Night had already fallen when they passed the traffic lights marking the start of Beach Road. The hulks that had blocked the road during the siege of the apartment blocks had been pushed on to the lawns. The key was still in the door under the stairway. The room was as they had left it, neatly swept for the next occupant. Anna K laid herself down in her coat and slippers on the bare mattress; Michael brought in their belongings. A shower of rain had soaked the cushions. 'We'll try again in a day or two, Ma,' he whispered. She shook her head. 'Ma, the permit isn't going to come!' he said. 'We'll try again, but next time we'll go by the back roads. They can't block every road out.' He sat down beside her on the mattress and remained there, his hand on her arm, till she fell asleep; then he went upstairs to sleep on the Buhrmanns' floor.
Two days later they set off again, leaving Sea Point a full hour before dawn. The zest of the first venture was gone. K knew now that they might have to spend many nights on the road. Furthermore, his mother had lost all appetite for travel to far places. She complained of pains in her chest and sat stiff and sullen in the box under the plastic apron K pinned across her to keep out the worst of the rain. At a steady trot, with the tyres hissing on the wet tarmac, he followed a new route through the centre of the city, along Sir Lowry Road and the suburban Main Road, over the Mowbray railway bridge, and past the one-time Children's Hospital on to the old Klipfontein Road. Here, with only a trampled fence between them and the cardboard-and-iron shanties clustered on the fairways of the golf course, they made their first stop. After they had eaten, K stood at the roadside with his mother clasped to his side, trying to flag down passing vehicles. There was little traffic. Three light trucks sped past nose to tail, wire mesh over their lights and windows. Later came a neat horsecart, the bay horses wearing clusters of bells on their harness, a troop of children in the back jeering and making signs at the pair of them. Then after a long empty interval a lorry stopped, the driver offering them a lift as far as the cement works, even helping K to lift the barrow aboard. Sitting safe and dry in the cab, counting off the kilometres out of the corner of an eye, K nudged his mother and met her prim answering smile.
That was the end of good luck for the day. For an hour they waited outside the cement works; but though there was a steady stream of pedestrians and cyclists, the only vehicles to pass were sewage department trucks. The sun was declining, the wind beginning to bite, when K hauled his cart on to the road and set off again. Perhaps, he thought, it was better when one did not have to rely on other people. Since the first trip he had moved the axle two inches forward; now, once he got it going, the cart was as light as a feather. At a trot he overtook a man pushing a barrow loaded with brushwood, nodding in greeting as he passed. In her dark little cabin, pinned upright between the high sides, his mother sat with her eyes closed and her head drooping forward.
A hazy moon was coming through the clouds when, half a mile short of the arterial road, K drew up, helped his mother out, and plunged into the dense Port Jackson scrub to seek out a stopping-place for the night. In this half-world of straggling roots and damp earth and subtle rotten smells no site seemed more sheltered from the elements than any other. He returned to the roadside shivering. 'It is not very nice,' he told his mother, 'but for one night we will have to put up with it. ' He concealed the cart as best he could; supporting her on one arm, carrying the suitcase, he groped his way back into the bush.
They ate cold food and settled down on a bed of leaves through which the damp palpably seeped into their clothes. At midnight a gentle rain began to fall. They huddled together as close as they could under a scrub-tree while the rain dripped on the blanket they held over their heads. When the blanket became soaked Michael crept on hands and knees back to the cart and fetched the plastic apron. He cradled his mother's head on his shoulder and heard the laboured shallowness of her breathing. For the first time it occurred to him that the reason she had ceased complaining might be that she was too exhausted, or no longer cared.
His intention had been to set off so early as to reach the turnoff to Stellenbosch and Paarl before it grew light. But at dawn his mother was still asleep against his side and he was loath to wake her. The air grew warmer, he found it harder not to nod himself. Thus it was mid-morning before he helped her out of the bush back to the road. Here, as they were packing their sodden bedding into the cart, they were accosted by a pair of passers-by who, coming upon a man of meagre build and an old woman in a lonely place, concluded that they might strip them of their possessions with impunity. As a sign of this intention one of the strangers displayed to K (allowing the blade to slip from his sleeve into his palm) a carving knife, while the other laid hands on the suitcase. In the instant of the flash of the blade, K saw before him the prospect of being humiliated again while his mother watched, of trudging back behind the cart to the room in Sea Point, of sitting on the floormat with his hands over his ears enduring day after day the burden of her silence. He reached into the cart and brought out his sole weapon, the fifteen-inch length he had sawn from the axlerod. Brandishing this, lifting his left arm to guard his face, he advanced on the youth with the knife, who circled away from him towards his companion while Anna K filled the air with shrieks. The strangers backed off. Wordlessly, still glaring, still menacing with the bar, K recovered the suitcase and helped his quaking mother into the cart with the robbers hovering not twenty paces away. Then he hauled the cart out backwards on to the road and slowly drew her away from them. For a while they trailed behind, the one with the knife miming obscenities and threats to K's life with elaborate play of lips and tongue. Then as suddenly as they had appeared they slipped into the bush.
There were no vehicles on the expressway, but people, many people, walking where none had walked before, in the middle of the highway, in their Sunday best. By the roadside a tangle of weeds grew as high as a man's chest; the road surface was cracked, and grass sprouted in the cracks. K caught up with three children, sisters dressed in identical pink frocks on their way to church. They peered into Mrs K's little cabin and chatted to her. For the last stretch, before Michael turned off to Stellenbosch, the eldest child walked holding Mrs K's hand. When they parted, Mrs K brought out her purse and gave each little girl a coin.
The children had told them that no convoys ran on Sundays; but on the Stellenbosch road they were passed by a farmers' convoy, a train of light trucks and cars preceded by a lorry armoured in heavy mesh in whose open back stood two men with automatic rifles scanning the ground ahead. K drew off the road till they had passed. The passengers gave them curious glances, the children pointing and saying things K could not hear.
Leafless vineyards stretched before and behind. A flock of sparrows materialized out of the sky, settled for a moment on the bushes all around them, then flitted off. Across the fields they heard church bells. Memories came to K of Huis Norenius, of sitting up in bed in the infirmary, slapping his pillow and watching the play of dust in a beam of sunlight.
It was dark when he plodded into Stellenbosch. The streets were empty, a cold wind gusted. He had not thought where they would sleep. His mother was coughing; after each spell she would gasp for breath. He stopped at a café and bought curried pasties.
He ate three of them, she one. She had no appetite. 'Mustn't you see a doctor?' he asked. She shook her head, patted her chest. 'It's just dryness in my throat,' she said. She seemed to expect to be in Prince Albert the next day or the day after, and he did not disillusion her. 'I forget the actual name of the farm,' she said, 'but we can ask, people will know. There was a chicken-run against one wall of the wagonhouse, a long chicken-run, and a pump up on the hill. We had a house on the hillside. There was prickly pear outside the back door. That is the place you must look for.'