by Smith, Roger
This is what Caroline calls his Victor Frankenstein moment: when he breathes life into his monstrosities. Or she called it that back before Sunny was born, when she was interested enough to stand at the computer, staring over his shoulder, her cigarette smoke irritating his nostrils.
Exley presses the render button and watches the progress bar at the bottom of his monitor creep from empty to full. But he pauses before he hits the spacebar to trigger playback.
He can’t bring himself to watch what he has brought into being. Not yet. Terrified that he’s created a travesty of Sunny, which would be like a double death.
He pushes his chair away from the console and stands, taking a few seconds to come upright. His lower back aches, his shoulders are locked and he feels a twinge of carpal tunnel in the joint of his right thumb. When he takes off his glasses and massages his eyes it’s as if he’s rubbing broken glass into his corneas.
Exley slides his glasses back on and steps out of his studio, standing for a moment in the darkness of the living room. The house is silent. Caroline must be asleep.
He opens the door to the deck and crosses to the railing, looking out at the moon hanging low and heavy over the ocean, feeling a gauzy vapor of sea air on his face, the stink of rotting kelp thick in his nostrils.
The water hisses and sucks, small waves slapping the sand where Sunny lay dead. He walks through to the dark kitchen and opens the refrigerator. There is only one bottle of Evian left and he reminds himself to call the liquor store in the morning, get them to deliver water and beer and wine. For whoever shows up for the funeral.
Exley released a flock of text messages earlier, to all of his acquaintances in the city and the parents of Sunny’s playmates. The replies are lost in the barrage he encouraged with his dumb Facebook post.
He stands in the kitchen and drinks, pours Evian into the palm of his hand and wipes his face and rubs some of the water into his hair, drops falling onto his glasses like rain on a windshield. He uses a washcloth to clean his glasses and then he knows he can delay no more, so he heads back to the studio, sits down, his hand hovering over the smeared spacebar. He closes his eyes, mumbles something that may be a prayer.
Then he hits playback.
And there she is, Sunny, dancing, lifting her arms, twirling, her hair floating away from her smiling face. She is perfect and he allows himself to cry for the first time since he saw her lying dead on the beach.
Chapter 16
Dawn brushes Brittany’s hair. It’s early morning and as always she hasn’t had enough sleep. Still got to get the kid to play school, little group of mainly white kids, Brittany looking like them but speaking different—although Dawn has noticed this is changing as she spends more time with the whities. A good thing? Shit, maybe. Why should Dawn feel anything for the Cape Flats? Never gave her nothing but heartache and grief.
“Mommy?”
“Ja?”
“Is Mommy gonna marry Uncle Vermin?”
“Jesus, what makes you say a thing like that?” Dawn snags a knot in the kid’s pale hair and her daughter yelps. “Sorry, man. No, my baby, I’m not gonna marry Uncle Vernon.”
“Then why he come on here all the time?”
“He looks after us.” The lie sticks in her throat.
“Why then Mommy don’t marry him?”
“God, what’s with all the bloody questions?” Dawn finishes brushing and stands. “Go pee now so I can get you down to the taxi.”
Brittany rushes off to the bathroom and Dawn takes jeans and a spaghetti-strap top from the closet, but before she can dress there’s a knock at the door. Too loud for Mrs. de Pontes. Not loud enough for Vernon. Must be the bloody landlord hassling her for the rent money.
Landlord’s an old Greek guy—buddy of Costa’s—and he always gives Dawn the eye, so she runs a hand through her matted hair and pulls down the T-shirt she wears over her nakedness, making herself look a bit more decent.
But when she opens the door it’s not the old Greek, it’s the cop from last night. The one with the nostrils and the balls that need constant adjusting.
“Ja?”
“Let me in,” Erasmus says.
“Why for?”
“I need to ask you a few questions.”
“So ask.”
“You want your neighbors to hear?”
“I got no secrets.”
But she steps back and the cop comes in, looking around with a sour expression.
“Nice,” he says. Meaning shit.
