Capture

by Smith, Roger

  It had been Vernon’s plan to scare him, hurt him just enough to get him honest again, but then he sees his father when he looks down at Boogie, caught in a spill of streetlight: the glazed eyes, the filthy teeth, the prison artwork. Feels that old pain. And righteous fucken anger.

  Channels that anger, as he grabs the hoodie and pulls it up, stretching it tight over Boogie’s head. He smashes the piece of shit’s skull against the graffiti-scarred wall. It makes a muffled thud and he hears the fucker groan. Feeble hands grab at his wrists. Next time he batters the head against the bricks he feels something give way under the cloth, like a rotten melon in a string bag, and the hands sag to the floor.

  Vernon gets a groove going, battering away like he is trying to knock a hole through the wall, till the skull is all spongy beneath his fingers.

  He releases the pulped head and lets it fall to the floor with a moist slap. Puts two fingers to the tik-head’s throat. Nothing.

  Vernon sits a moment, slowing his breathing. Feels something wet and sticky on his hands and his face, realizes the hoodie slipped down while he was doing his percussion thing, and Boogie’s blood has sprayed like a power shower.

  Vernon drags Boogie’s body farther into the construction site, leaves it behind a pile of builder’s sand. He wipes his hands on the dead man’s jeans and stands in the shadows, waiting until a taxi rattles by, then he limps to his car.

  Chapter 8

  Sunny tugs at Exley’s boardshorts, saying something about her boat in the water. Her milky child-smell comes to him before he opens his eyes to the darkness, before his brain allows him to recall what happened the evening before. Instinctively he reaches for her, the feel of her skin already on his fingertips before reality sucker-punches him and he sits up, fighting through panic to find air.

  The room filled with Sunny’s toys and clothes, her scent rising from the pillow, is too much for him to bear and he flees out into the corridor.

  The door to the main bedroom is still closed and he knows that facing his wife now is impossible.

  Exley goes down the stairs and walks toward his studio, the insulated box shrouded in welcoming gloom, sliding open the door, the chill of the A/C on his face. He closes the door and without switching on the lights sits down in his Aeron ergonomic chair, feeling it mold its shape to him like a lover. Reaching beneath his workstation, his hand red in the muted glow of a pilot lamp, Exley boots up his computer.

  He closes his eyes, listening to the whine of the hard drive rising to a low scream, like a distant jet taking off, hears the static crackle and low burp as the monitors come to life, followed by the cluck as the motherboard engages the CPU, catches that familiar hot-wire smell of the innards of his computer waking from their slumber, information coursing through the suddenly alert banks of memory.

  As he sits in the dark, his eyes closed, a flashback hits Exley that almost overwhelms him with its intensity. He’s lying with Caroline on the bed in their tiny London flat, his hand on her swollen belly, staring into her eyes as he feels their child kicking in her womb. Caroline, orphaned at twelve, raised by her much older sister—an aloof, distant woman—reaches up and touches his face and says, “This is all I ever wanted, Nick. A family.”

  Exley’s eyes open, and he grips the arms of the chair, staring into a cold and barren future. Even when Caroline’s madness exiled her, he’d had Sunny and the simple, undiluted love that flowed between them.

  Gone now.

  The computer grunts and Sunny, or rather the digital familiar of his daughter, appears on the monitors. He stares at the loop of dancing pixels and hears her singing just the day before, “Sun-ny Ex-ley is having her birth-day”, and he finds himself mouthing the words endlessly, giving them her childlike cadence, until they make as little sense to him as her death.

  Chapter 9

  The car engine wakes Yvonne Saul, the glass in her bedroom window buzzing as it vibrates from the low rumble. She looks at the clock next to her bed—just gone 4 a.m. The engine cuts, and the car door smacks shut, then the front door of the house opens and slams. She lies still, listening to his footsteps getting closer to the door that she can’t lock since he kicked it in.

  The door hits the wardrobe as he pushes it open. “Hey!”

  Yvonne keeps her eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. As if that will stop him. Suddenly cold as he pulls the blankets from the bed, leaving her lying in her nightdress, her knees lifted to her chin. “Move your fat fucken ass. I’m hungry.”

