Killing Karoline

by Sara-Jayne King

  It is early evening and we are driving to Audrey’s house in Sandton where she lives with her father, one of the city’s top advocates. It’s the first time I’ve been allowed out of the guarded confines of New Life since arriving a little over a week ago and I’m nervous. The Johannesburg I’ve heard about is a lawless metropolis, where car-jacking is a certainty and gun-wielding criminals (black, of course) are prepared to kill you, if not for your handbag, then often simply for fun. Each time we stop at the traffic lights – I haven’t yet started to call them ‘robots’ – I stiffen and wait for a semi-automatic to be shoved into my cheek. And yet as we drive around, I am surprised by how ‘normal’ everything looks. It is not the dark and dangerous Joburg I have imagined. Ungoverned and ungovernable. A post-apocalyptic wasteland where people only venture out in the dead of night to commit heinous acts of violence on one another. It’s actually rather nice. In fact, as we drive around it starts reminding me of Surrey, where I grew up. Lots of large houses, tree-lined streets and expensive cars. Nothing like the Joburg I have come to believe in by way of the occasional news report and the few white South Africans I have met in England who have left ‘home’ behind, they say, because of ‘all the violence, everywhere’. It doesn’t take me long to realise that the voice of White Fear is a loud one and I have inadvertently fallen for its convincing rhetoric.

  A moment passes and I turn to look at Audrey, still dumbfounded by her outburst.

  ‘What?’ she laughs, pressing her foot on the accelerator.

  I give her what I think is a reproachful look but clearly ruin the effect by saying nothing. Nothing at all.

  With every new day I’m in South Africa I’m ambushed by troubling realisations of the way things are here. I had no idea it was still so … bad. People say it isn’t, of course, that things are ‘so much better’ and, yes, on paper things have changed in the years since I was born. South Africa is a democracy, there is a Constitution. People like me can now walk on beaches and sit on benches alongside the privileged minority. Progress, they say. Apartheid, I’m told, is over, and perhaps for those who lived through it, those who survived through it, and those who benefited from it, some things have changed. But to me, arriving with a blank slate, as an outsider, it’s like watching a movie from the olden days. I’m met by a land still undeniably divided along colour lines, nowhere close to rebalancing its glaring inequalities. It is a country of haves and have-nots, rich, poor and poorest, and, mostly still black and white.

  I’m constantly astonished by the common, everyday conversations and accepted parlance of those chattering around me. The other patients in rehab frequently refer to ‘the nigies’ (Nigerians) who they claim are all drug dealers. The first time I hear someone use the term ‘coloured’ I nearly choke on my boerewors. I’ve also noticed how when they speak to the black staff they do so in stilted, broken English while affecting a strange ‘African’ accent. It’s prejudice plus power, hand in hand with active ignorance on a scale I’ve never experienced before.

  And so, when I look closer, I realise things are not quite the same as Surrey. In Surrey the houses are not fortified by massive iron gates, or enclosed by electric fences threatening to zap to death potential intruders. Security vans do not patrol the roads and people do not drive through red lights after dark as Audrey has just done.

  ‘That light was red!’ I exclaim, turning to her.

  ‘Huh?’ says Audrey clicking a button on her steering wheel that instantly sends a flurry of hot air into the footwell and directly into my face.

  ‘You just went through a red light!’

  ‘You have to. If you don’t they will jack you.’ she replies, matter-of-factly.

  ‘They?’ I ask.

  She doesn’t answer – she doesn’t have to. I already know who ‘they’ are.

  When we arrive at Audrey’s house a security guard is standing next to a boom, behind which lies an immaculately manicured compound and several mansions.

  ‘Evening, ma’am,’ he nods to Audrey, who ignores him and inspects her manicure for chips.

  ‘Hi,’ I say hurriedly, when it becomes clear Audrey will not be responding.

  When we pull up outside her house there are two men dressed in blue overalls tending to the front garden. Again, of course, they are black. As I climb ungraciously out of the bucket seats of the BMW and follow Audrey into the house I see them staring at me.