“And where the fuck you live? Beverly Hills?”
“Quite a mouth you got on you.” Cups that package. “Maybe I fill it with something.”
Dawn stares at his groin. “I take that in and I still got space for my breakfast.” She smiles as she sees him color and grabs a smoke from the top of the TV and lights it. “So talk.”
His eyes flick away from Dawn’s tits as Brittany comes in from the bathroom, looking up at the cop, saying nothing, just staring the way she does.
“And where you get that?” Erasmus asks. Dawn doesn’t answer. “Social services know you sell your ass?”
“I don’t sell my ass.”
“What? You give it away for free?”
He laughs, but this is uncomfortable for her. She doesn’t need no cop digging into her life. Brittany is watching them, understanding too much.
“Britt, go brush your teeth.”
“I already brush them.”
“Then brush them again. Go!”
Grumbling, the child returns to the bathroom and Dawn closes the door.
“So, what you want, Detective?” Putting some nice into her voice.
“The Boogie story. Something I got to ask you.”
“What?”
“Vernon Saul. Him and Boogie have any issues?”
“Like what?”
Uninvited he sits down on the sofa, and Dawn sits opposite him, making sure her T-shirt covers her snatch. Doesn’t stop Erasmus taking in the view like a tourist.
The cop shrugs. “You know Vernon. I hear Boogie was selling shit at the club?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Maybe Vernon wanted some of the action?”
“Told you, I don’t know fuck-all about that.”
But she’s sensing something here. Some messy cop business. Boogie was a nothing, wouldn’t warrant this kind of attention from the law. This cop doesn’t like Vernon. She guesses that it’s an old grudge, that he would like to take Vernon Saul down if he could.
And Dawn’s back on the street the night Boogie got himself dead, crossing Voortrekker, about to let the lobby of her building swallow her up, when something makes her look behind her and she sees Vernon catch up with Boogie, putting a heavy arm around his shoulders. Then she’s in the building and she sees no more.
“What?” the cop asks, smelling something, his nostrils flaring so wide she swears she can see his brains.
For a moment she almost tells him, thinking how fucken good her life would be with no Vernon Saul in it. But she knows the risk is just too great and she shakes her head.
“Nothing. I got nothing more to tell you.”
“What’s your relationship with Vernon?”
“We don’t got a relationship.”
He nods. Looks around, then back at her. “Gonna offer me some coffee?”
“Can’t. Gotta get my kid to play school.”
The cop stands, grunts, adjusts the hang of those balls. He takes a card from his jacket and drops it on the table next to the dirty mugs and the overflowing ashtray.
“You remember anything, don’t care what, you call me, understand?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, then.” He takes a last look at her ass and then he walks to the door. “Be good now.”
“You too.”
He laughs and he’s gone, leaving a whiff of armpits and cheap aftershave.
Yvonne Saul hardly slept. The pathetic wailing of the child in the shack next to her—so c
lose she could reach out her bedroom window, across the low Vibracrete wall, and touch the peeling wood of the hut—kept her awake again most of the night. She can still hear it, softer, though, here in the kitchen, as she stirs scrambled eggs, bacon already spitting in the pan. Preparing Vernon’s favorite breakfast. She hears him thumping around in his room and wonders what sort of mood he’ll be in today.
He limps in, dressed only in his underpants, his hair standing up in spikes. He doesn’t greet her, just sits down at the plastic kitchen table, that thin, scarred leg thrown out to the side. It’s withering away, the muscles going slack. He’s meant to do exercises to build it up but she knows he can’t be bothered and doesn’t dare to speak to him about it.
Yvonne dumps half a can of baked beans onto the plate and serves him. He holds his fork in his right hand, hunched over the table, feeding his face without so much as a word of thanks. She takes her place opposite him. No breakfast for her, a cup of black tea is all she can keep down in the morning.
The crying continues, she can count each sob as the poor little creature fights for breath. “You hear that?” she says before she can stop herself.
“Little brat needs a hiding.”
