The Lazarus Effect

by H. J Golakai

  ‘On lips, maybe, but not under our credits. My name was on it but it didn’t even appear in Urban.’

  Portia flinched and Vee stopped. Mentioning how often serious material got shifted to City Chronicle, how final decisions on content were beyond Portia’s control, was suicidal.

  Portia blinked thrice, slowly. ‘Would you like to go over to Chronicle?’ she asked, voice soft. ‘We’re family, after all, and you’ve collaborated with them before. It wouldn’t even be like moving.’

  Vee shook her head quickly. ‘No.’ Yes. Did she? They were all part of one media company; moving one building down the street wouldn’t be like moving at all. Everyone looked so happy over there. She bet only corporate demons of the recognised variety hounded their heels – stress, deadlines, brutal competition – not dead teenagers.

  Portia displayed her top row of pearliness in a rictus Vee could only assume was a smile. ‘You know what they say about grass being greener. Now, I suggest you take the piece about the singer-slash-socialite from Joburg. Rehab, steamy French boyfriend, new album … there’s a lot of meat on those bones.’ She slid another dossier over from the stack on her desk. ‘Look, she gushes, you go through the motions. This isn’t the worst idea.’

  Vee kept her arms at her sides.

  Portia sighed. ‘Voinjama. As combative as our … relationship has sometimes been …’

  ‘We have a relationship?’

  ‘Don’t be obtuse. It doesn’t suit you.’ Portia mulled a second more, measuring her words. ‘I do, despite assumptions, take interest in my best people. I’d actually prefer that you coast the median, for now, instead of … being you. So what’s it to be? Missing urchins, or pop star?’

  Vee reached over slowly, picked up her file and stowed it under her arm.

  ‘Your own funeral.’ Portia settled behind her desk. ‘Oblige me and don’t interpret that literally, which you have in the past. I have no intention …’

  Vee sighed. ‘Portia, if we’re not doing the movie scene, I’ll just take the rest as implied. Deliver and don’t screw up, or you’ll take me off it and make me regret it for the rest of my time here.’

  Portia cocked a brow. ‘Same chapter, same page,’ she said, and flicked her finger in a ‘get out’ gesture.

  *

  Vee put the magazine aside and checked her watch: well past 5 p.m. Where was Paulsen?

  Portia was testing, or merely pitied, her. Whatever the cause, the effect landed her here, parked in Little Mowbray opposite the home of one Adele Paulsen, itching for the first face-to-face interview of what would hopefully become … what? Vee was after more than a soapbox article. ‘Forces’ had led her here – God, how precious and moronic that sounded! – and she knew, much as she cringed at the admission, that the force was strong within her indeed. Her maternal grandmother, a woman possessed of mystical powers of the ‘African science’ variety, had often warned Vee in whispers about her ‘specialness’. Years later and Vee’s take was that she was just especially sticky for weird shit.

  Vee snickered, back of her hand over mouth, until she lost her breath a little. She was losing it. This was how the slip down the slope began.

  That was neither here nor there now. She had to turn this around fast or have it taken away – no, snatched and burned and never spoken of again. Precisely why she hadn’t been entirely transparent with Portia, who had no clue how flimsy a lead she truly had, or with Adele Paulsen, who’d chosen to believe she was in some way connected with the official investigation of her daughter’s disappearance. The former she would deal with later. Portia was fond of giving her sufficient rope with which to hang herself. As for the interview, experience had taught her that lying would get you through the door and no further. If Adele Paulsen smelled a rat early on, everything was dead in the water. Vee popped gum into her mouth and chewed. Coming clean was invariably harder than lying.

  A boisterous group of bare-chested young men in shorts and sneakers jogged past. One caught her eye and whistled, calling out something in Afrikaans that made the rest burst into laughter. Vee hissed and turned away, dismayed as a familiar, unwelcome warmth spread below her navel. Lately, her mind was a cesspool of smut and, being somewhat single-minded, she knew it would affect her work. It was hard to give anything full focus when sex – the loss of it from her life, reacquiring it again with any decent regularity, how much of it other happy bastards were having – occupied a startling portion of her thoughts.

