Playing in the Light

It is on the balcony, the space both inside and out where she spends much of her time at home, that it happens. A bird, a speckled guinea fowl, comes flying at a dangerous angle, just missing the wall, and falls dead with a thud at Marion's feet. Amid scatter cushions and a coffee tray and the smell and roar of the sea, it lies on the brown ceramic tiles. There had been the usual squabbling, angry flapping and circling overhead, and then a heart attack in mid-flight, she supposes. Still warm with rage but undoubtedly dead, her bare foot decides. Marion bends down to check the eyes, bloodshot and staring, and the distinctive feathers, by no means as fine a plumage as it appears from a distance.

There is silence overhead. Will the others, the enemies, line up on her balcony wall to pay their respects? Should she withdraw? She would like to toss the bird onto the communal gardens below, but she is squeamish about touching it; and besides, its landing is sure to be seen by someone who would calculate from the trajectory precisely which balcony it's been hurled from. Someone with the correct respect for property, who may well ring her doorbell, bird in hand, to return the fowl to its rightful owner. That someone would have to hold it by its feet, head hanging, so that the feathers billowed, the guinea fowl declassified by the ruffling of its black-and-white patterned plumage. Marion reaches for a shawl from the back of the rattan chair, spreads it on the tiles, rolls the bird over with her foot-it is surprisingly heavy-and wraps it in a shroud of sage green. Fortunately it is Thursday, cleaning day. She leaves the girl a note asking her to take the parcel of bird away. One never knows what uses such people might have for a dead guinea fowl.

A respect for property is precisely what this new luxury block on the beachfront at Bloubergstrand can guarantee. Residents are more than happy to pay for smartly uniformed attendants who monitor all and sundry entering the

Zoë Wicomb was born in South Africa in 1948 and returned in 1991, after twenty years of voluntary exile, to teach at the University of the Western Cape. The author of two previous works of fiction, she currently lives in Glasgow and teaches at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. She is the winner of a 2013 Windham Campbell Prize.

"Post-apartheid South Africa is indeed a new world. . . . With this novel, Wicomb proves a keen guide."
-New York Times

"Delectable. . . . Wicomb's prose is as delightful and satisfying in its culmination as watching the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean."
-Christian Science Monitor

"[A] thoughtful, poetic novel."
-The Times (London)

"Deep and subtle. . . . This tight, dense novel gives complex history a human face."
-Kirkus