by Smith, Roger
Nowhere to park the Landy, so she leaves it in the lot at the Junction Hotel and walks a block to the new mini-mall, where she finds Vlad sitting in a bistro. He is dressed in a suit. Another first. It is a good suit, bespoke, she guesses, but it reduces him somehow, neuters him. He looks uncomfortable, tugging at the collar of his shirt as if he is being throttled.
Vlad rises and kisses her on the cheek, like she’s his aunt. Follows it up on the other cheek, to make it seem more continental. But he avoids her lips.
“I haven’t seen you,” she says.
“I don’t want to intrude.”
“I could have done with an intrusion.”
He doesn’t respond with one of his clumsy double entendres, and—after they have ordered—he asks her about Sunny. The last thing she wants to talk about, so she gives him a shorthand version and he emits low grunts of sympathy.
Their meal arrives, fussy and nouvelle, with awful little doodles of food coloring around the edges of the plates. Caroline ignores her line fish and Vlad manages a few mouthfuls of fillet before pushing it aside and demanding Turkish coffee.
He leans toward her, his big, hairy hands on the table. “I go away for a while. Tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“Belgrade. Paris. Business thing.”
He’s lying, she’s sure. He’s dropping her. She moves in close enough to see the blackheads on his nose and grips his hand. “Oh, come on, cut the new-man crap, Vlad. Take me across to The Junction and fuck the living daylights out of me.”
He frees his hand. “Caroline, it is better maybe if we don’t see each other for a bit.”
“Are you dumping me?”
“I think is best. Because of your situation.”
“What the fuck do you know about my situation?”
Her voice is too loud, people are staring, and his eyes drift away from her, drawn to the bright sunlight outside like he is thinking of escape. He’s embarrassed. Another first.
But when he looks back toward her, she can swear his eyes are moist.
“We too had child. Me and Martina.”
Who the fuck is Martina? The question is already forming on her lips when she realizes this is the unnamed, unseen wife.
“A boy,” he says. “Jannic. He live to just second birthday.” He taps his chest. “Heart. That is why we come here, to Cape Town. Twenty years ago Chris Barnard was best in world for the heart surgery. But even he can do nothing.” He wipes his eyes, and sniffs, and she finds herself repulsed by this side of him. “We try to move away but somehow we cannot. Cannot leave his memory.”
Caroline imagines a room in an unseen wing of the house. The dead child’s room. Intact, untouched. A shrine. She sees the truth about Vlad: his marriage is inviolate. A sealed unit. She has outlived her usefulness.
He’s waving his credit card, the waiter swishing over with the portable terminal, fussing. Vlad goes through the business of punching in his PIN and the machine pukes out his credit card slip. He stuffs it into his pocket, stands and leans down to peck her on the cheek and then he’s gone, big shoulders slumped, de Bergerac nose thrust forward.
Caroline sits a while and sips her water, feeling herself slipping farther from her mooring. A metallic taste on her tongue, her sweat acrid beneath her scent.
The breakdown is close, now. All the telltale signs.
She reaches for the pills in her bag but she doesn’t take any. Instead she stands and rushes out, the pillbox still clutched in her fist. She opens the box, grabs the foil blister packs and dumps them into a trashcan in the courtyard, but returns the empty box, with her name on the printed pharmacist’s label, to her bag—some paranoid impulse telling her to not leave any sign of her presence.
As she hurries on she senses she’s being followed, spins around and confronts a mime in white pancake make-up, some Marcel Marceau clone in black tights and silly pumps, who has been tailing her, mimicking her agitated walk to the amusement of the strollers.
“Oh, just fuck off,” she says, and the mime holds up his hands and clutches at his heart as if he has been shot, staggering, then he finds his feet and tucks in behind a queer carrying a bouquet of roses.
Caroline flees out into the street, the hard afternoon sunlight blinding her.
