Her mother would always be with her, because her mother was taken so violently, so sentimentally.
How would he be taken?
How would all this end?
21
Freya lies in bed. She is panting. Her fists are clenched and her shoulders are arched. Her mind is filled with the scent, the texture, the red-blooded certainty of him. Abraham. Everything she has just seen is crawling, like insects in her imagination, rustling.
She’s scared, scared of what she saw in that shed, the concentration of anguish.
She is breathing fast; she feels feverish.
Her heart is beating madly in her chest.
Churning her blood.
Her black, black blood.
Her bruised, distraught blood.
Thursday
22
Nolwazi knows that she’s lost, but she drives for another five minutes before she pulls over to the side of the road and reaches for her phone. The address is written down, but she must have made some mistake. She’ll have to call, ask for directions. She begins to type in the number, but falters.
Maybe she shouldn’t have come.
She’s in a quiet suburban street, the kind of street where she grew up. Large houses fronted by manicured gardens hidden behind white walls or steel security gates roll for ever onwards, each looking vaguely like the next. The pavements are broad, surrounded by flowerbeds and strips of mowed grass. She rolls down her window. The sounds of the neighbourhood filter into her car: a sprinkler system, the loud hum of a hedge cutter, the laughter of children. She is parked under a jacaranda tree. Its branches are bare, twisting into the sky like old arms. The outside world smells like grass and lavender – and the pungent edge of freshly painted tar.
She closes her eyes and remembers days just like this one. Days spent sitting on the pavement with her mother, feet in the road, talking about schoolwork and family members and when they would be able to go home and visit and what the slow-roasting oxtail would be served with. When her mother appears in her memory, her hands on her hips, face pained, Nolwazi feels like a chastised child, sent home early from a sleepover for fighting with the other children. Not that she ever had sleepovers with other children. Her mother in an old, sparse laundry room, filled with clean washing waiting to be ironed, arranged around the ironing board in haphazard piles. Nolwazi sitting in a corner, facing her mother, knees up, arms folded around them. The iron standing ready, shedding feathers of steam, red light glaring, like a mechanical bird impatiently waiting to be fed. A shirt or blouse or other starchy thing stretched tight across the board. The iron giving a satisfied hiss. And then steam fills her whole memory. Like smoke in a beehive. The details melt, leaving a harsh aftertaste.
She hasn’t seen her mother in three years.
She can feel someone watching her and, welcoming the distraction, she opens her eyes. There, standing directly to her right, halfway down his lawn, between his house and fence, is a man. Tall and muscular, and young. He is watching her openly, but he doesn’t say anything as she turns to look at him, not even when she offers a half-hearted wave. He is standing with his feet wide, his arms pushed outwards. It’s an unnatural stance, a protective stance.
She is frightened by this blatant display. Would this stranger attack her? She is a woman alone, and she is lost. It is a quiet street. No one else is around. He could easily overpower her. She hears about these attacks all the time. And she knows – she knows what it is to think you are safe one moment, and feel the cold, intense ripple of violence the next. She can taste his masculinity on the tip of her tongue; it spoils the air.
But then her training reasserts itself. She has nothing to fear from this man. She is a police officer. And he is just standing there. He has no weapon. He is behind a fence.
She looks back up at him. He hasn’t moved. She starts her car, and the man gives a little jump. When he breaks eye contact and looks beyond and around her, she recognises her mistake: she isn’t wearing a uniform; she’s not in her official vehicle – she’s in a beat-up old Toyota (peeling paint, window cracked) that she borrowed from Angie. How is he supposed to recognise that she is a police officer?
It hits her like a punch. He is the one who thinks she is the threat.
She almost laughs. She almost smiles at him. She almost gets out of her car to ask him for directions, to reassure him that she has permission to be here – that she doesn’t need to be monitored.
But.
But he is looking at her again. He shifts his weight forward, takes a step. The air between them congeals. He is looking her directly in the eye now, and his gaze is forceful, taut like the string of a bow. Hostile. Poised to strike.
