Then she lets out a hollow laugh, and says, in a hoarse whisper, ‘You don’t own me, man.’
Slick moves quickly; he snatches the back of her hair through the gap in the headrest, and pulls. Lucky tries to grab hold of Slick’s arm, but Slick flashes his knife and says, ‘Just keep driving, brother. Or I’ll beat you like your daddy does.’ Leaning his head towards her ear, he opens his mouth and breathes across her face. When he speaks, it is softly, pushing as much menace into his voice as possible. ‘Don’t talk back to me,’ he says. ‘Don’t do anything other than what I tell you. You better hope this money is paid before the year is out, pretty girl. Because if it isn’t, I’m coming for your daddy. And then I’m coming for you. And then I’m coming for your faggy friend here. And you’ll be just as dead as your stupid mother.’
Tears are rolling down her cheeks.
‘Drop me off here,’ he says. Lucky pulls over, and before he gets out of the car, he says, ‘Don’t fuck it up.’
He watches them drive away. A flashing sign that reads Oxford’s welcomes him to the street. He slips a neon-yellow bib over his clothes and limps across the road.
All he has to do now is wait.
4
A list of things he misses about his wife: the way she smelt like caramel and rain, the way she danced with one hand held slightly aloft like she was rising into the air, the batter that stuck to her skin after she baked fish and chips, the way she said ‘ohlordlookathetime’, the way her body fit into his, the way she used to stroke his hair while she fell asleep, the way she loved her children, the way she loved him.
A list of things he doesn’t miss about his wife: the silences she herded around with her, the way she found it easier to be angry than to be honest, the way she secretly didn’t believe in God, the fact that she had a favourite child, that she wouldn’t give him blowjobs, that she wouldn’t go back to work after her children were born, that she banned chocolate from the house, that she was weak, that she was weak, that she was weak.
5
Slick likes disguises. They allow him to be rich or poor, educated or uneducated, tough or weakened, healthy or sick.
He has accumulated various uniforms over the years – a police officer, an employee of a private security company, a businessman, a casual labourer: whatever is going to be the most useful, is going to blend best with his surroundings. He can be anyone he wants. Mostly he uses his disguises on the trains, changing his appearance – and sometimes even his accent – every week. It means that his clients can’t get a read on him, that anyone watching isn’t able to pin him down, to know he’s the same man boarding the train every day. Disguises work because people expect him to be a certain way: speak a certain way, move a certain way, have a certain kind of life, a certain kind of language. And he plays in to that stereotype – that bland and casual racism. Misdirection: show them what they expect and they won’t see who you really are.
And his favourite disguise, his most prolific, is the informal car guard. People don’t see car guards, and don’t want to be seen by them; they avoid them. Even people who have seen him before, who know him, will look right past him when he is wearing this disguise. It’s a dynamic disguise, a perfect disguise. You can meet people in shopping centres, in busy streets, in parking lots, and exchange information, packages, messages. It makes it possible to meet his runners and collect money, to meet police informants without hassle. And it makes it possible to spy. To keep watch over someone without their notice.
Which is how he came to be on this street corner, on this Friday, squatting in the shadows, dressed like a car guard, waiting in the parking lot. Waiting to kill.
6
Ever since Sara died, Mr October has been looking for the signs: the signs he didn’t recognise when his wife was falling into her drug spiral. But he can’t see anything like it when he looks at his daughter. At Sophie. Her life is impenetrable. She hasn’t said a word since her mother’s funeral. She doesn’t eat the food he offers her; she doesn’t tell him where she is going or whom she is with. She eats dinner in her room. She spends most nights at Frennie’s house. He’s shouted, pleaded, threatened her, yet none of it makes a dent in her determined fierceness, her coolness.
But he knows where she’s going. He’s followed her before, to that bar, the one where she likes to go dancing. That’s where they will be headed. She and Frennie and Lucky, and sometimes others. Like clockwork, like moths to fire. Showing off her body. Hanging out with her lithe, promiscuous friends. People with loose morals. Not how she was raised – to be thinking only of herself. But he can’t blame her, and he’s incapable of stopping her, of holding someone else prisoner. He has no choice but to give her the freedom she wants.
