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Shut your traps I say but they dance buttocks in the air all around A. her lip trembles & I say it’s just kitchen-skivvies don’t take any notice of them they’re getting only head & guts & tonight you’re having chops.

There the sheep is hanging cut off the head I say it’s dripping on her feet. So then I see D. first cuts off the ear & pushes it into A.’s pocket without notches not marked yet for slaughter as we do with the hanslammers. Saw him say something to A. which I couldn’t hear & I didn’t want to ask in front of everybody (must beware of intimate contact between A. & the men-workers).

Then D. shows A. how she should loosen the skin & push away the meat from the membrane & I hold it & at first it’s a struggle she cuts now too deep now too shallow. I say take your fist knead the skin loose from the membrane while you feed the blade & only then it improved a little the right fist in the white crocheted jersey a bloody stump looked as if it had been amputated but she persevered well even though it took three times longer than usual but then she knew all the cuts also from the neck to the loin & the groin & what one can best use it for, for braai, for roasting, for baking in the oven or for stewing.

Well done my little girl now you know meat. Next time we slaughter an ox you’ll get to be the prime butcher here on Grootmoedersdrift I said we’ll just have to think of something for that little arm of yours a butcher’s sleeve.

5

Noon silence. The floorboards in the passage creak. Is it somebody standing by the telephone table, shifting weight from one leg to the other? Or studying a photograph on the wall, or hesitating, overtaken by a thought, an afterthought? To-ing and fro-ing? Pro-ing and conning? The floorboards creak of their own accord.

There is nobody there. These are the sounds of an old house.

My house can make more sounds than I.

Sometimes I imagine that I can hear footsteps, swiftly from the front to the back all the way through the house, a hurried, peremptory tread in the mornings. At night, in the afternoon hours between two and three, a laboured pace, a shuffling gait, a walking stick.

As if somewhere a recording has been made of all the times that I’ve walked in the passages and rooms of my house, as if it were now being played back to me on a worn audiotape, a record without clear information.

What must I make of it? What is the message? I was intended to be an upright animal? Intended to stretch my limbs, delimit four quarters in the air, a golden section, my reach the compass of my intentions? Created to swim, to walk, to climb, sufficiently sanguine to attempt flight?

Here I lie. Drawn and quartered would be preferable.

Sometimes there’s a knocking on the rooftop, once, twice, thrice, four times, loudly as the roof beams contract in the night. Then I wake up and wonder who has arrived.

Who wants to come in? I want to cry out, who is there?

But there’s nobody there. When Agaat leaves me alone, like today, I am nobody. Between me and me no fissure of differentiation.

In the mornings when the roof beams heat up, there’s a tick-ticking above my head for an hour. As if there’s a pacemaker wanting to help me think, an apprehension that on my own I cannot shape into thought.

I am less than a roof.

I am a gutter.

I hear, sometimes, a rustling in the door frames. Woodborer it must be, mice perhaps, or cockroaches. Gnawings sifting down between the wood and the wall, mice probably, insects.

I should be able to impress upon Agaat to bring me a cockroach in a bottle so that I can see it scampering with its grey flat body, scrabbling with its feet against the glass. She’d find mirth in my envy of a cockroach.

My bed in which I’m tilted, makes my weight palpable to myself. My loose weight inside my fixed weight. Each time I can feel my intestines welter inside me. My heart in a basket, my guts a roll of chewing-tobacco tumbling about inside a crate. That’s all she’s done