  The unsettling part was that men were everywhere – statistically, miserably, half of the population. Ever since she’d been dropped ass-backwards into singlehood, she noticed that they were more everywhere than she’d ever known them to be. Their obliviousness to their sexual draw bordered on spiteful. Striding around displaying V-shaped torsos misted with sweat and bare, muscled legs … it had to stop. Her last major assignment had propelled her into riots and neighbourhoods shredded by prejudice, and also into the arms of an Angolan photojournalist. No more mistakes of that kind.

  A woman laden with bags of shopping began fiddling with a front gate two houses up from the car. Vee leapt out of her head and the driver’s seat, clicking the alarm after her.

  ‘Ms Paulsen? I’m Voinjama Johnson. We spoke yesterday morning.’

  The older woman looked confused, then her eyes cleared. ‘Yes, yes, of course. Miss Johnson …’

  She trailed off and went back to fiddling with the clasp on the gate. Vee stepped in, unburdened her of two Shoprite grocery bags and followed her into the front yard when the gate finally swung open. It was a small, pale-blue house with a tiny but manicured front garden. The walkway leading up to the front stoop was a lattice of crumbling stone, swept free of dirt.

  Vee watched in amused wonder as a black puppy under a tree produced its body weight in excrement. She thought of her own dog as the puppy bounded up, barking and weaving around their feet. Adele Paulsen gave it an affectionate rub with one foot and brushed it aside, climbing the stairs as she rummaged for her house keys in her handbag. She launched into a ramble about how being a teacher was very trying work, especially without the use of a car, which was in the garage. It meant she was always late for the appointments she hadn’t forgotten. And she was really forgetful, especially now that there was no one around to hold things under her nose.

  The woman was obviously house-proud. The entrance corridor was neat, and the wooden floors looked like they’d enjoyed a recent wax and buff. In the sitting room, rays of fading sunlight poured through windows trimmed with heavy floral curtains.

  The bright tidiness kicked an unexpected swell of pity up Vee’s throat, and she checked herself quickly. If she’d lost a child – which she had, but not in the pure sense – keeping a home spotless and welcoming would be a priority of the lowest order. Her own period of misfortune wasn’t long buried in the basement of memory at all: unwashed body, swollen eyes, perfectly happy to marinate in her own stink and self-pity were it not for those who loved her. Society extolled the virtues of strength, but nobody ever gave any solid advice about how to break down properly. How long could a mother bustle about playing hostess, all the while wrestling the thought that her only child might be somewhere no mother would ever want her baby to see?

  ‘I completely forgot the time,’ Paulsen called from the kitchen. ‘I hope you didn’t have to wait too long.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Vee lied. Idly, she examined a large ornate cabinet filled with china plates, dusty mugs and tiny figurines. If there was one thing that crossed all cultural boundaries, it was the cabinet with the delicate glassware and precious silver. Jacqui, like all children, would likely never have touched its contents if she had valued her l–

  ‘Ian gave most of those to me. Precious, they are.’ Paulsen spoke up behind her, setting down the tea tray. ‘From his travels during his university and postgrad days. Me, I haven’t really travelled much. To Namibia once, before I got pregnant with Jacqueline, and once the two of us went to Zimbabwe in the good old days when
it was such a nice country.’

  Over the rim of the teacup, Vee dissected Adele. This woman devoted a daily portion of her energy to staying on the go. No one ever need see how miserable she was. Or how angry. The canned rage was hard to get at over the pain and armour of niceness, but it was unmistakably there. It had to be a struggle carrying on as a preschool teacher, seeing those eager eyes and candied smiles every day.

  ‘And where are you from?’ Paulsen probed, pushing short brown hair behind both ears. ‘Your accent’s very different.’ She leaned over, deftly spooned three measures of white sugar into her tea, and leaned back in her armchair. Moving Adele. Still Adele. Vee swiftly cast a vote for Moving Adele. Still Adele looked ready to rise at any moment and slap the taste out her mouth for holding the cup the wrong way.

  ‘I’m Liberian. From Liberia,’ Vee added stupidly.