  She opens her eyes. He stands over her, switching on the bedside lamp. As the light floods the room, she sees the blood on his shirt and jeans. Dried dark red on his arms and hands. So much blood.

  Yvonne can’t stop her mother’s reflex. “Boy, you hurt?” Sitting up, reaching a hand to her son.

  He slaps it away. “You gonna be fucken hurt if you don’t get up. I’m not talking again.” He slams out of the room.

  She lifts herself from the bed, a tall, thickset woman in her mid-fifties. The wild young beauty she once was lost in the flab and the wrinkles that have left her looking ten years older than her age. She draws a robe around herself, slides her feet into slippers and goes to the cramped kitchen.

  He is by the table, stripping off his bloody shirt, dropping his jeans and kicking them across to her. Standing there in his underpants. Yvonne can smell sweat on his body and the metal stink of the blood.

  “Wash these clothes,” he says.

  She bends to pick up the bloody jeans. “What you done now, Vernon?”

  His bare foot catches her in the abdomen and sends her flying against the stove. The back of her head smacks the oven door. “Who the fuck are you to question me?” Staring up at him as he looms over her, making a fist, waiting for him to beat her, as he’s done too many times before. But he holds back, leaning in until his face is close to hers. “Now you cook me eggs and steak and you wash my clothes. And there was never no blood. Nothing. You hear me?”

  “Ja. I hear you.”

  He smiles but she can’t see no softness in that face. Handsome like his dead father, and just as sick in the head. He disappears into the bathroom and she hears him splashing water, then he goes to his room, slamming the door after him.

  Yvonne closes her eyes, praying for God knows what. When she’s done she stands and carries the clothes to the bathroom and soaks them in the tub, the water stained red by the blood.

  Vernon feels it coming as he lies on the bed in the gloom, chilling, listening to Motown. The panic rising in him, making him restless, afraid.

  Before he was shot everything he did was about power, about imposing his will on people weaker than him. But since he came back from that terrifying blackness things have changed. There is a fear in him now. A fear that he could just evaporate, that the darkness could claim him.

  He sits up and clicks on the lamp. His room is neat, the way he likes it, nothing out of place. Just a bed and a table and a wardrobe. No pictures on the wall. Nothing. Doesn’t need that shit. Fucks with his head, which is already crammed too full of pictures. Takes a deep breath. He sits for a bit, just breathing, telling his nerves to stop shouting at him.

  After a few minutes he is feeling a little better. Loose. His hands not shaking no more. So he stretches out on the bed and then makes the mistake of allowing his eyes to close.

  And there they come, the images of his father, right here in this bedroom, with his tattoos and his missing teeth and his rancid smell, like a backed-up drain. Coming at him with the broken bottles and the lit cigarettes.

  Vernon’s little-boy skin smoking black as his father holds the cigarette to his stomach, hand over his mouth and nose, shutting out any screams. Not that his mother hears. Deaf she is, to all this. Blind, also, to the marks on his body and the blood between his legs when his father is done getting his jollies.

  Vernon has to fight hard not to scream. He sits up, telling himself it is all in the past, man. His rancid fuck-up of a father long dead. But his heart is l
ike a boot trying to kick open his breastbone and the sweat is heavy and rank on his body.

  He hears his breath coming in gasps as terror drives him from the room. He opens the front door of the house and stands battling to breathe. Catching dust and diesel fumes from the buses and taxis, the roads busy even this early on a Sunday morning.

  The streetlamps—the few that work here in Paradise Park—still burn, dropping green light down on the weekend workers hurrying to the buses and taxis. He ducks back inside and flops down on the sofa and channel-surfs the TV, not seeing the succession of darky politicians and those frosty bitches on CNN.

  He can’t sit still and he’s up again and goes back outside, where it’s lighter now, the streetlamps dead, and grabs the garden hose and starts washing his car. Wipes a smear of Boogie’s blood from the driver’s seat and hoses the exterior, trying to calm himself with work. But his throat is still tight, like his father’s hand is on it, throttling him.

