Rutherford had been hoping for a much gentler good morning when ‘Tickey! Tickey!’ woke him up. Agnes had not called him that in so long that he had even forgotten it was her nickname for him.

‘Tickey! Tickey!’ After the night he had had, this was the last thing he needed. He tried valiantly to hold onto sleep but heard his bedroom door open. ‘Tickey! How could you possibly be asleep at a time like this?’ She approached his bed. ‘Tickey! Tickey!’ If he wasn’t careful, she would shake him awake. They hadn’t touched each other in years. He slowly opened his eyes to find Agnes’s cold-creamed face looming over his, and gave an involuntary start.

‘Oh please, like you haven’t woken up to much worse in some brothel,’ she mumbled through lips that were holding on to a Kingston cigarette for dear life.

‘What is it, Agnes dear?’ he said, his hangover wanting more than anything for him to keep the peace.

‘Sitshengisiwe is dead. Been killed.’

What in God’s name was she talking about?

‘Sitshengisiwe, Philemon’s wife, is dead. Murdered!’

‘I don’t think that’s how you pronounce her name.’

Agnes made a frustrated sound in her throat. ‘Who cares how you pronounce her name? What I’d like to know is what you intend to do about it.’

‘About what?’

‘Tickey, I swear! Philemon is downstairs. He is so beside himself that he can’t even think of gardening. My poor African violets!’

‘Agnes—’

‘Come and talk to him. Poor man is shaking like a leaf. He’s seen the body, you see. Apparently the whole thing is very gruesome.’

The impressive length of ash on Agnes’s Kingston gave up the fight and fell onto Rutherford’s sheets.

‘Agnes!’

‘Just come downstairs at once and make yourself useful,’ Agnes said, leaving his bedroom, not bothering to brush aside the ashes first.

She hadn’t always been like this. In the beginning she had been more … malleable. Easy to shut up with a backhand across the face. That was before she had started taking self-defence classes, at his suggestion, during the war. The idea had been that she would be able to defend herself against a terr attack of any nature. No terrs had attacked their serene suburb during the war, but the last time he had raised a hand to her, he had found himself on the ground, his arm twisted behind him, her foot on his neck.

‘Tickey! Tickey!’

Oh, for the good old days, Rutherford thought as he slowly got out of bed.

Rutherford had not even put his other foot on the kitchen floor when Philemon said, from where he sat at the kitchen table, ‘My wife, baas, she is dying.’

What was it with these people and the present continuous tense, Rutherford thought, and not for the first time. ‘Is your wife dying, or is she already dead?’ he asked.