Читать онлайн «The Artful Egg»

And Tuesday morning had progressed from there. When he’d been woken again, it had been by the Widow Fourie making secret love to him, which he had pretended not to know about; and then, when he’d woken for the third and final time, it had been to find his favourite breakfast waiting on the locker beside her bed. Two jam doughnuts and a bottle of ginger beer.

Burping quietly—he found the burps that went with this breakfast one of its more attractive and lasting features—he had then taken himself out onto the veranda, there to scratch at the pelt on his chest in remarkably contented fashion.

A note, sticky-taped to a veranda-post, had read: “Me and the kids have gone out for the day to Myra’s and I’ve told Johannes to take the day off also so you can have peace and quiet for a change. XXX”

Quite what he had done with the time between then and now, which had to be somewhere around eleven o’clock, he wasn’t at all certain, except that he’d enjoyed himself. There had been the long, deep bath, which had lasted until the water had lost its heat, and then the change into fresh clothes, his first in over a week. After that, he had wandered round the old farmhouse, visited the pumpkin patch, and had eventually settled down in a crude hammock that her children had rigged between two peach-trees.

He lit another Lucky Strike, noticing that the match flame was almost invisible in the brilliance of the blazing sun. There would be a storm later on, there always was when the weather turned as hot as this, but for the moment it was as near to a perfect day as anyone with nothing to do, and absolutely no intention of doing anything, could wish.

A butcher bird came to sit on a branch above him. It had a fledgling in its beak, still struggling feebly. After a while, the fledgling hung limp, but the butcher bird remained where it was.

Kramer looked down and away. The coarse lawn was burned almost the colour of the tinder-dry veld beyond the barbed-wire fence surrounding the property; and far off, murky-grey at this distance, Trekkersburg lay in its wide bowl, brimmed by rocky outcrops. Nothing was distinct: the scraps of bright colour, the metallic glints, the little white shapes were like ants’ eggs, bits of beetle, gaudy scraps of butterfly wing and other insect debris caught at the centre of a cocooning spider web. Poke it with a twig, and God knows what might come crawling out.

The butcher bird had its head cocked, watching him.

He twisted round in the hammock, facing downwards through its wide mesh, finding a hole through which his blunt nose fitted comfortably. Below him, in the fine red dust, were two conical depressions made by a couple of ant lions. The ant lions were buried out of sight at the bottom of each depression, waiting for an unwary ant to come slithering down the treacherous walls of the pits they’d dug. A tiny moth, dizzy in the daylight, rang the changes by becoming a victim, and he turned away as the ant lion closed its pincers.

The butcher bird had gone.