I Heart Beat (4 page)

THE BIG HAIRY hand belongs to Mr du Plooy. He's the man who's going to help Grummer get the garden into shape. I make a mental note to google this character. The chances are we're related. He does hair in a big way. It sticks out of the top of his long socks. It glares at me in bristling tufts through the buttonholes of his khaki shirt and climbs all the way to the top of his neck. Can't wait to see his back.

I follow at a careful distance while Grummer tells him what she wants. She ticks off the items with her fingers. The guava trees have to go, all seven of them. What's the point of having a home with a mountain view (as the property advertisement claimed) when all you'll be able to see every winter are rotting guavas?

Mr du Plooy frowns. All of them? He's not pleased. There's nothing like the taste of a ripe guava or fifty in the winter. Grummer says yes. Mr du Plooy says no. Grummer looks uncertain.

She wants some oak and elm trees at the bottom of the garden. Most of the existing trees must come out. Mr du Plooy concurs. Yes, the rooikrans trees must go; they're invaders. But the quince trees must stay.

Grummer says no. She wants all the old quince trees gone. Mr du Plooy frowns. All they need is a bit of spraying and pruning. There's nothing quite like quince jam in the autumn. Grummer puts her foot in a vrot quince and flounders. She winces as her 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.

“They'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 bathroom (no bath but a rusty metal tub). The wallpaper is a collage of pictures from a magazine called
Scope
. And there's an old photo of two kids on the wall above a rotting mattress. One dark-looking girl and a whitish-looking boy.

Mr du Plooy and Grummer are still at it when I get back. They finally agree to disagree until Round Two. In the meantime Grummer says she'll chat to the neighbours about putting a pipe for the
leiwater
through their garden.

I watch Mr du Plooy off the property. He's built like a tank and before he leaves he makes a turn into one of the shacks. He nearly takes his head off at the doorway. Ha-ha.

He emerges a bit later with a piece of paper in his hand. Shoot me dead for being a liar, but I swear it's the photo of the two kids. He takes a last look around the garden, checking out all the guava trees and then roars off in his four by four.

Over supper I raise my action plan for tomorrow. I do it carefully, 'cos I don't want to alert Grummer to the strategy.

“I feel the need …” (yes, I say that) “I feel the need to pray, Grummer.”

Grummer says she also feels the need to pray. She needs the Lord's help in dealing with Mr du Plooy. “I've never met a person so … so … otherwise,” Grummer says. “I'm not used to dealing with difficult men. Your grandfather always used to know exactly how to deal with these sorts of people. He could always shout the loudest.”

I add another quality to The Target snapshot: Bully.

Before Grummer suggests we hold hands and do the prayer thing, I suggest church. The Anglican Church has a nine o'clock service tomorrow morning and we can go together. Grummer looks pleased. “Your mother never wanted to go to church with her father and me. We will have a lovely time,” she says.

Yes, we will, I agree. Project: Pulling for Grummer is entering a critical phase. Get ready to meet The Target.

ETA: Sunday 7:00 a.m. GMT.

Part Two

IT'S 5:35 A.M. GMT. I put on my church clothes: pants (black), T-shirt (black) and boots (black). I discipline my hair severely with hairbands (black), put on my shades (black) and brush my teeth (twice). I'm now ready to meet my new grandpa.

I cast a critical eye over Grummer. She's gone for a navy-blue jacket and skirt with a red scarf around the neck. She looks like an air hostess. I tell her she looks very nice. She looks at my Sunday best, sighs and says nothing.

We walk to St Paul's Anglican Church together. Everybody's out walking. Old ladies walking their old men. Young men walking their old dogs. I keep a sharp eye out for thin old men with red eyes walking their cats. My luck's out.

We get there way too early, like half an hour. Grummer says she likes to prepare herself before a service. We take seats in the third row and Grummer kneels and prays. I play a few hands of poker on my cellphone and get my best score ever.

I look around and do a quick assessment of potential targets. Seven kids sit in the front row. I figure they're related 'cos the three girls wear dresses made from the same material. The oldest kid is about nine. I guess their parents are at home having a Sunday morning zizz. Let's face it, day care isn't cheap.

There are only two other customers present in the church. They sit very close to each other and giggle and hold hands. They're probably doing their attendance quota before they're allowed to get married.

I keep the faith; there's always the minister.

He comes up a little short of the key characteristics. He's like one metre forty, about eighty-five years old, with a set of clicking teeth, a hairy, grey top lip, a grey Alice band to keep a mop of grey hair our of his eyes and a grey dress. He's a she and her name is Pastor Hettie Druiwe.

We're ten minutes into the show when I figure it's time we cut our losses. I catch Grummer's attention and give her a sign — the finger across the throat. Grummer adjusts her red scarf and smiles back at me.

Pastor Aitch keeps us at it for three hours. We sing, we clap and we pray. We do it all in Afrikaans. And then Pastor Aitch tells us about this guy called
Johannes die Doper
, who lived in a desert. And I think of Mom and calculate that she's been without a dop for two days. Old John the Baptist didn't have a drink for forty days and Mom's got twenty-six more to go.

