Free Kitchen Boy by Jenny Hobbs Page A

sniff?’
    ‘You knew and didn’t say. Typical. You make me sick. I wish I wasn’t your sister. I wish I was Marco’s, then we could French-kiss all we like.’
    ‘Sharon! That’d be incest.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘It’s disgusting. You can go to jail, even.’
    ‘ You’re disgusting.’
    ‘Be quiet, you two!’
    The command from further along the pew ends any more revelations. Sam isn’t sure what incest means. He’ll have to sneak a look at the whisperers when the congregation stands up again.

Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.
    – W ILLIAM C ONGREVE , The Mourning Bride
    Valerie Palmer, J J’s private secretary during his corporate years as Durban manager for SA Breweries, was known to everyone as Palmer the Charmer. Tall, thin, dressed like a model, auburn and ambitious. Valerie’s glossy lips issued orders disguised in compliments. Her high heels rapped an authoritative Morse code down the corridors. Her matching nails clacked on her typewriter keyboard.
    J J called her a company asset, leaving her to organise everything from board meetings, to the distribution of Christmas booty for other executives, to buying presents for his family on their birthdays. Shirley worried the whole time Valerie worked for him that she’d lure him away with her glamour and power over men who went all silly in her presence, snickering and straightening their ties.
    Valerie did her best to let J J know she was just the woman for him and available. Though tempted, J J had always been wary of predatory women and avoided the bait. She moved on to greener pastures, but her bosses seemed equally loath to dump their dull wives, despite all her efforts at corporate elegance and making vigorous nookie on business trips. In despair by her late thirties, she married a gambler who wanted sons and dumped her after their second daughter’s birth.
    Charmers who succumb to rage when their hopes are dashed don’t age well. Her crêpe de Chine lips pout, her eyebrows are pencilled on, her hair’s too red, her clothes have been bought in covert sorties to inconspicuous shops that stock rich women’s discards. Her glare at J J’s coffin says: I should be the grieving widow here. Me! Not that mousy nobody.

‘Go!’ The guards prodded them forward with rifles.
‘Hang on, chaps.’ Major Irving stood his ground, gathering the shreds of dignity left to an officer in battledress fit only for a dog’s basket.
    He turned to the SS Hauptsturmführer who had been sauntering behind them. ‘What’s this place?’ The man made an abrupt gesture with his swagger stick. ‘Für die Jagd. Go!’

· 6 ·
    M ULTI-HUED LOZENGES OF REFRACTED LIGHT crawl up the stone columns as the sun moves towards mid-afternoon. Reverend George brays, ‘I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle while the ungodly is in my sight.’
    Lin remembers her father and other Moths talking in low voices about the ungodly when they had evening meetings in the dining room. She had a hiding place under the yesterday, today and tomorrow bush outside the window, and the sickly smell of the purple and white blooms still makes her think of ugly dark secrets, a Pandora’s box of men’s terrors. She squatted there listening to things that had happened in their war, transfixed by stories of bombings and bloody deaths and grown-up men crying. These were her father’s friends who stood around at braais drinking beers and joking, yet in that room they spilled over with the horror and rage that crawled under the surface of their lives like reptiles. One of them shot himself when she was ten and she heard her father say to Shirley, ‘He never got free of the nightmares, poor sod.’
    ‘And you have?’
    ‘Learnt to live with the buggers,’ was his answer.
    Lin recalls the quizzical look on Shirley’s face. Her mother is an enigma, her intelligence seemingly satisfied by household trivia. Lin’s twenties and early thirties were