Below is a short sample from each of the 10 stories in the collection:
Gangsters Paradise
Seeing a young attractive white woman driving at speed down the road towards the local township accompanied by three yelling and gesticulating black men his reading of the situation was as swift as it was incorrect. He assumed that she was the victim of a hijacking and was being taken to the township under duress to be raped or killed or both. Ever the knight in shining overalls he gave chase to effect a rescue.
The Weekend
"What about your wife?"
"I already told her that I need to go down to Durban for a dealer store opening next Saturday and Sunday."
They arranged that both of them would come to work the following Friday with their bags already packed. They would leave the office 30 minutes apart and meet later at the airport to "avoid suspicion" as Sally had put it.
She had no desire to be the latest topic of discussion on the office grapevine.
Al readily agreed. Although he seemed to have no qualms about cheating on his wife, he was justifiably concerned that he might sabotage his career if the directors found out that he, a married man, was taking his deputy away for the weekend while leading his wife to believe that he was on company business.
Kidnapped
The ministerial couple was widely loved and respected in the community, if slightly pitied due to their inability to have children. Their assertion that they were happy & that the church was all the family they needed was generally believed and accepted. Most who knew them thought of them as a happy and near perfect couple. The few who knew them well and long enough to pick up on the frequent but hastily concealed looks of annoyance and tense atmosphere also knew enough to stay out of it. Mostly they had enough demons of their own to wrestle with and did not need to jump into the ring with the personal issues of Dominee and Mrs Pieterse. Douw was known to them as a loving pastor, a good friend but a formidable and unflinching enemy. Like several others in his denomination he had entered the ministry to seek absolution from his past and would not welcome interference, especially from those who had known him since his pre-seminary days.
Murder on the Platteland Express
He looked again at the faces observing him and tried to work out where he was. Dim recollections started to emerge from a distant part of his alcohol-soaked brain. Memories of stumbling down the passage and opening the door to what he assumed was his room swam through the hangover and into his conscious mind. He could not remember anything after he stumbled through the doorway. There was a vague image of waking several times and attempting to fight his way out of a small, dark and seemingly padded room. At first he thought he was remembering a bad dream but then looked around at his surroundings and concluded he was remembering snatches of a confused and rather terrifying night.
The Two-Second Smile
The freeway snaked out into a more commercial area and became the top level of a triple-decker section, a scalpel cut through the heart of the city. From his vantage point Thabo gazed out into this blackened and diseased heart. The dirty, broken windows and peeling paintwork bore silent witness to the inner city decay from which Johannesburg in common with many of its cousins on the continent suffered.
The Tall One
She was sexually molested at 10 by an uncle & then raped at 12 by an older boy cousin, the son of the same uncle. With her innocent femininity battered & shredded by the harsh reality of incestuous lust, she had slipped into a destructive whirlpool of cursory, numerous & short lived sexual encounters with a multitude of initially physically & later mentally adolescent men.
Aliens
Morris looked up, impressed.
“You have an appointment with President Mugabe?”
“President…”
Bill Austin and Morris faced each other through a haze of misunderstanding.
“Mugabe, the mountain with the old ruins…”
“Oh, Mapungubwe”, said Morris with a good-natured chuckle.
“That’s it. The one where they found the golden elephant.”
“Rhino.”
“Huh, where?”
“It was a golden rhino sir. At Mapungubwe”
Busted
The following Monday morning James walked briskly through the office, glaring piercingly at anyone who appeared not to be working. He rounded a corner and walked past the staff kitchen. As he passed by something caught his eye and he turned back for a second look. Satisfied that his first impression had not misled him he strode into the kitchen and forcibly addressed Dirk Venter.
“Good grief man, what happened to you! Have you gone undercover to investigate a ring of hoboes?”
“No sir” Dirk looked at himself in the mirror-finish of the refrigerator and grimaced. He hadn’t really noticed just how dishevelled he actually looked.
“Actually I spent most of the weekend in my car and haven’t had a chance yet to go home for a shower and change of clothes.”
“What earthly reason could you have for sleeping in your car? Your girlfriend give you the boot, landlord objected to your taste in music, well what?”
“Actually I didn’t sleep much at all, I was on a stakeout outside a hotel”
James shook his head in dismay and annoyance.
“A stakeout! Since when did you cease to be a journalist and become the star of a bad cop movie instead”
“I was being a journalist sir, the stakeout was in pursuit of a really good story.”
Jackpot
But his problems were not over, they were only beginning. Now he faced the problem of how to tell his wife. Jenny had made it abundantly clear on many occasions that she did not approve of the lottery. She regarded it as a state sponsored way to rip off poor and struggling people. Sporadic press articles reporting how little of the money collected was actually finding its way to the supposed charitable beneficiaries rather than administrators and politicians with deep pockets only served to reinforce her opposition.
The Plot
He was disappointed. Clive stood near the front of the room, rotating slowly and looking up and down the rows of chairs. As his gaze landed on Ken he grinned and called out,
"Kenny, Howzit!"
He swaggered across the room and hurled himself into the empty chair next to Ken.
"Mind if I sit here?" he asked, rhetorically since he was already seated.
Actually Ken did mind. He minded having his personal space invaded, he minded being forced to spend time with Clive and most of all, he minded being called "Kenny".
