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approved by Aunt Shirley; she is my grandmother’s thinking tank and if she sees everything to be right, then in my grandmother’s eyes it must be right too.
    There was this time when my grandmother wanted to build a new house. Aunt Shirley said no:
    â€œMa, we grew up in this house and you never thought of changing it. Now that we are not living here you want to build a new house? For whom? Because you are dying?”
    â€œMy grandchildren will live in it after I have died.”
    â€œWhich grandchildren? If you have money, give it to us and let us enjoy it, because if you build a house Lefa will sell it after you die.”
    That was it; the house was never built. Because my grandmother’s most trusted person said no to it.
    Not that my grandmother is a stupid woman, no. She was a teacher for many years but she didn’t have any teaching qualifications so she was eventually asked to resign, as there were enough candidates that the teachers’ colleges were producing. She has since taken a job working for a pharmaceutical company. It is just as my uncle said:
    â€œIf you want everything to be alright, you have to do it their way, which is actually my sister’s way. She is controlling her family as well as this one.”
    My grandmother has a secret life which she thinks no one is aware of, but I know about it. There is a Saturday, midday one – Uncle Mashego – and a midnight one, who comes as he wants – I call him Grandmother’s Midnight Man. If I want my grandmother to do something for me without having her fuss too much about it, the best possible time to ask her is on a Saturday afternoon, after Uncle Mashego has come calling.
    When Uncle Mashego – he is not really our uncle, we just call him that out of respect – drops her at the gate, she is a young girl again, losing everything that comes with being a grown-up, wizened grandmother until Sunday morning, when she regains her grown-up, wizened self.
    Uncle Mashego is married since long ago and has his own set of grandchildren. He is a retired police officer and these days he rears chickens at his home, which he sells. He also distributes tomatoes to street vendors.
    I don’t know if Uncle Mashego’s wife knows the extent of his friendship with my grandmother, but I know that everybody thinks that they are just veterans of friendship – they have been friends from long ago when they were still teens.
    Klip Man is Grandmother’s Midnight Man. The survivor of everything not good in life, he is not pleasant to look at and the fact that he rarely talks makes him even scarier. The scars on his face are the scars of apartheid’s brutality, scars of being caught on the wrong side of people, scars of what prison can do. But he is still walking on his two feet and it looks like he can survive another fifty years.
    There is a story that some Boers caught him stealing from them. They beat him up bad, grievous bodily harm first grade with intent to kill. When they were all tired, he stood up and looked at them.
    â€œIs julle nou moeg? Huh!”
    They beat him again, until they were convinced that he was dead, but as they were about to leave he opened his eyes and looked at them.
    â€œEk is a klip van ’n swart man.”
    He stood up again, with blood all over him, knocking one of them down flat before taking to his heels. They couldn’t catch him and that is how he came to be known as Klip Man.
    Only alcohol makes him vulnerable; without it I wouldn’t have known that he sometimes sleeps in our home. When he is drunk he will talk to himself as if there are two or three people talking at the same time, him and two other him-selves; listen carefully and you will hear that he is three people in one.
    He jumped the wall and fell on the flowers:
    â€œWat gaan nou aan?”
    â€œEk het geval. Is jy a moegoe?”
    â€œEk sê vir jou.”
    I knew who it was.
    â€œStarrag verseker,