A silence made of lions.
And then she is angry. It surges inside her like venom.
She hasn’t felt this – this fierce humiliation, this blistered disbelief – since 1994, the year she was sixteen, the year she was allowed to attend the new school, the ‘mixed’ school. Her father dropped her off down the road, outside the post office, and she had to walk up to the school, she and all the black students, and use the back entrance. The headmaster said this would make the transition easier. To give the old students a chance to acclimatise, not to force it down their throats. She was so angry she couldn’t breathe. When she reached the entrance to the school, and the headmaster was standing there, anxious and shifty, the shards of injustice shot through her whole body, and she wished she could pull the hatred and ignorance from that tiny, limp man; twist his beating heart right out of his chest and pull the little black leeches off it and throw them onto the hot pavement to burn in the sun until they were dead.
The memory unseats her, and she’s out of her car before she can help it, standing on the pavement outside the house. Number seventy-six. His fence is wrought from black steel and is patterned with hexagons, like honeycomb. She had thought she liked it when she first pulled over, but now it seems to her that every hole in the fence is an eye. A suspicious, bright eye asking: who are you? What are you doing here?
She can smell freshly dug earth, wet and peaty; the air is sour with the scent. The house behind the fence is small, whitewashed, normal.
The man still hasn’t moved.
She looks back down at her phone. She can’t seem to bring herself to dial. It’s easier to stand here, indignant and righteous, than it is to think about what her mother wants from her – what her mother could possibly want.
Could it be about her father?
The last time she saw her father she had told him that if he laid a hand on her again, she would arrest him. She had told him that she wasn’t going to be sending him money any more. She had sat across the table from him, his small, dirty mouth turned up against her, fighting not to gag on the stink of alcohol coming off him. And he had hit her, like he always did. His punches had been weak, his slurring violence soft and wordless, and she had simply walked out of the house while his blows fell on her back; he was too drunk to stop her. Her mother, as usual, did nothing.
And after that day, her mother punished her for walking out. Her phone calls went unanswered. Her mother quit her job; her parents moved away without notice. Her father was dead within the year. So why this call from her mother now, this subpoena?
A vehicle pulls up next to her.
‘Afternoon, sister,’ the driver says. He is uniformed and in a branded vehicle – private security.
‘Afternoon,’ she says.
‘Is everything okay here, sister?’ he asks, looking towards the man on the lawn, who waves and nods. And keeps watching.
‘I’m looking for Broderick’s Street. I can’t find it.’
‘Why are you looking for that street?’
‘That’s where my mother lives.’
‘Are you visiting your mother?’
‘Yes,’ she says. And with that simple word, she can’t help but imagine her mother waiting for her at the top of the driveway, her shiny eyes askance. Nolwazi would say: ‘Why did you
ask me to come, Mama?’ And her mother would say: ‘Can’t a mother ask to see her daughter on her birthday?’ And Nolwazi wouldn’t respond to that because it’s too sly, too obtuse. Or her mother would get right to the point: ‘You didn’t come to the funeral.’
‘I couldn’t, Mama.’
‘You are a bad daughter.’
‘He was a bad father.’ And her mother would pause, smooth the front of the apron she wears when she irons, and then she would strike Nolwazi with her big, harsh hands. Fast, unrepentant. And, like always, Nolwazi would let her. Against her father she could fight back, but against her mother . . .
‘Can I see your ID please, sister?’ the security guard asks.
Automatically, she reaches for her badge and her driver’s licence. But then she pulls back; she grits her teeth. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Just tell me which way to go, please.’
The security guard hesitates until Nolwazi repeats her question. He says, ‘Drive to the end of this road, turn left. Take another left, and then the first right, and that’s Broderick’s Road. But it’s not Broderick’s. It’s Roderick’s.’
‘I’ll drive behind you,’ he adds.