  I know why. They, like most of the people I will come across in South Africa, are baffled by me. They don’t know what I am or where they must put me. This ‘coloured’-looking, white-sounding, black-father-having, Sandton-born alien.

  Audrey opens the front door to a home that looks as though it belongs on the pages of Architectural Digest and flings her coat and bag to the floor. Within seconds, a woman dressed like Hattie McDaniel’s ‘Mammy’ in Gone With The Wind has scooped them up and is ferrying them away into a nearby closet.

  ‘Sawubona,’ I say tentatively. It comes out more like ‘Sow-woo-borna’.

  Audrey laughs. ‘She does speak English!’ I feel stupid.

  We enter a vast, immaculate kitchen where another woman, identically dressed, is mopping the Italian-made tiles. Audrey heads for the fridge, walking dirty takkies all over the still-wet floor. I look at the woman and smile. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, sisi.’ She smiles back.

  Some years later, I am invited to the cinema to watch the much-anticipated American period drama The Help. Set during the time of the civil rights movement, it tells the story of a group of African-American maids and the racism and indignities they face at the hands of the families they work for. The separate bathrooms, the paltry wages, the sacrificing of their own families to raise the children of ungrateful, privileged wealthy white people. It is 146 minutes of unpleasant, uncomfortable, all-too-familiar viewing. As I’m leaving the theatre, I overhear two middle-aged white women discussing the film.

  ‘So powerful,’ says one nodding thoughtfully, before adding, ‘Dreadful the things that happened back then.’

  ‘Awful,’ agrees the other solemnly.

  I follow them to the parking area where a man wearing one shoe, torn trousers and a grubby, too-small florescent tabard is sitting on a low wall close to the exit. He jumps up when he sees us approaching.

  ‘Good evening, madam,’ he cheerfully greets one of the women. ‘Your car, it’s been safe all evening.’ He points toward the shiny Honda, giving her a thumbs-up.

  ‘Go away!’ she snaps. ‘I don’t have anything for you.’ The man retreats to his wall.

  ‘I just can’t bear the constant begging,’ says the woman to her friend, as they exchange air kisses and she slides her Woolworths-clad ass into the obviously brand-new vehicle. As she drives off, I walk to my own car, scrabbling in the dark to find a couple of five-rand coins at the bottom of my bag. Eons, I say to myself. There are eons left to endure of grey, cloud-filled skies before the sun grants us a glimpse of a rainbow.

  CHAPTER 20

  Rejection

  * * *

  I don’t recognise the person in the silver reflection. I sense it might be me, but I am not sure. I am no longer sure who ‘me’ is. Perhaps this is what happens when you lose your memory. You see traces of the past, feel faded heartbeats tapping out the ‘before’, but the certainty is gone. The face in the mirror doesn’t look back at me – she looks beyond, into her own mirror, seeing a different version of herself. I remain a stranger. It occurs to me that when people write love songs it is themselves they are trying to win back.

  I will never forget the day – or, more precisely, the moment – I had to face head on the impact being given up by my biological mother had had on my entire life and on the person I had become.

  I’d been in treatment for nearly four months. Three months in Johannesburg and just shy of one in Cape Town. Despite staying far longer than I’d intended, I’d eventually had to leave New Life after my therapist, and owner of the centre, Cindy, confided in me that sh
e was sleeping with the Cowboy.

  It was a few days after arriving at New Life that I had first met Cindy. A pinched, terribly pale woman in her fifties, she had the look of someone doing their damnedest to hide just how ravaged she had been by life. Life and years battling her own demons, a rampant narcotics habit, raging anorexia and a still-very-much-active sex and love addiction. But she’d been ‘clean’ from the pills for years and by the time she came to open New Life had become something of an oracle in the recovery world in Joburg, which she thrived on. Cindy carried with her an air of being completely beyond reproach. When she talked, we listened with the obedience and awe of brainwashed cult members. Her eyes were the blackest I’d ever seen, framed by slithers of immaculately drawn-on eyebrows – she’d plucked her actual eyebrows out one by one while in rehab years before – and it didn’t take me long to work out why she was known by the other patients as The Ice Queen.

