Talion

by Beyers de Vos

  ‘Everything’s already happened to me,’ she says.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  ‘Me too,’ she says.

  11

  In the late afternoons, Pretoria undergoes a strange transformation. Dust settles on everything, everyone, and the scent of wilderness stalks the streets, a scent that speaks of yellow grass, bushveld sunsets, and the awakening of lions. The metallic tinge of the restless city is erased for a few hours, the rush of traffic disguised, the suited people hurrying, scurrying, between skyscrapers tamed. The sounds of the city change: the urban hum, the steel-fuelled beat, softens and grows remote. On later afternoons in Pretoria when the wind changes, the jungle comes crawling through the streets, seeking to reclaim the gentled people. For one long, elastic moment in the afternoons, Nolwazi feels like part of the earth; she feels a continent breathing beneath her feet, and she can hear the echo of elephants.

  It is a pause in the day that Nolwazi relishes, in which she cannot help but slow down.

  She stands in the station courtyard underneath the banana tree, and lights a cigarette. She’s smoking again; this is her fourteenth in so many hours. After the ambulance ride, after watching that small body being rushed into the white, chemical bowels of the hospital, she had nothing to do but stand in the cold and smoke the cigarette offered to her by a nurse.

  ‘Cold out here,’ said the nurse. She was overweight and had too-small eyes, but the corners of her face were kind.

  ‘Better than in there,’ Nolwazi said. And she thought about her blackening lungs, because that was easier than being inside and listening to the sounds of people trying to live. And she thought about Frik’s treachery, his cowardice. The way he shrugged his shoulders – this isn’t my responsibility. Even his shrugs came complete with that stupid Afrikaans note he couldn’t quite get out of his voice. White boys, soft and unreliable. Her mother had been right.

  In the hospital there was a whiteboard on which the nurses marked the number of fatalities. Nolwazi wasn’t supposed to see this board, but she caught a glimpse of it as she walked past a closing door; a big white- board keeping track of all the current surgeries in the hospital and how many of those patients had survived. It was a replica, in spirit if not in content, of the board behind her own desk. The board keeping track of the station’s active cases, of the monthly crime rates, written in green ink. The number of robberies, hijackings, rapes, murders that had taken place that month. Along with who had been assigned to those cases and how they were progressing. Benjamin Rust’s name was still on the board. Benjamin fucking Rust.

  As for the boy from last night, he died. The nameless boy, marked on the board at the hospital as Shooting victim #4. A corresponding entry would have gone up not soon after that on some police board. But not hers. Not her jurisdiction, as the thin-lipped inspector reminded her when he arrived and took her statement. She didn’t have the strength to follow the body to the morgue. Her job was done.

  And now she’s smoking again, watching people walk in and out of the place, avoiding her work. She wasn’t totally truthful with Frik last night: this god-damned Benjamin Rust case was beginning to screw with her. She was missing something, she had to be. How was it possible that an unknown assailant in a stolen car had shot him and then disappeared into thin air? Ben must have known his murderer; he must have. She has been canvassing all other police stations in the area, looking for unsolved drive-by shootings, but no other cases fit this one’s profile. It is infuriating. Increasingly – ever since that second interview with Freya Rust – she is becoming obsessed with it like she hasn’t been before. An itch that started out as a tiny bite has morphed into a permanent wound.

  She kills the cigarette beneath her boot, and pulls an apple from her pocket. The apple is sour, mealy. ‘You should really be trying to regulate your diet,’ Dr Phillippidis said to her that morning, burrowing into her head. Right before he’d asked her, quietly, coolly, whether she thought she was a hero.

  She is not a hero.

  Heroes have to be a little rogue, a little independent. They have to be action stars. They have to be beautiful and witty and able to run fast. She can’t run at all. She sure as hell can’t kick a door in. She doesn’t rush into certain danger; she’s the type that waits for back-up. Rushing into the dark is reckless and stupid and only ever pays off in television shows. ‘But you saved that little boy,’ Dr Phillippidis said. ‘That’s heroic.’