  Chapter 10

  Exley wakes at his workstation, keyboard denting his cheek, the strobing monitor agitating his eyes through their closed lids.

  As he sits up and squints at the wireframe that still dances, he can’t stop himself from sliding back along the timeline to the moment when Sunny came to him on the beach, desperate for his attention.

  But now, in his fantasy, he hands the joint to Shane Porter and he turns to Sunny and sees her pointing to the little sailboat, bobbing in the waves like some cheesy Hollywood model shot from pre-digital days, and he hauls the boat to safety and gives it to his daughter who, as a result, is safely asleep upstairs, her golden hair covering her pillow like fleece.

  Exley’s bulging bladder brings him back to reality and he hits the pause bar on the keyboard and stands, his legs uncertain as he leaves the studio and crosses the living room, opens the sliding door onto the deck and walks down to the sand, cool and powdery beneath his bare feet, a Turner landscape of soft blues, reds and yellows lying before him.

  The ocean is flat and motionless, with barely a lick of a wave.

  Avoiding the spot where Sunny’s body lay, he crosses to the hump-backed boulders, fissured and veined, indigenous bush growing like scraggly beard in the folds of the granite, digging his penis—uncomfortably stiff from the weight of his bladder—free of the boardshorts. Exley pisses away his hard-on and stows himself, wondering what to do next.

  The enormity of his grief takes his legs from under him and he sinks down onto the sand and dry-heaves, producing nothing but the taste of bitter bile in his mouth. He sits again, his back to the small wooden rowboat that lies against the rocks, oars neatly shipped, watching the gulls squabble on the huge, flat rock near the mouth of the inlet, its slopes alpine with bird shit.

  On calm days like these, before the sun got too high and too hot, he’d rowed Sunny out past the bird rock, laughing as she pinched her nose at the stink of the guano.

  The memory of her, dwarfed by the orange life jacket, her curls electric in the sunlight, burns his retinas when he closes his eyes, and he finds himself nostril-breathing, inflating and releasing his diaphragm as he was taught to years ago in the yoga classes on the ashram. It helps to calm him a little and the sun on his face is soothing and maybe if he just sits here and doesn’t move, the sorrow will drain from him, drop by drop.

  Exley feels the chill of the waves on his feet, then something more solid nudges his toes and he opens his eyes to see Sunny’s toy sailing ship bobbing in the shallows, returned on the tide.

  He grabs the thing and stands, lifts it over his head and smashes it down on the rocks and doesn’t stop until the boat is string and match-sticks. Tears blur his eyes and his face is a macramé of snot.

  He drops the splintered toy and looks up to see big, black Gladys, the cleaning woman, standing on the deck, watching him. She doesn’t usually work on a Sunday, but last week Caroline asked her to come up from her shack in Mandela Park, to help clean up the mess after the party, and nobody thought to phone her.

  As Gladys approaches him, her shiny, low-heeled shoes sinking into the sand, Exley sees that she is crying. Caroline must have told her what happened, when she buzzed her in.

  “Mr. Nick,” Gladys says, “Sunny, she is…?”

  Exley wipes a gout of snot from his face with the back of his hand, nodding, and this woman to whom he has said maybe ten words in the months she has cleaned their house enfolds him to her massive bosom, the scent of cheap soap and talcum powder rising from her warm flesh.

  It is comforting, being held like this, and he wishes he could stay here forever.

  She releases him and walks to the water’s edge, staring down at the sand, scuffed by the feet of the paramedics, a single latex glove—muddied and obscene—lying just beyond the reach of the surf. Gladys points out at the water in the cove.

  “Is it there that she died?”

  Exley sees Sunny floating down near the kelp, her hair trailing, the last few bubbles of air escaping her mouth, and he’s sure now that she died underwater, and that the rent-a-cop—despite his heroic efforts—did nothing but fill her dead lungs with his breath.

  “Yes,” Exley says. “Did Caroline tell you what happened?”

