‘Hortensia, good you’re here. Today is crucial.’
As if the word had been circulated, sent out in memo by Marion. True, there was an extra breeze of excitement. Hortensia, as always, chose a chair near the door. She did it deliberately to remind whoever might bother to notice that she could leave. Well, they could all leave, but it was particularly important to her for them to know that she could leave first.
‘Evening, ladies.’ Marion Agostino seemed to press these words out of her nose. Her smile was painted in a red too red for white skin, Hortensia thought, showing her distaste, hoping people would notice. ‘Today’s meeting is particularly crucial.’
A shiver went round, scented in a bouquet of Yardley, Ana?s Ana?s and talcum powder. Sometimes Hortensia hoped the women were pretending, like she was. She hoped they were there for the same reason, even if secretly. Not for the discussion of fencing left unfixed, bricks from previous works uncollected; nor for hedges to be trimmed or three quotes to be inspected; but for the promise of something non-threatening and happily boring with which to pass the time, get nearer to death, get closer to being done with it all. After so many years of living – too many – Hortensia wanted to die. She had no intention of taking her life but at least there were the Katterijn committee meetings, slowly ticking the hours off her sheet.
‘So.’
Hortensia watched Marion lengthen her stubby neck and lace her fingers together atop a manila folder obsequiously named (in elaborate stencil) Katterijn Committee Meeting File. That the same tattered folder had been in use for the twenty years Hortensia had been whittling time away at these meetings proved the kind of nonsense they’d been up to.
‘Yes, there is this pressing matter, but I first wish to deal with issues pending from our last meeting …’
True to form, Marion was circling the issue, circling. Marion the Vulture. Hortensia looked around the table. They were bickering about a swing in a park, just by the highway that headed back towards the city centre. A group of vagrants had taken possession of it. Clothes were seen drying there, strung along the bars. Offensive smells had been noticed. Someone resolved to take the message to City Council. Then there was the clutch of trees that was blocking someone’s view of Table Mountain, but someone else’s grandmother had planted them, and so on.
‘Okay, so now,’ Marion was readying for her big strike of the evening. Her hair was dyed a wan colour to conceal the fact that she’d been living for over eighty years. At one meeting Hortensia had overheard her refer to herself as a woman in her late sixties and almost choked on the tepid rooibos tea she’d been drinking.
‘… finally, ladies, to the matter at hand. I’m not sure if any of you realise – in fact the only reason I found out is because of my first granddaughter, I’m sure you all recall that she’s a law student – well, the point is, a notice has been made of a land claim in Katterijn. The notice was published in the Government Gazette by the … Land Claims Commission.’
‘What’s that?’ Sarah Clarke asked.
Sarah was the only other person on the committee who got so much as a word in edgeways. She was the resident gossip, now in the unfamiliar position of asking a question, since there was little that Sarah Clarke did not already know.
‘It’s the … Commission … it deals with land claims, things like that.’
Hortensia rolled her eyes. Not that she cared but, naturally, she knew all about it and said so, explained that the Commission was set up in the Nineties to restore land to the disenfranchised. While reaching into the hallowed folder, Marion spat a look at her.
Marion pulled out a map of Katterijn, which she unfolded in the centre of the table with a reverence Hortensia had seldom seen shown for paper.
‘The Land Claims Commission, Sarah, is one of those things with a self-explanatory name. And now,’ she rose to point out the parcels of land, ‘a group of some …’ she rifled papers, more a show of importance than a real search for information, ‘some three families … well, one big extended family, the Samsodiens.’
Marion rifled some more, until Hortensia had to concede that perhaps she was actually looking for information and, more than that, the woman looked nervous.
‘What’s the claim, Marion?’
‘Just a moment, Hortensia. Just a moment.’
She found what she was looking for. ‘The claims process has just this month been reopened, so … what I mean is they’d been closed since 1998 and then, for various reasons, on the first of July—’
‘Why were they closed?’ asked a woman whose name Hortensia could never recall.