  ‘I was just doing my job.’

  ‘How is that different from what you just described?’

  ‘It just is.’

  ‘Why?’

  Because choosing to do your job is not heroic. And Nolwazi chooses. Every day, she chooses. And there are days on which she chooses not to care, not to put that much effort in. To sit in the sun with Angie eating salt-and-vinegar chips until her lips crack. And no one cares. No one fires her. No one dies.

  It’s easy to be a hero on television – there is an opportunity to redeem yourself around every corner. Every day – every hour if you’re lucky – is an opportunity to be a hero. You have no choice but to be; narrative momentum is on your side. The problem with television is that it has things like pace and tension and plot. Plot is the thing. If you put things in the right sequence, anything can be exciting. Smart, sophisticated pyromaniacs don’t recur in your real life to ramp up the tension whenever your character has to be tested. The real problem isn’t just that television makes murder seem fast and sexy – it’s that television makes those things seem meaningful. And they aren’t. Murders are pointless, random and tragic. Solving them is tedious, messy and cynical. You couldn’t ever live up to television. Life isn’t television. Life is empty.

  As empty as the grave.

  ‘Nolly, babe?’

  ‘Yes, Angie?’ The other woman is standing behind her, uncertainty in her voice.

  ‘There is a man on the phone asking whether they can stop monitoring activity on Benjamin Rust’s second phone.’

  ‘What do you mean his second phone? What second phone?’

  Angie shrugs. ‘I dunno.’

  ‘I’ll be right there,’ Nolwazi says, walking to a nearby bin to dump her apple.

  But then she is confronted: on the rim of the bin, overweight and head cocked greedily in her direction, sits a pigeon. The green flecks on its wings reflect greasily in the sun. It has seen her apple, and it wants its prize. Nolwazi stops to take a good look at the bird: reptilian eyes ringed in pinkish flesh, wrinkled claws that seem to come from a prehistoric world. The pigeon erupts in bright, desperate sounds when it sees her hesitation. She looks down at the fruit in her hand; its flesh has already begun to brown where she has abandoned her eating.

  She looks back up at the bird. ‘Fuck you, bird,’ she says. Scavenger, chancer. Without giving herself a moment to reconsider, she throws the apple, violently, straight at the bird.

  Her aim has always been good.

  The apple hits the pigeon square in the face. It squeals loudly, frightened and hurt. But Nolwazi has already turned around, leaving the injured bird alone with its wounds.

  12

  The only time Freya’s mind is completely quiet, when the red fog that grips it releases her, is when she’s at the shooting range. When she puts on the earmuffs and stands alone in her booth, there is nothing but her and the target, nothing but the rhythmic thud of the gunshots and the pure, unblemished silence that follows.

  In the aftermath of a gunshot, there is peace.

  As she exits the booth, Greg is standing too close to her; a twinge of annoyance. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Do you want to see something cool?’

  ‘Sure,’ she says, but slowly. She isn’t sure at all.

  She follows Greg to the back room, which is reached via a door behind the counter (Crystal’s yellow smile falters when she sees Freya moving into this sacred employees-only zone). They descend a staircase. Greg takes her through a maze of underground storerooms before they emerge back into
the light, behind the mall, into an empty field; one of those stretches of open veld – all red dirt and thorny shrub – that are spread out between the buildings of Pretoria like pockmarks. Desolate spots of nothing, which flatten the city. Freya looks down at the dead grass, the scorched earth. She looks up at the sky, at the mid-morning sun, pale and strange.

  The whole world is black and white.

  ‘What is this place?’ she asks.