  On that Sunday afternoon, just two days into rehab, prior to my first meeting with Cindy, I’d begun to notice a strange atmosphere in the house. The inmates were edgy. Until then, they’d seemed largely carefree, making the most of having two days off from their treatment programme, but suddenly I felt a definite dis-ease in the air. They gathered around the dining table, looking studious, asking one another for pens and scribbling frantically on lined paper. I sat on the edge of an armchair in the TV room, fiddling with my cigarette packet, watching them.

  The atmosphere reminded me of the university library the week before finals. Dozens of us crammed into the Law Section, spilling over into Social Sciences, perched on windowsills, prostrate on the wooden floors, two to a chair. Brows furrowed, scouring through statutes and judgments, reading and rereading, hoping that by simple virtue of being inside the library building, we would somehow absorb the contents of the thousands of books and journals around us. Learning by osmosis.

  To this day, I still have anxiety-ridden dreams about those final exams where I am running up to the closed, imposing gates of the university, already late for the exam for which I have not prepared. My heart is thumping in my chest. Thumping, not racing as it usually is. I am thin, as I was then, and wearing my tight indigo-blue jeans with the boot-cut flare. When I run only the very top of my thighs touch, and the waistband of my jeans flaps against my nonexistent stomach. When my arms brush my sides, I feel my ribcage. My whole body is taut. I slip through the bars of the gate and sprint across the manicured grounds of the Old Royal Naval College, past the Painted Hall and into the Queen Anne building where I shoulder my way through the heavy wooden door of the exam hall. The room is filled with fellow students, all of whom are heads down, confidently writing, penning their way to adulthood. In the middle of the room is an empty table with an exam paper and a pen. I take my seat with a mixture of dread, shame, fear and regret. It is at this point that I wake up. These dreams are so real that often, some hours after I have woken up, it takes me a while to shake off the sense of disappointment at what could have been.

  At some point during this strange Sunday afternoon, I am approached by another of the patients. ‘Wanna come for a smoke?’ Rael, the handsome Lebanese-looking guy, stands in front of me waving his Peter Stuyvesants. I heave myself out of the chair and follow him outside into the cold Johannesburg twilight. Still unused to the cold, I curl myself up into the patio chair as tight as I can, covering my hands with the cuffs of my sweatshirt. Rael leans against the patio railings and lights a cigarette. In that moment, with his cap on, his arms folded so that he has an ever-so-slight hunch to his shoulders, and one leg bent, his foot against the pillar, he looks like he should be having his photograph taken. With his strong profile and thanks to his Jewish – not, in fact, Lebanese – nose, thick brow and intense, dark eyes, he reminds me of an eagle. I like Rael. Something about his presence is comforting. I feel at ease with him in a way I haven’t around a straight man for a long time. If I could remember how, I’d probably fancy him, but instead we have settled into a relationship of shared intellect, arrogance, dry humour and denial, assuming an air of superiority over our fellow inmates and considering ourselves better educated, more widely travelled, deeper thinkers and so much more sophisticated.

  ‘What’s flustered the cuckoo’s nest?’ I ask, taking a drag on my cigarette and blowing smoke in the direction of the dining room.

  ‘Ah…’ says Rael. ‘The terror that is Nurse Ratched.’ He’s put on a comedic Jack Nicholson twang.

  I laugh. ‘And who might that be?’

  ‘You haven’t heard? You have much to learn, little one.’

  I raise my eyebrows.

  He responds with a grin, his parted lips revealing long, neat teeth mercifully not ravaged by the heroin.

  ‘They’re all shitting it because Cindy’s back tomorrow. She’s the one in charge here. She’s the head counsellor, the owner, everything. She runs the place. She and her son Warren [aah, the sign-holder]. A total mommy’s boy, by the way.’

  ‘But what’s she like?’ I ask.

  ‘Cindy? Cindy is … hard. Hardcore.’

  I sit with this for a while.

  ‘Okay. So old, young, fat, thin?’

  ‘I dunno, I guess middle-aged, not fat.’

  ‘So thin then?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Well, if she’s not fat then she must be thin.’

  ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’

  ‘What’s there to think about? If she’s not fat, she must be thin, or certainly slim.’

