But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held – so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place – who knows?

Saskia found that she liked the idea of being a bag of miscellany so much that she copied the paragraph onto a piece of paper, and left the library with much more than she had entered with – a Zora Neale Hurston that she could carry with her everywhere she went and choose to treasure, if she so pleased.

Now, as she sat at her desk at The Chronicle, she thought of the ‘jumble of small things’ that her particular bag carried. When the phone on her desk rang, it took her a long time to answer it.

‘Is this Saskia Hargrave?’ the female voice on the other end of the line enquired.

Saskia could not quite read the emotion held in the voice, and so she said a little hesitantly, ‘Yes.’

‘You the one who wrote that nonsense about Emil Coetzee?’

‘Nonsense?’

‘Yes – about his being killed or some such by Golide Gumede.’

So it was one of those calls, Saskia thought with a sigh. She had been receiving at least three of these kinds of calls per week, ever since she had written the obituary. People, mostly with theories of their own about what had happened to Emil Coetzee, were eager to get in touch with her. Not everyone, despite the SIU’s best efforts, seemed ready to embrace the fact that Emil Coetzee had been murdered by Golide Gumede, especially after the stately hero’s funeral that everyone had been expecting had not come to pass. Why would Emil Coetzee be given a private burial attended only by his family? Suspicion soon led to conjecture, and Saskia started receiving the phone calls.