Chapter 21
The minibus taxi is there out of fucken nowhere and Vernon jams his boot flat to the floor and somehow gets the little red Sniper truck out of its way, his nostrils full of burning rubber as the taxi skids past, horn blaring like a train hurtling into a tunnel, ass wagging crazily across the road. The face of the darkie taxi driver flashes by, mouth gaping on white tombstone teeth and pink tongue, and Vernon’s sure that the taxi will roll but it doesn’t, just comes to a sliding stop, broadside to the traffic, smoke boiling from its tires.
Vernon puts his foot down away from Hout Bay, the taxi shrinking to nothing in his rearview. He didn’t even see it he was so caught up in his fury. Furious with Merinda Appolis for dissing him like she did. Furious with himself for miscalculating so badly. It was this kind of overconfidence that nearly got him dead last year, so sure that the American’s gang—their leader locked away—wouldn’t have the balls to come after him. But they came.
And now, because he underestimated that fat little bitch with her cellulite-dimpled thighs and her mouth like a weeping wound, he’s opened a door that he should have left tightly closed. Vernon knows it was no empty promise: Merinda will make it her mission to take Dawn’s brat away, just to spite him. Leaving him with no handle on the little whore.
For a moment he is tempted to phone Dawn and warn her, he even has his phone in his hand, sliding it open as he drives. Then he calms himself and clicks the phone shut. No. No more miscalculations. No more fuck-ups.
Vernon slows his breath as he crests the rise and sees the ocean, hangs a left into the road that leads down to Llandudno. One road in and out of this place, making it so easy to police. Vernon slows to a stop, pulling onto the shoulder in front of the wooden sentry box.
He leaves the car, waves at the Sniper man inside the box, walks across to the silver barrier rail on the ocean side and lights himself a smoke, letting the nicotine chill him out. A different universe this, from the Cape Flats. The mountains enfold it and protect it from the wind. The sun seems more golden, friendlier. The ocean, far below him, rippling with slow waves, is an intense shade of blue that he can’t even begin to name. The land of bloody milk and honey.
He fishes a fresh pack of Luckies from his pocket and walks over to the sentry box. The fat darkie sitting inside in the thick heat, a couple of droning flies to keep him company, tries to pretend that he’s alert but his drooping eyelids tell another story.
Vernon kicks him in the leg just below the knee and the darkie yelps. “Wake up, Banzi. Next thing the supervisor catches you sleeping and your wife and picaninnies go hungry.”
“Yes, sir.” The “sir” is because Vernon’s got lighter skin and is a patrolman, and because he’s just plain fucken scary.
“The woman? She back yet?”
“No, sir. I phone you if she is.”
Vernon grunts, leans against the door jamb, the little box heavy with the sweat of this black man. “And when she left this morning, you sure she’s alone?”
“Like I tell you, sir.”
Vernon tosses the pack of Luckies into the guard’s lap. “Here, don’t burn the bloody box down.” He steps back down onto the gravel. “Minute you see her, you call me, okay?”
“Yessir.”
Vernon cruises down the streets, empty of pedestrians, just white women in fancy SUVs chauffeuring their spoiled little brats. Vernon bought a half-chicken at the KFC down in Hout Bay but there’s no way he’s going to eat it with his gut knotted tight like a fist, and the reek of the rendered fat and the spices is getting too much for him, so he cruises past Nick Exley’s house and stops the truck in the dead end.
He finds the path through the undergrowth and goes down to where the Rastam
an lives in his own crazy world. At least the bugger’s got his pants on today, sitting in the shade of the overhanging bush, smoking some brand of weed that stinks like garden rubbish.
The Rasta shows his rotten teeth and bobs his head so his dreads fly around like kettle cords, clapping his hands, saying not a word.
Vernon tosses him the red and white striped KFC box and the Rasta opens it and gets busy, the joint stubbed out on the rock beside him, tearing at the chicken and shoving it into his mouth, juice gathering in his fuzzy beard.
Not something Vernon wants to watch. So he waves, which gets the darkie jiggling like a wind-up toy, and hauls himself up onto the rocks overlooking the house, finds some shade, a nice breeze coming in salty off the ocean, cooling him down.
