.

on her arms swayed a little as they followed her typing fingers. Hattie was at her computer, wearing a peach linen short-sleeved shirt and matching skirt. Linen, and still it wasn’t creased.

      ‘There are five emails for you, Maria,’ said Hattie. ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’

      Jessie’s phone sang, My black president. It was the song Brenda Fassie had written in honour of Mandela. But I did not look up; the letter on my table was pulling all my attention. I ran my fingertips over the writing on the envelope. I could learn a lot about someone before I even opened their letter. This writer used capital letters and pushed too hard with the pen, as if their message was very important. The address was written in the Afrikaans way, with the number after the street name. Elandstraat, 7. The words of the letter were pressed onto a lined page with a black ballpoint pen:

       TANNIE MARIA. I’M SCARED MY FRIEND’S HUSBAND IS GOING TO KILL HER. HE BROKE HER ARM. HE THINKS SHE’S LEAVING HIM AND HE SAID HE’LL KILL HER. SHE DOESN’T WANT TO CALL THE POLICE. SHE SAYS I MUSTN’T GO TO HER HOUSE. IF I KILL HIM IN SELF DEFENCE OF HER, HOW LONG WILL I GO TO JAIL?

      I put my head in my hands.

      ‘Hey, Tannie, what’s up?’ asked Jessie.

      I gave her the letter. She read it in three seconds.

      ‘Gosh, you look peaked, Maria,’ said Hattie. ‘Can I make you a spot of tea?’ I nodded. ‘What’s the letter say?’

      ‘It’s another bastard dondering his wife,’ Jessie said, handing the letter to Hattie. ‘Threatened to kill her. Jislaaik. I wish there was a giant insecticide for these guys. DDT that we could spray from an airplane.’

      ‘There was that other lady of yours,’ said Hattie, looking at the letter, ‘with the husband who was also a rotter.’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The lady with the ducks. Without the ducks.’

      ‘The bastard shot them, didn’t he?’ said Jessie.

      ‘I got another letter from her recently,’ I said, ‘telling me she was making a plan to leave. I think the woman who wrote this letter is duck lady’s friend. The one who gave her the ducks.’

      ‘Is there no return address?’ said Hattie.

      I shook my head.

      ‘Nearly all my letters are anonymous,’ I said. ‘But it’s got a Ladismith stamp.’

      ‘It might be someone else,’ said Jessie. ‘One out of four women in South Africa is beaten by their husband or boyfriend.’

      ‘I don’t think she’s one of those. I’ve just got a feeling that it’s my duck lady. She spoke about her friend who loved her. I told her to leave her husband. And now he might kill her.’

      ‘Fiddlesticks,’ said Hattie, putting a cup of tea on my desk. ‘There’s no need for that sort of nonsense. Let’s get a response to this woman right away. I’m sure you can help her. We can put your answer on the website now, and the Parmalat board, and we can get your letter into tomorrow’s Gazette.’

      ‘Eish. We’d better act fast,’ said Jessie. ‘I’ve got the number here for People Opposing Women Abuse.’ She was looking at her BlackBerry phone. ‘This is serious. At least three women are killed by their partners every day in South Africa. Okay, let’s give her the numbers for the Battered Women’s Shelter, Life Line and Legal Aid.’

      While Jessie wrote the phone numbers down on a bit of paper, I had a sip of my tea, and tried to think not of all the women in South Africa who were beaten, raped and killed, nor of my years with Fanie, but only of this woman and her friend, asking for my help. What did they need right now?

      ‘I can tell you this for sure,’ said Jessie, handing me the phone numbers, ‘self-defence won’t work as a legal argument, if she’s killing to protect her friend. The woman who’s being beaten can get a protection order and a warrant for the man’s arrest. If he breaks the protection order, the police will arrest him. The wife must organise this. A friend can help, but can’t do it for her.’

      I spent an hour making phone calls and another half-hour writing the letter telling her what I’d learned. Jessie was right. There was not much the friend could do. The woman had to act for herself. She must ask for the domestic violence clerk at the Ladismith Magistrates’ Court, and get a protection order. Her friend could give her all the information and the phone numbers. There was counselling and legal aid, and a shelter in George where she could stay.

      If duck lady was reading the paper – or the web or the Parmalat board – she would get this story herself. I don’t know why I hadn’t sent these numbers in my first letter to her. That was really stupid of me. I should have asked Jessie earlier. I wish I’d known about those phone numbers when I was with Fanie.

      I wanted to give the woman who had written to me some comfort food, recipes for chicken pies and chocolate cake. Things you could rely on when everything else is deurmekaar. But I knew that she would probably not be in the mood for baking, even if she had a thermafan oven. And I had no way of taking the food to her myself.

      Then I remembered Tannie Kuruman made the best chicken pies. Soft and juicy inside, with flaky pastry crusts. I phoned her up and got her recipe and put it at the end of my letter, saying that the pies were for sale at the Route 62 Café.

      Jessie put the letter on the website, and I went and pinned a copy on the Parmalat notice board. On the way back I stopped at Tannie Kuruman’s café and bought two warm chicken pies.

      I sat in the shade of a big umbrella, watching the mountains, the Swartberge, with the Towerkop peak, there above the town. The heat made them look further away than they really were. The shadows on their flanks were purple and green, like bruises.

      The pies were delicious. The first one I ate for duck lady. The second for her friend. In case they didn’t get a chance to buy their own.

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      The next two days I went to the Gazette, and replied to my other letters and emails. For lunch on both days I went to the Route 62 Café and ate two chicken pies. I sat on the bench in the umbrella shade and looked up at the mountain. Tannie Kuruman came and sat down beside me.

      Tannie Kuruman smells of the kitchen. It’s a nice smell. She’s a coloured lady in her sixties, and even shorter and rounder than me. She wears a doek over her head, a little cloth to tidy her hair away. Her skin’s a bit browner than mine, and her hair more frizzy. But coloureds and whites do not look so different from each other out here in the country.

      ‘It’s so dark up there,’ I said, when I had finished chewing, ‘in those mountain gorges.’

      ‘Ja,’ she said, ‘it’s where the tall trees grow. When it rains there are lovely waterfalls over the rocks.’

      That night I struggled to sleep. I was worried about those two women. I knew too well what could happen to them, and I tried not to remember what had happened to me. But sometimes these flashes just come to me as if it all happened only yesterday instead of years ago. I calmed myself down by reciting my mother’s muesli buttermilk rusk recipe. Butter, flour, sunflower seeds, dried apples . . .

      I had run out of rusks at home and at the office. And rusks should dry out overnight. So I got up and made a big batch and put them into two baking trays in the oven. I let the warm sweet smell fill my lungs, and somehow it helped fight away the memories, and the worry. Maybe duck lady’s husband was not as bad as my husband. And even my husband didn’t kill me . . .

      When the dough was baked and had cooled a little, I cut it into rusk-sized pieces and put them into the warming drawer. I ate two of the biggest pieces while they were still soft, with a cup of tea. They were like buttery cake. I went back to bed and kept my mind on the sweet bread that was becoming rusks, all safe and warm and dry, and I finally managed to fall asleep.

      I woke early, just before the birds,