He’s found her Instagram account, her Twitter. Social media is all over the school, children writing things about each other, sending things to each other. Revealing, intimate things. He’s searched for his own name a few times. Mr October needs to chill. Mr October is so lame!!! Mr October should buy some new threads. Haha, I saw Mr October smoking behind the cricket pavilion. Reduced to a joke, a curiosity.
He’s seen the photographs she posts of herself, breasts pressed against the camera, laughing. Her pain invisible, her life a series of flashing parties.
Fast-food outlets and petrol stations flash past him. He is driving fast: too fast, not fast enough. He’s in the Mercedes, because the Renault has a flat tyre; his whole body floods with anxiety whenever he drives it. He should have burnt it, all those years ago, but he couldn’t let the car go. He tried, took it out to the west of the city, to an abandoned quarry, determined to set fire to it. He stood in the summer air, surrounded by the pale stone and the thin sky and the sounds of a distant highway, and thought about that boy – man – he killed. That man sprawled in the parking lot, the blood dripping on the pavement . . . sticky, black. And he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t destroy the car that was a murder weapon. It was his first car and it had cost next to nothing, and he loved it. He loved how red it was, loved the freedom it gave him. He didn’t care that the stooped old man who sold it to him – who wore a greasy white vest and had hair on his shoulders – didn’t have any paperwork for the car, and would only accept cash. Mr October didn’t ask questions when he was told, ‘If you get pulled over by the cops around here, just give them a few bucks and they’ll turn a blind eye.’ He didn’t care; he was young. He was unafraid. And later he was sentimental: the car that Sophie was conceived in; the car that took him and Sara out on their first date.
The car that killed a man.
He waited for the sun to set, then he drove home and put the car away in that overgrown carport, locked it up and let it rust. Just like his gun.
He has to slow down when he passes a police car stopped next to the side of the road, on the pavement under a jacaranda tree. Inside it, a female officer sits with her chair inclined: short and plump with cropped hair, she is looking up at trees with half-closed eyes. Sleeping on the job. Still, Mr October tenses. He always tenses, convinced that one day someone is going to point a finger at his car and say: There, that’s the car that ran over that metal-head at that bar. Convinced that somewhere on a camera his car was captured, the resultant image pinned to a police notice board, some chain-smoking detective vowing to make sure he is brought to justice. The brown man who ran over the white man.
Mr October found the article in the paper, about the body outside Shiva’s Rock. Found the man’s name. Joey Jooste.
Joey Jooste, Joey Jooste, Joey Jooste.
He is almost there now, the streets narrowing. The campus surrounding him on all sides, serene and quiet, confined behind its wrought, blue fences, its superiority. He had hoped his daughter could attend the university. When she was younger, he’d fantasised about her future: she’d be a scientist, an architect, an engineer. But the way she was going, she would never perform well enough to gain access. To have a future. And he doesn’t know what to do about it, how to right her course. Because h
e can’t do anything for her when he doesn’t know how to help himself – how to be better at grief. All he knows how to do is put one foot in front of the other. He doesn’t know enough to hold her hand, too. Not when she won’t let him.
Mr October eases his car down the street, towards the bar.
That’s when he sees it: his daughter sitting in the passenger seat and the man – The Boy – who sold Sara the drugs, who killed her, slipping out the back of the car and hurrying away.
7
It was Mama Africa who taught him how to kill.
Mama Africa, who aside from her work in the drug industry, dabbled in petty theft, using her children to climb through windows, slip beneath fences, stake out potential houses. They were her drug runners, but also her thieves. Each night after midnight they would be sent into the streets in teams of two – one child and one adult – roaming gardens, finding open windows. If they had the opportunity, they would break into houses and take what they could find. ‘Small bodies, for small spaces,’ Mama Africa would giggle; pity the child who grew up too fast to fit through a window.