He stretches out his bad leg, massaging the muscle above the knee, taking himself inward, to where all the fury lives. Finding it. Containing it, like it’s nuclear waste. Storing it where it can’t hurt him no more, but where he can draw on it when he needs it.
A trick he learned when he was a youngster, eleven years old.
His father had been abusing him since before he could remember, dragging him into the bedroom and doing things to him that tore his body and did worse to his soul. His mother at church, or sitting in front of the TV, hearing and doing nothing.
The only time it stopped was when his father went to prison. But because his father was small-time—a bit of housebreaking, selling stolen goods, dealing in a little weed—he was never gone for long. Vernon had just had his eleventh birthday when his father came back from three months in Pollsmoor and it all began again.
But something had changed inside Vernon. Instead of being frightened and hurt he was just plain fucken angry. One Sunday afternoon his mother went to go to church, to bullshit to some nonexistent god, leaving Vernon alone with his father.
Vernon, sitting in front of the TV watching cartoons, knew what was coming and it wasn’t long before he heard his father calling him from the bedroom.
“Hey, you little rabbit. Come here.”
It was a hot day and Vernon was wearing only a pair of boardshorts.
They were his favorites—Adidas—so he took them off and left them folded neatly on the sofa, not wanting them dirtied. He walked naked into his parents’ room, where his father lay on the bed, also butt-naked, a bottle of brandy in one hand and his dick in the other.
“Well, look at the little rabbit, already stripped for action. You like it, don’t you?” The stink of his unwashed body filling the room, his eyes yellow from Mandrax and liquor.
Vernon climbed onto the bed, straddling his father, grabbing his cock. It was thick and hard, and for some reason it was how Vernon imagined it would feel if he took a goose by the throat. His father’s eyes dipped closed and Vernon could feel the pulse drumming in the stiff thing in his hand. He reached under the bed and came out with the hammer he had hidden there earlier in the day.
“Daddy,” he said. He wanted the bastard to see this. Those glazed eyes opened slowly, pus-filled smears in the map of wrinkles that etched his skin, prematurely old from the drugs. The sick fuck saw the hammer, even managed a wet laugh, before Vernon brought it down and struck him on the left temple.
His father lifted a skinny, tattooed arm, but it was useless. Vernon was already big for his years, showing signs of the broad shoulders and powerful biceps of his mother’s side of the family. He brought the hammer down again and again and again. Until his father’s head was mush, flesh and brain and bone sprayed out across the wall and the pillows and the comforter.
Vernon, when he stopped hammering away like a blacksmith, was astonished at the amount of blood that had come from the thing on the bed. Felt it dripping from his face and his body.
He wiped hair and brain and gore from the hammer and slid off the bed, carrying the tool with him into the bathroom. He showered, washing himself until there was no trace of his father on him. Washed the hammer down, too.
As he walked to his bedroom, Vernon looked into his parents’ room and saw his father’s dead arm dangling off the bed, already seething with flies. He found himself a T-shirt and pulled it over his head and grabbed his tennis ball. Padded through to the kitchen and wrapped the hammer in a yellow Checkers bag, then retrieved his boardshorts from the sofa, pulled them on, and went out, leaving the front door of the house standing open, way it always was during the day. Nobody in the area was going to mess with Vernon’s mean snake of a father.
Vernon dumped the Checkers bag in a drain and walked down to the store, bouncing the ball on the hard sand of the sidewalk. He made a bit of a production of buying a Double O orange drink. Pretended he couldn’t find his money, the old Muslim behind the barred counter getting all pissed off. Then he paid and left, knowing if anybody asked, the old man would remember him.
He went to the open lot near his house—car wrecks and rubble and weeds and gang tags—and drank his Double O and played keepy-uppy with the tennis ball the way he always did. Spending hours moving the ball from head to toe, to chest, to head, this loner of a boy.
Vernon saw his mother coming home through the dust, walking up from the taxis. She called to him but he ignored her. Head, to toe, to knee, to head. Watched her out the corner of his eye as she went into the house and when the screams came he didn’t even lose the tennis ball, controlled it nicely and let it drift to the ground, trapping it under his bare foot and slowly walking toward home, bouncing the ball, to where his mother came flying out the front door like something shot from a cannon, falling to her knees, dress riding up her fat thighs so he could see her pants, the neighbors running over and his mother gabbling, spit dangling from her mouth and one of the neighbors going in and then coming out again in a hurry and parking his lunch in a flower bed.