“Vernon, people saying things about them in that shack.”
He doesn’t look at her, shoveling egg into his mouth. “What things?”
“Mrs. Flanagan—”
“That fucken big-mouth bitch?”
“She say the man is abusing the child.”
He laughs a yellow spray of egg. “True’s God?”
“Ja.”
Now he’s staring at her, his fork clattering onto his plate. “And suddenly you give a shit? When it’s happening to somebody else’s kid?”
“Vernon, God only knows how sorry I am—”
“Sorry? Sorry means fuck-all.”
His dark little eyes—spitting image of his father’s—burn with hatred and she is afraid that he’s going to reach across and hit her. She stands and hurries across to the sink, busies herself washing the pot and pan, the bacon fat floating on top of the muddy water.
She sneaks a glance at Vernon. He has pushed his plate away, his breakfast unfinished, and he sits with his elbows on the table, his huge shoulders slumped, his hair falling across his face, and she feels a sudden terrible pity for him, this wounded thing that is her son.
Yvonne dries her hands on a washcloth and edges past the table, wanting to slip away from the tiny kitchen. She was going to ask him about her insulin but she can’t bring herself to mention it now. Vernon grabs a handful of her pink chenille nightgown.
“That old fucker I seen you with at church last night, who’s he?”
“Nobody.”
He yanks at the nightgown and the fabric rips and the front falls open and half of a sagging breast is exposed. Shamed, she tries to close the nightgown but he tugs all the harder, and she has to fold her arms across her breasts.
“Tell me his name.”
“Mr. Tobias.”
“You not getting fucken ideas in your head, are you?”
“No, boy. Never.”
He pulls her down so her face is near his and shoves his fork at her, the tines denting her cheek. “I’m fucken watching you.”
He drops the fork and pushes his chair back and bumps past her, going into his bedroom and slamming the door.
Yvonne, feeling like she is going to faint, sags down into a chair, resting her head in her hands, fighting back tears. And she hears that crying again, sawing through her head, enough to drive her mental.
Chapter 17
The aubergine-colored preacher sounds like he’s commentating on a horse race with his mouth full of marbles, and it takes Caroline a while to realize he’s speaking English, or what passes for English out here. She catches a few words: young life cut short, in the arms of Jesus, merciful God, and then tunes out. Her eyes lift from the man’s sweaty face—rivulets of water running down his flat cheekbones, tracing the bulges of his many chins and pooling around his shirt collar—and she stares out over the channel of blue ocean at the bird shit on the rocks beyond, like icing on a stale cake.
She wears a sunhat and dark glasses, a simple white cotton dress and Indian sandals. Her feet sink into the molten beach sand and she has to keep shifting them to stop her exposed toes from burning.
Caroline looks back, as she has done every few minutes since this absurd charade began, looks over her right shoulder—even though this means passing her eyes over her husband, to whom she hasn’t said a word since their set-to last night. If she looked to her left she would avoid him, but then she’d see the little white coffin that lies on a flower-strewn bier under a striped shade-tent, the type of thing found at a tacky sidewalk flea market.
The upper panel of the coffin is open. Caroline allowed herself one glance, earlier, before hurriedly looking away. Just long enough to see that Sunny’s hair has been blow-dried almost straight and her face painted like that of a Mexican child whore.
Caroline knows that if she looks at the coffin again she will come undone. So her eyes skid across Exley—he stares down at the sand, his face pale beneath his tan, a small square of toilet paper, hard with dried blood, glued to his left mandible—and travel over the sad little group that has assembled: Gladys the maid, rock-like in the blazing sun, dressed in black from head to toe. A blonde woman, the mother of one of Sunny’s playgroup friends, trying vainly to find shade near the deck, sneaking a look at her watch. The sallow undertaker, his worn suit so shiny he could be in a glitter band, standing with his hands clasped before him in the manner of a professional mourner. The rent-a-cop brings up the rear, bullish shoulders barely contained by a fake leather jacket, sunlight dancing on the frames of his sunglasses, shifting his weight from the leg that is visibly skinnier than the other.
