Of course, her tea had been steeping in a pot on the stove for hours so that the whole house perpetually stank of rooibos, and her rusks were homemade from a recipe that had been handed down for generations. I serve him Ouma-brand rusks that Dee bought from the shops and make the tea by quickly dunking a tea bag into boiling water. Still, he’s lucky to be shown any hospitality at all considering the purpose of his visit.

“What can I help you with, dominee?” I ask as I put the tea and rusk down on the table in front of him.

His eyes flicker to something behind me, probably just so he doesn’t have to look at my defiant face, and I see them widen as he spots what’s hanging on the lounge wall. It’s my old magazine cover that I had Vince ship from Cape Town. It seems he either can’t take his eyes off the snake draped over me or my naked body. Definitely one of the two.

“So, it’s true what my father said,” he says. “About you and the . . .” He trails off there, clearly at a loss to find a polite enough word that will encompass all the debauchery I personify, and then settles on “dancing.”

“I was actually less of a dancer and more of a stripper,” I say. “But how lovely that your father still remembers my show so many years after he sneaked in to see it.”

He puffs himself up like a bullfrog. A large, menacing bullfrog. His father was an imposing bastard too. “He didn’t sneak in. As a man of God, it was his duty to go and see for himself if the rumors were true.”

“Hmm. Yes. And once he’d confirmed for himself that I was, in fact, dancing naked with a snake, you’d have to assume that he’d leave immediately.”

He squirms.

“Or at least after a few minutes,” I amend generously.

“He had to see for himself the degree of degradation—”

“You know that he stayed right until the very end?”

“It was his duty as a man of God to bear witness!” he splutters, and sloshes some tea into his lap. I hope it’s burned his crotch.

“How strange that he didn’t tell you and the rest of the congregation, during that particularly malicious sermon he gave about me, that he took my hand and put it on his penis to show me how very hard I’d made him. Perhaps he was proud that a man his age could still get it up.” I laugh. “But that was how most of the men in this God-fearing town went about trying to make me see the error of my ways, so don’t feel too bad, dominee. Your father wasn’t the only one.”

“You are a lying slut!” He stands so quickly that he knocks the table over.