Pastor Aitch doesn't allow us to just sit and listen. Just when I think my bum's finally found a comfortable spot on the pew, she gets us to get on our knees. There's no warning, she just screeches, “
Gat op jou knieë
!”

We do this about twelve times in every hour. It's like a high-intensity aerobics class. After the sermon, we sing, we clap and pray some more.

At the end of it all, Pastor Aitch comes and introduces herself. She gives us a register and asks us to sign our names.

“Are yous from England?” she asks Grummer. She thinks we're tourists. Grummer tells her where we live.

Pastor Aitch says, “Oh.” And she makes big eyes at us. She says very few of the local white people come and worship with the coloured people. “It's still very us and them,” she tells us and she takes Grummer's pale, speckly hand in her brown, leathery one and shakes it again.

“I knew the people who used to live by your place,” Pastor Aitch tells Grummer. “They were also churchgoers. They grew the best quinces in the dorp.”

Grummer and Pastor Aitch get talking and I wander outside. I watch people leave the other churches across the village green. I do some quick maths. I've got three more churches and three Sundays left in the holiday to get it right.

Grummer cooks Sunday lunch while I do some strategic analysis on my laptop. I adjust the information under Target Venues: doctor's rooms (one), churches (three).

I make another category: other. There must be other places where people with nice teeth who love God and went to university get together. Before I can do a brainstorm, Grummer calls me for lunch.

She's made a special effort. There are six bowls lined up on my side of the table. They each contain the following: pieces of lettuce, cherry tomatoes, chick-peas, two boiled eggs, tuna, and the last has sliced cucumber.

“Look, Beatrice. I've made it just as you like it. You will eat properly today? Say you will?” she pleads.

I say, “You will” and Grummer shakes her head at me like I've hurt her feelings.

She has two plates on her side of the table: a roast chicken and a mixed, dressed salad. She waits for the one o'clock news and then we eat.

She tells me that one of the people who used to live on our property is still alive. Well, just. He's ninety years old and lives in the coloured township on the other side of the village. The township is called “Die Skema” or “The Scheme”.

It's the name the authorities gave it when they came up with a scheme to chuck all the coloured people out of the village and take their land. And the name stuck. It stinks too. Grummer says it was daylight robbery! And she repeats it again in a voice with capital letters: DAYLIGHT ROBBERY!

I'm eating the yellow part of the egg (I don't like the white) and wondering where exactly Grummer's history lesson is going. She finally gets to the point: “Pastor Hettie has invited me to Die Skema to attend a prayer group of a few of her parishioners who are also bereaved,” she says.

Ching-Ching! Now here's something I can work with. A group of singles getting all close up and personal with each other in an enclosed space. Holding hands, praying and comforting each other. I couldn't have planned things better. I give Grummer ten out of ten for initiative. If I hadn't had yellow egg all over my teeth I would've given her a big smile as well. I nod encouragingly instead.

After the prayer meeting, Pastor Hettie's going to take her to visit Mr September, Grummer tells me. I nearly choke on a chick-pea with excitement. A date! Already! My Grummer really is a dark horse.

“I want to talk to him about the guava trees and the quince trees … before I make the decision to remove them all … I don't want to do more wrong.”

Okay, I get it. Grummer's going to see the old guy who used to live here. I don't like it one little bit. I mean he's so way out of the age range. He'll be dead before the honeymoon.

Conserve your energy, Grummer. FOCUS!

Grummer does. On two faces that are peering around the doorway.

“Hullooooo,” says one of the faces. The face has a big red nose. My radar says Boozer. Grummer gets up from the table and greets The Neighbours.

THE NEIGHBOURS ARE Mr and Mrs Thomas Phillips. They live in the house behind us.

“I can see
everything
that goes on in your home. Right into the little girl's bedroom. She's always
busy
on her computer. Working on a
secret
project, hey? Am I right, am I?” says Mrs Thomas Phillips, whose name turns out not to be Thomas at all; it's Candice.

Great. I make a mental note to increase security.

Grummer offers them tea. Mr Phillips checks his watch and he makes a joke about it being a little too early for the “other”.

They take normal tea. So I make a pot of rooibos for me and Grummer and a pot of no-name brand special for the Phillipses.

“You
must
call us Tom and Candy,” Mrs Phillips tells me when I take the tea onto the veranda. I tell them they
must
call me Beatrice.

Candy likes to place an emphasis on certain words in a sentence. When she does it, she bares her teeth and makes her mouth very wide. I can see she had something fleshy for lunch. Gross!

Candy asks me what I want to be when I grow up. I tell her I want to be tall. Grummer gives me a narrow-eyed look. I wink back behind my shades. Okay, Grummer, I'll play nice.

Tom runs a small antique shop (he calls it an “anteekee shoppee”) in Hermanus, aimed at the weekend visitors from Cape Town.

“It's amazing what you can pick up in the countryside for
practically nothing
,” Candy tells us.

