The most notorious dissident, according to The Man Himself and The Organisation, was one Golide Gumede. Golide Gumede was still at large after his alleged murder of Emil Coetzee, and his reign of terror was purportedly spreading throughout the country. There was a large reward – $10 000 – for anyone who helped The Organisation apprehend Golide Gumede. Where there was reward, there was often punishment when The Organisation was involved, and so anyone caught harbouring, aiding or abetting Golide Gumede would be sentenced to death by hanging. Spokes had long found that history repeated itself in highly unimaginative ways.

Spokes and the lovely Loveness had been happily retired in peaceful Krum’s Place for three years now, but, although their lives were filled with the gentle pursuits of fishing, baking, reading books that they borrowed from the mobile library – their latest title being Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger – or working their way through Heinemann’s African Writers Series, a gift from Dikeledi and Lukha – they had hardly known a moment’s peace.

First, there had been the return of Immanuel when Dikeledi was expecting Lukha’s first child. Disentangling that union had proved so very knotty that Chief Cele Mkhize had sought Spokes’s advice at every turn. The villagers seemed to be of one mind: since Dikeledi and Lukha had met in Spokes’s home, he was partly responsible and had to help put things to rights. Besides, what else did he have to do now that he was retired? they mused. Not finding a satisfactory answer, they requested his presence at almost every case that came before the headman. Whatever his intentions were, they could and would not let him let his brilliant mind go to waste. Then Dikeledi and Lukha’s baby, Daisy, failed to thrive, and the lovely Loveness decided it would be best if they all came to live in Krum’s Place so that she could keep an ever-watchful eye on the baby. Therefore, the Molois found themselves helping with the baby’s feedings, nappy changes and rockings to sleep. It must have been while the Molois were doing these things that Dikeledi and Lukha found the time to make another baby.

Upon discovering that Dikeledi was pregnant again, the villagers had demanded that Lukha not only pay damages a second time, but also do the right thing by Dikeledi and marry her. Lukha proposed to Dikeledi, was promptly accepted, and it was left up to the Molois to put together the wedding. The wedding had apparently been too extraordinary, because now every couple who got married in the village wanted at least part of the ceremony to take place at the Molois’ homestead in Krum’s Place; and so a lot of their weekends were taken up by that. Sometimes – but only sometimes – Spokes thought that Krum’s Place was perhaps a little too close to Chief Cele Mkhize’s village.