  The big woman shakes her head. “No, I don’t see Miss Caroline. She is only buzzing me in. Sunny tell me, in a dream.” Gladys steps close to Exley, who says nothing, staring at her. “Last night, I dream about water. About Sunny. This morning when I am coming in the taxi my heart it is very cold. And when I see you here, I already know.”

  “You saw Sunny in a dream? Last night?”

  “Yes, Mr. Nick.”

  Exley feels as if he is looking down on himself from on high. Part of him realizes how absurd this conversation is, how dumb he is to be grasping at this simple woman’s superstition. The other part speaks before he can stop it.

  “What did you dream?”

  “She is coming to me. Crying. And the way she is looking I know she has passed.”

  Madness, of course. Primitive hocus-pocus. But he feels dizzy with loss.

  “In our culture the death of a child is a very bad thing,” Gladys says, “and the child must be protected from the bad spirits, must be guided to the ancestors on the other side. You understand?”

  He nods. Crazy as it may seem he does understand. There is a whacked-out symmetry between what this Xhosa woman is saying and the teachings of the self-styled guru on the ashram he fled as a teenager, where his mother still lives. These teachings (tales of souls wandering lost in an endless maze of hellish afterlives) terrified the living shit out of him.

  “What can I do?” asks a man who is not quite Nicholas Exley.

  “We believe that the spirit of the person stays where it dies for a few days, before it crosses over. Only the love of a parent, Mr. Nick, is getting Sunny to the other side.”

  Then she sets off, heavy and slow across the sand, and into the house. Later he will see her sitting on Sunny’s bed, singing in Xhosa, weeping without shame.

  A movement in the house draws Exley’s eye. Caroline watches him from an upstairs window, smoking. Then she turns away and disappears.

  Exley goes inside, tramping water and sand across the tiles. He considers climbing up to the bedroom, but is too raw to deal with Caroline’s anger, so he ducks into the studio and slumps down in his chair, triggering the mo-cap loop of Sunny. He feels a disturbance in the air and swivels as Caroline steps into the room, dressed in dark tights, an old sweater baggy on her slight frame. The sweater is her security blanket, the wool mottled from years of use and scarred by cigarette burns.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” he says, pausing the loop, his fingertips stroking the smooth rectangular spacebar.

  “Is this how you’re going to handle it?” she asks. “Locked away in your bloody hobbit hole?”

  “I’m just watching her.”

  “That’s not her. That’s not Sunny. That’s nothing but a collection of zeros and ones.”
/>   He doesn’t rise to this. “What did you say to Gladys?”

  “Not a word. I just buzzed her in. Then I saw the two of you having your little pity party on the beach. Why, what did she say to you?”

  He shrugs, eyes on the frozen wireframe figure on the monitor. “She knew Sunny was dead. Said that she had a dream about her last night. Something about water.”

  “Jesus, what a load of voodoo bollocks.”

  “How did she know, then, if you didn’t tell her?”

  “The bloody bush telegraph, how do you think? The taxi would have been full of it this morning when she came up.”

  “She doesn’t strike me as a liar.”

  “Oh, come on, Nicholas, you don’t seriously believe this nonsense, do you?” He stays mute. “You know these bloody primitives and their conceit that they are born with a connection to some greater power. A connection that we have somehow lost. It’s just a form of spiritual one-upmanship.”

  Caroline sees his face and laughs. “Shit, how pathetic,” she says. “You want to believe it, don’t you, to lessen your guilt? To believe that Sunny is out there in some cozy afterlife, instead of lying dead in the mortuary? My God, despite your protestations of rationality, you’re your mother’s son, after all.” Exley does what he always does when she gets like this: retreats into silence. “Well, sorry to piss on your parade, darling, but Sunny’s dead. Gone. Shuffled off the mortal bloody coil. Muerto. Fucking get used to it.”

  When he doesn’t look at her and stays closemouthed he hears her breath—a hiss of frustration—and waits for the torrent of rage, his shoulder muscles tensing, his hand gripping the mouse. But the door slides open and shuts with a muffled kiss and he’s alone.

  Exley nudges the spacebar again, setting free all that is left of Sunny, her little proxy dancing and twirling on the twin screens of his glasses.