours and my tummy full, and I answered my own question: ‘I think not.’

CHAPTER EIGHT
    The next morning my phone rang. It was Hattie.
    ‘Have you heard?’ she said. ‘Nelson Mandela died last night.’
    When I put the phone down, I made myself a cup of coffee and took two rusks and sat out on the stoep. But before I could bring the coffee to my lips, the tears started leaking out of me.
    Mandela was ninety-five and had been sick for a while, but it still came as a shock. I looked out at the brown veld and the wrinkled gwarrie trees and the distant mountains. My tears made it seem like rain was falling, but the sky was wide and empty. I knew that people all over the land were crying with me for Tata Mandela.
    Then my belly started shaking and tears from deep inside me came up and I realised I was crying for my own father too. My pa who had left me too soon.
    I looked out at the veld and let my heart be filled with my sadness and my pride for my father and for Mandela.
    Sometimes I thought that my father left my mother because of Mandela. But of course I couldn’t blame Mandela, who had, after all, sat for over twenty years in prison on Robben Island, a long way from the Klein Karoo. I knew my father did love my mother – with her brown eyes and soft hands, and her delicious food – but I also knew that the Klein Karoo, even with its big veld and open skies, was too small for him. And my mother’s mind too narrow.
    To my pa, Mandela was a freedom-fighter and a great leader; to my ma he was a terrorist and a kaffir (though she did not use the K-word in front of my father). They did not often argue in front of me, but this was a disagreement that I heard more than once.
    My father was the African correspondent for a newspaper in England, the Guardian , and he would travel a lot. Over the years, he came home less and less, and then he stopped coming back altogether. He would send money and postcards. The cards made my mother angry. Eventually the postcards stopped, although the money carried on every month. When I missed him I would read the old postcards that I had rescued from the rubbish bin (and