  ‘It isn’t quite finished yet,’ Greg says, ‘and we have to wait for the grass to grow back; it doesn’t even open for another month.’ He walks towards the door they just came through, next to which equipment lockers have been mounted on the wall. He fumbles with a key before opening a locker and taking out a bag. Something rattles inside the bag. ‘Ever shoot with a bow and arrow before?’ he asks, taking out two curved bows and a bushel of arrows. From the locker he also extracts a canvas target-­board, mounted on a tall stand, which he walks to the back of the field, placing it some distance from where she is standing. Bright red rings surround a yellow bull’s-eye – like a colourful ghost in a dead world.

  Freya shakes her head in answer.

  ‘Give it a try, then,’ he says. ‘You’re the first person to ever shoot here. We haven’t even finished the access tunnel yet.’ He grins widely. ‘Free of charge.’

  Freya takes the bow, and picks up the long thin arrow. The plastic point at its tip is sharpened; little artificial feathers on its end feel like skin against her fingertips. She places the arrow into the string; she seems to know, instinctively, what to do. Her feet are planted wide apart; her mind has been stilled. She pulls the arrow tight.

  There needs to be a pause.

  She looks up.

  High against the blanched sky, she sees the solitary bird. A falcon, gliding upwards in a spiral of air, away from the world. She imagines the sound of his beating wings, like the striking of a match.

  ‘He’s too far away to shoot,’ Greg says.

  ‘I don’t want to shoot it.’

  ‘I shoot birds all the time.’

  For a moment, Freya imagines herself riding in the sky on the back of the falcon. Her hair is tied behind her in a plait that lies heavy as gold against her back, her bow and arrow in her hand, her legs strong and fast. She is a hunter, a warrior. From the falcon she sees the blackened land, the dusty city, laid out against the earth: a mighty city, a little city, an ordinary city, an abnormal city. She and her falcon-steed are circling ever upwards, coiling through the air. They cannot hear the world below; they are breaking away from it. Calmly, she takes an arrow in her hand and locks it into place. She can see, with eyesight godly and keen, her real-­world self, still on the ground. She aims. She breathes in.

  She shoots.

  The air ripples. And shatters.

  ‘Ooh, well done,’ Greg says, in his lazy voice. Freya looks around. She’s loosed the arrow. It’s hit the bull’s-eye. ‘Want to go get a drink then?’

  Freya looks Greg up and down; she finds it so difficult to understand what it is that he wants. ‘No,’ she says, pulling the arrow from the target and handing it back to him. ‘I want to go back inside and shoot some more. And I don’t think we should see each other again.’

  13

  Sophie serves lunch; she’s learnt how to cook in the past year. She wants to show him, she says. The sounds from the kitchen comfort him; this is the first time in a long time that the two of them have shared a space that isn’t silent or rotting. That isn’t so big and empty. The house sounds like a house again; strange, how he fell right back into the possibility of something better, when for so long he hadn’t considered there would be anything but desolation and guilt in his future. Although he has told himself more than once today that this is probably only a temporary respite; that sooner or later, his deeds will be back to haunt him. Ghosts don’t go away; ghosts remain.

  Ghosts remain.

  ‘Lunch is ready,’ she says.

  ‘Coming.’ He stands in the stillness of his bedroom. Why he has kept Sara’s wedding ring on his bedside table, he doesn’t know. He no longer wears his, no longer thinks of himself as married. She betrayed him a long time before she died, and his fidelity lapsed along with that betrayal. But for some reason her wedding ring comforts him, connects him to something in the past that was generous and kind. He slips it into his pocket – he should give it to Sophie.

  He puts his gun beneath his shirt, into the small of his back. Ready.

  They eat in the musty dining room, under the supervision of his frowning, thin-lined parents. The curry is deep and delicious.

  They talk about Peter and they talk about Sara. They talk in small important sentences.

  ‘When was the last time you visited the graves?’ she asks.

  ‘A long time ago,’ he says.

  ‘Can we go tomorrow?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Can I drive?’

  ‘Can you drive?’

  ‘I’ve been taking lessons. From Lucky.’

  ‘Do you want to drive me to poker later?’

  ‘Sure,’ she says, with the ghost of a smile, ‘I’d like that.’