Slick was particularly good at it. ‘Good job,’ Mama Africa would say when he came back from such an expedition, patting him on his head, which she insisted he keep shaved, ‘very slick.’ Most nights he was sent out in the company of a very large, very dangerous, and very stupid man named Jacob. Jacob rarely spoke. He was the muscle. He was there in case something went wrong. He was there in case Slick decided not to come back with what he stole. On these expeditions, the children weren’t armed. But after Mama Africa gave him that knife, Slick always secretly carried it with him. He didn’t trust that it would be safe back at the house. It was too important to be abandoned.
Jacob carried the gun.
And then one night he was standing in a bedroom, the window of which he had just slipped through, standing very still, letting the room get used to him, letting the silence settle. There was a child asleep in this room, a boy about his own age, and next to him on the bedside table, a phone. Shiny and silver. He would have to lean over the bed to get it, over the sleeping pink boy.
As his small arm shot out, the boy sat up.
And as soon as the boy saw Slick, he screamed. And Slick panicked.
He panicked.
He struck. He struck quickly. There was nothing smooth about it, nothing neat. He just thrust the knife crudely at the boy’s face. And then he ran.
To this day, he doesn’t know if the boy lived or died that night. All he knows is that for the first time he understood the power of fear.
When he killed again, it was to defend Mama Africa.
A man, probably a contract killer, had slipped into her parlour. Not a very good contract killer, not someone who knew his victim. Mama Africa, of course, could defend herself. When he was summoned to her room, she was standing over the man with a gun. Completely composed. ‘Kill him,’ she said when Slick walked in, handing him the gun. Beneath her foot, the man squirmed.
Slick did it because she asked. He had been around enough violence not to be surprised by the sound or the feeling of shooting someone. But he paid careful attention as the life left the man, revelled in the subtle change in the texture of the room – the small ways in which the silence mutated: there is never real silence in a room where someone has died.
He pulled the trigger and Mama Africa was happy, and that is all that mattered.
Slick has killed nine times in his life. He doesn’t like killing, as a rule. He only kills as a last resort. Violence scares people, violence is a good motivator, and dead people are useless people. No, killing was something he did only out of necessity. If there was no other way. Killing means careful planning; it means getting away with it. It means getting to know your victim. It means having an escape plan. The risk–benefit ratio is rarely justifiable. Inevitably, though, there are times in life when it is unavoidable, when killing is the only choice. The night he killed his father was one of these moments. But that had been an irrational act, full of emotion, and fear. After that, he was determined never to respond so instinctively again. Never to let anyone have that kind of power over him again. Being forced to kill someone, having your choice taken away – that was unforgivable.
So with Benjamin Rust, he has planned carefully. He’s been patient. He has followed Ben for over three months, learning him. Finding out where he lives, whom he loves, what his routine is. It is how Slick has discovered that Benjamin Rust spends every Friday night, without fail, drinking at a bar called Oxford’s. It is how he discovered that Benjamin uses this opportunity to drop off his orders – he leaves the drugs in previously decided-upon destinations; one minute later someone picks them up. No cash is handled. Bank deposits were made.
It is how Slick has discovered an opportunity of his own.
Slick should never have trusted Benjamin Rust.
Ben wasn’t Slick’s first mistake, but he was the biggest.
Ben began working for him almost six months ago, selling drugs to students on the campus. And Ben was good at the job, very good. He increased Slick’s customer base almost tenfold. He was proactive, enterprising. Slick trusted Ben, relied on him.
But then Slick began to hear rumours.
Rumours from the other people he had floating around Hatfield. Rumours confirmed by his friend in the police force and by Bra Joe, one of Ben’s principal sellers: Ben was inflating his prices and skimming the extra cash off the top. Ben was stealing from him. Blatantly, fearlessly. Too smart for his own fucking good. This rich bored boy who was selling drugs as a way of milking excitement out of the world, because of some oblique fascination with criminality, because he wanted to be defiant. Playing a game – playing a game with Slick’s livelihood, his freedom, his power.
Slick decided immediately that Benjamin Rust had to die.
Yes. He has killed nine times. And here he is, about to kill again.
8
Mr October is stricken by what he sees.
