Esther's House by Carol Campbell

Author:Carol Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Esther Gelderblom has been waiting for a house for twenty years. In the bitter Oudtshoorn winter she and her friend Katjie queue to ask when their names will finally appear on the government’s list of housing recipients. Esther dreams of a home for her daughter Liedjie, who plays the keyboard for the Bless Me Jesus church, and for her husband, Neville, who will then get his life in order.
ISBN: 978-1-4152-0614-0
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2014-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

They had been good neighbours in the old area but now the legals turned away from the occupiers and kept their eyes down when they passed. They knew their neighbours needed water but huffed and sighed when they begged to fill their buckets and bottles.

Katjie made Criszenda and Bessie take cooldrink bottles to school to fill at the playground tap and Liedjie filled her bottles at the Bless Me Jesus. Jaco filled bottles at work and Esther paid the builders with cigarettes to use their hose.

“Their baas is getting fed up with this,” Katjie commented one morning as they filled buckets for washing on the building site. The baas stood leaning against his bakkie, blowing smoke rings and watching them.

Access to water was becoming a big problem. There were too many occupiers now and they all wanted to use the hose. That baas was going to put his foot down.

“We must fill the buckets when he is not here,” Esther said. “Without the builders’ hose we will struggle.”

“I am not carrying this washing to the river,” Liedjie complained when Esther and Katjie came back with the water. “Really, this municipality should give us a tap. It’s not human for people to battle so to get water.”

“When the builders are gone we won’t have a choice,” said Esther. “For now we ask them nicely and if they stop us, then we will go to the river.”

“It’s their plan, Ma. They want to force us out these houses by not giving us water.”

Esther knew Liedjie was right. Without water people would start giving up and go back to their yards. It was too hard carrying buckets and bottles all the time. Already the people were complaining they had no water to drink, never mind wash.

In the mornings, when Esther passed the legal houses, she heard toilets flush and the trickle of showers and she wondered what it must be like to have a tap inside the house. Or a toilet. All her life it had been outhouses and toilet pits and with them the flies and stink. If she had been given a house, they would have been showering and flushing too.

Every Friday before the builders went home they rolled up their hose and took off the handle of their tap. For the weekend the occupiers had to look elsewhere to fill their buckets. It was on one of these Fridays, when Titty was still under the covers in Liedjie’s bed, that Esther saw Charlie playing cards with his friends at the side of his house. Until now she had been too proud to ask him to fill their buckets but with Titty showing no sign of going home Esther felt it would be okay and she crossed the veld to ask him.

“Hello, Charlie,” she smiled. He glanced up but didn’t reply.

“Would you mind if I take water from your tap?”

Charlie played a card and said something to his friends that Esther couldn’t hear and they laughed.

“Please, Charlie, I will do your washing for you.

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