  With each sentence, things become lighter, lighter: ‘I know you still follow me when I go out, Pa.’

  ‘I know you know. I’ll always follow you. I have to protect you.’

  ‘I need to forget sometimes,’ she says. ‘I needed to have fun. Otherwise I wouldn’t have made it. You understand?’

  He does understand.

  But forgiveness is a long way off, and the grief is still there, hot and searing.

  ‘Have you heard from Slick?’ he asks.

  She gives him a warning look, then says curtly, ‘No.’

  ‘When will he expect his money?’

  ‘I dunno. Not tonight. Tomorrow.’

  ‘Can I come with you, when you go to meet him?’

  ‘No, Pa.’ She sounds desperate, alone; an animal backed into a corner. ‘No, please. I just want to get it over with. Please.’ He doesn’t reply. Her pale brown eyes look up at him, pleading. She puts down her fork. ‘And don’t,’ she says, ‘follow me.’

  ‘Where will you get the money?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He takes an envelope out of his pocket and pushes it towards her. ‘Is that enough?’

  14

  The square of window is frosted, but even so Freya can see that the sky outside is a dark, oozing blue. The bathroom is filling up with steam, and when she places her feet in the shower they sting from the temperature change.

  When Freya was younger, her father told her that she should never-­ever-under-any-circumstances bath during a storm. The lightning, he said, could strike the pipes, killing her instantly.

  It was a comment he carelessly flung out, but it became stuck in her brain like a fly in a trap. This throwaway warning crept into her childhood fantasy until she became obsessed with it: what happens when lightning strikes inside the house? She had visions of charred corpses, of brilliant white electricity surging through the rooms, alive and volatile and looking for victims.

  As she grew older, so the idea grew. Her fascination with it became almost pathological. And she began to court it. She would find opportunities to take baths during a storm, to tempt the consequences. Part of her didn’t believe her father at all, and so it was an act of pure spite: he was wrong and she was right, and the more she didn’t get hit by lightning while in the tub, the more right she became. But part of her – some reckless, daring part – also hoped that he was right: what would it feel like to be hit by lightning while submerged in water? While she lay in the bath, young and full of courage, she had flashes of her family finding her shocked and dead.

  That thought had made her happy, then.

  But there is no one left to find her now, if she is killed. Her wet body would decompose and slip down the shower drain, and all that would be left in the bathroom would be a pile of her bones, and a smell that could once have been hers.

 
She steps out of the shower lightly.

  She dresses: skinny jeans, green sneakers, Ben’s hoody.

  She puts her gun in her bag.

  She walks quietly, one last time, to Ben’s room. Everything is as it was, as it should be. His unmade bed, as if it were only moments ago that he left for class.

  She isn’t nervous; she isn’t scared. She doesn’t feel anything – nothing but solid determination. She is ready.

  15

  Pretoria, a city of hills. The train dips and rises, showing Slick by turn the creamy concrete walls splattered with the words metro rail, metro rail, metro rail suffocated between nests of graffiti – gang tags, bubbled words, protests, hate speech, declarations of love – and glimpses of the city: here, the tall, hard buildings, nestled together; here, a view of red-bricked warehouses, church steeples and packed, overflowing streets: steel and steel and steel. The train rattles through it all, through Pretoria’s backways, through its scars. Towards Sunnyside, towards the end of things. The dirty sunlight filtering through the window is beginning to darken. He’s never liked winter in Pretoria, the dry crackling air. But he won’t have to endure much more of it.

  He’s known – ever since the police found out about Benjamin Rust’s second phone, he’s known – that sooner or later the whole thing would crumble. That detective was this close to connecting Benjamin Rust to Slick, and Slick to his friend at the police. If she knew what she was doing, she would draw a neat line from Lucky to Slick to Sophie, too. It might take some time, but she would. All she had to do was look closer, with keener eyes; he doesn’t trust that she won’t eventually figure it out. He doesn’t trust that Lucky will keep his mouth shut.