  ‘Okay, she’s slim.’

  ‘How slim?’

  He chuckles. ‘I don’t fucking know!’

  ‘So, what else?’

  ‘She’s been in recovery for a hundred years.’

  ‘And she’s hardcore?’

  ‘Yes.’

  But like most people who operate under a veneer of steel, Cindy is, in fact, not the tough cookie she wants us to think she is. She’s hard-faced, can be colder than an Eskimo’s shit, but underneath it all she is just like the rest of us – fucked up and definitely bat-shit crazy. Perhaps that is why, after my first session with her, I feel able to open up to her. Because I can sense that behind the mask she is as scared of herself as I am of me.

  Prior to her revelation of the affair with the Cowboy, I had started to do something with Cindy that I hadn’t done with another person in years, maybe ever; I’d started to trust her and that feeling was one I wasn’t prepared to forfeit simply because she couldn’t keep her panties on. I had come to view her as someone with whom I could honestly reveal the darkest, most shame-inducing parts of myself. I opened up to her about my crippling self-hate, my fear of never being good enough, and the reality I carried with me every day that I was an unlovable mistake. I started to see her as a mother figure, one who, unlike either Kris or my mum, could and would hold my pain and comfort the terrified little girl who screamed silently in the darkness inside her.

  Broken and at my most vulnerable, for weeks I had said nothing to anyone about the affair. Instead, spurred on by the need for Cindy’s approval and my people-pleaser on nitro overdrive, I ended up becoming something of a go-between for the pair. Once her shameful revelation had been made, my one-on-one therapy sessions with Cindy no longer involved me ‘opening up’, ‘sharing my truth’ or telling her my own secrets, but rather sixty minutes of her own confessions, feelings and ill-concealed excitement at her new ‘relationship’. It was fucked up on an epic level. I had become the counsellor and she the patient. Almost worse was the Cowboy’s frequent insistence on taking me aside during lunch or smoke breaks to regale me with details of the affair; the sex texts the pair would send each other, the blowjobs he’d get while on Cindy’s therapy couch (the same one on which I was paying her thousands to bare my soul), and the secret sex signals they would send to one another during group therapy sessions. I resented Cindy for what she was doing, the position she was putting me in, but fought that resentment with everything I had left in me, because to resent her could also mean
losing her.

  But then, as with all secrets, Cindy’s illicit relationship with the Cowboy eventually slipped out from the room in which the pair had held me hostage for several weeks. It was all rather dramatic. One day the Cowboy had decided he wasn’t feeling so ‘lekker’ and had stolen the keys to the medicine cabinet from Cindy’s handbag during one of their sessions. The following morning I found him comatose in a pool of his own vomit, having downed an entire bottle of the heroin substitute Physeptone. Along with another of the patients, I had been forced to perform CPR on him until the ambulance arrived and, of course, the whole sordid story had then come out. The Cowboy lay in a coma for a week, but by then I’d already been thrown out of New Life by Cindy on the premise that my ‘anger’ was negatively affecting the other patients. Only she and I really knew the truth. That she couldn’t stand to have me around as a witness, the evidence of her shame.

  Strangely, even though I knew I had done the right thing, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had betrayed her.

  And so the moment eventually came. The one when I realised that every bad thought, every unspeakable feeling I had ever had about myself had come from knowing that the only person on earth who was supposed to have loved me didn’t, or couldn’t or wouldn’t.

  I was sitting in group therapy at the Ubuntu Addiction Treatment Centre in Cape Town where I’d been sent after being banished from New Life. The memory of Cindy’s betrayal and what I perceived to be my betrayal of her pulsed fresh in my temples. I couldn’t shake the sense of loss. I sat, one in a circle of broken souls, twisting my hands against the dread that a metamorphic shift was about to come.

  We’d all been asked to write a letter. A letter to our ‘addict’ that we would read out in group therapy. It was standard rehab stuff. Confront the demons, embrace the devil within and then exorcise it in a dozen simple steps. But as I held the pen against the paper in my new journal what came out was not a letter to my addict, but a letter to her, the one who had given me life but sentenced me to death.