He would know The Boy anywhere. The Boy who sold Sara her drugs, who enabled her escape from this reality, who facilitated her addiction. Who murdered her. He watches The Boy walk across the street and come to rest on the inner edge of a parking space, squatting in the shade of the tree. He is dressed like a car guard, could be a car guard for all Mr October knows.
Mr October dims his lights.
The presence of the gun in his cubbyhole radiates through the car.
The night he came home to find his wife on the couch with The Boy is the shard that separates the past from the present; it symbolises the moment his future was torn.
As he walked through the door, Sara, high and happy, pulled him into a dance and kissed him. She said, ‘Peter’s here, Abraham, he’s here, he’s back!’ When he didn’t understand, when he couldn’t indulge her, she turned violent. She stabbed him with a potato peeler; she drove the short, blunt blade deep into the hand he reached out to her, and it formed a puckered scar. Her face was full of sweat, her eyes full of strangeness. The meth lay on the table between them.
‘Who is this, Sara!’ he yelled, bleeding, not understanding, not keeping up.
‘This is the man who makes me happy,’ she said.
‘Does he have a name?’
She shook her head, her tongue tasting the air, her eyes manic.
The Boy looked up at Mr October and started laughing. Laughing like a lunatic, he said, ‘High five, Auntie October.’
Mr October takes the gun out of the cubbyhole.
Mr October moves slowly, turning back into the road. The Boy is only a few metres away, looking in the other direction. And Mr October has a vision in which he rolls his car forward, sticks his gun out of the window, and shoots The Boy dead.
He pauses.
Beside him is an empty row of parking spaces and behind that a dark compound hidden behind a green fence and a line of trees that throw shade across the pavement. In the distance, just beyond where the parking spaces end (and where The Boy is stand
ing), Mr October sees the bright neon lights of Oxford’s. The pavement in front of the bar is oddly quiet; still too early for a crowd. There are no cars behind him, and he is frozen in the street, unable to drive forward and unable to turn back. Between the world of light before him and the dark, quiet world lingering in his rear-view mirror, he senses a membrane, a divide.
He has to make a choice. Isn’t this why he has his gun in the car – to protect his daughter from men like this one? How could she be associating with the very man who fed her mother’s addiction? How could she be in a car with The Boy? Is this why she doesn’t talk to him? Is this her dark secret – that she is friends with the man who killed her mother?
He rolls forward.
He is almost level with the parking space now.
Then Mr October sees it, the white Citi Golf coming towards him, the orange light of its right indicator flashing like a frenzied question mark.
And then a change in the way he experiences things. A shift in reality – time and light slow down; his thoughts are swept aside by something more organic, wilder. Mr October points his gun at The Boy, an automatic response.
But then The Boy stands suddenly to attention, rising from the shade in a swift, brazen motion. He has gun in his hand, a gun that had not been there before. He lifts a gloved hand.
And.
Bang.
9
Slick had only one possession with him when he was introduced to Mama Africa and her house of runaways. It was a figurine made of wire, wrought by a street vendor. Red with rust, Slick had stolen it one day while he was roaming the streets of the city looking for food. The street vendor didn’t notice; he was asleep on his chair. Slick was compelled to take it by something he didn’t understand then, and hardly understands now: a feral greed for something beautiful, something to possess. The figurine had no face; no eyes through which to see the world, no mouth through which to speak. It was old, unwanted, and only in a few places on its body did the silver wire still shine through. His first night in Mama Africa’s house, he slept with it next to him; he wouldn’t give it up. Until one of the other children, malicious and bossy, tried to take it from him. Slick fought; he scratched and kicked and yelled until the other child became scared. But in the process, the wire man’s hand was broken off, snapped at the wrist; the sharp stump cut across Slick’s body, a straight line of blood the width of his arm. (Mama Africa, when she saw the wound, said, ‘Better hope it doesn’t get infected, little impundulu.’) The pain was invigorating and sobering, but Slick looked down at the broken wire man in disgust; he felt harmed, betrayed. The next day, he threw the wire man away.
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