Eventually the cops arrived and Vernon’s mother told them she came home from church and found the thing in the bedroom. Vernon said he left his father sleeping and went and bought a drink and played with his ball. Didn’t see nothing or no one.
The cops took the body away and said it was “gang-related.” And that was that. Vernon’s mother was left to clean up the mess. Vernon sat watching TV as night fell and his mother was in and out of the bedroom, gray under her copper skin, carrying buckets of bloody water, her hands crammed with matted rags and newspaper. Vernon laughed, somewhere deep inside.
At 10 p.m. she was finished. By this time Vernon was in his room, reading his comics. His mother sat down on the bed and when he looked at her it was as if she’d seen some kind of hell she couldn’t describe.
“I’m sleeping in here with you tonight, okay, boy?”
She drooped toward Vernon, putting an arm around his shoulder, wanting some sympathy from him. He slapped her face. She jumped away, hand to her cheek, staring at him.
“You take your stinking fucken ass out of my room,” he said. “And from now on, you listen to me, and you do what I say, otherwise I do to you what I done to him.” The bitch backed away from him, another kind of hell in her eyes now. “Understand?”
She understood.
Sitting on the rock, more than twenty years later, Vernon can feel the satisfaction, the sense of power, like it was yesterday. The turning point in his life. Made him what he is today.
His phone purrs in his pocket and he slides it out. “Ja?”
It’s the darkie in the sentry box. Caroline Exley is on her way home.
Vernon, perfectly camouflaged in the shade, hears the high whine of the Land Rover, sees it bumping and rattling up to the house. The motorized gate rumbles open and the Land Rover rolls in. He hears the echo of the engine in the garage before it cuts. After a few minutes the door onto the deck of the house slides open and the woman stands there, staring out at the ocean, then she disappears inside.
Vernon sits. Waiting.
Chapter 22
The voices are back. A chorus of banshees, all screaming at once of murder and plague and death and hell and damnation. The energy that her rage at Nick
gave Caroline—the protection that it afforded, the way it insulated her from her emotions—is gone.
All she feels now is the inevitable slide toward a major breakdown, and she is alone, without her medication and without her husband.
Driving down to the pharmacy in Hout Bay and refilling her prescription is a bridge too far and Nick’s return is in a future too distant to imagine.
She’s terrified.
Caroline has had two breakdowns. One after Sunny was born and another, three years later, while they were living in Paris. Her psychiatrist, a bland asexual man with rooms in an anonymous medical center in leafy Constantia, assures her repeatedly that by dutifully swallowing her pills each day and managing her stress—as if he were talking about balancing her checkbook—she will prevent another breakdown. Where, she wonders, as the voices scream and roil inside her head, did a dead child and a now ex-lover fit into the notion of stress management?
Somehow Caroline finds herself in the kitchen and, though she knows better, she opens the fridge and grabs the half-empty bottle of Riesling lying beside the leftovers, her fingers chilled by the sweating glass. She frees the cork and tips the bottle, glugging like one of the bloated fetal-alcohol mutants who shamble along the Cape Town sidewalks. The wine is sour and she drops the bottle and it shatters on the ceramic floor tiles. Rushing to the sink, her sandals crunching over broken glass, she spits out the vinegary liquid.
She heads for the sitting room but the windows are too big and she’s left the door open onto the deck and the sunlight blares in at her and she has to turn and flee, kicking off her sandals and taking the carpeted stairs two at a time, until she comes to the cool dimness of the upper level. She passes Sunny’s room, the door standing ajar (left open by Nick making his morning pilgrimage of pain before leaving for the airport) and the voices channel her daughter, mimicking her laugh and her off-key rendering of a nursery rhyme: ‘Ring a ring of roses…’ Caroline slams the door and hurries into her bedroom.