“He bought the house in 1982, the year he got tenure,” says Moira as I park my car pointing nose-first down Signal Hill and pull the handbrake up as far as it will go. We clamber out. I nod at a car guard who promises to keep an eye on my vehicle for me.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“The date he got tenure is on the university website, and the date he bought the house is a matter of public record. I put two and two together and figured that the financial stability of getting tenure enabled him to get a bond to buy the house. It must have been a very different place back then.”

“You mean when the original residents could still afford to live here?”

“Well, yes. It was an odd choice for a white man during the height of apartheid. This place was basically a Cape Malay neighbourhood. I wonder how he was even allowed to buy property here.”

“He was a white man.White men were allowed to do whatever the fuck they liked under apartheid.”

“True. Mind you, he must be laughing all the way to the bank now. Property up here costs a bomb these days.”

Coetzee’s house shows no sign of the gentrification that has romped unchecked through the rest of the Bo-Kaap. Flyblown net curtains hang in the windows. The paint is weathered and dirty. Only the metal bars crisscrossing each windowpane and the old-fashioned security gate at the front door bear witness to Coetzee’s days as the only white resident in the neighbourhood.

“Isn’t it interesting that he bought a house here decades before it became fashionable to do so?” Moira clasps her hands. “Doesn’t that make you feel kindlier towards him?”

I shrug. In the narrative looping through my head, Coetzee was a slumlord. He bought up dozens of these little houses and rented them out to poor families at punitive rates.

“Please, professor,” a mother in rags begged him. “My children are dying of cold. Please fix the broken windows and the holes in the door. The rain comes right into the house.”

“Begone, woman. And don’t darken my doorstep again.”

“So, what do you want to do? Shall we ring the bell?”

I’m not sure what I want to do. I want to confront Coetzee. I want to tell him that I’m nobody’s lacuna, and that I won’t be erased from my own story. But I also don’t want to see him at all, and this is the more likely scenario.

The car guard has seen us looking at the house and wanders over.

“Is djulle hier ommie prifessa te visit?”

“Sort of.”

“Djulle sal hom nie sien nie, merrem. He duzzin’t answer da doorbell. Not for no one, merrem.”

“We’ve heard that.”

“Dja! Ou Prifessa Coetzee. Snaakse ou, daai. Djulle wiet hy’t mos ’n boek geskryf, né?”