  Adele ‘ahhed’ and raised her eyes ceiling-ward, snapping her fingers. In the measured cadence of an educator, she rattled off the capital city and two neighbouring countries before leaning into current politics since the end of the civil war. Vee jarred, pleasantly surprised and impressed. Most locals had little knowledge of other cultures ‘further north’, as they called it. The darker Africa, a realm devoid of ice cream or shopping malls.

  ‘To be honest, I really didn’t know what to expect after we spoke yesterday,’ Adele said, wary as the small talk died. ‘With a surname like Johnson … but you’re obviously not coloured. What does your first name mean?’

  Vee’s internal alarm beeped a warning. They were gliding into avoidance-tactic territory, and time was something she didn’t have much of. ‘I’m named after a trading city in the north. There was a mix-up on my birth certificate between place of birth and my intended name, so … Voinjama stuck.’

  ‘What name were you meant to have?’

  ‘Ms Paulsen, I’m sorry to be abrupt, but …’ Adele tipped her head, understanding mixed with resignation that they had to buckle down to it eventually. ‘I’ll start by being upfront as to why I called. I mentioned looking into old missing persons cases, but … it’s actually for a magazine article. I’m an investigative journalist for Urban magazine. Maybe you’ve heard of it.’

  Paulsen gave no response except to settle deeper into the sofa. Vee plunged on.

  ‘I’m not connected with the police in any way, nor am I a private detective. But I do care about what happened to your daughter and others like her. Her story stood out and … shall we say, led me here.’

  Truth kept light. No way in hell could she explain to this woman that during her panic attacks she caught glimpses of what looked like the ghost of her missing child. The photograph she’d ‘borrowed’ from the bulletin board at the Wellness Institute would remain under wraps for now.

  Vee squirmed under Adele’s gaze. She was reminded of waiting outside the principal’s office for punishment.

  ‘So Ian, Dr Fourie, he didn’t hire you to find Jacqueline? How’d you find me?’

  ‘Um, no, he didn’t,’ replied Vee, taken aback. Had she gone that far in her misrepresentation? She was certain she hadn’t. Ignore the second question.

  Armed with the photograph and buckets of innocent charm, she’d managed to wrangle an identification out of the more talkative staff at the paediatric oncology unit. People were blabby if they thought there was a chance of seeing their names in print. It was easy enough to link Jacqueline to her mother, but suspicion sealed off communication beyond that. Otherwise, all she got was a very tenuous connection to a Dr Fourie; both an Ian and a Carina falling under that surname had refused to take her calls.

  ‘I’m sorry if I led you to think otherwise,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t change your mind about speaking to me.’ She cringed internally. Never give a source the option of shutting you down. Her sanity, more than her livelihood, depended on finding the truth behind Jacqueline’s disappearance.

  ‘How much do you want to know?’ Adele Paulsen asked wearily. Vee wasn’t fooled. Adele’s eyes were heavy with words, heaving for release. Vee whipped out her Nokia, switched it to voice recording and got a mute nod from across the table, the go-ahead.

  ‘Please,’ said Vee, propping it on the table. ‘Everything.’

  4

  At the age of sixteen, she had met Ian Fourie, Adele Paulsen began. They were two middle-class coloured teenagers growing up in Athlone, her family a few rungs further down the ladder of the class system than the Fouries. It was the early eighties and the winds of change were blowing through apartheid South Africa, but not hard enough to keep up with the tornado of ambition swirling inside Ian. His aura of ‘more-ness’ had him destined for greater things than what the restrictive government had mapped out for ‘non-whites’. Bright herself, Adele was perfectly content with her horizon and vacillated between nursing and teaching. Highest on her list of priorities was to adore her secret boyfriend. Ian was immensely intelligent, but – like many talented men – lived under the thumb of an insufferable matriarch.

  ‘It’s amazing how powerful men can be such shrivelled assholes in their mothers’ presence.’

  Vee started a little at an expletive dropping so comfortably out of the mouth of such a collected, well-spoken woman.

  ‘Ian’s family didn’t have much more than mine, but watching his mother carry on you’d think they were rolling in it. Every time I came by, that crabby old bat had her face scrunched up like I had come to steal something. In a way, I guess … I guess I had. We were both so young and didn’t think for a second that we wouldn’t end up together. Naïve first love.’

