There exists, in the Xhosa language, a word of such precise descriptive power that one suspects the language itself had specific foreknowledge of certain children before coining it.

Umxokozelo.

A living commotion. A breathing disruption. An animate condition of domestic chaos that wears short trousers and arrives home from school with the benign expression of a choirboy and the operational sophistication of a minor general.

The word describes Gareth entirely. It is, one feels, the word that had been waiting patiently in the language for some years, knowing its moment would come.

Lena arrived at the household when Gareth was six — which is to say, she arrived at the precise geological moment when the situation was already beyond management and was merely awaiting an audience. She moved into the kaya with the sensible confidence of a woman who had handled difficulties before and considered herself equal to whatever the universe might propose.

The universe, in this instance, proposed Gareth.

By the time the family relocated six years later, Lena had aged in the manner of large working dogs — rapidly, comprehensively, and in direct proportion to the demands placed upon her by a force of nature she had never specifically agreed to manage. She adored the boy with the fierce, helpless devotion of someone who knows perfectly well that affection and good sense are rarely found in the same room.

She could not pronounce his name. This was perhaps the universe's single small mercy — it would have been unseemly to shout "Gareth!" quite so often and with quite such range of expression. What she shouted instead was "Cárat!" — a word that managed, in its two syllables, to convey affection, exasperation, centuries of ancestral wisdom, and a very specific warning about the immediate future. When the tone rose on the second syllable, diplomatic channels were closed. The matter was in other hands now.

Her preferred designation for him was Scabenga, delivered in the manner of a verdict after the evidence has already been weighed, found damning, and set aside in favour of simple conclusion. She applied it most frequently upon discovering whatever fresh enterprise he had lately completed, and it carried with it the particular weariness of someone who has long since stopped being surprised but has not yet stopped being exasperated.

The fruit was a source of recurring theological dispute.

The neighbours were generous people, as neighbours in that part of the world tended to be — dispensing apples and pears and peaches and oranges and lemons and guavas with the open-handed cheerfulness of the genuinely mild-tempered. Gareth received these offerings, assessed them briefly, and marched directly to Lena with the announcement that he had stolen them.

He delivered this confession with the solemn gravity of a man unburdening himself to a priest. The fruit was presented as evidence.

Lena did not believe him. She never believed him. She scolded him anyway, on the entirely sound principle that whether the fruit had been stolen or gifted was, in the broader context of Scabenga's activities, rather beside the point.

The boy, for his part, seemed to find the scolding satisfactory. He filed it away with the others.

Then there were the snakes.

One hesitates, in polite company, to dwell upon the snakes. Yet the snakes were, if one is being precise, central to Lena's spiritual development during this period.