Summary
It is late on the following night.
Lights fade up and the office is empty, gloomy but for the moonlight that streams in through the Venetian blinds at the window. The music holds, full volume.
SHANELL enters via the alcove in the half-light. She is barefoot and dressed in revealing summer sleeping gear. She looks vulnerable. She taps away on her smart phone, sending WhatsApps and moving across to the car seat. Some reply she has received to her WhatsApp angers her and she slams her phone down on the makeshift coffee table. Looking at the locker, she moves towards it and then collects the key, which is stuck under her husband's desk, and unlocks the padlock. Quietly opening the locker, she removes the rhino horn as the music fades.
SHANELL carries the rhino horn to the car seat and puts it down, kneeling beside it. She appears mesmerised, transfixed. So focused is she on the horn that it is a good few moments before she becomes aware of the presence of her husband, also barefoot, who has appeared in the alcove, wearing an old T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms.
DWAYNE [still half asleep]: What the hell are you doing?
SHANELL [startled, covering the horn]: How can they …?
They come with their rifles, their chainsaws, and …
[She is devastated.] … what happens to the babies?
[She is mystified.] What was Jonas doing with this?
Beat.
DWAYNE [quietly]: Maybe he was keeping it for someone.
SHANELL: Or he could have been waiting to take it to the sangoma to have it, sort of … whatever it is they do. You know what these people are like.
DWAYNE: These people? [He snaps on the light, dead calm.]
I want you to put that thing back where you found it.
In the brief pause that follows, SHANELL's phone bleeps, a message has come in. She snatches up the phone and glances hurriedly at the screen.
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- Suddenly the Storm , pp. 57 - 62Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2017