None of it made sense. Emil Coetzee was a red-blooded male who, in Tom’s performance of him, attended braais every weekend and told bawdy jokes around the braaivleis while prodding at a coiled kilogram of boerewors with one hand and proudly holding ‘my best girl’ in the other. ‘What happened when the blonde put her head on the pillow? Her legs flew open,’ his Emil had said countless times as he flipped over the boerewors. Tom could see his Emil chuckling at his own inanity as he popped a juicy chunk of meat into his mouth and then downed it with an ice-cold Castle Lager. Where was that Emil, his Emil, Tom wondered as he reached into the fridge, retrieved a block of mature Cheddar cheese, and let his dreams of having a proper English breakfast for lunch turn to nothingness. He cut a healthy chunk of the Cheddar into bite-sized pieces, put a piece in his mouth and savoured its sharpness as he imitated Emil Coetzee chewing his boerewors with relish.

With a few pieces of cheese in his hand, Tom decided to explore the rest of the house. The more he acquainted himself with Emil Coetzee’s surroundings, the more he lost sight of his Emil Coetzee. There were a few pairs of khaki trousers in Emil Coetzee’s wardrobe, which was otherwise filled with many shades of blue. There was no Clem Tholet record in Emil Coetzee’s album collection, but there was every album that Kenny Rogers had ever recorded – The Gambler was on the record player. In addition, there were four LP records by The Carpenters, three records by Nana Mouskouri, two by Dionne Warwick, the same number by Dolly Parton, one by Demis Roussos, another by John Denver, and another by Don Williams – and so Tom had to let go of the Emil Coetzee who was so blindly patriotic that all he did was listen to Clem Tholet. Most surprising of all was the fact that, while Emil Coetzee predictably had a den, instead of there being mountains of magazines with pin-up centrefolds in that den, there were stacks upon stacks of National Geographic.

Who exactly was Emil Coetzee? Who was Tom supposed to be pretending to be? Who had he been pretending to be all these years?

As Tom put the last piece of Cheddar in his mouth, he heard a car driving up the driveway. Soon voices approached, and as Tom listened to them, he relaxed and went to the corridor to meet them. Rutherford and Joseph entered the house with several other men. This time around, Rutherford and Joseph were very sober and very, very serious. They barely acknowledged Tom as they walked past him, obviously men on a mission.