When I pulled up to the old gate hanging off rickety hinges, I had to get out to swing it open, and then again to close it behind me once I was through. Rounding the bend, I was greeted by the rusted windmill that looked as decrepit as it had when I’d left almost forty years before. A waning gibbous moon backlit its enormous blades, and the moonlight reflected off the dam, casting eerie shadows in the thatch grass.

The farmhouse hadn’t changed. It was still painted the same muddy brown I remembered, and the paint was chipping and peeling from the fascia boards and drainpipes. Though I couldn’t see them in the dark, I knew the avocado orchards stretched out behind the house, and that beyond them, the Magaliesberg mountains rose up in the distance. They were giant waves on an otherwise calm sea, the only thing breaking the monotony of a landscape made up of seemingly nothing but earth and sky.

When I came to a stop in front of it, I eyed the darkened house warily. The farmstead was called Verdriet. It meant “grief” in Afrikaans and if that didn’t sum up everything there was to know about it, then I didn’t know what did. My Afrikaner grandfather had named it just before parceling it off and bestowing it to his daughter and her new Scottish husband as a wedding gift. My mother had said it was a prophecy; my father believed it to be oupa’s curse.

I left the headlights on and opened the car door. My shadow loomed large as I slowly walked up the stairs. The illumination made finding the old concrete statue of the angel easier. I hefted it to the side, tipping the base, and there it was in the wedge that had been chiseled out specifically for it: the key my father told me would always be waiting for me in case I ever decided to come home. At the time, I hadn’t known if the gesture was a taunt, my father’s way of predicting that I would fail at something he so strongly disapproved of, or if it came from a sincere place.

Dislodging the key, I blew the cobwebs and dust off and fit it into the door’s lock. It yielded immediately like it had been expecting me. After I locked the car, I hitched my rucksack over my arm and went back up the stairs, shouldering my way into the house.

It was dark inside and smelled strangely of stale cigarette smoke. Closing the door with my foot, I automatically turned right, knowing the light switch lay against the wall two steps in that direction. When I flicked it on, the fluorescent lights hummed awake, revealing an odd scene in the lounge.