The West Coast

The shop in Saldanha Bay smelled of dried fish and floor polish and the particular dusty warmth of a place that has been selling the same things to the same people for a very long time.

DG had been in town three weeks. He had a small rented room two streets from the lagoon, a job at the local paper that started in a fortnight, and almost no furniture. He had come to the shop for bread and coffee and, he thought, possibly a tin of something that could be a meal without requiring much imagination.

He was not looking for anything else.

He saw the box on the shelf beside the counter, and he stopped.

Black Forest Tea. The same box he had known all his life, seen in every shop from Johannesburg to Port Shepstone, the packaging unchanged for as long as any of them could remember. A box their mother had always bought. A box their grandfather had created, built a company around, had taken from him, rebuilt under a different name, and finally, in January 1952, walked away from.

DG picked it up. He turned it over. He read the back. He read the side panel. He turned it over again.

ST's signature was not there.