Here are the cups and saucers from before, filled with English tea-bag tea. We sit down and set to, with a pitter of porcelain and steel. The heating pipes burp intermittently. Hardly four o'clock and the day fades, pot plants suck twilight from the window panes. The sky goes toxic orange above suburban motorways.
Someone mentions gooseberries, and soon the old house in Johannesburg comes up.
Somewhere in the garden there was an unassuming bush that gave an annual crop of little papery lanterns. Press one open and out popped a tight amber Cape gooseberry, with a whiff of petrol and a taste of sour honey. But as to the bush's exact location, we can't seem to agree. So my father traces the house in the middle of the table, with a tentative cross for the bush, just behind it, to the right. Someone adds in the giant tree, the rockery, the outside room where Jane, our pillar of strength, lay down at night.