Chapter 3

Trudie returned to the room from her ordeal with the police officer shaken and suffering from the beginnings of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and silently crawled under the bed to escape into sleep for a while.  By this time, Lord Balah himself had succumbed to exhaustion and was lying curled up uncomfortably on the floor, as the twins snored expressively on the bed.  Gunshots rang out in the distance as, presumably, a drug deal turned sour, or an angry pimp found his whore sleeping on the proverbial job.  For Lord Balah and the Witches, however, the night passed smoothly and without incident, as they all lay lifeless recovering from the day’s excitement- which, unbeknownst to them, was the beginning of an epic and now legendary journey which will forever be remembered in the annals of history.

It was unexpected, then, that Lord Balah and the Witches would be unceremoniously awoken by an angry mob of Afrikaans men sporting hideously unfashionable mullets and mean expressions on their faces.  In the middle of the circle, looking down on the panic-stricken and slightly confused twins, stood their now ex-husband Kobus Jansen Van Rensburg.  Having vowed to never again be belittled or emotionally abused by a woman the way his mother used to when he was a child, Kobus Jansen Van Rensburg had spent the last 24 hours hunting the twins down by using his rottweiler, Killer, to sniff the pair of G-string thongs the twins had sent him in their attempt to woo him into financing their intrepid escape from communist China.  Hell bent on finding them and exacting his revenge, Kobus Jansen Van Rensburg had easily rustled up a group of unemployed, washed-out drinking buddies to join him on his quest.

As you, dear reader, are familiar with by now, Lord Balah is a particularly sensitive and evolved soul who is against violence in all its many forms.  Despite this fact, however, it is a closely held secret within the Chisselton family that for five years- between the ages of 8 and 13 years of age- that Lord Balah had been unnaturally obsessed with Bruce lee movies, and had watched “Enter the Dragon” at least 30 times.  Somehow mysteriously during this time, the boy then known as Edward had somehow absorbed everything he had seen on the television screen, and without even throwing one roundhouse kick or performing a single kata, had learnt the basic art of fighting.

Although at this moment in time his pacifist ideals were being challenged to their limit, Lord Balah quickly remembered back to a scene in one of Chuck Norris’s (another childhood hero of his) movies in which he says something about violence being justified if it is in self-defense.  In fact, as Lord Balah recalled, Mister Meyagie had said exactly the same thing to Daniel-San in the Karate Kid.  And so it was without remorse that Lord Balah graciously opened up a can of whip ass, which resulted in every member of the East Rand gang lying face down in their own blood.  Thereafter it was unanimously decided amongst Lord Balah and his female companions that it was time to (immediately) leave the humble, godforsaken inn and find another place to stay.

Without even grabbing their bags containing the few belongings they possessed, Lord Balah and the Witches ran silently from the hotel and stepped into the early morning summer sun.  Already the streets were lined with mini-bus taxi’s, and so Lord Balah and the Witches hopped unhesitantly into the closest one and Trudie gave the driver the name of their next intended destination:  a place she had heard about and seen depicted in a movie once but had never been to herself (despite the fact that her mother had been born and raised there)…  Their next port of call, ladies and gentlemen, was Sofia Town.