“It's a cash business of course,” Tom says. He taps his soggy nose as he lets us in on his little tax dodge. Poor Tom's got a bit of a cold. He's sure he picked it up in the dentist's rooms last week when he was having a crown fixed.

“The dentist is treating all sorts of people these days,” he says. “A different sort of person, if you know what I mean? You take your life in your hands going in there.”

I take a photo of Tom with my cellphone and upload it to my laptop. I do a little work in Photoshop and enlarge his nose. It looks like a sunburnt prickly pear. There are about seven bristles to each enlarged pore. It's one of my finest pieces of work. I send it to my two and only friends back home, captioned “Still-life of a nose in the countryside”. They text me back that they love it too much.

Grummer tells Tom and Candy about the irrigation system she plans to put into the garden. She asks them if she can run a pipe down the side of their property so she can get the
leiwater
feed. She tells them she's not sure how it works, precisely.

Tom tells her, precisely, in between dribbling tea on his shirt, how it works. The leiwater was originally used to irrigate the vegetable gardens grown by coloured people in the middle of the twentieth century.

“
They're
not here any more and
we
still get the water. And it's for
practically nothing
. We only pay twenty ronts a month,” Candy says, putting in her five cents' worth.

“Not that we grow
vegetables
of course. But, let's face it, you can't grow an English country garden without
lots
of water,” Candy says.

Candy says Grummer just
has
to get rid of the guava trees. “
All
the starving kids from Die Skema will come and steal the fruit if you don't. It's
impossible
,” she says.

I'm starting to like these people very much (not).

Candy says she will be
dee
lighted to accommodate Grummer's leiwater pipe. Tom asks Grummer who's putting in the irrigation system. When Grummer tells him, Tom tells Grummer what he thinks (precisely).

“Old Du Plooy's not a bad sort, as Afrikaners go. A bit too familiar with the coloureds,” he says, and Candy pulls down her mouth knowingly.

The Phillipses are from England — Milton Keynes. They moved to South Africa thirteen years ago and bought in the village, for
practically nothing
, Candy says. Property prices, especially for land by the river, have now just gone
through the roof.

I'm about to go through the roof, my head's hurting so badly. But the Phillipses stay and stay. And then they stay some more.

Candy asks Grummer what she's been up to. Grummer tells them that she got the house cleaned by the fairies. Candy says she has a girl from Die Skema. “You have to watch them
all the time
. I turn my back for
one second
and she's at the sugar. But labour's very cheap in these parts. She costs
practically nothing
. I'll lend her to you,” she offers generously.

Grummer says she couldn't possibly accept. No, she simply couldn't. And she flaps her hands around madly like there's a bad smell in the air.

“You just can't get reliable labour this time of year,” Tom says, stroking his nose. “They all go home to their tribal villages in the Transkei for Christmas.”

The Phillipses miss Milton Keynes
awfully
. I think Milton Keynes misses them
awfully
and they should go back there. Fast.

Grummer tells Tom and Candy about the church service we attended and about meeting Pastor Hettie. Candy nearly falls off her chair laughing. “Oh, don't tell me you went to church this
morning
. Oh, my dear, that's the
wrong service
. It's for the
coloureds
from Die Skema. You're supposed to go in the
evenings
for the
white
service.” And Candy and Tom shriek like a pair of psychos.

I've reached the conclusion that Tom and Candy will not be on my new best friend list. I'm about to email an anonymous complaint to the tax man about a certain Thomas Phillips, previously of Milton Keynes, Yoo Kay, when Candy finally says something interesting. I catch the tail end: “… and we meet at seven o'clock every Thursday night at one of the member's homes. It's very
informal
of course and we spend
more
time talking about each other than
books
, but it's
very
jolly.”

Grummer says she belongs to a book club in Pee-Eee. She would love to attend one during the holidays. She's running out of decent books to read.

“And there are some really
super
people. One or two elderly gentlemen and a few younger ladies,” says Candy.

Ka-ching! A book club. Of course! I make a mental note to update the Target Venue list.

Candy promises to discuss Grummer's holiday honorary membership with the other members and says she'll let Grummer know. “I think they will absolutely
jump
at you,” she says. “We are bored to
death
of each other. And I'm so
sick
of the same old food everyone cooks. It will be a
lovely
change to have it in your home.”

I think the Phillipses give up on Grummer ever offering them something decent to drink, 'cos at about 3:45 p.m. GMT, Tom announces that it's time to go.

“They seem pleasant enough people,” Grummer says, clearing away the tea things.

Yeah, absolute charmers, Grummer.

She catches my eye. She holds my look for a second and then turns away. “I'm sure they mean well. Never judge a book by its cover, Beatrice,” she says. But she looks cross. Like I've caught her in a lie. But I haven't said a word. Not one.

Grummer says she's going for her walk. She has her pre-breakfast walk and her pre-supper walk. She takes an hour's exercise every day. No more, no less.

I update my project file. I add two items to Target Venues: singles' prayer meetings, book club meetings (Thursdays). Things are happening fast. I am making progress!