‘Thanks,’ she says.
But she pauses as she gets back into her car. She freezes. Goosebumps ripple across her skin.
‘Actually, I don’t think I will. I’ll just go.’
The security guard gives her a smug look; the look of someone who has figured out a riddle. She glances behind her to the man on his lawn, his arms crossed, his shadow cast big and unbroken across the grass. Then she gets in her car and decides to go home.
‘You okay, sister?’
The thing is, she did go to her father’s funeral. She was there. Standing back from the small scattered crowd. Hiding from her family. Watching the coffin as it was lowered into the wet ground, like a setting sun. Like the cool relief of night after a hot, desperate day.
Nolwazi shakes her head, her memories rattling, and says, ‘I am not your sister.’
23
Freya looks up at the billboard: Come shoot with an AK–47! it proclaims loudly. The shrill sounds of playing children echo from the restaurants to her left. Behind the restaurants, the mall stretches onwards to the drained horizon. The billboard tells her to walk to the very back of the mall – Right next to the Spur!
It’s ugly, this part of the city. Deep-down ugly. Endless parking lots, faded shopping centres on every corner. Concrete wastelands. Everything is a replica; nothing has substance. Overrun with fast-food outlets and chain stores and vaguely beautiful people standing in front of face-brick storefronts selling plastic things they don’t believe in. She can smell tar spoiling in the heat, can feel the freckles on her back standing on edge. It’s hazy, all of it. The light is harsh; the sun has burnt everything to monochrome. Every shadow she passes shrinks away from her. There is no vegetation, no air, no relief.
The sliding doors open at her approach.
‘Welcome to the Boutique Gun Shop and Shooting Range. My name is Crystal, how can I help you?’ The voice comes from very far away.
Crystal has bleached hair and a tan. She looks like she has beams of sunlight nesting in her smile, a smile that never stops. She is wearing a tank top and shorts, as if the cold couldn’t possibly ever affect her. The wall behind her is yellow. Her whole world is yellow.
‘Uh, yes. I’d like to learn how to shoot.’
Crystal’s smile widens. ‘Well, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve got four packages to choose from.’
‘Sure,’ Freya says, ‘whichever is cheapest.’
‘That would be our Ladies’ Special. Four guns, four hours, and a whole lot of fun.’
‘How much?’
‘That package comes to just one thousand rand.’
‘It costs a thousand rand to learn how to shoot?’
‘The special is only valid this week.’
‘Oh. Well, I guess that’s fine.’
Their father took them out to shoot once.
They were young, very young. It was cold and she was wearing her new coat; it was purple. She felt special because Ben hadn’t been given a new coat. His was an ugly old brown, the same colour as the trees; hers was bright and pristine. They were on a farm somewhere in the heart of the Free State, where the winters are so cold that it snows. Their mother said goodbye to them at the door of the farmhouse wearing a white dressing gown and an angry expression. Their father, a gun slung over his shoulder, took them down the dirt road away from the house to a small copse of trees. On a fencepost he had set up a line of empty beer cans. Ben was allowed to go first. He was excited. As soon as the gun went off, like the little white firecrackers they got for Christmas, Ben asked eagerly when they could shoot real animals.
‘Maybe one day. First you have to hit the target,’ Dad said, laughing.
The sky was iron.
When Dad gave Freya the gun, setting it over her right shoulder and holding on to the back of it, he put her fingers around the trigger carefully. Then he showed her how to aim, before saying, ‘Whenever you’re ready, little goddess.’
‘I’m scared.’
‘Don’t be, sweetheart. It’s just a game. Just breathe.’
She hit the beer can right in its heart, and Dad jumped up and down with pride. But shooting had hurt, and the next day when their father took the gun out again, she said she wanted to stay at home.
Today, her muscles are tense with anticipation.
Every part of her wants to shoot.