  ‘What made you stop seeing each other?’

  ‘We didn’t. We never actually broke up, not formally. He left in December of ’81. One day he was here in Cape Town, the next he wasn’t. They had family abroad, in Europe. His mother hadn’t wanted him to leave the country to study medicine, but once he’d started up with me, it became the best idea she’d ever heard. I knew Ian wouldn’t pass up the chance in a million years. Not that our relationship didn’t matter: Ian’s just like that, always has been. He had a fire to climb, still does, nothing ever stood in his way. Personal relationships, love and the like, just have to work their way around his grand plans.’

  Bitterness left her voice and she looked up with softer eyes. ‘He isn’t all cold, ambitious bastard. Ian’s a good man, he truly is. He protects and provides. I think so much is expected of him by so many people that it gets hard balancing success and keeping everybody happy.’

  She still loves him. Something, fear maybe, coiled around Vee’s heart. Given time, would she deflate and petrify into an Adele, a woman blindly defending a man who had, for all intents and purposes, moved on with his life? What the hell was love worth, then, if you could be abandoned without a backward glance?

  ‘We stayed in contact as much as we could. We didn’t talk much about where our relationship was going, or whether it was going anywhere at all. Ian avoids confrontation when it matters most and being apart took a huge toll on his studies, so I stopped asking. There was nothing either of us could do about it. After a while, we just grew up. I, for one, started feeling extremely stupid waiting for a man who’d be so different when he returned – that’s if he ever did. He’d be a doctor and I’d be a teacher, you know? Politically, things were taking drastic turns. Apartheid was on its last legs and we were on the brink of new opportunities. But at the end of the day, he’d still be a doctor and me a teacher. I started thinking …’

  That his mother was right.

  ‘Maybe his mother had a point, much as I hated to admit it. And you know how long-distance relationships can go and what men are like. Who knows what they get up to? I was young still, and if I didn’t look forward, my whole life would pass me by. So …’

  Adele shrugged, an encyclopaedia of history in the movement of her shoulders. She’d done what she had to, and damned if she didn’t look ashamed and apologetic about it. Her hunched posture spoke of a woman who believed, to her own bewilderment
, in one true love in a lifetime.

  ‘We fell out of touch eventually. It got easier. There were other men. Some were wonderful and I tried to take the relationship seriously. But … have you ever been in love?’

  Vee dropped her eyes to her boots.

  ‘Then you know what I mean. You pretend to get over someone so well that you start to believe it. You remember all the history, everything they put you through, and tell yourself you can’t forgive. Then you plan this new life, to hell with the past. And all the while, deep inside you know you’re completely full of shit.’

  Vee fidgeted. Dammit, was she looking at her own future here? ‘What happened when Ian finally came home?’

  Adele shrugged again, only this time it was more a lazy lifting and resigned dropping of the shoulders. As if gravity was too strong to encourage more.

  ‘What I expected. We didn’t just pick up where we’d left off. Too much time had passed for that. We danced around it. I heard talk in the old neighbourhood that he was home for good, but over a year passed before we saw each other. Cape Town’s pretty small but you can avoid people if you want to. We finally ran into each other at a party at a mutual friend’s place. He looked so much the same. Only difference, he was married.’

  She looked over, clearly expecting reproach. Vee nodded, impassive.

  ‘I knew – of course I knew. His wife wasn’t with him that night. She was ready to pop by then, about to have their first. I only saw her in passing over the years, and not often. We … met, much later on.’

  ‘What was she like? When y’all finally did?’

  ‘We didn’t talk much that night. Wanting to pretend for a while,’ Adele ploughed on, voice soft, a lover reminiscing aloud, alone in her sitting room. ‘That’s what grown-ups are meant to do, save face and moralise until they’re not fooling anyone any more. Then we met up for drinks, just to catch up. How long does that last with a man you have a past with. We swapped old stories from back in the day and laughed … It became a routine. More drinks, lunch, we’re only talking, I was just in the neighbourhood, until …’