BOOK EXTRACT | Cape Town author Catriona Ross’s new novel ‘The Which Word’

Rafi scribbled her name on the lease agreement while the rental agent with the signet ring steadied the pages for her on the windowsill.

He whistled as he walked away down the path, and she was about to leave, too, the key to the cottage in her fist.

Wait.

It would be another two weeks before she moved into The Plex, and she wanted to see the communal garden he had mentioned, behind the two horseshoes of cottages.

The units had originally been stables, built during the late 1800s, he’d said proudly. Wooden floors, thick walls, high ceilings. Cool in summer: a bonus in Africa.

He didn’t say cold in winter, which all old buildings were. Probably didn’t want her changing her mind.

She locked the front door and stood on the paved path. Was someone watching her? A frog chirped. A chair scuffed a floor in a nearby cottage.

She heard a woman’s laugh, then silence. Bamboo wind-chimes clattered behind the foliage cloaking the cottages’ low front fences: ivy, Virginia creeper, star jasmine, potato vine.

Feeling her intrusion, Rafi kept her gaze politely on the plants and stepped past the windows without looking in. Intimate domestic smells wafted out: basmati rice, a gust of cashew-nut chicken, then that sweet bush, what was it called again?

Yesterday-today-and-tomorrow. Mom loved it. Rafi stopped to admire a moonflower tree beside a yellow door, its trumpet-shaped flowers hanging in poisonous bloom.

They were deadly, apparently, and a few kids lived here – she’d spotted a small sandpit with plastic buckets and spades on the porch of one cottage. Hopefully, their parents had told them to avoid moonflowers.

Each stable door was a distinct colour. The door of the cottage nearest the gate was ajar: now this one had class, lacquered a glossy dark purple like aubergine skin. The resident obviously liked hearing the burble of water from the fountain at the entrance.

A peach-coloured door came next, then a sky-blue one, a lemon yellow and a forest green.

She did wonder about the colours. People these days took a lot of care choosing the paint colour for their front doors, creating online mood boards, gathering all those cardboard swatches from the paint shop, trying out different patches, agonising over them and consulting their friends.

Which grey: Antique Petal or Aluminium Snow? They obsessed about it in that depressingly suburban way.

Around the corner, the size of the communal garden was a surprise. The lawn was big enough for a game of tennis, and at the far end sat a large cement Buddha with eyes modestly downcast.

Well, he’d sure put a damper on your drinks party. Briskly, she began to walk the perimeter, expecting to warm up within minutes, but she could only feel the cool moisture from the tall trees and dark shrubbery along the fence. It was getting cold, goosebumps were pricking her skin, and she lost her nerve.

Jesus. She returned to the path near the fountain and stood, gathering herself. Her heart was thudding as if she’d done something illegal. Maybe she had. The doors in her row were sugar pink, dove grey, midnight blue. Tasteful. At the end a black door. Hers, number sixteen, in the middle, was pearlescent white.

Was she expected to pick a new colour and paint her door?

What colour would she choose?

No idea.

Why she’d decided to walk to the end of her row before leaving she didn’t know, but she had.

The top of the black stable door was open. Why hadn’t she noticed this as she approached? Her pulse was ticking up; already she felt like a trespasser. Why hadn’t she stopped and turned back?

It was too late. Without meaning to, she had looked inside the house and seen – how to describe it? – the total blackness. She could smell men’s deodorant. Axe – Jono used it.

And there was someone in there, watching her, but she couldn’t see who. She simply knew he was there.

And here was the weird thing: she had this feeling that the man inside had known she would walk to the end of the path, to his door, where he would be able to view her. That was why he had left the top of his stable door open.

And he had known she would want a glimpse of the interior.

Rafi was turning to go back to her car when the bottom of the stable door opened. A dog slipped out. Her chest was pulsing. Just a dog, relax.

It was one of those thin township dogs with long legs and pricked ears like a fox. Mostly black, a mottled back — an Africanis. Rural people traditionally used them for hunting, and now hipsters had them as pets.

She didn’t intend to, but she made eye contact with it, and when she did, the back of her neck went cold. The dog regarded her with what she could only describe as human intelligence, as if it knew exactly who she was and what she was thinking.

It was sizing her up — the blatant way some dogs did. Then it snatched up a stained paper bag from a flowerbed with its mouth and whisked away into the bushes at the end of the row. It gave her the goddamn creeps.

• This is an extract from The Which Word, a new novel by Cape Town author Catriona Ross