It’s the lightness that surprises her the most. No heavier than a bottle of water, and just as plastic. The only part of it that feels real is the trigger. The rest is toy-like, branded with a logo, like it’s proud of itself, like it is special: I am a gun. Terms and conditions apply.
There is silence – heavy, muffled silence behind the earmuffs that Greg, her lazy-eyed and grungy instructor, has given her. He is standing behind her. She can’t see him, but she can feel him waiting, impatient. All she can see is the target in front of her: an almost-human-shaped dummy, white and featureless. Like a ghost. Between her and it, there is nothing but black. Just her and the thing to shoot at. Tunnel vision.
Just breathe: Greg’s voice, her father’s, giving the same advice, two voices heard as one.
Just breathe.
She pulls the trigger. Feels the bullet leave the chamber, the pushback that ripples up her arm and collides with the muscles in her shoulder. The bullet flies true. It hits the mannequin right in the heart.
‘Very good,’ Greg says, not meaning it, when she takes off the earmuffs. ‘Would you like to try the next gun?’
‘Definitely.’
The sound of a gunshot. Like an alarm clock, this is the music that wakes her almost every night.
She’d been dreaming. Dreamt that all her grief, all her anger, had come spilling from her cells. Her stomach heaved, her ribs burst, and from her mouth there emerged, limb for limb, a terrifying angel. The angel was sleek and sharp and dripping in purple blood, in afterbirth. It stood up and unfurled its slender wings. Naked, it turned to face her. Deep, cunning eyes looked at her with clinical interest. It lifted her chin on the tip of a long, black nail and seized her gaze. Then this child of hers enveloped her in its embrace, and pushed itself into flight with a fierce shriek. A battle cry. A call to the hunt. As they flew, it whispered to her in an old language: ‘I will kill your enemies. I will set you free.’
She stands at her open bedroom door, looking back at the bed, finishing her wine. Greg is in there, naked, unbothered by the sounds of her ghostly orchestra. Flashes from that afternoon: leaving the shooting range, deciding to get a drink at the shitty fake saloon next door, being joined by Greg when he got off work, bringing him home, his asking about Ben’s room, his trying to take a look inside it, her distracting him with sex.
She can’t remember the actual sex.
Finding herself standing outside Ben’s bedroom door, she opens it slowly. She hasn’t been
inside here since it happened. No one has, since Ash finally left. Freya refused to get rid of any of his things, has left everything just as it was. His guitar in the corner, his Placebo poster, his books. His books piled everywhere around the room. He didn’t want to buy a bookcase, said he liked the chaos. Freya sits down between two piles of books, careful not to touch them. One of them, stuck haphazardly between two piles, catches her eye. The Bible. Except it isn’t the Bible at all. She picks it up and opens it. The hollow cavity falls open, revealing five bankies of weed, and a phone. It’s an old phone, one of those flip-phones that were popular when they were teenagers. This is the first phone their parents bought them, and they were forced to share it. It’s odd that Ben would keep it. Freya picks it up and flips it open. It is dead. It still has the sticker of the Pokémon on the back, which Ben had insisted be put there. Freya almost smiles. She puts the phone back, closes the Bible, and tucks it under her arm.
Her eye catches a photograph. Photographs of her parents tend to shock her. Her father always looks out of place to her, the actual space he occupied not tallying with the one she has created for him in her imagination. She prefers to think of him standing in a field of snow, his face cocooned in a furry hood, ski poles held slightly aloft, a midnight sun behind him. It’s his tall, strong frame, his blonder than blond hair, his fascination with Viking history, his persistent longing for a white Christmas, which initially gave her this image.
It must be because he was completely remote – always – that she so associates him with ice.
Her mother was never as beautiful in photographs as she was in memories, but was always younger.
Freya puts the photograph aside. The room still smells like Ben. Musty and sweet. Freya takes one more look around, and before she leaves she wrenches Ben’s duvet loose, leaving the unmade bed in the darkness, as if someone has been sleeping in it all along.
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