A movement catches Caroline’s eye and for a moment she feels a rush of hope but it is only Shane Porter slinking in, wearing a jacket over jeans and a T-shirt, like some aging rock star, his cowboy boots sinking low into the sand.
Nobody else from Saturday’s soirée has pitched up: funerals are obviously way less popular than boozy parties.
And no Vlad.
I’m not fun, now, Caroline thinks. I’m trouble. Too much trouble for him.
She looks forward again, in time to see the buffoonish cleric—just where the fuck did Nick find him?—close his eyes and lift his arms heavenward, beseeching “Jay-sus” in an ever more incomprehensible gabble. Maybe he’s speaking in tongues? Then she catches the name Jane, repeated over and over, bobbing to the surface of the sea of clogged vowels, and this very nearly shatters her composure.
Their child’s name was Jane Exley. But Nick, from the day the infant came home from the hospital, started calling her Sunshine, and then Sunny, cooing at her in the crib, wiggling his fingers at her. Making her smile and giggle.
Caroline feels her throat tighten and fixes her gaze again on the rocks, watching the birds hovering and lifting off and jostling one another, trying to dodge the tendrils of emotion that reach their suckers out toward her.
Caroline’s sense of smell, acute as always when she is off her medication, catches something foul drifting in from under the shade-tent to her left. Just the flowers in the hideous wreath, she tells herself, but she is unable to stop imagining that it is Sunny’s body rotting.
But of course they must have done something to her, some barbaric embalming. All at once her mind is alive with images of her child lying naked on a steel table, being eviscerated, her innards lifted from her and thrown into a bucket, her blood sluiced away by a savage in gumboots.
Caroline must have reacted to the horror of this image, allowed a groan to escape her lips, because Nicholas tries to take her hand, his fingers cold and clammy on her skin. She pulls her hand free and folds her arms and goes so very, very far away that she barely registers when her husband stands beside the dark charlatan and fumbles and stumbles his way through what he imagines is a eulogy.
“Sunny, I love you with all my heart and I always will. The thought of you gone is more than I can comprehend. I keep wanting to say, come back. Come back to me.”
Nicholas sheds the only tears and then it is over. The undertaker is joined by two flunkies and they screw the faceplate of the coffin in place and wheel Sunny away and collapse the shade-tent into lengths of pipe and rolls of cloth. Caroline watches the little white coffin disappear around the corner of the house, on its way to being burned. Sunny will turn to smoke and float up into the sky in some mean, industrial part of the city.
Nick shakes hands with the preacher (she glimpses the palming of banknotes) and the fat man labors off after the undertakers. A shadow falls onto Caroline and she smells last night’s booze as Shane Porter mumbles some Antipodean platitude in her ear.
“Shane?” she says.
“Yes, love?”
“Eat shit and die.”
He stares at her, mouth gaping open on capped white teeth, and she turns and heads toward the house.
As she gets closer she hears the twang of an acoustic guitar and a frayed American voice whines out at her about his daughter in the water. The old Loudon Wainwright song that Exley used to sing—wildly off-key—to Sunny, splashing with her in the sea, while Caroline watched from the cool sanctuary of the house.
She crosses the deck and sees that her husband is having his moment. That he has unveiled to the uncomfortable group of would-be mourners what he has been slaving away on since Sunny died, locked away in his studio.
A giant plasma TV is suspended above the table of drinks and crisps and nuts, and Sunny dances on the screen, radiant against an infinity curve graded from white to blue. A more alive Sunny than the thing she glimpsed in the coffin, Caroline has to concede.
Then she gets closer and understands just what grotesqueness her husband has wrought. It is realistic, of course. He is skilled, her boy-man. But it is not real. She sees in the face of this computer-generated effigy something unhealthy and unappealing that disturbs her on a primal level. A knowingness in the eyes of this faux-Sunny, something wanton, almost lascivious in the curl of the lips. Caroline’s instinct is to recoil.